You know the hair, you know the voice but maybe you don’t know the current music. Justin Courtney Pierre (formerly of Motion City Soundtrack) has decided to try the solo thing and will be coming to The Turf Club on Friday, November 16th.
It’s been a couple of years since we heard from Justin Courtney Pierre. When we last left off, his celebrated rock band Motion City Soundtrack decided to take a hiatus following a victory lap in support of their sixth album, Panic Stations. This culminated with a Riot Fest performance and a sold-out, career-spanning show at The Metro in Chicago in September of 2016… and since then aside from a few sporadic singles—both under his own name and as half of the video-game-themed duo The Rapture Twins—Pierre has kept a pretty low profile after spending nearly two decades in the band. In reality, what he’s been doing lately hasn’t been terribly exciting bio fodder: He’s been in Minneapolis, mowing the lawn, cultivating tomatoes, taking care of his daughter and figuring out who he is if he isn’t the guy fronting Motion City Soundtrack.
But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been making music.
Ultimately regardless of what happens with In The Drink, Pierre is simply excited that he had the opportunity to make this album and in that spirit he’s planning on making a video for each song and exploring these concepts in multiple mediums, something he always wanted to do in his previous act. “The songs are connected to the artwork and the artwork is connected to the videos and it’s a crazy amount of work but it’s also extremely validating as an artist,” he summarizes. “It all just comes back to trusting my gut instinct in the sense that there are all these branches that people can follow and interpret in different ways. I know how it all connects and comes together for me but that doesn’t mean that that’s the way it is for anyone else. You know? Does that make sense?”
Pronoun will be kicking the show off. “It’s a heartbroken girl in her shitty apartment in Brooklyn,” Alyse Vellturo, aka pronoun, says of her Rhyme & Reason debut There’s no one new around you. Recorded in solitude in a cramped corner of the artist’s bedroom, the four-song EP is both personally charged and sonically inventive, matching richly layered guitar textures and insistent lo-fi beats with vivid, uncompromisingly personal lyrics.
Remaining Tour Dates:
11/8 Philadelphia, PA The Foundry @ The Fillmore
11/9 Washington, DC U Street Music Hall
11/10 Asbury Park, NJ House of Independents
11/11 Pittsburgh, PA The Funhouse @ Mr. Smalls
11/13 Cincinnati, OH 20th Century Theater
11/14 Milwaukee, WI The Rave Bar
11/16 Saint Paul, MN Turf Club
11/27 Kansas City, MO Record Bar
11/28 Denver, CO Larimer Lounge
11/30 Phoenix, CA Valley Bar
12/1 Anaheim, CA Chain Reaction
12/2 San Diego, CA Casbah
12/4 Los Angeles, CA The Echo
12/5 San Francisco, CA Bottom of the Hill
12/6 Sacramento, CA Goldfield Trading Post
12/8 Portland, OR Doug Fir Lounge
12/9 Seattle, WA The Crocodile
