Al Olender Brings "The Worrier" to the Bard Spiegeltent

August 1, 8pm | Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Al Olender makes her Spiegeltent debut on August 1 as part of Bard SummerScape, performing songs from "The Worrier," her second full-length album, released in February.

Olender's music grows out of a real loss: her older brother Keith died twelve years ago, and grief has stayed a constant thread through both of her records. "Easy Crier," her 2022 debut, sat directly inside that grief.

"The Worrier" doesn't leave it behind so much as let new anxieties accumulate around it—about aging past the age her brother was when he died, about sexuality, about the difficulty of staying present while everything keeps shifting underneath you. She recorded the album live to tape at the Chicken Shack studio in Stanfordville with producer Nick Kinsey, no overdub safety net, the full band playing together in the room—a phone alarm going off mid-song made it onto the final record rather than getting edited out.

The result is acoustic and blues-tinged, sincere without being precious, tracing what the Fisher Center describes as the "butterflies of first crushes, the gut-punching weight of responsibility, and the eternal romance of friendship." Olender has spent the past year touring in support of Shovels and Rope, and Deer Tick, and the New Pornographers.

The performance takes place in the Spiegeltent, the ornate traveling pavilion that anchors Bard SummerScape's late-night and cabaret-adjacent programming each summer.

Spiegeltent, Fisher Center at Bard College, 60 Manor Ave., Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Tickets at fishercenter.bard.edu.