eTown Taping with The Brook & The Bluff and special guest

Date and Time

• Tuesday, May 5, 2026  7pm - 9:30pm

Location

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Details

More than just a regular concert, eTown Radio Tapings are a unique live experience! The show includes performances and interviews with both of our visiting artists, and an interview segment with changemakers from our local and national community who are doing their part to make the world a better place. As an attendee, you serve as a vital part of our eTown show, which will be broadcast across the country on our affiliate radio stations and all streaming platforms. Listen for your cheers on the radio, and to hear how it all comes together, in just a few weeks following the night!

About The Brook & The Bluff:

The Brook & The Bluff get back to their rock & roll roots with Werewolf. Heavily inspired by the band’s live show, it’s a transformative album that finds the road warriors turning up their amplifiers, speeding up their tempos and howling at the moon in four-part harmony. The result is both energizing and electrifying, a record fueled by sharp songwriting and stacked vocal arrangements that have always been hallmarks of the band’s catalog, now shot through with the supercharged sonics of their concerts.

“The goal was to treat the record like a live set,” says frontman Joseph Settine. “With each song, we asked ourselves, ‘Will this be incredible to play onstage?’ If the song passed that test, we kept working on it. That’s where it all started.”

For the first time in years, The Brook & The Bluff took a break from the road. They’d been moving at highway speed for nearly a decade, touring America every spring and fall, earning over 200 million streams with viral hits like “Halfway Up” and “Everything Is Just a Mess” along the way. This time, they stayed put in Nashville, meeting up every weekday morning for band practice. It felt like old times again, four friends working together in one room, rediscovering the raw energy that first took them from the campus of Auburn University, where Settine and Alec Bolton formed the band in 2015, to venues across the country.

Outside of the rehearsal space, regular life continued to unfold. One band member prepared for his wedding. Another made his way through a divorce. For several hours a day, though, The Brook & The Bluff shut out the world and focused on nothing but music. Channeling the southern-fried sounds of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tom Petty, Eagles and Little Feat, they wrote songs like “105,” a highway anthem built for the fast lane, and the swaggering “Get By.” This new material was full of melody and muscle, each song delivering a message that often reexamined the tropes and tired expectations of manhood in the modern-day South.

On “Super Bowl Sunday,” crashing guitars and anthemic hooks provide the backdrop for reflective lyrics about masculinity, ego and the ties that bind. “That song is about being kind of a dumb guy at the crux of your life,” says Settine. “You’re falling apart with the love of your life, but you can’t take the time to work it out because the game is on. It’s a song about self-introspection and criticism.”

Other songs explore coming-of-age themes like responsibility and self-assessment over the band’s loudest and liveliest material to date. Somewhere between the catharsis of the instrumentation and the sharply written lyrics, Werewolf packs its biggest bite.

“We’ve made records in the past that were similarly self-introspective,” says Bolton, “but the guitars were much softer. It felt cathartic to do that over louder instruments, where the parts we’re playing can evoke just as much emotion and energy as the lyrics.”

Even the softer songs feel different. While arranging “Baby Blue,” the band wove three-part harmonies throughout every verse and chorus. They elevated “Can’t Figure It Out,” buoying the melancholic song with ringing acoustics and a thick vocal arrangement inspired by Eagles’ “Seven Bridges Road.” By the time they entered the studio, they had already played each song dozens of times, letting their collective energy drive the process.

“Werewolf feels very full-circle for us,” says drummer John Canada. “When we started this band, we didn’t know anything about the recording process. All we had were our instruments, our voices and the energy we created together.”

The sessions unfolded like a live show, with the band recording together in real time, often capturing each track in multiple full takes.

“We did nothing but live takes,” says keyboardist Kevin Canada. “We’d already spent months playing together. The arrangements were worked out. The songs were finished. We were ready to go, and you can feel that energy in the tracks.”

Fueled by rediscovery, amplification and a decade’s worth of brotherhood, Werewolf is the sound of a rock & roll band reinvigorated.