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Chris Milam with Shotgun Lover, Will Holland, and Dave Daniela

Presented by The 5 Spot at The 5 Spot

September 9, 2011

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Step into a Greenwich Village venue and notice the cardigan-clad kid onstage. Notice the crowd--young, sizeable, and overeager. Now notice that, despite the packed room, the air is silent. The metallic ring of a finger-picked acoustic cuts through the tension. There’s some quick applause, some halted “shhh’s,” and the kid onstage begins a song you haven’t heard yet: “I see her only in cold weather.../in lieu of something better/while the band plays I watch her roll her eyes...”

 

The kid plays like a polished troubadour but looks like a prep-schooler; he jokes between songs like the class clown but sings stunningly poetic lyrics with a valedictorian’s pride. Forty-five minutes later, this packed listening room has applauded wildly, nodded reverently, and one bookish undergrad has surprisingly thrown a bra onstage. Something is happening here. A rising singer/songwriter in the Village, packaging lyricism with a pop melody to a new generation. It could be 2010, or it could be 1963. “Who is this kid,” you think, “and where did he come from?”

Chris Milam, the known Nashville critical darling and songwriting prodigy, just dropped his suitcase in the Big Apple. He moved to New York in the fall of 2009, leaving behind his home base, a stack of industry offers, and a potential career as a hit Nashville songwriter. He came by way of Nashville, Memphis, and (most recently) a secluded winter in an Arkansas attic. But to really understand what’s happening now, we need to learn a little about what happened before; what turned a professor’s son from Memphis into New York’s hottest singing commodity.

Don't miss Chris Milam live at The 5 Spot with Shotgun Lover, Will Holland, and Dave Daniela