Lou's Lips is a former New York City music collective known for their fusion of rock, soul and blues. The band consists of Pierce Kline, Tim Cotilla, Austin Johansen, Cole DeThomasis and Thompson Brandes--Becky's oldest son. Lou's Lips put on incredible performances at the Bash in 2021 and 2022 and can still be caught performing at NYC venues like Bitter End, Piano's, Arlene's Grocery and The Delancey.
Neal Francis’ sophomore album ‘In Plain Sight’ offers up a body of work both enchanting and painfully self-aware, recorded entirely on tape with his bandmates. Mixed by Grammy Award-winner Dave Fridmann (Spoon, Tame Impala, Flaming Lips), the album spotlights Francis’s refined yet free-spirited performance on piano, an instrument he took up at the age of four. The album came to life over the course of a tumultuous year spent living in a possibly haunted church in Chicago. The result: a portrait of profound upheaval and weary resilience, presented in a kaleidoscopic sound that’s endlessly absorbing. ‘In Plain Sight’ ultimately reveals the possibility of redemption and transformation even as your world falls apart. “When I started the process of writing these songs, I was so emotionally out-of-sorts and really kind of hopeless that I’d be able to come up with anything,” says Francis. “But then I sat down and started working, and embraced whatever inspiration came my way. Sometimes it felt like beating my head against a wall, but I tried to trust that it would lead somewhere. The whole thing was like a weird dream—this very strange time of terrible, wonderful isolation.”
George got his first guitar at about ten years old, and it wasn’t long before he was summoned into a lifelong love affair with the mercurial dark magic that is the blues guitar. Artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix were two early influences who inspired George to delve deeper into both the classic rock and traditional blues lexicons. As a young teen, George would go to blues jams at local bars with his dad and hang in the far corner with his Strat until it was time to sit-in. As George developed as a musician, he became more interested in incorporating the musical vocabulary and style of other genres of music into his own personal musicianship and began studying music theory, singing in choirs, acting in both straight plays and musical theatre productions, and began performing his original music with his bandmates around Tampa Bay.
George has performed at many music festivals and iconic music venues around the United States such as Gasparilla Music Festival, Suwannee Hulaween, Brainquility Music and Arts Festival, Rockwood Music Hall in New York City, and the legendary Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles. George has released two albums, "Daydream Sequence" and "GPIII". The former is on Spotify.