Keepsake House Presents: Americana the Beautiful

Keepsake House & Twangville present: Americana the Beautiful

Challenge what it means to play Americana music and achieve “the American dream.” Artists in Residence Napat Snidvongs and Valarie Walker join songwriters Garrett Owen and Laura Zarougian to share experiences and songs about America in the first-ever collaborative showcase between Keepsake House and Twangville. Peak behind the industrial curtains with us as we unearth the music of this land, its past and present, played by the people who are here.

Keepsake House is a home for independent artists to share the stage and make memories out of live performance. Founded in 2021 by singer/songwriter Jasmine Jang and program manager Hailey Savage with the mission to amplify marginalized voices in the New York City music scene, Keepsake House now hosts monthly roundtable shows at Rockwood Music Hall featuring seven artists in residence and more.

Founded in 2005, Twangville is a music review website covering all corners of Americana, including folk, country, bluegrass, rock, and blues.

Fort Worth singer/songwriter Garrett Owen draws inspiration from a multitude of sources, not the least of which is a childhood spent in Africa and South America with his missionary parents. “Quiet Lives,” his most recent release, looks at the push-pull of relationships, love, and loss with musical arrangements bristling/filled with complex chord changes and melodic dissonance. “With a sound akin to the more melancholy side of Jesse Malin, Owen brims with a mixture of mourning and understanding," said American Songwriter.

Owen has been nominated for numerous Dallas Music Awards and won the 2018 Troubadour Contest at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

Laura Zarougian is based in the Hudson Valley (by way of Boston, Chicago, Yerevan and Brooklyn). She has been an open mic host, poet for hire, barista and an elementary school art teacher. Describes her music as Armenian Cowgirl, although listeners tend to call it Americana, folk pop, and alt country. Mostly she spends her time stacking cords of wood, turning the compost pile, and chasing the groundhog that loves to snack on her sunflowers and hollyhocks.

Napat Snidvongs is a Thai singer/songwriter who currently resides in New York City. Napat mixes Thai storytelling traditions of magical realism and Buddhist folktales with the independent music sound that he discovered while studying at an American high school in the late ‘90s. He released music through a Bangkok independent label, So::on DryFlower Records, and his compositions have been featured in many television commercials and Thai blockbuster films.