Mason Jennings Live at The Cooperage with Dramatic Lovers

When Mason Jennings started writing songs for his new record, Songs From When We Met, he was in a setting he had never written in before. “I was living out at a farm for a month and walking through some old woods on the property every day. There was a river. And each day an owl would come find me, and then perch above me, day or night. I saw lots of snakes. Songs just came to me there. They were coming in so fast they just about took my head off. It was unlike anything I’ve experienced before,” recalls Jennings. In Native American animal medicine snakes symbolize rebirth, owls symbolize seeing what others cannot and turning darkness into light. Both are themes throughout the album and the music has a clear hopeful feeling.

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Dramatic Lovers take their name from a violence-prone group of WWI-era anarchists that haunted the very same Milwaukee neighborhood that the band calls home. The band played their first show at the Cactus Club, the exact building in which the anarchists gathered a hundred years before. Their methods and goals are different, but both groups of Lovers share a certain sense of righteous passion.