CAROLINADAZE Music & Arts Festival: Cavetown, Indigo De Souza, & Adia Victoria

CAROLINADAZE Music & Arts Festival is bringing Cavetown, Indigo De Souza, Adia Victoria, & Pink Beds to the Outdoor Stage at Salvage Station on Sunday, October 13th, 2024! Doors open at 5:00PM and the music starts at 6:00PM.

This is a General Admission, all-ages show with kids under 7 free! Minors must be accompanied by guardian at all times.

This is a LARGE EVENT, so please read our FAQs to learn more about parking options and our shuttle service. NO CAMPING CHAIRS or BLANKETS allowed for this event due to space restrictions.

“The CAROLINADAZE Music & Arts Festival is a concert of, by, and for young people building a brighter future in this state, featuring iconic musical acts, special guests and the best of North Carolina’s arts, community, and culture.

Learn more at www.carolinadaze.com. Presented by Common Cause North Carolina, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to fulfill the promise of a multiracial democracy across our state.”

About Cavetown:

For 23-year-old singer/songwriter Cavetown, making music typically involves excavating and exposing his most deeply hidden thoughts and feelings. “It’s a weird dynamic because a lot of the time I’m taking something that it’s hard for me to admit even to myself, then putting it into a song and sharing it with the entire world,” says the London-based artist otherwise known as Robin Skinner. Since self-releasing his debut single at age 16, the Cambridge-based musician/producer has proven the disarming power of that outpouring, steadily amassing a devoted following and bringing his extraordinarily close-knit live show to venues across the globe. On his new album worm food, Cavetown delivers his most elaborately realized body of work to date, shaping his idiosyncratic storytelling into songs that ultimately give voice to our own most intimate emotions.

The follow-up to his 2021 EP Man’s Best Friend, worm food arrives as Cavetown’s latest full-length since his major-label debut Sleepyhead, a 2020 release that inspired NME to hail him as a “bedroompop hero building worldwide community.” As with all his output, Skinner produced the album on his own at his home studio, holing up in his garage and infusing his understated alt-pop with a powerful new vitality. “All these songs were written with the live set in mind, which I hadn’t thought about much before,” notes Skinner, who performs live with a full band. “It was fun to imagine how something might come to life onstage, and to think about how I might interact with the audience at different moments.” But while worm food encompasses a more expansive sound than his past work, each track sustains the raw sincerity that’s earned admiration from the likes of The 1975 and found him collaborating with such acclaimed artists as chloe moriondo and beabadoobee (who recently teamed up with Cavetown for his early-2022 release “Fall In Love With A Girl”).

On the album’s lead single “1994,” Cavetown presents a formidable introduction to worm food sonic landscape, offering up a wistful piece of pop-punk driven by his mercurial guitar work. Graced with an exquisitely tender vocal performance from Skinner, “1994” once again reveals his rare ability to spin his unsparing introspection into impossibly catchy rhyme (from the first verse: “I’m tryna love the person I was when I was born/Hating on a kid doesn’t serve me anymore”). “I think most people forget they’re still the same person as when they were just an innocent child,” says Skinner. “That song is about trying to allow yourself the same compassion and forgiveness you’d have for a little kid if they’d made some kind of mistake, instead of beating yourself up over it.”

One of the more lighthearted moments on worm food, “Frog” emerges as a delightfully warped declaration of affection. “‘Frog’ is about my girlfriend,” says Skinner. “When we first started dating we were both too nervous to say the words ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend,’ so one day I said to her, ‘Did you know that “BF” and “GF” stand for “boy frog” and “girl frog”?’ That was my silly way of asking her out, and now it’s our nickname for each other.” Laced with his sweetly off-kilter lyrics (“I’m gonna tell you you’re pretty/Till it makes you sick”), “Frog” unfolds in gauzy acoustic-guitar tones, then drifts into a bouncy synth line that Skinner refers to as “the frog solo.” “I had the idea to put this frog-sounding synth in the middle, in the hopes that it’d be fun to get everyone to hop up and down like a frog when we play that one live,” he says.

All throughout worm food Cavetown gracefully amplifies his vast inner monologue, often uncovering entirely unexpected ways of expressing the most familiar of feelings. On “Juno,” for instance, he precisely captures the inertia of depression while sharing a dreamy serenade to his beloved cat. “If I’m having a hard time and struggling to find a reason to get out of bed, there’s always the need to get up and feed Juno her breakfast,” says Skinner. “So no matter what else is going on in my life, she always gives me that sense of purpose.” Spiked with brooding guitar riffs and loopy synth lines, the slow-building “Worm Food” transforms his existential angst into a strangely exhilarating anthem. “It’s about feeling so small in the context of the world around you, and recognizing that in the end we all end up in the same place,” says Skinner. “It might be a pessimistic way of thinking, but it’s comforting to me in those moments when I’m worrying so much about things that maybe aren’t that important.” Meanwhile, on “Heart Attack,” Cavetown shares an up-close portrait of anxiety and self-doubt, intensifying the track’s unhinged energy with pogo-ready rhythms and a galvanizing guitar solo. “I wrote that after touring in South America, where the crowds were very excited — which was really cool, but also overwhelming,” says Skinner. “‘Heart Attack’ is about feeling pressured to put on a great show while looking after all these kids in a room that felt out of control at times, and questioning my ability to balance all that.”

Although Skinner tends to write in solitude, a number of songs on worm food arose from his collaboration with other musicians. To that end, “Wasabi” features a guest appearance from his mother, a Baroque flute player who lends the achingly bittersweet track a certain enchanted quality. “I wrote ‘Wasabi’ after going to L.A. to visit a girl I had a massive crush on, trying to process the fact that I still had a thing for her even though I’d tried hard to get over it,” says Skinner. On “Laundry Day,” he enlisted a string quartet to magnify the melancholic mood at the heart of the song, a gorgeously sprawling piece penned after a difficult family trip. “That song is about some hard times my family’s gone through, but the chorus came from a fond childhood memory of mine, where my dad would always end up shrinking all his clothes every time he did the laundry,” Skinner reveals. And for “Kill U,” he worked with Pierce the Veil’s Vic Fuentes to sharpen the song’s arrangement of serpentine guitar lines and combustible beats. “‘Kill U’ is about wanting to kill particular parts of yourself, and finding more of those parts as you get older,” he explains.

An innately DIY artist, Skinner first discovered the depths of his imagination as a child, when he’d write and illustrate his own storybooks. After taking up guitar, he began writing and recording in his bedroom in his early teens, then releasing his lo-fi yet emotionally intricate songs on Bandcamp. Not long after the arrival of his 2018 album Lemon Boy, Cavetown inked a deal with Sire Records and started selling out venues across the U.S. and U.K. as well as performing at festivals like Reading & Leeds and Lollapalooza — all while forging such an intensely personal connection with his audience that he’s taken to keeping a cupboard full of letters received from fans. With his past triumphs including producing for artists like Tessa Violet and mxmtoon, Skinner also brings his immense creativity to the visual element of his output, an endeavor that recently found him co-directing the fantastically surreal video for “1994” alongside Lorenzo Diego. “It’s inspired by The Little Prince, which is the story of a kid who lives on a planet by himself and doesn’t want to grow up,” says Skinner. “In the video I’m portraying the Little Prince, but instead of rejecting adulthood I’m getting ready to let go of childhood, and trying to build a rocket to fly away from my planet.”

While worm food in many ways marks a major leap forward for Cavetown, the album took shape from the same instinctive approach he’s embraced since earliest days as a songwriter. “Most of the time I think up lyrics without really trying — they just fall out, and then I realize that they’re expressing something I’d been having a hard time trying to articulate,” says Skinner. “Over the years I’ve had people tell me that my songs have had the same effect on them, where there’s something going on in their head that they haven’t been able to verbalize but then the song helps them to finally understand it. So even though I write songs for myself, as a way to process the things I’m struggling with, it’s really nice to know that they might end up helping people in some way.”

About Indigo de Souza:

“I was finally able to trust myself fully,” says Indigo De Souza of making her masterful third album All of This Will End. When the North Carolina-based artist released her compelling and explosive second LP Any Shape You Take in 2021, it led to a successful year of sold out tours and rave reviews from outlets like Pitchfork, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Across 11 songs, the LP, which is out April 28 via Saddle Creek, is a raw and radically optimistic work that grapples with mortality, the rejuvenation that community brings, and the importance of centering yourself now. These tracks come from the most resonant moments of her life: childhood memories, collecting herself in parking lots, the ecstatic trips spent wandering Appalachian mountains and southern swamps with friends, and the times she had to stand up for herself. “All of This Will End feels more true to me than anything ever has,” she says.

Indigo finds recent inspiration from community and stability. “Up until recently, my life felt chaotic,” she says. “Now, so much of the chaos is behind me. I have an incredible community, I love where I live, and I’m surrounded by truly incredible people who are dedicated to deep connection and joy. My music feels like it’s coming from a centered place of reflection.” Opener “Time Back” deals with the necessary forward momentum she cherishes. It’s a song about rising out of struggle, putting things in the past, and moving on where she sings over comforting synths, “I feel like I’m leaving myself behind / And I’m so tired of crying / I wanna get back up again.” The track later explodes with her voice booming over a stunning arrangement. “You can fall into dysfunction or sadness, or allow other people to hurt you and not have boundaries,” she says. “There was a time in my life when that was a lot of what I was doing. I thought this track was a sweet way to talk about coming back to yourself, to your true self.”

Alongside the all-encompassing emotions captured in the first song, the album is bookended with the heartfelt and nostalgic closer “Younger and Dumber,” which Indigo chose as the lead single. One of the first songs she wrote for the album, the track began as a way of her speaking to her younger self. “While I was writing about the time when my music first started to take shape, it was also the worst time in my life and the most unstable I’d ever been,” she says. “I wrote this song paying homage to a younger self that didn’t know any better. I was flailing through life, trying to make something stick, and coming to terms with being on earth.” The song is her most intentional yet, where she sings, “You came to hurt me in all the right places / Made me somebody.” Though the track starts as a whisper, it slowly unfolds to something cathartic and explosive as she belts out, “And the love I feel is so very real it can take you anywhere.” With the clarity that comes with experience and healing, Indigo treats her past self with immense kindness. It’s her most stunning offering yet.

Creatively reenergized from having these songs pour out of her so quickly, Indigo and her band went to Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios with producer and engineer Alex Farrar, who also worked on Any Shape You Take. “We just clicked so hard,” she says. “We had such an organic energy flow and we felt really inspired by each other.” Tracks like the pummeling “Wasting Your Time” and the muscular single “You Can Be Mean” highlight the band at their most defiant and locked-in. With lines on the latter like, “I’d like to think you got a good heart and your dad was just an asshole growing up,” Indigo says it’s “about the last horrible guy that I let push me around.” While she lets her band loose in the arrangements, especially guitarist Dexter Webb and drummer Avery Sullivan, these songs come from her own vision. “This time, I was more true to myself and refused to allow other people’s ideas to shape what my songs sound like,” she says. “It also feels really special because Dexter was able to fully express his freaky alien guitar voicings, and played a larger role in the production.”

All of This Will End boasts songs that run the gamut of human emotion. There’s pain and sadness, sure, but there’s a triumphant spirit of resilience throughout. Take the single “Smog,” which is exuberant, danceable, and about the exhilaration that comes from breaking out of daily monotony. Elsewhere, she’s introspective, like in the soul-shattering “Always,” which excavates her relationship with her father. But in the single “The Water,” she transforms a childhood memory of visiting her best friend into a meditation on growing up and the fragility of relationships. Over a programmed drum beat, she sings, “I think about what it was like / That summer when we were young and you did it with that guy in his car.” Though she’s no longer as close to that person as she was when they were kids, there’s power in reminiscing.

In many ways, All of This Will End has become a personal motto for Indigo. “Every day I wake up with the thought that this could be the end,” she says. “You could look at it as a sad thing, or you could look at it as a really precious thing: Today I’m alive and at some point, I will not be in this body anymore. But for now, I can do so much with being alive.” There’s a peacefulness in acceptance throughout. As she sings on the title track, “I’m only loving only moving through and trying my best / Sometimes it’s not enough but I’m still real and I forgive.” She describes the experience of writing this song as “magic,” as if everything about it from the words and melody had felt timeless and intangible and that she was just writing it down. Like the hues of reds and oranges that her mother painted on the LP cover, All of This Will End marks a warmer and unmistakably audacious era for her. It’s a statement about fearlessly moving forward from the past into a gratitude-filled present, feeling it all every step of the way, and choosing to embody loving awareness.

About Adia Victoria:

Southern blues rocker, Adia Victoria is a daughter of the South, a born and bred South Carolinian who now makes her home outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is no surprise, then, that stories of the South find their way into her music, into the lyrics she pens and the chords she plays. It has been the case through her first two albums—2016’s Beyond the Bloodhounds and 2019’s Silences—and it remained so for her third full-length effort, A Southern Gothic — released in fall of 2021. Working with her creative partner, Mason Hickman to write and produce the 14 tracks on her latest album, the project saw further collaborations with Executive Producer T-Bone Burnett, along with Jason Isbell, Margo Price, and more. On the album Adia continues her journey through the conflicts of the American South and the troubling resonance of it’s past. In 2021, SONOS launched “Call & Response”, a weekly podcast hosted by Adia, where she’s interviewed notable talents such as Brandi Carlile, Brittany Howard, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, amongst many others. 

A Southern Gothic landed on numerous year-end lists including Rolling Stone and also Good Morning America who noted, “A Southern Gothic sounds like something from another century, making it one of the most unusually stirring records of the year,” Paste who said, “Adia Victoria doesn’t just have a way with words, she’s a storyteller. Anchored in the present, yet steeped in the history and literature of an inclusive South, Victoria has a sharp eye for detail that informs the songs on A Southern Gothic,” and NPR who declared “Victoria crafted stunning, heat-infused blues vignettes that brilliantly capture the painful depth of Southern racism and the frustrations and complications of being a Black woman in the south.” 

Boasting a Top-10 debut on the Billboard Blues Chart, the project received a nomination for Album of the Year and garnered Adia a nomination for Emerging Act of the Year from the Americana Music Association Awards. 

2024 finds Adia writing and recording her next album with select live performances in the US.

About Pink Beds:

Pink Beds sits at the intersection of spacious grooves and lush song-crafting. If All I Have, the band’s debut LP, was a love letter to the sounds that surrounded them in Appalachia, the March 2024 follow-up, Spare Key To A Memory, is a nuanced and evolved form, showcasing their love of lush, angular, and ethereal sounds designed to resonate with our deepest emotional experiences.
Shifting from a lockdown songwriting project to an electrifying live act, the band has taken on a vibrant and captivating quality all to their own. Playing o of the spark of a live environment, the band evolves and expands upon their familiar compositions, taking them to new and exciting places. After securing a foothold in southeast markets, becoming a FloydFest On-the-Rise artist, a Relix Magazine Sonic Showdown Finalist, and making prominent regional festival appearances, the band is eager to bring these new songs and experiences to audiences throughout 2024. Pink Beds from Asheville, NC comprises Aaron Aiken (Vocals, Guitar, Keys, Synths), Jackson Van Horn (Guitar, Keys, Synths), Logan Hall (Bass, Synths), and Ryan Sargent (Drums, Percussion). The group explores their shared influences nurtured by a deep bond with one another. “What started as a casual jam to entertain a keg party has morphed itself into one of the most intriguing new musical acts in Western North Carolina. Aiken, a Brevard native, now fronts an Asheville group that stands at the intersection of indie rock, psychedelic folk, and cerebral pop. It’s a seamless blend, more so a vibrant flow, that harkens back to the sounds of early 2000s indie icons The Strokes and Keane, with a thick thread leading to the melodic camps of Tame Impala and Snow Patrol.” — Garret K. Woodward, Rolling Stone Contributing Writer

DAY OF SHOW INFORMATION (PLEASE READ):

We look forward to hosting you at Salvage Station! Please read this information to ensure you’re prepared for a fabulous evening!

PARKING: DO NOT park along the railroad tracks, bike lanes, or at other businesses along Riverside Drive! YOU WILL BE TOWED! PAID on-site parking is first-come, first-served with a $10 cash; $12 credit card fee per car and the lot opens at 4:00PM. On-site handicap parking is available. As always, PLEASE carpool, Uber, Lyft, Taxi, or bike when you can!

FREE PARKING: Starting at 4PM there will be FREE PARKING available with complimentary shuttle service every 20 minutes (or faster, if traffic is good to us) just down the street at Asheville Visitor Center at 36 Montford Ave, Asheville, NC 28801.

AGE LIMIT: This is an all-ages show. All minors must be accompanied by their guardian at ALL TIMES or their entire party will be asked to leave. Kids under 7 are FREE.

CAMPING CHAIRS: PLEASE NOTE – NO CAMPING CHAIRS or BLANKETS WILL BE ALLOWED FOR THIS EVENT DUE TO SPACE CONSTRAINTS. Step It Up Lounge will be open and handicap seating will be available for those who need it. Thank you!

REQUIRED: Shirts + shoes are required at all times while on property (this used to be a salvage yard and can be very dangerous for bare feet).

FOOD/BEVERAGE: We will have food trucks on-site with options for everyone, so come hungry! No outside food or drinks are allowed into the venue. Multiple full bars will be open with an incredible selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic options. EMPTY water bottles are allowed in an effort to cut down on waste. Remember to reduce, reuse and recycle and LEAVE NO TRACE (aka- put your used items in the proper bins when done).

BAG POLICY: ALL guests are subject to being searched prior to entry. No large bags or backpacks allowed into the venue. For the fastest entry, only bring a small, clear bag for your personal belongings.

THE FOLLOWING ARE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE THE VENUE:
-No Pets or Animals
-No firearms, knives, weapons, pepper spray, fireworks, or projectiles of any kind
-No drugs, drug paraphernalia, or illegal substances of any kind
-No personal video cameras, Go-Pros, drones, or lasers
-No professional audio, video, or audio recording equipment – (including detachable lenses, tripods, zooms, or commercial use rigs) without proper credentials
-No inflatables
-No tents or easy-ups
-No frisbees, hula hoops, or balls

WEATHER: All shows are RAIN or SHINE. Please dress appropriately for the weather. SMALL handheld umbrellas are permitted and we recommend wearing layers. Be prepared and remember there is no re-entry!