Adeline Hotel return to Hideout January 16th!
“What I’m going through is hard to describe,” Dan Knishkowy sings near the end of his kaleidoscopic new album, Watch the Sunflowers. Recording as Adeline Hotel, the songwriter, guitarist, and Ruination Record Co. label head has made an art of complicated feelings, whether zooming in so closely that he can describe each individual thread or panning out until the view becomes psychedelic and strange. At a prolific pace, he has accompanied these observations with music that’s just as creatively restless. On one record, he is a solo guitarist improvising in a quiet room; on the next, he’s a piano balladeer backed by strings. He may front a rock band that draws inspiration from Neil Young at his most ragged and Richard Thompson at his most stately; on another, he may blend into the autumnal hush of a complex jazz group.
The expertly written, masterfully delivered Watch the Sunflowers is the most colorful music of Knishkowy’s career. This, of course, is a direct response to what came before it. These seven imagistic songs arrive after 2024’s breakthrough Whodunnit, a record whose stark portraits of codependency and isolation were delivered as raw and nakedly as Knishkowy ever allowed himself. If those songs seemed to burst forward on the immediacy of their feelings, this time, he compares his approach to a Richard Linklater film. This process encouraged him to live inside the stories and notice how the passing of time changed the atmosphere, whether that meant embellishing the compositions with lush, expansive arrangements or sanding them down to impressionistic loops.
Produced with Nate Mendelsohn and bandmate Winston Cook-Wilson, the music arrives in a lineage of rock bands pushing their sounds to the brink. I think of the rock-bottom alien transmissions on Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born or the downer anthems of Big Star’s Third: albums where traditional rock bands presented their most fragile material in rooms where everything seemed to be falling apart. The recording process proceeded in two distinct phases. First was a traditional session in 2022 with regular collaborators Andrew Stocker on bass, Sean Mullins on drums, and Cook-Wilson on keys. After sitting on the material and letting the songs shapeshift in his mind, Knishkowy revisited them in early 2025 with Mendelsohn and Cook-Wilson, whom Knishkowy also enlisted to provide the sweeping string arrangements.” – Sam Sodomsky
& Wisconsin’s
DUSK join the bill to ramp up the evening even higher.
