Sheridan Arts Foundation Presents: Eric Hutchinson, 9/9!

16 Aug Sheridan Arts Foundation Presents: Eric Hutchinson, 9/9!

Telluride’s Sheridan Arts Foundation presents An Evening with Eric Hutchinson on Friday, September 9, 2022 at 9 p.m. Doors open at 8 p.m.

Tickets are $25 each, all reserved, plus a $5 ticketing fee. Tickets here.

And scroll down for a preview of the show.

Go here for more on the Sheridan Opera House/Arts Foundation.

Eric Hutchinson performs solo and acoustic for an intimate evening with the singer/songwriter who has penned such hits at “Rock ‘n Roll” and “Ok, It’s Alright with Me.”

The past few years have taken away so much from everyone, yet people are still able to find moments of inspiration and hope in the midst of grief. The dichotomy is not unfamiliar to singer-songwriter Eric Hutchinson, who has shared the stage with Michael Franti, Ingrid Michaelson and Jason Mraz to name a few.

Hutchinson and his family recently had their own experience with the highs and lows that life can hand us: Eric’s wife Jill lost her mother to cancer and, just days later, Eric and Jill learned that they would be having a baby girl.

“I felt an overwhelming sense of inspiration,” Hutchinson says. “I wanted to capture all the positivity and love inside of me, and make something I could show my daughter later.” 

The result is Before & After Life, a complex, introspective, and jazz-tinged record that weighs happiness against sadness, written and recorded in the days leading up to the birth of Eric’s daughter, Zelda in 2018.

“I wrote these songs in a reflective and transformational time while I was existing in the valley between death and life,” Hutchinson explains. “The first half of the album are all songs about birth, life and parenthood. The second half of the record are questions and musings about death and where any of us goes in the afterlife.”

This new work continues Eric’s recent pattern of genre-hopping. After diving into the Americana/soul of Modern Happiness and the 90’s alt-rock escapades of Class of 98, Before & After Life finds Eric exploring a pop-based, jazz-rooted sound, one that calls to mind artists like Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell. He explains:

“I’m very inspired by artists who are constantly evolving their sound and aren’t afraid to incorporate all different types of music into their songs, while still maintaining a sense of self.”

Taken as a whole, Before & After Life arrives as Hutchinson’s most introspective, yet inspired work, one that will surely resonate and surprise longtime fans of the singer’s pop-soul hits like “Rock & Roll,” “Ok, It’s Alright With Me,” and “Dear Me.”

For Hutchinson, 2021 felt like the right time to release this time capsule from 2018.

“These songs and their sentiments are very aligned with the strange and emotional days we’re all living right now,” he says. “Life and death have never mattered more.”

The Sheridan Arts Foundation was founded in 1991 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization to preserve the historic Sheridan Opera House as an arts and cultural resource for the Telluride community, to bring quality arts and cultural events to Telluride and to provide local and national youth with access and exposure to the arts through education. The Sheridan Arts Foundation is sponsored in part by grants from the CCAASE, Colorado Creative Industries, the Telluride Foundation.