College Street Music Hall Weekly Round-up: 3 shows announced including Dark Star Orchestra returns in March
College Street Music Hall announced Dark Star Orchestra, Hannah Berner, and Magdalena Bay with Sam Austins An Inconceivable Evening with Cary Elwes and Jimmy Carr this week. Tickets are on sale now, via collegestreetmusichall.com.
Dark Star Orchestra
College Street Music Hall – 238 College Street, New Haven, CT 06510
March 6, 2025
Click here to purchase tickets
Dark Star Orchestra
Performing to critical acclaim for over 20 years and over 3000 shows, Dark Star Orchestra continues the Grateful Dead live concert experience. Their shows are built off the Dead’s extensive catalog and the talent of these seven fine musicians. On any given night, the band will perform a show based on a set list from the Grateful Dead’s 30 years of extensive touring or use their catalog to program a unique set list for the show. This allows fans both young and old to share in the experience. By recreating set lists from the past, and by developing their own sets of Dead songs, Dark Star Orchestra offers a continually evolving artistic outlet within this musical canon. Honoring both the band and the fans, Dark Star Orchestra’s members seek out the unique style and sound of each era while simultaneously offering their own informed improvisations.
Dark Star Orchestra offers much more than the sound of the Grateful Dead, they truly encapsulate the energy and the experience. It’s about a sense of familiarity. It’s about a feeling that grabs listeners and takes over. It’s about that contagious energy…in short, it’s about the complete experience and consistent quality show that the fan receives when attending a Dark Star Orchestra show.
Dark Star Orchestra has performed throughout the entire United States, including a sold out debut at Colorado’s Red Rocks Park & Amphitheater, plus shows in Europe and the Caribbean with the band touching down in seven different countries. DSO continues to grow its fan base by playing at larger venues for two and even three-night stands, as well as performing at major music festivals including Bonnaroo, Milwaukee’s SummerFest, The Peach Music Festival, Jam Cruise, Wanee Festival, SweetWater 420 Festival, Mountain Jam, and many more.
In addition to appearing at some of the nation’s top festival, Dark Star Orchestra hosts its own annual music festival and campaign gathering, titled the “Dark Star Jubilee”, currently in its eighth year where DSO headline all three nights and are joined by a mix of established and up and coming national touring acts. Beyond the shores of the United States, DSO has taken its internationally-acclaimed Grateful Dead tribute to the beaches of Jamaica in the dead of winter for the past six years, with their event appropriately titled ‘Jam in the Sand’. Featuring an ocean-side stage, DSO sets up camp to perform shows for four nights along the tropical sands of an all-inclusive resort, selling out the event each year for hundreds of lucky attendees.
Fans and critics haven’t been the only people caught up in the spirit of a Dark Star show. The band has featured guest performances from six original Grateful Dead members Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, Vince Welnick, Tom Constanten and even toured with longtime Dead soundman, Dan Healy. Other notable guests have included Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman of Phish, Keller Williams, Warren Haynes, Steve Kimock, Peter Rowan, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and many more.
“For us it’s a chance to recreate some of the magic that was created for us over the years,” keyboardist and vocalist Rob Barraco explains. “We offer a sort of a historical perspective at what it might have been like to go to a show in 1985, 1978 or whenever. Even for Deadheads who can say they’ve been to a hundred shows in the 90s, we offer something they never got to see live.”
Hannah Berner
College Street Music Hall – 238 College Street, New Haven, CT 06510
March 29, 2025
Click here to purchase tickets
Hannah Berner
Hannah Berner is a stand-up comedian known for her relatable humor and charismatic crowd work. She rose to prominence with her debut comedy special “We Ride at Dawn” that premiered at #2 on Netflix.
She hosts two hit podcasts, Giggly Squad alongside Paige DeSorbo and Berner Phone with Des Bishop, which have garnered over 100 million combined downloads.
Her video series, Han on the Street, has earned over 350 million views. In addition to her regular appearances in the New York comedy scene, Hannah was named one of Variety’s “Top 10 Comics to Watch” in 2023. Hannah has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Good Morning America, and more. She is a Brooklyn native and resides in New York City with her cat Butter.
Magdalena Bay with Sam Austins
College Street Music Hall – 238 College Street, New Haven, CT 06510
April 30, 2025
Click here to purchase tickets
Magdalena Bay
Somewhere in the ether/net of our collective social cosmos soup floats the magical, masterful pop music of Magdalena Bay, the duo from Los Angeles composed of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin. While the pair may claim California as its terra firma, its true home is in the clouds, from where the two emit and output the unique yet familiar frequencies of synthesized nostalgia, kitschy catchiness, and bombastically warped neo-hooks for which the group has become celebrated. Transmitting in both the audio and video realms, Magdalena Bay is an entity adroitly suited for these times, caught in a haze of the known and felt while pushing sonic landscapes woven with the now into the next.
Having met as teenagers in a high school music program in their hometown of Miami (Tenebaum having moved to Florida at age 1 from Buenos Aires), each quickly recognized a kismet and kindred spirit in the other, resulting in the formation of a band, the prog outfit Tabula Rasa, as well as a romance. Lewin was a self-styled guitar shredder armed with his dad’s prog and concept rock records — The Wall, The Bends, Genesis, Fiona Apple — while Tenenbaum was a pianist and singer dipping toes in indie (Modest Mouse) and emo (My Chemical Romance) rock as well as pop made by princesses (Shakira, Britney). Both could read music and Lewin had even studied music theory, also teaching himself how to produce, record, and mix while making two Tabula Rasa records. The pair took a brief break from dating and headed to different colleges but kept the band together, often trading eight-hour bus rides from Penn to Northeastern and vice versa to rehearse, before eventually realizing two things: one, their relationship was too real to be denied, and two, no one young likes prog.
“It was like, ‘No one’s listening to our prog music, what a shame,’” Tenebaum says with a laugh. “We were excited to try something different. So we got into the mechanics of ‘what does it mean to write a pop song?’ and ‘what is this craft?’ and that was the beginning of Magdalena Bay.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Pop music is simple, so we should be able to make it,’” Lewin says. “And then, of course, there’s way more to it, lots of complexities in the writing and production that I wasn’t aware of. We had no artistic perspective at that point because we were still figuring out the genre and how to make something that resembled pop music before we could think about how we could make it interesting. So that was our early process.”
Holding tight to that all-encompassing genre descriptor (“We make pop, but what really is pop anyway?” Tenenbaum asks, while Lewin counters, “We’re a pop group making pop music; all the rest is implied…I think it’s fun to imply that pop music is a wide range of things”), the duo released a grip of EPs and singles before launching its debut album Mercurial World in the fall of 2021. Many outlets, while uniformly praising its melodic hooks, sing-song vocals, and meticulously-crafted production, called it “synth-pop,” which is probably the most specific subgenre Lewin and Tenenbaum will allow. Regardless, the mark had been made, and Magdalena Bay soon began to gather respect, adulation, and fans in the true currency of the day: streaming numbers, social media followers, support slots, festival appearances, and creative collabs. All the while, aided by its highly stylized online aesthetic and internet presence, the band was inching closer to realizing something of an artistic perspective after all.
“We love extending the world of our music past sound into videos or a website or graphics or whatever it might be,” Tenenbaum says.
“We like to think of them as one and the same, but I think it has to start with the music,” Lewin says. “We’re trying to create an atmosphere or an emotional quality with it.”
“It’s the jumping off point that inspires the rest,” Tenenbaum agrees. “But as the years have gone by, as we’ve made more and more videos and such, the process has become more integrated. We were having visual ideas, which was never the case before. I guess people call it ‘world-building.’”
Sam Austins
Sam Austins has never been one to stay within the lines, venturing beyond dimensions to redefine what alternative music can be. His sound, fluid and alive, shifts to mirror his emotions, reshaping expectations of creativity and individuality. The Detroit-born artist endured homelessness post-high school, a transformative period that shaped his
perspective and fueled his art. Living at his aunt’s house, he poured himself into songwriting, quietly buzzing out of Michigan with independent releases, television placements on shows like HBO’s Euphoria, and a reputation built around his live performances in the city.
Sam’s breakout track “Seasons” has not only topped the Global Viral charts but also
inspired over 200,000 user-generated TikTok clips, showcasing his cultural resonance. Critics like Billboard and OnesToWatchpraised his boundary-breaking artistry, while Vogue, AltPress, and Pigeons & Planes celebrate his unique vision. Now based in Los Angeles, Sam draws on influence across all genres, using his limitless creativity to push alternative music into uncharted territory.
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