Ethan Buckner, Rae Isla, & King Dream at The Troubadour

Wednesday, Jun 10

7:00pm

PTET

Hosted by

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+4

Tickets

TICKETS @ TROUBADOUR.COM/CALENDAR OR VENMO $20 TO @RAEISLA TO NOT PAY SILLY TICKET FEES :) Ethan Buckner wants you to see who he really is: his traumas and triumphs, anxieties and hopes. His forthcoming sophomore record EPHEMERA is part meditation, part declaration: blink, you’re here - blink again, you’re gone. There’s a fervor, an urgency to the fundamental truth: you can’t stop change. Etherial, intimate, vulnerable, and anthemic, his new work embraces vulnerability as a source of power. Following a whirlwind year of touring and releases, topped by a packed headline show at LA’s iconic Troubadour to celebrate his debut LP Treading Water, Ethan’s world ground to a screeching halt in early 2025 when he suffered a severe back injury while traveling in rural India. Multiple operating rooms later, Ethan was completely immobilized, confined to his apartment for months, reckoning with mortality, long-overlooked shadows, consequences of pushing past limits. In that liminal space, Ethan wrote much of the material that worked its way into his forthcoming record EPHEMERA, his second collaboration with grammy-nominated producer Justin Glasco (Paris Paloma, Lone Bellow). EPHEMERA builds from the alchemy of soaring hooks and lush soundscapes that blanket his debut Treading Water (2024). Where Treading Water searches for calm in the chaos, EPHEMERA fully surrenders to life’s fragility, probing deep into grief and reckoning. To Ethan, the path to reconcile the beauty of life with forces of destruction is to build community. That ethos permeates his career as a songwriter and advocate for social and environmental justice. In years past, he often put himself at great personal risk in pursuit of greater good, with enough harrowing stories to close down the bar, and then some; from rappelling off a highway bridge to confront Big Oil and enduring military detention in Egypt to leading mass non-violent protests against corporate greed and political corruption, he has always lived his values into action. Now, he leads the non-profit Earthworks’ campaigns to challenge the power of the fossil fuel industry and protect public health and the climate. For Ethan, songwriting and performing is the necessary counterbalance to work that often feels impossible. EPHEMERA premieres June 9th, followed by a June 10th headline Troubadour show in LA and a 10-show run up the west coast. Rae Isla is a queer independent American singer-songwriter and musician from Bainbridge Island, WA, now based in Los Angeles. Drawing from her early years playing classical cello, learning piano and guitar as a teenager, and attending Berklee College of Music on a vocal scholarship, Rae weaves together a unique blend of folk, indie rock, and alt-country influences to create lush, evocative songs. Her 2021 debut album, Another Life, garnered critical acclaim with features in Rolling Stone and Billboard, and charted #27 on NACC radio. Her newly released sophomore album, New Frontier—featuring fan favorites like “Miles and Miles” and “Free to Love”—marks an evolution in her artistry as a songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual storyteller. Known as a “traveling bard,” Rae​ breaks down the barrier between artist​ and audience, from sending 700 handwritten postcards to promote her Pacific Northwest Tour, to creating a Music NFT collection of her real life rocks, Rae Isla's music is a communal experience. Rae’s voice has also reached new audiences through film and television. She performed the lead original song for Ezra, a feature film starring Robert DeNiro and Rose Byrne, and composed the theme for the upcoming Reggie-Watts narrated docuseries SCENE: SILVER LAKE. A burgeoning American songwriter in her own right, Rae Isla’s ability to blend honest and intimate storytelling with cinematic arrangement will draw you in, and keep you there. King Dream is an L.A.-based rock ‘n’ roll project helmed by Oakland native Jeremy Lyon, a lifelong songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, engineer and producer who crafts dive bar anthems with heart, brains and soul. Hard-rocking yet poignant, his music combines a love for American rock masters like Springsteen and Petty with ‘60s West Coast psychedelia and more contemporary torch-bearers like My Morning Jacket and The War on Drugs — all brought to life by a rotating cast of California’s most in-demand players. Lyon has played in bands since his teens. He’s done Outside Lands and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, toured nationally and internationally, and also knows what it’s like to busk on the street. You can hear all of this in King Dream songs: Balancing hope and world-weariness, they seem wise beyond their years, and they also have a way of sneaking up on you. You know the giddy, ragged vulnerability that arrives when you’ve been awake for way too long on a road trip? Between the good times and the clinks of beer bottles, these songs inspire a wistfulness, deep in your bones, for a place you’ve never been. Glory Daze is King Dream’s opus: Ambitious in scale and scope, it clocks in at 24 tracks, divided into three parts. Technically, these songs are a record of Lyon not only maturing as a lyricist and musician, but developing into a self-sufficient producer and engineer, a silver lining to the constraints of the pandemic. Over the last five years, he’s engineered more than a dozen records for some of his favorite artists in the Bay, including Rainbow Girls, SUZANIMAL, Hot Brother, Aviva Le Fey, Daniel Steinbock, Trevor Bahnson, and more. Recorded at studios in San Francisco, Oakland, and at his home studio in Bodega, Glory Daze also traverses vast territory in Lyon’s life: a period in which he toured and recorded as a sideman with a slew of Bay Area artists (Whiskerman, the Stone Foxes, M. Lockwood Porter); dealt with the grief, anxiety and loss of community wrought by a pandemic and years of sociopolitical turmoil; and went from living in an Oakland bachelor pad with high school friends to marriage and a settled life in the country to starting from scratch in 2025, renting a room in East L.A. The result is an expansive, multifaceted album that invites the listener to climb in, lean back, feel the widest possible range of emotions — and trust that getting there’s at least half the fun. “I make driving records,” says Lyon. “And this one’s about an hour-forty long, so I hope you’re going somewhere far.”

Guest List

40 Going · 7 Interested · 6 Maybe

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