Lindsay Anderson, Angela James

We’re excited to host an evening with two of Chicago’s finest songwriters with their respective ensembles, Lindsay Anderson and Angela James!

Lindsay Anderson will take us on a 12-song conceptual journey inspired by the romantic and artistic entanglement of surrealist painters Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst. Moved by Carrington’s autobiographical text Down Below, Anderson delves into themes of love, artistic identity, power dynamics, and feminine self-reclamation. Drawing parallels between her own experiences as an artist and muse, Anderson reflects on the challenges of defining one’s voice within male-dominated creative spaces. Her songs become a medium for reclaiming that voice—fusing autobiography with myth, dream logic, and archetypal storytelling. “While my creative and romantic relationships have formed me as an artist, they’ve also distanced me from my true voice,” she says. “This project is about reclaiming that voice, and reshaping the narrative on my own terms.”

In this body of work, Anderson inhabits characters like Lewis Carroll’s Alice—no longer innocent, but older, restless, and yearning for meaning. In a Wonderland turned darker and more coercive, she meets the Wolf, a seductive figure inspired by Carrington’s paintings, and navigates the liminal space between desire and self-liberation. At its core, her latest album is a love story—intense, impractical, and timeless—between two artists navigating creation, intimacy, and loss. Through her music, Anderson invites listeners to join her on a journey that is both deeply personal and universally human: a meditation on embracing shadow as part of wholeness and finding one’s true self in the process.

Angela James' voice elicits comparisons to classic country artists Patsy Cline and Hazel Dickens, while her emotionally forthright songwriting and penchant for experimentation place her directly in the present. Over the span of 4 records and a 10 year career, her work speaks to horizons in progressive Americana in a way that feels both indebted to and freed from the strictures of time. Her music has been called “smoldering and gorgeous” by the Chicago Reader and featured in the Chicago Tribune, NPR, and Tiny Mix Tapes (RIP), among others. Her latest project is a conceptual cycle of songs imagining the lives of her matrilineal ancestors she's never met. Born and raised in TN, with sojourns in Mississippi and Brazil, James is a hospice nurse and lives in Chicago with partner, visual artist/organizer Jordan Martins, and is a proud caregiver to a nine-year-old daughter.