This show currently has no COVID safety requirements for attendees. This is subject to change. If this changes we will be sure to update this page as well as notify all ticket buyers via email.
Wed Mar 8 2023
8:00 PM (Doors 7:00 PM)
$20.00
Ages 21+
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PFR w/ Leigh Nash
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PFR
Christian Rock
With its debut album, PFR became one of the most popular Christian rock acts of the
1990s. Pray for Rain, released in 1992, earned the group both a Grammy Award
nomination and the Dove Award for Best Christian Rock Album. PFR's two subsequent
releases of original material, Goldie's Last Day and Great Lengths, were also critical and
commercial successes, and the band was a popular concert act as well. However, by 1996
band members had tired of their professional commitments and announced that their
next album, Them, would be their last.
In 2000 a request to record a track for an album titled Roaring Lambs brought the
bandmates back together and led to a full-fledged reunion of PFR. Disappear, the
band's first album of original material in five years, was released in 2001. "I think you
don't realize what you have until it's gone," Andrew told Christian Retailing. "We broke
up, and it was a good break. But we realized we are never going to have this chemistry
with anyone else. We have something special, and I think now we all see that. As our
producer said, 'You guys never really broke up; you just stopped making music.'"
The members of PFR grew up in Minnesota, where Joel Hanson and Mark Nash met at a
Christian youth camp around 1987. Before long, Hanson and Nash started to think
about putting together a band with Nash on drums and Hanson on guitar. The two
recruited Patrick Andrew to play bass for the new group and settled on the band name
Pray for Rain, from a poem Hanson had read. After its first album came out, the band
discovered that another group was already performing as Pray for Rain and decided to
carry on simply as PFR.
The trio of twenty-somethings scored an immediate hit with their debut on Sparrow
Records in 1992. With its singles "Do You Want to Know Love?," "Let Go," and "Pray for
Rain" popular on Contemporary Christian radio stations, the album Pray for
Rain gained a Grammy Award nomination for Best Christian Rock Album and won the
1993 Dove Award for Rock Album of the Year. In 1994 PFR released an album that
solidified its reputation as the leading power-pop group in Contemporary Christian
music. Although the title of Goldie's Last Day was taken from a song about the death of
a dog, most of the tracks feature upbeat tempos balanced by soul-searching lyrics. The
same style permeates PFR's 1995 release, Great Lengths, an album Billboard praised for
its "high artistic caliber."
With the release of Great Lengths, PFR also made headway as an international act with
tours across Europe. However, the pressures of touring and promoting its work took a
toll on the band. Going into the studio to record its fourth album, Them, PFR had
already decided that this project would be its last. The decision was mutual and
amicable and PFR's members were quick to dampen any rumors to the contrary. "Mark,
Pat, and I certainly like working together," Hanson told Billboard magazine. "That's not
the reason this is the last record. We have been doing what we do together for eight
years.... This is the time for us to move into directions that may be different from each
other."
Although it had a harder edge than the group's previous efforts, Them turned out to be
PFR's most successful album with critics and fans. "Over the past eight years, [Andrew
and Hanson] have taken the vocabulary of the top pop writers which have come before
and used that song writing language to compose their own chapter in Christian music
history," reflected Bruce A. Brown in CCM Magazine. "No matter what their
accomplishments as individuals, Them should help us remember PFR as an exciting and
innovative band." Rick Foux of Cmusic Web agreed: "A milestone in Christian
rock, Them features some of the best music of the nineties decade," he wrote. Them was
PFR's best-selling release with about 120,000 copies sold.
The band capped off its farewell release with the Now You See Them, Now You Don't 12-
city tour. "We are excited about these changes," Hanson told Billboard. "We don't want
people to feel sorry for us or wonder if there are ulterior motives. This is just something
that we believe in, and we are glad to be ending the group with such a good record and a
chance to go out and say good-bye to people who have been so helpful to us." With a
final show to over 10,000 fans in the group's hometown of Minneapolis on September
28, 1996, PFR officially disbanded. A greatest hits compilation, The Late, Great
PFR, was released in 1997.
Each of PFR's members pursued music-related careers after the band broke up. Hanson
worked as a songwriter in Nashville for EMI Christian Publishing before moving back to
Minnesota in 1998 to take a position as a worship pastor. Andrew formed a new band,
Eager, also based in Nashville, and after Eager disbanded, he set up a recording studio
in Arizona and worked as a worship director. Nash served as a producer for other bands
before joining the staff as directer of A&R of Squint Entertainment, a division of
Nashville-based Word Records, in 2000. Nash's then wife, Leigh Nash, was also on the
roster of Squint Entertainment as the lead singer of crossover Christian band Sixpence
None the Richer.
In 2000 Squint Entertainment was planning to release a compilation album of various
Contemporary Christian artists under the title Roaring Lambs. When a producer asked
Nash if PFR would be interested in contributing an original track, the three members
quickly reassembled to work on the project. "Joel wrote the song ["Kingdom Come"] in a
couple of days, [then] came and recorded it," Nash told Jen Abbas of
FamilyChristian.com. "We had a really good time recording. The chemistry was still
there. It was like all of the reasons you get into music in the first place--just the joy of it.
We talked a lot during that session. 'What if we took this a step further?'"
When "Kingdom Come" was released to radio stations, its popularity demonstrated that
PFR had not been forgotten by its fans. Still, the group went into the recording sessions
for the comeback album Disappear determined not to be intimidated by the desire to
match its past success. "We went into it after discussing how we could just have the joy
and the fun of creating an album and not all the spin about positioning and marketing
and all that," Hanson told Christian Retailing. "We really want it to be about the music."
Whereas Andrew and Hanson had been PFR's primary songwriters, the creative process
on Disappear had all band members sharing writing credits on the album's ten tracks.
"The only meditated decision musically was, 'Whatever we do, let's make sure that it's
the music we would be making now if we would've continued,'" Nash explained in a
Jamsline interview. "We sort of wrote a four-year history for ourselves."
Now, in 2022/2023, Joel Hanson, Mark Nash and Patrick Andrew are back to play
selected dates in Minneapolis, Nashville & other select markets with some new material
and exciting projects in the works. -
Leigh Nash
Alternative
It comes down to vulnerability.
When you let reality and circumstance wash over you, and make the conscious choice to allow it to shape the way you see the world, you can erase the footprints of the past and start anew.
For more than a quarter-century, Leigh Nash’s instantly recognizable voice has been a fixture in modern pop, from her days as frontwoman for Sixpence None The Richer to her more recent artistic output.
Now, with the world having been reshaped in so many ways purposeful and not-so-much, Leigh has opened her creative self up to new experiences.
She’s called on muses she’d kept just below the surface, and reached out to personal superheroes to help her define present reality.
The result is The Tide, Vol. 1, a six-song set that uncovers and shines brilliant light on Leigh Nash as songwriter, song interpreter, collaborator and, always, singer.
“I think the thread is vulnerability, just being open to whatever the creative thing is that whispers in our ear,” Leigh says of the half-dozen songs featured on the initial volume of The Tide. “Listening to it…trusting it. It’s being vulnerable to the moment, to the songs, to the music, to why I’m on this earth.”
The world knows Leigh best as the delightful pixie-esque voice atop massive global hits such as “Kiss Me” and “There She Goes” with Sixpence, but she’s worked long and well to define her perspective though her songwriting output, choices showcased definitively on this project.
“What I’ve found to be true with my songwriting is that I seem to serve a story or song better when it’s something that just happened naturally with me, like an encounter or conversation,” she says. “I guess I tried it back with Sixpence, but as an adult now — I guess that’s what you call it at 45 — I’m just now starting to feel a little bit more at home in those songwriter shoes.”
Combine those choices of subject matter — honesty with partners in times of strife, recognizing others’ perspectives in periods of trouble, identifying blessings in the everyday — with the choices made in songs to cover, and mesh them with voices both iconic and close to home, and The Tide reveals an artist at the peak of her powers.
“These are a collection of songs that I’ve had that are my favorites, and just hadn’t had their due yet,” Leigh notes. “So this is an exciting opportunity for me to get them out there, and work with some of my heroes, too.”
Leigh’s creative partners on The Tide include her husband and longtime songwriting partner Stephen Wilson Jr. on “Made For This,” a Butch Walker-produced track penned in the midst of the circumstance-forced closeness of the past year. “Stephen and I were pretty good about not fighting because we really couldn’t afford to,” Leigh remembers. “With us all being so close in proximity, you don’t want to have a knock down, drag-out fight simply because you’re stir crazy.
“But we definitely had a few fights, so we decided to lay a blanket out in the back yard and write about it. I knew the first line had to be ‘I hate you,’ because I’m such a good wife,” she laughs.
While Wilson’s participation was pretty much inevitable, Leigh also took the opportunity to swing for the fences singing partner-wise, reaching out to a country and pop music legend she’d loved since she was a kid for the “what have I done this time?” lament “Never Again, Every Time.”
“It’s simple. I grew up in Texas and grew up loving Tanya Tucker, as a little girl does. She’s incredible, and has been for so long,” Leigh says. “I never thought in a million years that I would get to sing with her, but I was delighted that she loved the song and was willing to be on it with me. It was definitely the best day of the whole year.”
Another long-time “wish list” voice for Leigh was Vince Gill, who counterpoints her plaintive vocals on the song “God Gave Me Horses,” a tale of regret and redemption.
“What he added to the song was just wonderful,” Leigh says. “It’s one of the songs that’s closest to my heart, and it was a dream come true and the best-case scenario for that song with that tenderness in his voice.”
The Tide’s final original track, “Good Trouble,” a collaboration with Ruby Amanfu, stands a both memorial of the late civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, and reminder to look at the perspectives of those around us, friends/neighbors/humans who might be living a very different reality (and have been for far too long) despite being an arm’s length away.
“I started writing the song with my friend Matt Maher, and we got a lot done, but we discussed what the next step was and that the song was really unfinishable unless we had the other perspective, the black perspective,” Leigh remembers. “I didn’t know Ruby all that well but I reached out to her, and she sent back this magical verse within half an hour.
“I had chills and was in tears, and I think she surprised herself,” Leigh says. “That was something neither one of us had expected that day, but it ended up getting written in a day.”
The two remaining tracks on The Tide — covers of Elton John’s classic “Your Song” and of the venerable hymn “I Need Thee Every Hour” — show not only Leigh’s instincts in choosing songs to interpret, but her tenacity in choosing duet partners, as well.
For the timeless hymn, Leigh enlisted gospel music legend CeCe Winans, a dream partner with whom she’s enjoyed her personal interactions with for many years. “I had wanted to sing that song with her forever,” Leigh says. “I got to sing at her daughter’s wedding, so I think, in her mind, she was thinking — somehow — that she owed me. And she doesn’t, but I’ll take it!
“I love that hymn, it’s always been one of my favorites and getting to sing that with her is definitely a highlight of my entire career.”
As for the Elton John cover, Leigh makes no bones about the gifts of Raul Malo, the longtime Mavericks frontman, and wanting to pair up with him. . . vocally, she insists.
“I’ve always wanted to sing with Raul Malo. Always, always, always, and he knows it,” Leigh says. “I made a very inappropriate comment at a party once suggesting what we sing together, and I was so very much hoping he’d forgotten what I said and he had not. . . and neither had his wife.
“When the idea of him doing a verse in Spanish came up, he easily worked up the phrasing and just knocked it out of the park,” she continues. “The most amazing thing about that recording is that we got to do it face-to-face, and in that 45 minutes we were singing, I just felt a lot of kismet in the room. It felt really, really good.”
The power found in letting those moments wash over you can be cleansing, freeing, resetting. Music, in the chaos of the “constantly on” culture of the day, can be that way, too. . . if only we let it. Leigh Nash has made a career of letting those moments in, and redirecting them back out.
$20.00 Ages 21+
This show currently has no COVID safety requirements for attendees. This is subject to change. If this changes we will be sure to update this page as well as notify all ticket buyers via email.
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