The Standard

Mark your calendar this Wednesday for another “friends & family” style jam session at The Standard Hollywood. Our weekly party, Desert Nights, is coming together again with 3 fresh new acts ready to provide some aural pleasure.

(Listen to Henry Wolfe here)

Henry Wolfe is a singer/songwriter living in Los Angeles. He writes good, old-fashioned songs that bring to mind the mid-70’s heyday of Paul Simon, Randy Newman, Paul McCartney and Harry Nilsson, emphasizing quality and taste over novelty and experimentation. Yet while his music sounds familiar, his voice is unique and is anything but ordinary. Whether performing solo on his hollow-body electric guitar, or accompanied by a backing band, Henry Wolfe swings and stomps, moans and whispers. His music is alternately jazzy and twangy, funky and soulful, channeling the best of the past for an audience of the present.

(Listen to Alex Lilly here)

Alex Lilly, ringleader and multi-instrumentalist behind creative pop outfit, Obi Best, is clearly a talent to be reckoned with. The band’s debut album, described as “subversively catchy” by Pitchfork and “about as original as they come” by LA Weekly, has garnered stellar accolades and drawn comparisons to artists as diverse as XTC, St. Vincent, and The Cardigans. With melody lines that hardly sit still, lyrics rich in wordplay, and a sprinkling of sound effects you might hear in a rural backyard, Lilly’s compositions manage to come off at once winsome and wily, and if you don’t pay attention to the affectations in her airy vocals, you might mistake an open heart for a bleeding one.

(Listen to Samantha Shelton here)

Instead of trying to describe Samantha ourselves, we prefer quoting Sean Moeller of Seagate Presents when he says: “Samantha Shelton brings some of that old standard intrigue to her music, which is less about the hard living times of the Great Depression and more about the purity of a flame, or many flames – the way that they burn true and burn cleanly if given the chance. The young Los Angeles born and bred actress and singer has so much of the feeling of music long gone in her countrified songs that they seem of that era when young men were balding severely by their late 20s and women were wrinkled and done bearing the last of their 10 children by the age of 30. Shelton, who has performed in an old-timey group with her buddy Zooey Deschanel, sings soundly like a veteran, not a kid trying to out-do a veteran with some of the new-fangled extravagancies that always turn out sounding unforgivably wrong for many reasons. She’s got a way of turning all of the appropriate tunings and awnings into meaningful additions to her music – making it something that sounds of a different time period and not just simply retro-fitted.”

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What is Desert Nights?

Desert Nights is a weekly gathering at The Standard, Hollywood. Every Wednesday, we curate 3 musical acts on the rise to perform a special acoustic set in our hotel lounge. The vibe is warm and intimate, evoking an impromptu jam in a musician’s living room. Also, expect 2 clever cover songs delivered by each performer. The sets begins at 7:30 pm in the Cactus Lounge (thus the title of the evening, Desert Nights).