SAM KNUTSON is a singer-songwriter from Iowa City.  His most recent album is Donkey Island. He is happy as a pig in *#*@ in a listening room.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=d0-gRGmjEDU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=7yy5pdcBYRQ

Of late he has been involved with the Iowa Opera House project.

From the Shepherd Express: “Sam Knutson’s 2022 release Donkey Island is a collection of observational folk songs. “Already Gone” recalls John Hartford’s breezy melancholy, while “Prayer for the Downtown” leans into the lineage of fellow Iowan Greg Brown. The album’s sparse instrumentation allows Knutson’s songwriting to shine. In fact, his Bandcamp discography reveals a songwriter ripe for discovery. Milwaukeean Jeff Stehr’s fondly recalled Jamaica-centric combo The Tritonics and his current project Still No Tomatoes present him in collaborative settings.”

Opener Jeff Stehr is a glass half empty cognoscenti songwriter from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is fond of using stage names like Hunter Gatherer, Matthew McCudahy and Ike Witt, which are just a few of the many reasons why you have likely never heard of him.

Jeff’s songs are mostly wordplay and present-day doomsday reportage propelled by one drop rhythms and held aloft on ukulele wings and guitar strings. Jamaican ingredients conspire and collaborate with folk, pop, rock and blues influences to get into your head and steal your heart, but all genres are accomplices. 



When not performing solo, Jeff (guitar, ukulele, harmonica, vocals) is one half of Still No Tomatoes, a duo project launched in 2022 with his Tritonics bandmate Mike Lizzo (trombone, baritone horn, melodica, vocals). Following is a review of their work:

In the diminutive Milwaukee ensemble “Still No Tomatoes”, Jeff Stehr plays guitar and ukulele; Mike Lizzo, trombone and baritone. Although their music is mostly original, the texts of the proudly quirky duo are concerned with the familiar tropes and preoccupations that have long populated the American songbook.

Yet the band comes across as triumphantly new. Perhaps it is the orchestration that allows for this impression. When was the last time that you heard a ukulele and trombone duet? When they sing together, their voices are intervallically close; the sound soft and certain. Lizzo plays his trombone or baritone softly as if loudly would be impolite. They take water from a fountain of diverse experience and dip into a deep pool of genres. What to call it? Currently, they describe their music as “Hodgepop”. This is accurate. Stehr takes generously from the songbook of his experience, plays around with the hodgepge he finds, and writes music that ranges from the witty to the poetic. Despite the impatience of its name, “Still No Tomatoes” is ripe for the table.

Jeff has had his fingers in many Milwaukee music groups: the Tritonics, the Best Westerns, the John Sieger Combo, the Mike Benign Compulsion, Mark Truesdell & The Lost Pioneers, World Roots, Brave New Groove and C-Food Buffet, who once accidentally opened for Jimmy Buffet at Alpine Valley Music Theater in 1990.