Win Tickets ($50): Blitzen Trapper @ Aladdin Theater | w/ Small Paul, Country, Folk, Rock

We are giving away a pair of tickets to Blitzen Trapper @ Aladdin Theater on May 17. To win, comment below on this post why you’d like to attend. Winner will be drawn and emailed May 13.

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From our sponsors:
Blitzen Trapper
May 17, 2024
Doors 7PM, Show 8PM | $25 | All Ages
More info: etix.com

Aladdin Theater
3017 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR 97202

There are numbers so vast they exceed the scope of human reckoning, concepts so immeasurable they surpass our capacity to understand. On their radiant new album, 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions, Blitzen Trapper make peace with the unknowable, surrendering themselves to forces beyond their control as they explore the infinite with a broad mind and an open heart.
“The album title comes from a phrase that appears over and over in the Mahayana sutras,” says singer/songwriter Eric Earley. “To me, it’s all about perspective. Your body is its own universe made up of trillions of cells and microscopic organisms; perhaps this universe we all inhabit is just a single cell inside some even greater being, and that continues on and on, up and down the line in either direction, larger and smaller, forever and ever.”

Inspired by Earley’s fascination with Buddhist texts and meditation, 100’s of 1000’s, Millions of Billions offers a captivating take on rebirth and transcendence, navigating its way through the space beyond dreams and reality, beyond gods and mortals, beyond life and death. The songs here are as sincere as they are surreal, rooted in rich character studies and deep reflection, and the production is intoxicating to match, blending lo-fi intimacy and trippy psychedelia into a mesmerizing swirl of analog and electronic sounds. Add it all together and you’ve got a gorgeous collection of stripped-down bedroom folk wrapped in lush layers of synthesizers and washed out electric guitars, a poignant, expansive exploration of perception and purpose that manages to look both forwards and backwards all at once.

“This whole project grew out of a box of old four-track tapes from the ’90s that I found recently,” Earley explains. “The tapes were full of songs I’d written and recorded back when I was 19 or 20 years old, and the sound and the spirit of those recordings got me excited to start writing music again, to go back to working the way I did when I was first starting out.”

Launched roughly two decades ago in Portland, OR, Blitzen Trapper garnered early attention with a series of self-released albums before breaking out internationally with a pair of critically acclaimed LPs (2007’s Wild Mountain Nation and 2008’s Furr) that would cement their status at the forefront of the modern indie folk revival. Rolling Stone hailed the band’s “hazy, psychedelic Americana,” while NPR praised their “explosive live performances and infectious roots-rock swagger,” and the New York Times compared their songs to Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young. Dates with Fleet Foxes, Wilco, and Dawes followed, as did festival appearances at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Newport Folk, and Coachella, among others. In the years to come, the band would go on to release six more similarly lauded studio albums culminating with 2020’s Holy Smokes Future Jokes, which Mojo proclaimed “sound[s] like the Beatles at Big Pink.”