You may not know, but nowadays I play bass in my friend Joe Barresi’s alt-Americana/folk rock group Chico States. In fact, I play shows much more often with this setup than solo. We’ve admired each other’s music for a long time—since Olympia, Washington, in fact, where we worked at the same café.
Previously, I collected all our show posters from 2024, which was an active year. We have a few upcoming shows with posters, so I’m putting them up!
2024 was a busy year for Chico States, and a fun one. It felt like rather than practice the steps of a dance, we mostly just danced. To celebrate that momentum, I thought I’d archive show posters I can find from the past twelve months.
This year was also the first that I played an improvisational set of the No Guide: Sketches sort. As Joe put it: “We were like, Alex is sending it in this bar.” What a compliment! (Stay tuned for a future article questioning why concerts are also parties…). Something started cracking open in doing that show that gave me a sense of safety/abandon for publicly creating things like this blog.
Essentially, the Hi-Fidelity “set” used the style of context-based music I’ve worked the hardest on for over 10 years. Yet it was still a precarious experiment. I hand-wrote a subset of lyrics that have continually resurfaced over that time, in an indiscriminate scroll, and handed them out to the audience. The idea (which comes from teaching children) was to pre-expose the audience to the material so that words meant more when they heard them sung.
In 2025, we’re hoping to do a tour and who knows what summer will bring. Joe et al. are busy finishing up the new Chico States record, which I believe I’m allowed to say will be called I Saw A Galloping Horse Cover No Ground. Stay tuned for a release show. Happy New Year!
