Nights of Grief & Mystery

We have an idea where the monsters are. That’s where we’re headed.

Friends are forged on the dark road headed out of town, and so we head there again, sojourning across North America and the United Kingdom in the name of psychic sanity and spiritual resolve in these most troubled and troubling of times.

These are nights in which love letters to life are written and read aloud. There’s some boldness in them. They have that tone. These nights have the mark of our time upon them, and they’re timely, urgent, alert, steeped in mortal mystery. They’re quixotic. They have swagger. What would you call such a thing? We call them Nights of Grief & Mystery.

We know and you know that the “Feel Good Now No Matter How the World’s Doing” industry is in full swing, so anything that calls itself A Night of Grief & Mystery seems a tough sell there on the banal information-overload, post-modern killing ground, where depth and spirit and subtlety are usually substituted for ‘steady as she goes’. Concerts for Turbulent Times they surely are. We aren’t poets – we wouldn’t claim that – but the evenings are poetic. They are musical and grave and raucous and stilling, which probably means they are theatrical. They are ceremonial, you could say. They are nights devoted to the ragged mysteries of being human, and so grief and endings of all kinds appear.

The band are, all of us, children of that ragged and sorrowing New World diaspora that Europeans began a few staggering centuries ago. Our UK Tour is something in the way of a subtle, minor keyed return to those shores. On 3 continents, people have put their evening and their hard-earned money down on the possibility that, for a few hours, it can all be otherwise, and that the willingness to congregate in sorrow-tinged mystery has magic in it, a conjuring, consequential magic that these times could use more of. With no idea of what to expect, they came.

The tour is served by the reckless labours of local friends and accomplices who fashion genuine gigs in their home towns from their dreams for a better day, their labours amounting to a love letter of their own that they are writing to their towns or cities, an act of citizenship of the most profound and responsible kind.

That dark road thing? That image is more than an image. That is what we do. That is our devotional act.

Watch the Tour Video Trailer

Watch the Tour Short Film – Lost Nation Road

Tour Stories

About Stephen Jenkinson

Stephen is a Harvard Educated Theologian, Culture Activist, founder of The Orphan Wisdom School. He is the author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, the award-winning book about grief, and dying, and the great love of life. He is the subject of a National Film Board of Canada documentary, Griefwalker. He brings teachings of the ramshackling kind, about honour and grace under pressure, about how we might learn our darkening times. His new book, Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, wonders about elderhood in an age of age-intolerance, and about the withering of the World Tree.

About Gregory Hoskins

Often described with epithets like “best kept secret”, “unsung”, and “an artist that has flown under the radar”, Gregory Hoskins’ career spans 11 recordings over 27 years and record deals on 3 continents. Hoskin’s lyrics and voice tend to break and bind at the same time, and his songs are steeped in the drama of living awake, with one foot in the sorrow of it all and the other in the beauty of it all. He does it over propulsive grooves, brooding electric guitar work and rich sonics. Material from his most recent release, Vain + Alone, is featured in the Nights of Grief and Mystery. Please visit Gregory Hoskins Music to listen.

Buy Tickets. Watch Gregory Hoskins in concert.