INDY April 16, 2025

April 16, 2025

Deep Roots Deep Roots

Two decades after the Carolina Chocolate Drops formed, bandmate Rhiannon Giddens celebrates Black roots music with Biscuits & Banjos, a landmark festival coming to Durham.

By Sarah Edwards

WAKE WINNERS! Also inside:

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill

Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill

42 NO. 8

NEWS

Contents

5 Should a developer be able to get out of building affordable apartments near a Raleigh transit hub by paying $1.5 million? BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL

6 Some Durham neighborhoods saw a staggering increase in property values during the county's recent reappraisal process. BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW

8 Durham's school board adopted a first-in-the-state policy giving staff a role in district decisions. Why did it land like a loss? BY CHASE PELLEGRINI DE PAUR

INDY BEST OF THE TRIANGLE 2025

CULTURE

22 A trademark lawsuit results in a battle of the Big Spoons. BY LENA GELLER

26 Alex, the sophomore effort of Daughter of Swords, is a cheerfully cynical rejoinder to late capitalism. BY TASSO HARTZOG

28 A dispatch from the fifth and "final" Dreamville Fest. BY RYAN COCCA

30 A tribute to Kenny Hobby, who ran the Brewery in Raleigh for many years, and who died on April 3 at age 71. BY DAVID MENCONI

32 Rhiannon Giddens returns to Durham for Biscuits & Banjos, a landmark celebration of Black old-time music and foodways. BY SARAH EDWARDS

THE REGULARS

3 Backtalk 4 Op-ed 34 Culture calendar COVER Rhiannon Giddens. PHOTO BY EBRU YILDIZ

Publisher

John Hurld

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief

Sarah Willets

Raleigh

Berry Media Group Membership/ subscriptions John Hurld Mathias Marchington 10

Editor

Jane Porter

Culture

Editor

Sarah Edwards

Staff Writers

Lena Geller

Justin Laidlaw

Chase Pellegrini de Paur

Report For America Corps Reporter

Chloe Courtney Bohl

Contributors

Mariana Fabian, Jasmine Gallup, Desmera Gatewood, Tasso Hartzog, Elliott Harrell, Brian Howe, Jordan Lawrence, Elim Lee, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Cy Neff, Andrea Richards, Barry Yeoman

Copy Editor Iza Wojciechowska

Creative

Creative Director

Nicole Pajor Moore

Staff Photographer

Angelica Edwards

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Publisher

John Hurld

Director of Revenue

Mathias Marchington

Director of Operations

Chelsey Koch

Account Representative

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To reach INDY staff directly: tips@indyweek.com

Rhiannon Giddens (See Q&A, p. 32)

PHOTO BY KAREN COX

B A C K TA L K

Our last print edition featured an in-depth look by freelancer Jasmine Gallup at how Raleigh libraries serve the homeless population. Readers appreciated the reporting:

From Facebook user WILLIAM CASTLE:

This was so good—thank you for not only shedding a light on an incredibly vulnerable population, but also highlighting some of the wonderful people in our community who are working to improve lives—in ways both large and small.

From Reddit user RIGHT-MIND2723:

This is so true. I frequently say that [librarians] are the bartenders of books and resources. Our unhoused population spend most of their days in our library. We act as a warming and cooling station. We work very close with our community partners to assist people at their lowest. Each person is different though and that can be hard.

Lena Geller wrote online about a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by Hillsborough’s Big Spoon Roasters against a California chili crisp company with a similar name (find the article on page 22). Readers had a lot to say:

From Reddit user PERPETUALETERNAL:

I think the thing getting lost in this conversation is that the band Spoon should sue all of the people involved, and then the creators of the Tick should turn around and sue them for co-opting their IP’s trademark catchphrase “Spoon!”

This is all so obviously targeted at this one company because they inadvertently got their chili crisp all up in someone’s peanut butter.

From Reddit user WELSHMCHUGH:

It is always frustrating to see people getting worked up over trademark enforcement. Seems to happen every few months. The short answer is that if you don’t enforce your trademark, you risk losing it. I understand why it looks bad, but this is what you have to do if you have a trademark and someone is operating under the same name. If they don’t enforce it,

there is a chance someone else could take the mark and then sue Big Spoon Roasters forcing them to change their name. No one wants to see two small well-liked local businesses in litigation, but this is why any company (no matter the size) should do a trademark search before settling on a product name.

From Instagram user BENAY.NC:

Good, unbiased article! I really hope they can just drop this. The world is such a mess; surely a nut butter company and a chili crisp company on opposite sides of the country can coexist.

Chloe Courtney Bohl wrote about a recommendation by Raleigh’s Planning Commission to allow a developer to pay the city $1.5 million instead of building promised affordable housing units near Union Station (find the story on page 5). The request goes to the city council for final approval in coming weeks. In the meantime, readers have thoughts:

From Bluesky user BSAMUELS:

Where is the public benefit in this “public/private project” if no affordable units? Ten percent of units affordable at 80 percent of AMI isn’t even a heavy lift—it’s basically median income for renters. And an in lieu fee of just $40,000/unit is a joke.

From Instagram user VARANI:

Yeah, put all luxury apartments next to the PUBLIC TRANSIT station instead because the optics at Moore Square better not make its way to some rich developers portfolio. This proposal is just passing the buck.

From Instagram user HANGRYCHELSEA:

No, they should include affordable housing units as agreed upon. They can still add that 1.5 million to the affordable housing fund though. It’s a drop in the bucket to them.

Senator Overcash, You Know Me. Why Are You Erasing Me?

A former classmate urges a state senator to choose compassion over cruelty when it comes to anti-trans and anti-DEI bills.

BY PAIGE SULLIVAN backtalk@indyweek.com

Dear Senator Overcash:

I shouldn’t need to reintroduce myself to you, but I’m Paige Sullivan. I’m a native and lifelong resident of North Carolina. I’m also transgender and a former classmate of yours. We shared the same public school hallways for 12 years. We had many of the same teachers, though never in the same classroom at the same time.

I write to you today, standing up not only for myself but for thousands of transgender, gender-nonconforming, nonbinary, and intersex North Carolinians and families with transgender children. Since we already know each other, let’s keep this casual.

Brad, what are you doing? I was shocked when I saw your name on this bill. You were always a go-getter in school, but I never thought you’d put your name on a bathroom bill like Senate Bill 516. Have you considered the implications of the bills you have sponsored?

Can you all please explain to us how a person with a beard and a deep voice, who’s been on testosterone, belongs in the women’s room? What protections would you offer a transgender woman who is forced to use the men’s room? What will happen when someone needs to take their child or aging relative to the restroom of a different gender? There are many other scenarios to consider, and this bill will hurt many people.

Secondly, why is there a restriction on changing our birth certificates and driver’s licenses? Is that a personal dig at me, perchance? What’s between our legs is no one’s business, especially the government’s. On top of that, you have no idea how the transition process works. For me, it has taken the better part of twenty years. I’ve had psychological evaluations relating directly to my gender identity, by doctors over a few years. I’ve been on estradiol injections for 12 years. I’ve had five surgeries. You don’t just walk into

a clinic and have reassignment surgery.

OK, let’s move on to Senate Bill 227. By banning DEI programs, you’re not eliminating bias but codifying it. Students deserve to learn the full scope of American history, including the lives of Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and immigrant communities. Silencing these narratives doesn’t protect kids—it denies them the tools to understand the world they’re growing up in. We went to overwhelmingly “white” schools, but you had at least three racial minorities in your graduating class. Maybe you should ask them what they think of this bill. Explain to them that because they are a racial minority, other kids shouldn’t learn about their history or struggles for freedom and equal rights.

What’s the real reason? Brad, I know you are better than this. Stand on the right side of history. Don’t let party politics close your eyes to the harm these bills will cause. Think of your Christian beliefs. Would Jesus stand for this? I invite you to read Matthew 25:34-35, Luke 14:13, and the many teachings that call us toward justice and mercy. I’m not asking you to change overnight. I’m asking you to listen, to remember who I am, and to lead with compassion. We were taught in civics class that we are equal—did you forget that? Would you like me to contact some of our former teachers to provide a refresher course on the foundational documents of our country and state? I know one who would do it in a heartbeat for you.

Brad, you and I learned the same lessons about fairness, equality, and civic responsibility. I’m not asking for a debate. I’m asking for humanity. You may not accept my meeting request, but I hope you’ll receive this: Laws like SB 516 and SB 227 harm real people. And now, you still have the chance to choose compassion over cruelty. W

Paige Sullivan is a transgender software engineer who has been advocating for equal rights for the last 20 years.

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

Unfavorable Conditions

Raleigh’s Planning Commission accepted $1.5 million in lieu of promised affordable housing units at Union Station. Will the city council do the same?

BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL chloe@indyweek.com

Should GoTriangle and the developer Hoffman & Associates be allowed to pay $1.5 million into Raleigh’s affordable housing fund instead of including affordable units in the high-rise apartment complex they’re building next to Union Station, as they originally offered?

Last month, a majority of the members of the Raleigh Planning Commission said yes.

Although the planning commission’s 4–2 vote in the developers’ favor is only a recommendation (the city council gets the final say), it illustrates the tension between the City of Raleigh’s stated housing goals and the political and financial realities affecting its ability to realize them.

In 2019, the city approved GoTriangle and Hoffman’s request to rezone 1.74 acres of GoTriangle-owned land at 200 South West Street for a high-rise, mixed-use development. This was prime real estate in Raleigh’s up-and-coming Warehouse District; Union Station had just opened next door and the city was already in a housing crunch. At the time, the partners planned to build two towers

containing retail space, a hotel, and hundreds of apartments. Embedded in the rezoning was a condition that 10 percent of the apartments be priced affordably for households earning 80 percent of area median income or less.

Over the subsequent six years, the pandemic hit, construction costs spiked, and the site sat empty. GoTriangle and Hoffman revised their development plans down to a single, 23-story tower with retail and 385 apartments. Then, last week, they asked the planning commission to amend the property’s zoning conditions to allow them to contribute to the city’s affordable housing fund rather than include any affordable units in the development. Specifically, they offered to pay $40,000 times 10 percent of the total housing units in the building—about $1.5 million—to the city in lieu of including 39 affordable units as planned. Ordinarily, a developer in Raleigh is not obligated to build any affordable housing or pay any amount of money into the city’s affordable housing fund. But since GoTriangle and Hoffman voluntarily added the affordable housing

condition to their rezoning request, the city has leverage to hold them to that commitment—or not.

During the planning commission meeting, Hoffman representative John Florian argued that high-rise construction costs have gone up and rents have dropped since 2019, creating unfavorable conditions for development that make it impossible to include affordable housing in this building.

“It is an extremely, extremely challenging financial environment right now,” Florian told the commissioners. “We don’t see any point in the future where you can get enough rent on the nonaffordable units to cover that deficit in the affordable units to make that financially feasible.”

“Maintaining the current conditions … would render the project unviable,” Florian elaborated in an email to the INDY. “If the rezoning request is not approved, the site would likely remain undeveloped for an extended period or be limited to a less financially challenging, lower-density use that does not align with the city’s growth and housing needs.”

(GoTriangle deferred to Florian and Hoffman & Associates after INDY sent the agency a request for comment.)

The two planning commissioners who voted against GoTriangle and Hoffman’s request questioned whether a $40,000 payment in lieu of each affordable unit was sufficient.

Commissioner Reeves Peeler said the amount was “not adequate for a downtown high-rise given the housing inequality, homelessness and general unaffordability of Raleigh.”

Commissioner Tolulope Omokaiye called the paymentin-lieu proposal an “escape route” for the developers and questioned whether an extra $1.5 million would meaningfully impact housing production elsewhere in the city.

Commissioner Dwight Otwell, who ultimately supported the request, said he was “conflicted” about his vote because GoTriangle is a public entity and the development is next to a transit station—factors that potentially increase the city’s responsibility to deliver affordable housing.

Florian’s response: “The public-private nature of the project does not exempt it from fundamental financial realities.”

Florian presented the planning commissioners with a binary choice between accepting the $1.5 million payment in lieu or saying goodbye to this downtown development opportunity. He framed the first option as fair and data-driven. But is it?

According to Florian, GoTriangle and Hoffman landed on $40,000 per-unit based on “past city guidance on affordability contributions, intended to reflect the cost of replacing a market-rate unit with an

(continued on page 7)

GoTriangle and the developer Hoffman & Associates want to build 385 market-rate apartments next door to Union Station. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Sticker Shock

Some Durham County residents were caught off guard when they received their updated property valuation in the mail last month. Here’s what you need to know about the appraisal process and upcoming appeal deadline.

BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW jlaidlaw@indyweek.com

In January, the county’s tax administration office completed its two-year reappraisal process, which reassessed the property values for all of the roughly 126,000 parcels within Durham County. Notices for the new valuations started going out to residents at the start of March.

The assessed value of the property and the county tax rate determine a property owner’s annual tax bill. The last property valuation in Durham County was in 2019, when the median sale price for a house was approximately $239,500. By the end of last year, that figure had grown to $416,000.

North Carolina state statute requires all counties to conduct a reappraisal at least once every eight years, but because of the rapidly shifting housing market in the Triangle and neighboring counties, Durham County moved to a four-year appraisal schedule, which would allow residents to adapt to a more gradual change in property value, and accompanying tax bill.

Keyar Doyle, the county’s tax administrator, is a Durham native who started working in real estate in 2005. He says the new valuations come as a surprise to everyone, including him.

“I remember when some of these properties were $80,000, and I saw them go from $80,000 to $160,000, and from $160 [thousand] to $335 [thousand],” Doyle says.

In some neighborhoods, the price jump is staggering. During a February 10 presentation to Durham County commissioners, Doyle shared examples of home values that made significant leaps since the 2019 appraisal. A home that sold in south Durham jumped from $325,000 in 2018 to $560,000 six years later. In Watts-Hillandale, a west Durham neighborhood, a home skyrocketed 136 percent from $300,000 in 2018 to $710,000 last May.

And in east Durham, just a 10-minute walk from the city center, a home sold for $160,000 in 2020 and a colossal $597,000 just a year later, a 273 percent increase.

“Now, we’re seeing stuff I would have never imagined when I was growing up here,” Doyle told the INDY

Where is all this demand for Durham properties coming from? Near the onset of the 2010s, Durham saw a spike in new residents as the Bull City’s renaissance started taking shape. The relatively low cost of living compared to larger or similarly sized cities, a flourishing food scene, high-paying tech jobs, and proximity to other amenities like state parks, the beach, and an international airport made Durham attractive to people from across the country.

Doyle also says that climate change could be impacting migration patterns. Raging fires to the west, elongated and more brutal winters to the north, and hurricanes in the Deep South are pushing Americans to plant roots in

a different class of city.

“I believe what we’ve seen over the last 10 years is just people being a lot more observant and paying more attention to what’s going on in the world,” Doyle says. “You got a lot of people that just got smart about migrating to an area where we get all four seasons. We’re talking about the greater Piedmont: Wake County, Durham County, Chatham County, Orange County.”

Since 2019, Durham County has added an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 new parcels. Those parcels include residential and commercial properties, vacant land, and some tax-exempt properties like schools and religious institutions. Without annexing land from neighboring counties (or Greenland), new parcels were created by rezoning vacant lots or sprawling properties that only included a few structures and turning them into subdivisions packed with townhomes and apartments, each with their own parcel ID. With a majority of property values likely going up due to this year’s appraisal, the county board could look to balance the burden on taxpayers by lowering the county tax rate. The county has a significantly larger tax base due to the rise in population and parcel count.

Durham County Commission Chair Nida Allam also suggested at the February presentation that the county start publishing more detailed itemized tax bills so residents get a more transparent understanding of how their tax dol-

ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

lars are being spent. In 2024, the Durham County tax rate was 79.87¢ per $100, second highest in the Triangle region following Orange County. Property owners who also live within Durham city limits paid an additional 59.62¢ per $100 in city property taxes for the 2024–25 fiscal year.

Some Durham County residents suffered sticker shock after receiving their updated property valuation in the mail last month.

For recent homebuyers, the shock of a new valuation is tempered by the fact that the value is fresh in their mind, and the bill is likely divided up and bundled into their monthly mortgage payment. The challenge, Doyle says, is for long-time homeowners who have paid off their homes and don’t have a mortgage. These folks skew older, and some are on fixed incomes. Those residents tend to get their tax bill, often thousands of dollars, all at once, and they have a short window to pay it off.

“That’s why I spent the last year trying to do aggressive community outreach, because the number one issue isn’t about the buyers,” Doyle says. “It’s the people who have owned their home for 20 years and paid it off. They don’t have a mortgage. Those are the people that we want to get to and speak to and make sure that they are aware of what’s going on.”

Folks can appeal the valuation with the Board of Equalization and Review. Applications are due by June 16 before the county commissioners establish a new tax rate for the next fiscal year. Doyle rec-

ommends residents take action on their appeals based on the valuation and not their tax bill.

“If they are considering appealing, they need to appeal based on their tax value. Do not wait for your tax bill. Once you get your tax bill, it’s too late. You have to wait until next year. Don’t wait to see what your bill is to appeal. If you’re going to appeal, you need to appeal based on your value, not your bill.”

Most residents appeal in the first year, Doyle says, and then submissions taper off. In 2019, the county received 7,000 appeals (about 5.55 percent), but by 2024, there were only 80. Doyle says the state considers 10 percent of appeals— for Durham, that’s 12,600—as an acceptable measure for an effective reappraisal. Still, tackling a large volume of appeals with limited bandwidth can be daunting for Doyle’s department, so the fewer, the better.

“We want to make sure that we’re able to keep the standard of customer service high while doing that, and it gets harder the more appeals you have. So it’s a good operating number if we can stay around 7,000 or less, but considering this is a historic real estate market, and the market dictates the tax value. If the market was out of this world, unfortunately, the tax rates were, so because of that, I would expect us to have a historic amount of appeals. I don’t want it, but it’s to be expected.” W

(continued from page 5)

“We need mixed-income, mixed-use housing integrated with transit.”

—Raleigh mayor Janet Cowell

affordable unit elsewhere.”

Matthew Klem, a senior planner for the city, told INDY via email that Raleigh “does not have a policy that encourages or specifies a monetary contribution for affordable housing production.” If a developer volunteers to make a contribution, Klem wrote, the money goes into “a discretionary fund that the Council can use to support a wide range of affordable housing programs or projects.”

Like Raleigh, most cities in North Carolina have not created policies for payments in lieu of affordable housing. Even the ones that have policies on paper, like Chapel Hill, have struggled to successfully implement them.

Further afield, in places where mandatory inclusionary zoning is unambiguously legal, cities like Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis would likely require a significantly larger contribution from the developers.

In Portland, developers can choose to build a certain amount of affordable housing on-site or pay a fee of $27 per residential square foot. Constructing 385 market-rate apartments with footprints of, say, 700 square feet (which is below the aver-

age for a one-bedroom in Raleigh) would trigger a $7.8 million payment to the city.

In Minneapolis, where the payment-inlieu fee is $22 per residential square foot, the city could charge the developers about $5.9 million.

Raleigh isn’t Portland or Minneapolis. It can’t enact a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy without running afoul of the General Assembly. But in this rare instance, city leaders get to decide whether GoTriangle and Hoffman’s proposal represents a fair trade-off.

The day after the planning commission made its decision, Raleigh mayor Janet Cowell gave her first State of the City address. In it, she spelled out her vision for increasing the city’s housing stock.

“We need mixed-income, mixed-use housing integrated with transit,” she said.

The 200 South West Street development is a test case for that vision. When the city council hears GoTriangle and Hoffman’s request in the coming weeks, it can opt to accept the $1.5 million payment in lieu, double down on the original zoning condition, or, if it doesn’t like either choice, try to negotiate with the developer. W

Durham County Tax Administrator Keyar Doyle. PHOTO COURTESY OF DURHAM COUNTY

The new Raleigh Union Station Bus Facility under construction. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

A Hard Bargain

In a surprise vote following months of advocacy, the Durham school board approved a policy giving educators input on district decisions. Ironically, the Durham Association of Educators was left out of finalizing it, prompting members to storm out after the vote.

BY CHASE PELLEGRINI DE PAUR chase@indyweek.com

After more than a year of aggressive campaigning from the Durham Association of Educators (DAE), the Durham school board approved North Carolina’s first ever meet and confer policy in a surprise 4-3 vote last week.

The policy approval, which gives the DAE input on district decisions without violating North Carolina’s laws against public sector collective bargaining, was a historic win for organized labor in the antiunion South. But in a Pyrrhic twist, it landed like a loss for the DAE, the district’s majority union, whose members stormed out of the boardroom immediately after the vote.

“After months of thousands of workers being a part of a process, eight people decided on a final policy and totally left workers out of that process,” DAE president Mika Twietmeyer told INDY outside of the Durham Public Schools (DPS) headquarters last Thursday night.

The disagreement was over just one number, which the DAE and Superintendent Anthony Lewis have been haggling over for months: the percentage of membership necessary for other groups to win seats at the meet and confer table.

The board’s attorneys advised that they keep that number low, in order to avoid violating a state law that prohibits the board from giving any employee group “preferential treatment” through policy. (Asheville City Schools’ recently adopted a meet and confer procedure, which the superintendent can carry out without board approval and thus lacks the permanence of a policy).

At Thursday’s meeting, Lewis presented a draft that would give other organizations a seat if they could demonstrate they represent at least 6 percent of nonadministrative staff. The DAE’s draft called for 30 percent. No DPS organization other than DAE has demonstrated enough support to reach either of those thresholds.

The board ordinarily reviews draft policies at two meetings before voting, and most board members seemed ready to step back and let Lewis and the DAE come back with an agreement on that number. (During a recess in the proceedings, Lewis even pulled a chair up in front of Twietmeyer and quietly asked to meet again. Twietmeyer agreed, as long as the meetings would be part of the public record.)

But the board still haggled over that number for 40 minutes until veteran board member Natalie Beyer made the surprise move to call the policy for a vote without a later second reading. Beyer was the most persistent in arguing for the 6 percent threshold, as strongly suggested by the board’s attorney. She pointed out that the board, and its attorney, would ultimately answer to the state for any broken laws.

“We didn’t write it, we don’t like it,” Beyer said of the state law. “But we are trying to give a win to our education association.”

Board members, caught off guard, sat and processed Beyer’s motion for 14 seconds before Millicent Rogers moved to second it.

Beyer and Rogers were clearly frustrated with a process that has consistently been

tense but has only recently turned truly contentious. Beyer specifically mentioned a March meeting between the superintendent and the DAE, at which a room of over 100 red-shirted educators hissed and jeered at the superintendent as he sat at a table with over a dozen DAE representatives.

Even board member Joy Harrell Goff, who spoke in support of the DAE policy at the beginning of that meeting, called the later parts of the encounter “very uncomfortable” and “not our best moment.”

Since that meeting, communications have continued to break down as the DAE and board members have invited each other to more meetings while declining the other’s invitations.

In late March, the DAE invited board members to public meetings later in April. A few days after that invitation, the board invited the DAE for an hour-long budget talk at last week’s budget hearing. But the DAE didn’t show up, and only three board members have indicated they will accept an invitation from DAE to meet this week.

INDY has also viewed records that show most board members missed at least one recent email from the DAE because the district’s security system flagged the mass communiqués as suspicious.

As Thursday’s meeting dragged on, the number of DAE members in the audience dwindled until only about 20 remained to silently watch as board members bartered over that membership threshold. After an hour of this, Beyer, who declined the INDY’s request for further comment, reminded her

colleagues that the policy could still be edited after it was approved.

“It is putting something in place that gets this moving and can be modified in the future as all policies can,” she said.

Harrell Goff, Emily Chávez, and Wendell Tabb voted no. Tabb had repeatedly urged members to “trust the process” by sending Lewis to meet with DAE again, and even made a last-ditch effort to try to get Beyer to rescind her motion for a vote.

Beyer, Rogers, and Bettina Umstead voted yes, joined by Jessica Carda-Auten in a surprise shift.

Carda-Auten previously spoke in support of DAE’s version of the policy, including at that heated March meeting, and made several attempts Thursday to raise the membership percentage. She declined INDY’s request to elaborate on her vote.

In a statement the next day, Lewis called the policy “a significant step towards fostering open dialogue and cooperative problem-solving within our school system.”

After Thursday’s vote, the DAE huddled to try to figure out what to do at the end of an exhausting process that won them nearly everything they asked for but may have shown the limits of their influence.

Under the approved policy, the meet and confer sessions will start in October. Will the DAE, as the district’s only currently eligible organization, attend those meetings? Or will they push for a change to the policy?

“Our members will decide how to proceed,” Twietmeyer told INDY after the huddle. W

DAE members rallied in the rain ahead of a school board meeting in 2024. PHOTO BY KULSOOM RIZAVI FOR THE 9TH STREET JOURNAL

WINNERS!

For two decades, readers have relied on the INDY ’s Best of the Triangle awards to help them navigate important decisions about how to spend their time, where they spend their money, and—perhaps most importantly—what to eat and drink.

INDY stalwarts will note that, once again, we’re rolling out winners from our highly anticipated reader poll one county at a time. First up, we’re sharing winners for all categories in Wake County, with Durham and Orange counties to follow. From the best restaurants, to yoga studios and hair salons, to museums, and preschools, we’ve got you covered with readers’ top picks.

This year’s Wake County winners, as determined by our readers, have something for everyone—a greatest hits of food, bookstores, concert venues, parks, local causes and more. We hope you’ll take a look and check out some of the places, people and activities that make the community unique.

In the meantime, thank you for nominating all your favorites, and congratulations to all of the finalists in Wake, who will receive our coveted star decal and a poster to display.

Stay tuned for Durham and Orange County winners throughout the year and, in December, a special print edition rounding up the best of the best across the Triangle.

FOOD & BEVERAGE

Be S t alcoholic cocktail S FOUNDATION

Runners-up: Dram & Draught, Lime & Lemon Indian Grill & Bar

Be S t bagel

Benchwarmers Bagels

Runners-up: New York Bagel & Deli, Bruegger's Bagels

Be S t Bakery

Boulted Bread

Runners-up: Paul and Jack, Yellow Dog Bread Company

Be S t Barbecue

Longleaf Swine

Runners-up: Prime Barbeque, Mac's Speed Shop

Be S t Beer Retail Store

State of Beer

Runners-up: House of Hops, Tasty Beverage Company, House Creek Beverage Company

Be S t Bi S cuit S

State Farmers Market Restaurant

Runners-up: The Flying Biscuit Cafe, Rise Southern Biscuits & Righteous Chicken

Be S t Brewery (brewed locally)

Trophy Brewing

Runners-up: Neuse River Brewing & Brasserie, R&D Brewing

Be S t Brunch Re S taurant

Irregardless

Runners-up: Hummingbird, PRESS Coffee

Crêpes Cocktails, Neuse River Brewing & Brasserie

Be S t Hot Dog

Snoopy's Hot Dogs & More

Runners-up: The Roast Grill, The Cardinal Bar

Be S t Burger

Neuse River Brewing & Brasserie

Runners-up: Shake Shack, LaGana, Mac's Speed Shop

Be S t Catering

Sassool

Runners-up: Lime & Lemon Indian Grill & Bar, Mac's Speed Shop

Be S t Cheap Eat S

Char-Grill

Runners-up: Snoopy's Hot Dogs & More, Benny Capitale's, Mac's Speed Shop

Be S t Chine S e Re S taurant

Imperial Garden Chinese Restaurant

Runners-up: Peace China, Chengdu 7

Be S t Coffee Shop

NoRa Cafe

Runners-up: Jubala Coffee, Sola Coffee Cafe

Be S t De SS ert S

Hayes Barton Cafe & Dessertery

Runners-up: Bittersweet, Groovy Duck

Bakery, Asali Desserts & Cafe

Be S t Draft Selection

Raleigh Beer Garden

Runners-up: Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, Mac's Speed Shop

Be S t Ethnic Grocery Store

Grand Asia Market

Runners-up: Golden Hex European Food Market, A&C Supermarket

Be S t Food Truck

Mr. Burro Breakfast + coffee

Runners-up: 454 Grill, Qspresso

Be S t Indian Re S taurant

Lime & Lemon Indian Grill & Bar

Runners-up: Bombay Curry, Kebab and Curry

Be S t Italian Re S taurant

Vic's Italian Restaurant & Pizzeria

Runners-up: Cafe Tiramisu, Vivo Ristorante

Be S t Japane S e Re S taurant

Waraji Japanese Restaurant

Runners-up: O-Ku, Sushi Mon

Be S t Late Night Meal -

Pa S t 10 p.m.

Cook Out

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Be S t Mexican Re S taurant

Gringo A Go Go

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Be S t New Re S taurant

(within 12 month S )

Brodeto

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Be S t Non-Alcoholic Drink S (not coffee)

Cha House

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Be S t Pizza

Oakwood Pizza Box

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Be S t Wine Retail Store

Total Wine & More

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Catering

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N.C. Seafood Restaurant at the Farmers Market

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Be S t Su S hi

Waraji Japanese Restaurant

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Lemongrass Thai Restaurant

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Angus Barn

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Be S t Wing S

Woody's Sports Tavern & Grill

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Best

in Wake County: Sassool. PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

Best Japanese Restaurant in Wake County: Waraji Japanese Restaurant.

PHOTO BY JEREMY M. LANGE

PLACES

Be S t Wedding/Event Venue

The Umstead Hotel and Spa

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Marbles Kids Museum

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JC Raulston Arboretum

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Legends Nightclub

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Lonnie Poole Golf Course

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William B. Umstead State Park

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The Umstead Hotel and Spa

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Be S t Hotel Lounge

The Longleaf Hotel and Lounge

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indy Best of the Triangle 2025: Wake County

Best Park in Wake County: William B. Umstead State Park PHOTO COURTESY OF RALEIGH.GOV

indy Best of the Triangle 2025: Wake County

Be S t Karaoke Place/Event

Neptunes Parlour

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North Carolina Museum of Art

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North Carolina Museum of Art

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Downtown Raleigh

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Raleigh Little Theatre

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Be S t Pre S chool/ Early Education Program

Temple Beth Or Preschool and Kindergarten

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PEOPLE & MISC.

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Ashley Christensen

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Luxe Posh

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Cailin Peterson @ Clouds Brewing Raleigh Taproom

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Raleigh United Mutual Aid Hub (RUMAH)

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Be S t Non-Profit

Second Chance Pet Adoptions

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Note in the Pocket

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Be S t Rea S on to Love Wake County

Parks and Green Spaces

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Be S t Local Band

Dan Davis Group

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Kiara Ruth (@the.bananamoon)

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Be S t Politician

Roy Cooper

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Republican State Politicians

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Affordable Housing

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Bigge S t Wa S te of Public Money

Republicans Fighting Allison Riggs' Legitimate Win

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HEALTH

Be S t Barber Shop

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Children's Lighthouse of Raleigh

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Be S t Chiropractic Practice

Oak City Chiropractic

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Riccobene Associates Family Dentistry

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CLARA Dermatology

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Be S t Gym

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A New Day Integrative Health and Wellness

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Be S t Dog Veterinarian Practice

Care First Animal Hospital

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Care First Animal Hospital

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Wilkerson Obstetrics And Gynecology

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YoBa Studio

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A New Day Integrative Health and Wellness

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indy Best of the Triangle 2025: Wake County

BUSINESSES

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Cara Gibbons, Sterling Law

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Precision Tune Auto Care

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Stage Door Dance Productions

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Dog Diggity Daycare & Boarding

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Pack&Pride

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Dog Diggity Daycare & Boarding

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Chris Lee Electric, Inc.

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Fallon's Flowers

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indy Best of the Triangle 2025: Wake County

A

Be S t In S urance Company

Farm Bureau Insurance

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Raleigh Denim Workshop + Curatory

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PRESS Coffee Crêpes Cocktails

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Alvarez Painting

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HomeServices, Linda Nuxoll, RealtorRaleigh Durham Chapel Hill

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The Flourish Market

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ARTS

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Artspace

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North Carolina Museum of Art

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North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

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Goodnights Comedy Club

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Hopscotch Music Festival

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Legends Nightclub

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Be S t Electronic Concert Venue

Red Hat Amphitheater

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Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Raleigh

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Be S t Local/Regional Podca S t Level Up Artists

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All Are Welcome 428 S McDowell St

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Be S t Radio Station Serving Wake County

91.5 WUNC

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Wake County

Spoon Wars

In late 2024, Hillsborough nut butter company Big Spoon Roasters reached out to Big Spoon Sauce Co., a California chili crisp purveyor, alleging trademark infringement. Then things got ugly.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

When Mark Overbay started making his own nut butters in 2011, he named the company Big Spoon Roasters in honor of his dad, Gary, whose penchant for eating spoonfuls of peanut butter from the jar landed him the sobriquet “Big Spoon.”

Two thousand miles west and a decade on, after Lani Chan and her partner, Nathan Bender, caught Bender’s mom digging into a jar of the couple’s homemade chili crisp with—you guessed it—a big spoon, they decided they had a perfect name for their pandemic-born business: Big Spoon Sauce Co.

Now, the two companies are colliding in a federal lawsuit that pits Hillsborough’s Big Spoon Roasters—a local specialty foods success story that grew from a farmers’ market stall to a national brand, attracting praise from the likes of

Bon Appétit—against the California-based Big Spoon Sauce Co. In an industry where both companies are dwarfed by corporate bigwigs, the clash raises questions around cultural ownership, trademark boundaries, and who really wins when small producers go to war.

On March 28, Big Spoon Roasters, which Mark Overbay owns with his wife Megan, filed a lawsuit in the Middle District of North Carolina claiming that Big Spoon Sauce Co.’s use of the “Big Spoon” name infringes on their trademark and causes consumer confusion.

The suit seeks to stop Chan and Bender from using the name and demands they “deliver up for destruction all signs, prints, products, labels, advertisements, promotional materials, catalogues, brochures, information sheets, website materials, or other printed or graphic materials” bear-

ing the Big Spoon moniker.

“It would destroy everything we have,” says Chan, who cofounded Big Spoon Sauce Co. with Bender in 2021. “We would be starting from scratch.”

The suit, which names both the company and Chan and Bender as individuals, includes some stinging allegations, declaring the defendants’ conduct “immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, or substantially injurious to consumers.”

“I was not expecting a full attack on my character,” Chan says. “I am personally named in this lawsuit, as is my partner. It contains very damaging allegations of misleading our customers and capitalizing off the goodwill of a company that’s been around before us, which is extremely hurtful, on top of being flagrantly untrue.”

In response to a request for comment, Mark Overbay cited the ongoing legal case as a reason he couldn’t answer most of the INDY’s questions, including a question about the basis of naming Chan and Bender individually in the suit.

“Our hope as small business owners has been that we would be able to find an amicable solution for both businesses that respects our company’s rights in the Big Spoon trademark and the integrity and hard work that has gone into establishing our identity within our category while allowing both of our small businesses to continue to grow and find success,” Mark Overbay wrote.

Both companies occupy niches in the artisanal food space. Big Spoon Roasters—founded by the Overbays after Mark Overbay’s time in the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe, where he first experimented with adding flavorings to stone-ground peanuts—sells nut butters and bars.

Historically, the company has primarily offered sweeter flavors like chai spice and carrot cake, though recently they’ve been expanding their savory selection: Per a January blog post, the company, which Megan Overbay says is comprised of a team of 15, is “on a mission to convert y’all to savory PB appreciators” with products like their award-winning Lum Lum Thai Curry Peanut & Cashew Butter, for which they donate a portion of proceeds from every jar sold to Carolina Tiger Rescue.

Big Spoon Sauce Co. produces chili crisp, a Chinese condiment made by infusing oil with chili peppers, aromatics, and spices. Chan and Bender, who both previously worked in journalism and restaurants before being laid off during the pandemic, started the company as a fundraiser to support Asian American community organizations at a time when anti-Asian harassment was on the rise. At present, the pair are the company’s sole employees.

According to correspondence reviewed by the INDY, the two companies first came in contact in November 2024, when Big Spoon Roasters’ attorneys sent a letter to Chan

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

“The joy of applying different culinary traditions to our beloved medium of nut butter is essential to our DNA.”

—Big Spoon Roasters co-founder Mark Overbay

and Bender after noticing their trademark applications for “Big Spoon Sauce Co.” had been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. After a failed months-long negotiation between the two companies, Big Spoon Roasters filed a lawsuit.

The suit asserts that the two companies’ products are similar and distributed through similar channels, creating a likelihood of brand confusion. It names one retailer, Lunchette in Petaluma, California, that carries both companies’ products, and includes a screenshot from the store’s Instagram showing both products on the shelves.

“They found the one retailer that carries both of our products,” Chan says.

A January Forbes article states that Big Spoon Roasters’ products are sold in more than 4,000 stores nationwide. The company has recently announced plans to scale down and pull out of grocery chains, and in an email to the INDY, Megan Overbay wrote that “we currently sell into just over

600 retailers across the country.” (A Big Spoon Roasters store locator was taken down from the company website after the INDY reached out for comment.) Big Spoon Sauce Co. products are carried in about 20 small businesses, mostly within 30 miles of Chan and Bender’s home in Sebastopol, California.

“Our products are sold nationwide, and to have two companies with the same name in the same category presented a problem of customer confusion both in-store and online, as well as in wholesale channels,” Mark Overbay wrote in his response for comment.

Mark Overbay wrote that he first learned of Big Spoon Sauce Co. when a customer contacted him asking if the company’s products were connected with Big Spoon Roasters. When the INDY asked for a copy of the communication or specifics about where the customer saw both brands, Megan Overbay responded in a follow-up email that “the customer was doing an

online search for Big Spoon in California, and Big Spoon Sauce Co. came up.”

During the two companies’ initial email negotiations, the dispute took on a new dimension when Mark Overbay informed Chan and Bender of plans to expand into the chili crisp market with a chili-crisp-inspired nut butter.

“The joy of applying different culinary traditions to our beloved medium of nut butter is essential to our DNA,” Mark Overbay wrote in an email to Chan, adding that his company’s “core product line” has pulled “inspiration from the Caribbean, India, Africa, different parts of Asia, and Europe.”

Chan, who is Chinese American, says the revelation that Big Spoon Roasters plans to launch a chili-crisp-inspired nut butter makes the lawsuit feel less like brand protection and more like a ploy to clear competition from a food space before entering it.

“That immediately, for me, was more clarifying of their intentions than any actual brand protection,” Chan says.

Chan says she found Mark Overbay’s “DNA” remark culturally insensitive, particularly in the context of Mark Overbay asking a Chinese American–owned business to rebrand while his company develops Asian-inspired products.

“It feels bad for me to set aside everything I’ve worked on so that you can make one offshoot of a peanut butter that’s, like, an Asian-focused flavor that happens to be the one thing that I sell,” Chan says. “I am a Chinese person, and I make a Chinese chili crisp.”

In response to the INDY’s request for

comment, Mark Overbay wrote that the company’s products include “Lum Lum Thai Curry Peanut & Cashew Butter, Linzer Cookie Cashew & Almond Butter, & Chai Spice Peanut & Almond Butter.”

“While we have been planning a nut butter collaboration with a chili crisp maker for almost two years as part of this series, we are not planning to launch a chili crisp or line of chili crisp products,” Mark Overbay wrote.

Emails obtained by the INDY show a series of tense back-and-forths between the two companies before the lawsuit was filed.

Following the initial letter from Big Spoon Roasters’ attorneys in November 2024, Chan and Bender engaged in direct discussions with Mark Overbay, initially seeking to find a way for the two brands to coexist. Chan offered to more clearly display “Sauce Co.” in their branding and optimize their SEO to distinguish their offerings from Big Spoon Roasters. Chan also suggested the companies explore a collaborative gift box that would celebrate both of their offerings, emphasizing that although they share similar wording in their names, the biggest similarity is their appreciation for creative flavors and whimsy.

(This wasn’t a far-fetched proposal for Big Spoon Roasters, which has a monthly “featured jam” series that packages their nut butters with jams from other specialty food companies. April’s collaboration is with the Michigan-based company American Spoon.)

But these offers weren’t satisfactory

Big Spoon Roasters products in 2015. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

Big Spoon Sauce Co. chili crisp.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BIG SPOON SAUCE CO.

for Big Spoon Roasters. By January, talks had shifted to potential rebranding terms. During several rounds of negotiation over compensation for rebranding, the Overbays stuck to a final offer of $10,000— significantly less than Chan’s request for $95,000 to cover what she estimated as the full costs of business disruption and rebranding.

Chan eventually accepted the reduced amount, maintaining that it was insufficient to cover a rebranding overhaul. But negotiations began to deteriorate when Mark Overbay asked Chan to cancel her pending trademark applications in good faith—citing an upcoming deadline for filing oppositions—before Chan had seen the settlement contract.

Chan declined on the grounds that she wasn’t willing to abandon her applications without the contract in hand. Shortly after, the settlement fell apart altogether when Big Spoon Roasters’ attorney sent over a draft agreement containing provisions that Chan says took her and Bender by surprise.

One clause that the couple found particularly troubling was a confidentiality agreement that would have prevented them from explaining why they were rebranding. Chan says this would have required Big Spoon Sauce Co. to present the rebrand as a voluntary choice rather than the result of legal pressure, something she wasn’t comfortable misrepresenting to customers.

The draft agreement also restricted Chan and Bender in future branding, stating that any future business name must not have “any mark that includes the terms BIG and

Roasters, peanut-butter-based snack foods, peanut-butter-based energy bars, peanut butter, and nut butters; for Big Spoon Sauce Co., chili sauce and hot chili pepper sauce), the legal standard is not whether the companies are using the trademarks for the same products but whether they’re similar enough that consumers could be confused, Gerhardt says.

“If you’re talking, like, Delta faucets and Delta airplanes, it’s the same mark but the context is so different, people are not likely to be confused,” Gerhardt says. In the case of Big Spoon Roasters and Big Spoon Sauce Co., “the two names are virtually identical, and they’re both for food condiments. It’s similar enough that consumers seeing one could think it comes from the other company.”

filled a dozen orders in North Carolina, so there was grounds for a suit.

But in an Instagram post that Big Sauce Co. shared with customers on April 2, Chan shared one more detail: days before the lawsuit was filed, one more North Carolina order came in “from a customer who appears to be a legal assistant at the massive corporate law firm representing Big Spoon Roasters: Fox Rothschild, LLP in North Carolina.”

“We believe this was done to justify filing the lawsuit in North Carolina instead of California, where we are located, to make it more difficult and costly to defend,” Chan wrote in the post. The Overbays did not respond to an emailed question about what Big Spoon Sauce Co. posted regarding the legal assistant.

SPOON,” and proposed a payment schedule that the couple found unworkable.

High-profile trademark disputes have made headlines over the past year. Last April, chili crisp itself was at the center of a controversy when celebrity chef David Chang and his restaurant group, Momofuku, came under fire after trademarking the term “chili crunch” and sending ceaseand-desist letters to smaller Asian-owned businesses using similar branding for their products. Chang ultimately apologized and announced he would no longer enforce the trademark.

In February, The New York Times reported a case between a vegetarian Michelin-starred New York City restaurant and a Texas farm, both named Dirt Candy. The dispute ended with the farm rebranding as Wild Candy Farm after spending $10,000 in legal fees.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is filled with “Big Spoon” businesses: Big Spoon Yogurt, Big Spoon Energy, Big Spoon Marketing. There are pending applications from a Miami-based coffee business, a restaurant operated by the Osage Nation, a company making nonalcoholic mocktails, and a body pillow brand, all seeking approval on variations of the same name.

Deborah Gerhardt, a UNC law professor who teaches trademark law, says when two companies use the same trademark in the same or very similar products, there’s a high likelihood that consumers will be confused. While Big Spoon Roasters and Big Spoon Sauce Co. have registered trademarks for different goods and services (for Big Spoon

“The reason why it’s problematic,” Gerhardt continues, “is because, let’s say the California company’s product is not very good, and the North Carolina company’s product is very high quality. If the California company is selling a product that has different qualities or different ingredients, or isn’t that good, it could damage the reputation of the North Carolina company.”

Gerhardt says from reading the case, Big Spoon Roasters looks to have a strong case.

For the lawsuit to be filed in North Carolina, as this one was, Big Spoon Sauce Co.’s products had to have been sold in the state. Chan tells the INDY that she has

Big Spoon Roasters also posted about the lawsuit on Instagram this week.

Chan tells the INDY she doesn’t have the resources—financial or emotional—to fight a protracted legal battle with Big Spoon Roasters.

“We did some research when they first reached out to us, and they seemed like reasonable people who champion the same things that we value,” Chan says. “To receive a lawsuit from somebody like that is absolutely crushing and disheartening.”

“I would expect this from a bigger company—not that that would be pleasant either,” she continues. “But these guys know what it’s like to be small.” W

Big Spoon Sauce Co. cofounder Lani Chan. PHOTO BY MARIELLE CHUA

Big Spoon Roasters co-founder Mark Overbay in 2011.

PHOTO BY D.L. ANDERSON

Tricks of the Trade

On Alex Sauser-Monnig’s sophomore release as Daughter of Swords, cheerful electropop contends with a world coming apart at the seams.

BY TASSO HARTZOG music@indyweek.com

When I meet Alex Sauser-Monnig, the musician who performs under the name Daughter of Swords, it’s been two days since President Trump declared “Liberation Day” and levied tariffs on imports from every country in the world. Sauser-Monnig’s new record on local label Psychic Hotline, Alex, a playful and sometimes rollicking pivot from their mellow acoustic origins, is due out in a week.

As we talk on a bench beside Durham’s Ellerbee Creek Trail, seated under cascades of wisteria blossoms, the S&P 500 loses hundreds of points on the way to one of its steepest declines since 2008.

I mention Liberation Day, and Sauser-Monnig laughs. They have worked many part-time jobs over the years to support a career in music, and those places of past employment could not be farther from the world of Wall Street: goat farm, flower farm, public library. Most recently, they started an upholstery business.

So when it comes to bull runs and bear runs, Treasury yields and basis trades, a line from the jangly single “Money Hits” best describes Sauser-Monnig’s outlook on the present absurdity: “Does it matter anyway?”

It does matter, of course, whether we like it or not, and Sauser-Monnig acknowledges as much on Alex. “We need that money though / Without we won’t get very far,” they sing over the energetic pop beat on “Money Hits.” While writing the album, “paying the bills, or not being able to, was very much on my mind,” they say.

There are moments of real earnestness on the album—“Morning in Madison,” “Willow,” and “Song” all embrace the tender, forlorn romance that characterized Sauser-Monnig’s previous releases—but Alex’s defin-

ing mood is a kind of cheerful cynicism and hedonism. In “Vacation,” for instance, Sauser-Monnig indulges in a White Lotus–like fantasy of a tropical getaway with a lover, complete with “hummingbird yellow daquiris in the sun.” Frank discussions of sex abound on “Hard On,” and on “Money Hits” cash gives as much as it takes: “We won’t need anything / When the money hits.”

“Capitalism has always felt like a joke,” Sauser-Monnig says. “It is really funny, and it is so deadly serious. The punch line is on poor people, and the punch line keeps getting so much more severe on a daily basis.”

As Sauser-Monnig and I sit beneath the wisteria, the conversation turns from the farce of Liberation Day to the tragedy of the Great Recession. The 2008 financial crisis— “the beginning of modern life as we know it,” they say ruefully—hit when Sauser-Monnig was a senior at Bennington College. Unemployment peaked in the months following their graduation. But Sauser-Monnig was on a different path, having formed the folk trio Mountain Man in early 2009 alongside fellow Bennington students Amelia Meath and Molly Sarlé.

The group’s angelic vocal harmonies, honed at house shows, quickly attracted a devoted following. Under the pall of economic collapse, they found themselves packed into a Prius, touring the country. Two years later, they toured the world with Feist.

That Sauser-Monnig would end up a musician seems almost predestined. Their parents owned a music store in Minneapolis, where Sauser-Monnig grew up.

“I’ve always been really interested in the craft of songwriting,” they say. “I remember sitting down with my dad

and being like, ‘How do you write a song? What is this thing that’s so magical?’”

At the end of this month, after more than a decade in the Durham area, Sauser-Monnig is moving back to Minnesota to be closer to their parents and their partner. Alex, which arrives at a time of significant personal change, also captures a years-long period, punctuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Sauser-Monnig found new strength in their relationships and reckoned with their gender identity.

The new record will surprise anyone familiar with Sauser-Monnig’s 2019 solo debut as Daughter of Swords, Dawnbreaker, which predated these personal and world-historical shifts. “I wrote those songs singing very quietly to myself,” they say of the 2019 album, which is full of pretty folk harmonies and country-inflected ballads.

Alex, on the other hand, was the product of a close, dynamic musical collaboration with Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, whom Sauser-Monnig describes as their “two best friends.” (Sanborn is credited on every track but one; Meath co-wrote two songs on the album.)

Sanborn’s wizardry in the realm of “beeps and boops,” to use Sauser-Monnig’s description, gives the album much of its infectious bounce. The production and instrumentation—streaks of electric guitars, jolts of drum programming—also seem to have set Sauser-Monnig’s voice free. It stalks over Alex like a big cat, sometimes soft, sometimes snarling, always powerful. On “Dance,” it stretches and cracks with newfound confidence.

The plangent lead vocals on “All I Want Is You” nearly obscure Meath’s vocal harmonies—a carryover from

“I wrote a happy-sounding record about the death of humanity on planet Earth,” musician Alex Sauser-Monnig says. PHOTO BY GRAHAM TOLBERT

the duo’s past collaborations. Listening to the song’s chorus, you can almost see the object of Sauser-Monnig’s affection walking in slow motion into a crowded bar: turned heads, a stolen glance.

Alex takes cues from a wide range of genres. On “Willow,” for instance, TJ Maiani’s swinging brush patterns on the snare drums consciously emulate the warm jazz percussion of the Vince Guaraldi Trio. While writing and recording “Hard On,” Sauser-Monnig took inspiration from 1980s British singer Robert Palmer, and “Strange” has more in common with the Talking Heads than with Sauser-Monnig’s previous work on Mountain Man. “I feel strange,” Sauser-Monnig sings on the track, “but it’s just a natural reaction to a world coming apart at the seams.”

The result of Sauser-Monnig’s musical and personal discovery is an album that is remarkably attuned to the sounds and feelings of the present moment. “The earnestness of protest music in the ’60s had its place, and it was appropriate to the moment,” they say, “but there’s no way to make a record that feels totally relevant that’s acoustic-guitar-based. I mean, I’m sure that there is, but I wanted to get away from that being the basis of the record. Before recording any acoustic guitar, I would ask the question, ‘What could do that instead?’ And it opened up so much room for other sounds.”

Those new sounds have proved to be useful tools for expressing new ideas, partic-

ularly about social ills like class inequality and climate catastrophe—realities that Sauser-Monnig feels any artist who aims to be a “citizen of the world” must wrestle with.

“I wrote a happy-sounding record about the death of humanity on planet Earth,” they say. The last song on Alex, “West of West,” imagines a family driving through wildfires toward some “last retreat” from the havoc we have wreaked on the world. Sauser-Monnig sings softly over a mournful sequence of piano chords and a pulsing saxophone. The family doesn’t make it: “Smoky skies, burning heat / Melted rubber on the ground.” All that’s left in the end are “waves crashing on the beach, wind blowing through the trees.”

“I have a hard time saying the world is dying,” Sauser-Monnig says. “I don’t want to give up on it, but it feels like we’re Thelma & Louise–ing toward the cliff.” For those who haven’t seen Ridley Scott’s 1991 film, it ends with the titular duo driving over the side of the Grand Canyon. There is probably no better mascot for Alex than that turquoise Thunderbird, suspended triumphantly in midair.

Sex and extinction, joy and finances— all of these things manage to cohere on the album.

“There’s so much darkness, and there’s also this fragment of me that’s weirdly cheerful,” Sauser-Monnig says. “Like, is this the moment when we burn everything down?” W

Alex Sauser-Monnig PHOTO BY GRAHAM TOLBERT

Sweet Dreams

In its fifth and “final” year, Dreamville Festival shows off a party too good— and too good of a business—to let things wind down just yet.

BY RYAN COCCA music@indyweek.com

An abridged list of things famously billed as final chapters that, ultimately, turned out not to be: Michael Jordan’s ’97-’98 season with the Chicago Bulls. Jay-Z’s 2003

The Black Album. And, as of last week, rapper J. Cole’s 2025 installment of Dreamville Fest, the multiday, blockbuster hip-hop event that first arrived in Raleigh in 2019.

Not unlike last year’s festival, which arrived just days after Cole’s brief (and ignominious) foray into the simmering Kendrick Lamar–Drake feud that would come to dominate the summer, this edition had its own air of intrigue: namely, the news that the 100,000-ticket extravaganza, promoted over the past year as the “fifth and final” festival, would be, well, not so final after all.

“We’re gonna continue on the same path that’s been suc-

cessful for us,” Raleigh city manager Marchell Adams-David told reporters as part of the announcement, describing a new event that would definitely not be J. Cole’s annual April, Dix Park–based Dreamville Fest but would be held 1) in Dix Park, 2) around the same time every year, and 3) with involvement from J. Cole and his label, Dreamville Records. So far, organizers have been light on any further specifics about the yet-unnamed event, only offering that more details will be announced later this year.

“Our consumers have told us what they like,” Adams-David said, “and we’re gonna try to provide that for them for the next four years.”

One could be forgiven for wishing that beloved arts and cultural institutions not be spoken about in language that

seems better-suited for a Fortune 500’s quarterly prospectus. And yet, on Dix Park’s sprawling grounds—kaleidoscopically adorned this year, as ever, with imaginative public art sculptures, a massive Ferris wheel, food and drink vendors from near and far, and two towering stages on opposing ends of the park—Adams-David’s basic premise was hard to challenge.

As in years past, conversations with attendees made it clear that the draw wasn’t so much specific names on the lineup as it was a general ambience—one that Dreamers find to be more communal, more calm (I’ve never seen so many adults blissfully napping in public in my life), and more inviting than other music festivals of its scale. Late on Saturday, I spoke to two thirtysomethings from Vegas who said that even without J. Cole headlining, even without the Dreamville brand, they’d likely come back to future event iterations. Ditto for a trio of older Chicago millennials attending the fest for their third time, and a young woman from the Bay Area who in five Dreamvilles had never missed a single one.

Even when I finally did encounter defectors, it was hardly a commentary on the event itself: an artsy couple handing out free stickers ruefully told me this year would be their last, mostly because they wanted to become parents soon and felt the festival was part of a concluding chapter in their lives. It seemed that everywhere one looked, “the path that’s been successful for us” was plain to see.

But in at least one arena, organizers weren’t just continuing on the same path as much as charting a new one: operations and logistics, which reached a new level of sophistication this year. Everyone seemed to notice that things had never been so professionalized, from security to water supply stations, sound, and even the timeline of the day itself.

Consider the dizzying taxonomy of RFID wristbands (a chip technology often used for contactless exits and entries) on-site, of which I counted more than 10 types, but the true number could well exceed 20. At various checkpoints through the campus, access (to photo pits, VIP lounges, backstage, etc.) could be granted solely by the green- or red-emitting LED lights triggered by the bands— the freewheeling days of just being waved through by some figure of authority, or being granted certain privileges by association, were over.

At least, for the most part. On Sunday morning, riding along with an artist’s team as they entered the park— including a complete deboarding and reboarding of the vehicle for a K-9 search—I did make it into the artist village that sits behind the headlining stage. But once there, I was in wristband purgatory, with access to free Hennessy and hookah, and not much else. Knowing that the next time I approached a checkpoint, a machine would glow red and I’d be booted out, I was tempted to stay. Still, after a few

Crowds at 2025 Dreamville Fest PHOTO BY SIMON CHASALOW

“To me, this shit feels like a cookout, like a family reunion.”

complimentary Henny-ritas, I sensed that the story was elsewhere and headed back to GA, relinquishing the first-class privileges that I never really had in the first place.

Most of the oddities and amusements of a spectacle like Dreamville aren’t to be found backstage, anyway. Exiting and reentering the grounds, I stopped to talk with a young man in Birkenstocks with flowing blond hair who was not on-site to attend the festival but rather to preach to the masses streaming into it. Unfortunately, most questions I asked him were reversed into questions about me, like whether or not I was right with Jesus (I confessed I was not). On the other side of the park, a group of young girls no older than 13 regaled entrants with freestyles over oldschool, “Rapper’s Delight”–style beats—I first saw them at two p.m., and they were still there doing it when I left at around 11, leaving me with no choice but to assume that these children were rapping for nine hours straight.

One might suspect that, for all the joys it provides to those inside its confines, the Dreamville circus might risk being a nuisance to those just outside it. As the crowd fanned out into the adjoining Boylan Heights neighborhood on Saturday night, I noticed a man on his porch who had set out a chair by the sidewalk with a sign reading “Hydrate!” alongside free bottles of water. Had the deluge of 100,000 people across

two days become an undue burden on the residents? In five years, “we’ve never had a problem,” he said.

Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising for a festival that has made a friendly sensibility core to its brand (some merch this year literally featured the phrase “Dreamville Family Reunion 2025”)—not just among customers but increasingly with the North Carolina hip-hop community itself.

To wander through the Fam or VIP areas was to constantly bump into a who’s who of local music figures, with some even ending up on the biggest stages: Cyanca and Shame Gang performing during Charlotte rapper Lute’s set; Jooselord and NLH Darian appearing as extras for Bas in front of 20,000-plus people. All the while, major North Carolina stars like TiaCorine and Vic Blends chatted and posed for photos with celebrities and fans alike but mostly just hung out.

Technical achievements aside, the festival’s biggest feat every year may be this: the way that by the end of two days, it has reduced what would otherwise be remarkable in Raleigh to essentially background noise. Such things are just what happens at Dreamville.

Exiting the festival grounds with a group of friends and acquaintances on Sunday night, the friend driving our F-150 abruptly parked and got out when he saw an unassuming man in the post-fireworks quiet of

the staff parking lot—forties, glasses, flatbrimmed cap—with the hood popped on his old school. Our friend embraced the man, chatted with him for a bit in a way that conveyed an easy familiarity, then popped back into the driver’s seat and told us who it was: J. Cole’s brother. Not part of an entourage, not hopping into a tinted-out SUV, just packing up his stuff and heading home, like this was the end of a youth soccer tournament.

Onstage just an hour before, amid a gauzy, finale-appropriate set that chronologically explored his 15-year career, Cole had once again invoked the familial, laid-back framing: “To me, this shit feels like a cookout, like a family reunion.” He wasn’t wrong. Sure, it’s

a cookout where the T-shirts are $50, there are 20-plus levels of wristband-based citizenship, and the DJing doesn’t come from a wooden picnic bench but rather from a multistory liquor villa—but it’s a cookout nonetheless.

In managing to maintain that sense of authenticity and organicness alongside mainstream popularity, big-ticket corporate activations, and increasingly streamlined efficiency, the folks behind Dreamville have done something that even a hardened cynic would have to concede is pretty incredible.

It’s hardly a mystery why, Dreamville name on the banner or not, they aren’t ready to let the music stop. Not yet. W

J. Cole and Erykah Badu PHOTO BY JULIAN BAJSEL

Right: J. Cole. PHOTO BY MUSTAFA AL-KHAWAJA; Below: PHOTO BY BRANDON TODD

Remembering Kenny Hobby

Hobby, who ran downtown Raleigh venue the Brewery from 1983 to 2004, left an indelible mark on the local music scene.

BY DAVID MENCONI music@indyweek.com

Whether or not they’ll tell it in the interests of protecting the guilty, every Raleigh clubgoer of a certain age has a Kenny Hobby story.

Here’s mine, from way back in 1991, when a rumor went around that R.E.M. was playing “secret” shows under a pseudonym. Raleigh’s Brewery nightclub was supposedly on the itinerary.

The night it was supposed to happen, a capacity crowd showed up and a bad scene broke out when R.E.M. did not turn up. Things got contentious enough that I wrote a column about it for The News & Observer. When I sought out Brewery owner Hobby to ask if he knew how that rumor got started, he laughed for a long, long time.

“Nope,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “But I hear AC/ DC’s gonna be in here next weekend with Mojo Nixon.”

Similar stories have been going around town this week following Hobby’s death on April 3, from an array of health problems. He was just short of turning 72 and lived some high-mileage years.

“He had congestive heart failure, and that caused a lot of other things,” Lisa Thompson, his partner of three decades, told the INDY. “There was deterioration, and he just wore out.”

A native of Durham, Hobby played drums in bands through high school before moving to Raleigh in 1971 to attend NC State University. While his field of study was textiles, his real education came from haunting local nightclubs.

Hobby got involved in running a number of local nightspots, including the Silver Bullet (which later became Goodnights Comedy Club). But it was the Brewery on NC

State’s Hillsborough Street main drag where Hobby truly made his mark. He owned and operated it from 1983 to 2004, through several momentous eras of local music.

“Every bar owner in town stands on Kenny’s shoulders,” says Van Alston, a longtime Raleigh nightlife impresario who was Hobby’s business partner at the Brewery for several years in the 1990s. “He was a guy who cared about the bands, the sound, making sure everybody was happy, even though he was not the most astute businessman. But he had a great product, sold what people wanted.”

From outside, the Brewery was a frankly unsightly plywood box, and you wouldn’t have called the inside a comfortable room. Yet it had a great dive-bar vibe and the best sound in town. I lived a two-minute walk from the Brewery through the 1990s, when I was the N&O’s music critic, so I was there several nights a week for years.

The list of national acts that played the Brewery on their way up is formidable. I saw The Cranberries and Sheryl Crow playing there for minuscule crowds, not long before both blew up on MTV. And I also saw Blind Melon, maybe the worst band ever to earn a platinum record, playing a month-long Sunday-night residency during their brief time as local residents. They were terrible, but they did send Hobby a platinum record after hitting it big. He kept the Blind Melon plaque on the wall behind the bar, taking it with him when he sold the club in 2004.

In the 1980s, the Brewery was a prime spot for hardcore shows with bands like Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and local heroes Corrosion of Conformity. The club’s other most notable peak came in the second half of the 1990s, when it served as home court for a gener-

ation of local alternative country acts.

It seemed like The Backsliders, 6 String Drag, Two Dollar Pistols, or Whiskeytown were playing the Brewery every weekend back then. The Backsliders recorded their 1996 live album From Raleigh, North Carolina at the Brewery on a hot Saturday night in July of that year. Connells drummer turned director John Schultz set a key scene there for his 1997 movie Bandwagon. And one night, Whiskeytown fiddler Caitlin Cary began singing in the Brewery’s women’s room with Tonya Lamm and Lynn Blakey—and Tres Chicas were born.

Keeping the party going was hard on everyone, of course. Jac Cain said working as soundman at the Brewery “turned me into a raging alcoholic,” and he wasn’t the only one (of note, he got sober years ago). But the foundational role the Brewery played in local music is undeniable.

Hobby finally sold the Brewery in 2004 to Tom Taylor, and it kept going until 2011, when it was torn down to make way for the student housing complex Stanhope. Hobby retreated to the coast and kept working, most recently at the Ocean Grill and Tiki Bar at Carolina Beach (which hosted a celebration of Hobby’s life on April 9, his birthday). Meanwhile, so much of Hillsborough Street has been torn down that it’s unrecognizable from the Brewery’s heyday.

“It’s a shame Hillsborough Street as it was no longer exists,” says Alston. “In a perfect world, Kenny would have been there until the end of time, running that bar.” Plans are in the works for a Kenny Hobby tribute event in Raleigh this summer, probably at the Pour House. W

Kenny Hobby with the late Tim “Skully” Quinlan at the Brewery’s Christmas party circa the late 1990s. PHOTO BY DAVID BARTHOLOMEW

Resonant Sounds

Biscuits & Banjos, Rhiannon Giddens’ landmark new Durham festival, celebrates the deep roots of Black old-time music and foodways.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

“I’m interested in the throughline. That’s always what I’m interested in.”

Rhiannon Giddens is speaking from her home office, stacks of books and skeins of yarn piled on a shelf behind her. She’s speaking about reviving traditional music from the past (specifically, in this conversation, songs honoring German student protester Sophie Scholl, who was beheaded in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets) and finding its resonance in the present.

Giddens, a devout student of history, has made a career of excavating past acts of resistance—from Scholl, whose example has clear historical reverberations today, to Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar trafficked into slavery in North Carolina whose memoir Giddens turned into a Pulitzer Prize-winning opera in 2023—and drawing them into the present. Last month, Giddens was in the news for her own moment of defiance, deciding not to play the Kennedy Cen-

ter after it fired its longtime president, appointed a Trump loyalist in her stead, and installed President Trump as chair.

It should be no surprise, then, that Giddens’s next act also has a compelling throughline to the past: Biscuits & Banjos, a three-day “exploration of Black music, art, and culture” takes place in downtown Durham April 25–27. The event marks 20 years since Black Banjos Then & Now, an old-time music gathering, took place in Boone.

There, Giddens and other revivalists, including future Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmates Justin Robinson and Dom Flemons, met Joe Thompson, an Orange County fiddler born in 1918 who is credited with keeping the Black string band tradition alive. The Carolina Chocolate Drops— who will reunite for the first time in over a decade, at the upcoming festival— formed in response to Thompson’s mentorship, as he passed down singular techniques learned from his father and grandfather, who was born into slavery.

Ahead of the festival, the INDY spoke with Giddens about roots music, her new album with Robinson, and readying for Biscuits & Banjos.

INDY: Biscuits & Banjos is a few weeks away. Why did you choose Durham, and what are you most excited about with the festival?

RHIANNON GIDDENS: Durham and Chapel Hill is really where the Chocolate Drops got started. We met at the Black Banjo Gathering and App State, and went down to Joe Thompson’s house in Mebane. But when we played together as a trio, we would busk on the street at the Wachovia building in Chapel Hill, and played at all the venues around Durham and Carrboro and Chapel Hill. The whole area is kind of like our birthplace as a band. INDY Week, you know, broke us out there as a band. We had barely been a band when Dom was on the cover, and it’s really how things got kick-started. I think we mentioned in that article, “Yeah, we do school shows”—we hadn’t done school shows—and we wanted to. And then we got all these schools that were packing out February for Black History Month. And, you know, we had to come up with stuff, and that all went into our first record.

It felt like a natural fit to come back to the Triangle. Durham specifically is a historically Black city—and obviously that’s changed over recent years, but the history is very deep. We were very careful. We talked to people from Durham, like, “Does Durham need a festival like this? Would Durham be interested in a festival like this? Would we be adding value?”

When we found out there is a space here—the Art of Cool is gone, Moogfest is gone—we did our due diligence, and the whole time we’ve been working with people from Durham and from North Carolina. The whole team is made up of mostly North Carolinians, outside of the folks on my team.

This festival has all these other aspects of material culture—food, storytelling. Can you speak to what you see as a relationship between all of these things?

It was kind of my dream—really, biscuits, books, and banjos was the ultimate dream, but Biscuits & Banjos is shorter and catchier. The idea came about as I was just seeing what was happening in the culture. I call it nonmainstream Black culture, right? This is not Kendrick Lamar, not Beyoncé, not Black moviemakers and stuff. We’re on the edges, and we break through every once in a while.

In terms of the music, I wanted it to be a place where that was the center—instead of us being on a stage somewhere or an act in another festival, all it is is us doing this work. The cultural excavation that a lot of us are doing in

Rhiannon Giddens PHOTO BY KAREN COX

work is also happening in the foodways world. This idea of creating a space where we can cross-pollinate and see each other and meet, and somebody coming in can get an idea of what’s happening in general, across— you know, I think it is a culture in and of itself, of historically informed art-making and food-making and books and thinking about how they all come together. These folks have been doing this work, and a lot of them I know very well—it was an idea of “Gosh, let’s come together and celebrate.”

I have that 2005 INDY feature pulled up and wanted to ask you about something you said in it: “Playing this music is a reclamation, and I think that’s happening across the board in oldtime music, a lot of youngsters are picking it up because it’s something that’s real. It’s not pre-packaged, pre-fabricated, and spoon-fed to you on MTV.” That was 20 years ago—what has or hasn’t changed since then?

I think in general, the old-time, Bluegrass, and Americana community—Americana obviously being a new term—really has picked up a lot of momentum.

There is a lot that’s very exciting about what’s been happening, but I also feel like there’s also been a lot of commodification of this music, and that brings its own problems. There’s an academization of this music going on. Not to throw shade on those institutions, but I want us to be aware of what’s happening to this music.

All traditional music changes. It changes function—it’s dance music, and then it’s performance on stage music. The Chocolate Drops took dance tunes, and we performed them on stage. I’m not saying that you can’t do that, but [we’re getting further] away from that last generation that grew up connected to the land.

I just want us to investigate why we’re playing this music still, and what we’re doing with it. It’s something worth saving but I do want to make sure that we’re connected. That’s kind of behind the release of [Giddens’ new release with Justin Robinson] What Do the Blackbirds Say to the Crows? It’s a reminder: Yes, let’s play it fancy ways, and let’s put on the gear and get on stage and do it. But also, let’s make sure we’re still sitting on the porch and just playing the tunes.

I’m curious about where your new album was recorded and the significance of those places.

Joe’s [Thompson’s] tradition was fiddle and banjo—no guitar, no percussion. It was just fiddle and banjo, and there’s a different sound to the banjo when it’s not played with a bass or a guitar. Particularly, Joe’s music really wasn’t developed for guitar or bass, and that’s why Dom often played percussion instruments with Joe’s tunes.

I was like, “You know, gosh, it would be nice to just have a whole record of fiddle and banjo, and let’s do them in the places where the tunes come from. Let’s do something from the West [in North Carolina], some in the Piedmont, some in the East,” because I knew Justin knew tunes from all of those places. So then it was naturally like, “Well, let’s do Joe tunes that we’ve never recorded at Joe’s house.” Joe’s nephew welcomed us and fed us, and it was just really a beautiful thing. And then we went to Etta Baker’s house in Morganton— and her house has not changed. It’s insane. It’s like she

wandered off one day and never came back. It doesn’t have electricity, [and] literally her hat is on the rack. Both me and Justin walked in there and almost cried because we’re like—“Grandma!” Her son came and hung out with us for the day and told us stories about Etta and listened to the tunes.

Several weeks ago, you canceled your appearance at the Kennedy Center, and it made headlines—

That still surprises me.

I think we’re starved for anyone standing up. People are just capitulating right and left.

That decision was difficult. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to protest; I wanted to figure out the best way. But then I was like, “What am I staying for? People who want to come to my show aren’t gonna feel comfortable.” I had enough time to pivot, and there was another venue open. I was lucky. There are people who stayed at the Kennedy Center, and they made statements or made the show a protest. I really feel the best thing that we can do is support each other. As long as people make a statement, we need to support it, because there are people in all sorts of different positions— big platforms, little platforms, people dependent on them. The main thing is that whatever people decide to do, do something that feels right to you. I don’t use social media to talk about current events, because I use my social media for other things. I use it for history; I was just talking about the German Peasants’ Rebellion. I’m playing the long game. Some of us aren’t playing that long game, and they can afford to play the short game. If you’re a big pop singer, there are things you can do that keep the sanctity of your platform.

What drives you to incorporate history into music?

I can’t not do it. I’m so obsessed, and it’s become my way of living at this point. Like I said, I’m a really long-haul person—I’m in the middle of a musical right now that incorporates a lot of very fraught things from our past—and when it comes to songs, I’m not a Bob Dylan. There are people who are writing about what’s going on now.

I’m interested in looking at these movements in the past—people have been fighting against the same shit for generations. And centuries. And centuries. I’m interested in the throughline. That’s always what I’m interested in.

I’ve been in the stacks at Wilson Library—well, not in them, but benefiting from the people who work in them. Part of the problem is that we didn’t know what we had. We didn’t know because we didn’t educate ourselves about things that were set up in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s and ’30s, even; we just took them for granted. And now we’re being shown what we took for granted as they’re being dismantled one by one. How to fight that, as a musician, when we’ve been gutted? When all the creatives are being gutted and now we’re being silenced and put into fear, and we’re the ones who are not supposed to lead the charge but provide the soundtrack? I’m going to do what I can.” W

This

EXTRAS ON THE SIDE

Upon being announced, Biscuits & Banjos sold out pretty quickly—which is great news for the future of Americana music and Durham’s ability to sustain ambitious festivals like this one, but disappointing, of course, for those still hoping to catch some world-class string music.

Luckily, festival organizers have curated abundant free programming. You can find a full list of community programming online; below, here are our quick picks for free things to do.

FRIDAY, APRIL 25

Pembroke musician Charly Lowry, a member of the Lumbee/Tuscarora tribes, first rose to fame on American Idol and has soared as a soulful dynamo since. See her play at 8:45 p.m. at the Blackbird Stage at Lot 20.

At PSI Theatre, catch two film screenings: German Soul presented by Justin Robinson at 6 p.m. and Boil That Cabbage Down with director Candace Williamson at 7:30 p.m.

Break it down both Friday and Saturday night with the Pinhook’s 10 p.m. event Sweet Molasses: A Pop-Up Juke Joint, hosted by local DJ collective The Conjure.

SATURDAY, APRIL 26

Blackbird Stage at Lot 20 has programming throughout the day, all Saturday, so show up anytime after noon (programming runs 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m.) and you pretty much can’t miss. But if you’re trying to narrow down your options: A 3:30 p.m. performance by breakout string band New Dangerfield, followed by guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams’s 5 p.m. show, is a powerhouse sequence. It is likewise impossible to pick favorites from programming at the ATC Water Tower; however, 1:30 p.m. talk “Sounds, Soul, & Supper,” featuring Durham’s Ricky Moore alongside other culinary mavens, promises to be delectable, and 3 p.m. talk “Libraries as Sanctuaries for Black Stories,” featuring Tressie McMillan Cottom and Mychal Threets, is apropos of the moment.

SUNDAY, APRIL 27

Carry the inspirations from the weekend forward with a stop at 21C’s Music Village, where you can find banjo lessons from Deering Banjos, shop for instruments, and more. W

C U LT U R E C A L E N D A R

THUR 4/17

MUSIC

Rubblebucket 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Shadowgrass w/ Clay Street Unit 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

STAGE

Little Shop of Horrors April 9-27, various times. PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill.

Merrily We Roll Along April 10-27, various times. Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh.

SCREEN

Faya Dayi 7 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

MUSIC

Back to Back to Black: the Amy Winehouse Celebration 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Brother Kent 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Cherub Tree / Megabitch / Alaska’s Angels / Dead Sea Sparrow 8 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

CHIODOS: 20 Years of Alls Well That Ends Well 6 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Larry & Joe 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

The Wildmans 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

STAGE

Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

PAGE

Adam Sobsey presents: A Jewish Appendix with Rabbi Hannah Bender 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

SCREEN

“Human Highway” 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

FRI 4/18

MUSIC

Asleep at the Wheel 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Daisy the Great w/ Benét 7 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Dexter Moses Quartet 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

The Dip: Love Direction Tour Part II 8 p.m. Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw.

Flamenco Vivo’s Tablao Flamenco April 18-19, various times. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

FLO: Access All Areas North American Tour 2025 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Golf Clap 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

I Laugh At Myself: An Evening With Justin Furstenfeld Of Blue

October 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Keller Williams’ Grateful Gospel ft. Gibb Droll 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh. WED 4/16

John Howie Jr and the Rosewood Bluff Album Release Show 7 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Johnny Sunrise 6 p.m. The Glass Jug Beer Lab, Durham.

Kurrent 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Lud, Knockout Artist 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

Meshell Ndegeocello: No More Water, The Gospel of James Baldwin 7:30 p.m. Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham.

MIKE 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Party Illegal Presents BLENDR!! 9 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

Flamenco Vivo brings creativity, tradition, and high energy to Motorco on April 18 as they showcase what the flamenco artform has to offer. PHOTO COURTESY OF MOTORCO MUSIC HALL

Seattle-based R&B band The Dip performs “poignant songwriting, detailed arrangements, and vintage sound” at the Haw River Ballroom on April 18. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

Pollute w/ Grudge, Cumshot Wound, and Survival Tactics 7 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Tablao Flamenco April 18-19, various times. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Yesness w/ Weird God 7 p.m. Kings, Raleigh.

STAGE

Duke Opera Theater: “Art of the Divine” 7 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

SAT 4/19

MUSIC

Blake Hornsby, knives of spain, Crowmeat Bob 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

Chicago Live in Concert 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

The Conjure’s 8th Year Anniversary 10 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

The Djam 7 p.m. Succotash, Durham

Dogs in a Pile w/ Wright Ave. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Fortune Factory Presents: Rave 90-9 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Fust 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Grace Lucia / blankstate. / Front Woman 7 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

Jermainia Presents: UPLIFT 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Pouya: THEY COULD NEVER MAKE ME TOUR 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Rebecca Kleinmann Quartet 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

SUN 4/20 MON 4/21

MUSIC

Cheekface 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Kidd G w/ Sterling Elza / Tyler Nance 7:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Leonid & Friends: A Tribute to the Music of Chicago 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Live Music with Ed Kincade 12 p.m. Lanza’s Cafe, Carrboro.

Magic Sword w/ Starbenders & Mega Ran 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Youth Lagoon w/ Valley James 7 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

MUSIC

Free Throw: Those Days Are Gone 10 Year Anniversary Tour 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Howling Giant / Bronco / Lie Heavy 8 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

Joey McIntyre: Freedom Tour 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Machine Head, In Flames 5 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

The Mystery Lights, Levitation Room 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Swervedriver w/ Frankie Rose 7 p.m. Kings, Raleigh.

Nashville’s “preeminent fuzz-psych power trio” Howling Giant graces the stage on April 21 at The Pinhook. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PINHOOK

Midnight Release Party: Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry 10 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

C U LT U R E C A L E N D A R

TUES 4/22

MUSIC

Lowertown 8 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

WED 4/23

MUSIC

Ally J on the Roof 7:30pm. The Durham Hotel, Durham.

Cameron DeWitt / Morgan Harris 8 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

Griffin William Sherry w/ Eli Winders & Kit McKay 7 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Jennifer Curtis 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

THUR 4/24

MUSIC

An Evening with The Tannahill Weavers 7:30pm Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

The Fray: The Fray Is Back 2025 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Jazzmeia Horn 7 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

KPOP Rave 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Lonnie Rott / Chessa Rich 8 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

Perfect Person 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

STAGE

Carolina Ballet: Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto Apr 24-27, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Theatre in the Park presents: The Book Club Play April 24-May 3, various times. Pullen Park, Raleigh.

PAGE

Jim Lampley and John Grisham discuss It Happened! 6 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

FRI 4/25

MUSIC

Adventure Club 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Rhiannon Giddons Presents Biscuits and Banjos Festival! April 25-27, various times. the Pinhook, Durham.

Brother Ali 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Darren Kiely 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Hiroko Yamamura 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Peter Holsapple Album Release Show 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Shrek Rave 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

UNC Faculty Jazz with Special Guest Ross Pederson 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Warren Zeiders: Relapse Tour 8 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

Weebs N’ Wubz 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

STAGE

NC Symphony: Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony April 25-26, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

with

Tannahill Weavers April 24

Cat’s Cradle Back Room. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

Lowertown performs April 22 at Cat’s Cradle Back Room. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

MON 4/28 TUES 4/29 SUN 4/27 SAT 4/26

MUSIC

Momma: Welcome To My Blue Sky Tour 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Slow Teeth (Record Release) 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

STAGE

Bring Out Yer Dead 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Carolina Youth Ballet: Don Quixote 1 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

MUSIC

Anvil w/ Don Jamieson & Midnite Hellion 7 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Bartees Strange 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Gang of Four 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Live Jazz with Joseph Silvers 11 a.m. Lanza’s Cafe, Carrboro.

STAGE

Rhizome Comedy: Bailey Pope 8 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

MUSIC

Sawyer Hill 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Stillhouse Junkies 7:30pm Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

STAGE

Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: In Concert 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for Performing Arts, Raleigh.

MUSIC

The Balourdet Quartet 7:30 p.m. Atomic Clock Brewing, Durham.

North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Olivia Ellen Lloyd / Isa Burke 8 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.

Witness the sonic collision of roots, bluegrass, Texas swing, blues, and rock performed by Durango, Colorado-based band Stillhouse Junkies April 28 at Cat’s Cradle. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

Olivia Ellen Lloyd performs at the Pinhook on April 29 at 8pm. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PINHOOK

PUZZLES

CROSSWORD

Los

SU | DO | KU

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

Edited by Patti Varol

© Puzzles by Pappocom

C L A S S I F I E D S

EMPLOYMENT

TK Configuration Management Specialist

Arrow International seeks a Configuration Management Specialist (IPN Mgt. Team) (CMSDON) in Morrisville, NC. Provide logistical support & conduct impact analysis for all internal pt nos (IPNs) w/in our supply chain. Reqs MS+2 yrs rltd exp. Email resume to tfxjobs@teleflex. com. Must ref job title & code in the subj line.

Lead Infrastructure Engineer

Lead Infrastructure Engineer, F/T at Truist Bank (Raleigh, NC) Apply in-depth knowl of application support & an understanding of best practices. Provide level 2 & 3 level support for web / middleware issues that come through the enterprise support center. Must have a Bach’s deg in Comp Sci, CIS or related tech’l field. Must have 3 yrs of exp in application support positions performing/utilizing the following. Middleware production support & prgm analysis; installation, configuration & administration of application servers & webservers that host intranet/ internet facing application server setup & mgmt; Infrastructure & Environmental migrations; monitoring of critical systems/systems processes & problem resolution/escalation of application, data networking & system mgmt issues; exp w/: Linux Red Hat, AIX, Windows Operating Systems, & J2EE standards & best practices; 2 or more of the following: Microsoft IIS Server; IBM Websphere Application Server; IBM WebSeal (Tivoli Access Manager) &/or ISAM; VMWare Tomcat / TCServer; IBM MQ; IBM Datapower Gateway; Tibco; & Pega. Position may be eligible to work hybrid/remotely but is based out of & reports to Truist offices in Raleigh, NC. Must be available to travel to Raleigh, NC regularly for meetings & reviews w/ manager & project teams w/in 24-hrs’ notice. Apply online (https://careers.truist.com/) or email resume to: Paige.Whitesell@Truist.com (Ref Job #R0100960)

EMPLOYMENT

Process Engineer II

Process Engineer II, F/T at Truist Bank (Raleigh, NC) Own a portfolio of technology & business process models & procedures, functioning as a SME w/in process vertical & display mastery of industry specific knowl. Dsgn & implmt process-oriented IT solutions & ensure adequate change mgmt & adoption across all levels of the organization. Measure & monitor ROI of process improvement projects to ensure organizational efficiency & profitability. Must have Bach’s deg in Comp Sci, CIS, Comp Engg, or related tech’l field +8 yrs of progressive exp in systems engg or IT consulting positions. In the alternative, employer will accept 10 yrs of exp in systems engg or IT consulting positions. Must have 8 yrs of exp w/ the following: providing tech’l solutions for big data mgmt, Enterprise data warehouse & BI solutions; providing tech’l & thought leadership to the team of dvlprs & engineers; dsgng, dvlpg, integrating & testing ETL data pipelines & systems; providing architectural dsgn of ETL methodology; performing data engg & dsgng strategy to manage large data volumes; applying understanding of data analytics life cycle methodologies incl data cleansing & prep’n methodologies; planning & managing IT projects; Prep reports & ensure the project is on track by coord’g w/ cross functional teams; & utilizing the following: SQL; Relational D/bases; ETL/ELT architecture & concepts; data integration concepts & big data concepts; Hadoop; Cloudera Data Platform (CDP); Snowflake; Hive; Informatica DEI; & Python. Position may be eligible to work hybrid/remotely but is based out of & reports to Truist offices in Raleigh, NC. Must be available to travel to Raleigh, NC regularly for meetings & reviews w/ manager & project teams w/in 24-hrs’ notice. Apply online (https://careers.truist.com/) or email resume w/ cvr ltr to: Paige Whitesell, Paige.Whitesell@Truist.com (Ref Job# R0100961).