Jacob Smigel

Jacob Smigel: songwriter/musician— turned ER doctor— turned musician again, is coming to Sweden just ahead of the release of his new album... a long overdue follow up to his left-of-center collection "If I Were Me", tentatively titled "We Laughed A Lot, Didn't We". He has teamed up a second time with Providence, RI’s own Deer Tick, to bring you many styles and many moods. Smigel has a knack for taking a scalpel to the human condition, wether he’s singing about the dharma and doldrums of midlife (“You Can Relate”), what cadavers can teach the living (“The Library”), remembrances of time spent on the road back in the day (“Waste Your Life, Be an Artist”), or his own medicine/music duality (“The Shadow”). As the Nashville Scene says “He’s folded interests like medicine and entomology and a fascination with found sound into gentle songs that seem to tumble out of his head fully formed.” Vowing to keep artistic expression at the forefront of his life, Smigel is coming to Europe in May 2025. “I suppose that if I had two lives to live, I’d be an ER doctor/family man in one of them— which I am for the most part— and in the other I would have never stopped making music full-time, and instead have followed that pure creative energy where ever it could take me. Considering I have just one life to live, I need to do both." Besides music, Smigel has also released several collections of "found sound"— culled from thrift stores, yard sales, and more… these recordings often find their way into live shows and even into the songs themselves ("Band Nerd Love”). These human-centric recordings are best experienced live and blur the line between eavesdropping and performance art. One such recording from 1976, "The Carol Tapes,” is a shockingly raw audio diary that follows a young woman named Carol, through her troubles in art school, her love/hate relationship with Mick Jagger, her fast food binges and diet pill-induced starvation, to her eventual arrival at rock bottom, and then— the foothills of recovery. "The Carol Tapes" is available now… on cassette of course. Also performing is Swedish-American singer songwriter Rebecca Tilles, who blends these two cultures seamlessly. All ages show. Music starts at 5pm-7pm.