Kare11
2023 Minnesota State Fair KARE 11 Barn bands Aug. 31-Sept. 3
bloodline
Favorite State Fair food:
Julia – Pronto Pup; Eliza – garlic cream cheese wontons from Que Viet; Lukaz – chocolate-covered bacon
Favorite State Fair activity:
Julia – Miracle of Birth Barn; Eliza– rides at the Midway; Lukaz – collecting free things
“Honestly, they know me better than I know myself sometimes.”
Unabashed openness and vulnerability don’t come easily for members of a lot of families, but luckily for the three siblings who make up Twin Cities alt-pop/R&B band Bloodline, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“It’s just our immediate family here in Minnesota. In the Brazilian culture, family are very open and vulnerable — it’s just a very common thing when we’re there,” Eliza said. “I think both of those two things combined made it so much easier when we were just starting our musical journey.”
As the name of their band suggests, family is everything to Eliza (big sib; songwriter, backing vocals), Lukaz (middle sib; production, keys), and Julia (little sib; songwriter, lead vocals), that’s why it’s only natural that the bandmates’ American and Brazilian heritage comes on full display with each work of audio art.
“Our parents are actually from Brazil, so we always kind of have that culture with us,” Julia said. “Just getting those two fields [American and Brazilian] and trying to combine them into our own now.”
With each of their different talents and tastes coinciding, the bandmates actively pour themselves out through their music. Currently navigating through the process of recording and releasing their second album, “Moments,” the band collectively agrees each new track shines a light on its always-evolving cultivation and growth.
“Writing and singing-wise, we’ve just gotten more honest,” Julia said. “We used to say a lot of things without saying them, you know? But now, I think we’re not afraid to really just be honest about the emotions we felt and really portray them so that, you know, other people can be inspired.”
A type of progress, they said, that simply comes with getting older.
“I think at first, we were kind of scared to take risks — all the music is really safe,” Lukaz said. “Now with this album, we’re a little bit more comfortable and kind of playing closer to the edge.”
Eliza added, “I think, with having our first album and seeing that we could have creative differences but still come together, at least made me more honest and more willing to push limits and stuff with this album.”
Bloodline will perform at the KARE 11 Barn Window Concepts Live Music Stage on Thursday, Aug. 31 — the same day they release their sophomore album, “Moments.”
For more information about Bloodline, visit their website, or check out their Instagram, TikTok and YouTube pages.
Elizabeth Ghandour of Elour
Favorite State Fair food:
Favorite State Fair activity:
In a world where women are sometimes just expected to play along, singer-songwriter Elizabeth Ghandour insists on playing to win.
“I get to play a powerful person, you know? And that’s what I really do feel like inside.”
The artist, who fronts Twin Cities band Elour, said her progression from folk rock to femme rock has changed the entire game.
“As a certain age group of a female-identifying person, you know, there’s a lot of like, playing sweet,” Ghandour said. “I’m sweet, but I just don’t get a lot of opportunities to be like, ‘Bam! This is what it is — no apologies.'”
But Ghandour said that learning to be unapologetically herself while expressing her art isn’t always considered pretty.
“I scream and things, and sometimes, they sound awful,” she said. “I mean if you’d see other people privately experiencing some of their real, raw emotions… it’s frightening. So there was an aspect I wanted to share — for real — of this part of this rawness that is human. It’s also embarrassing, but you know, I feel like it’s not all of who we are.”
Ghandour said to find out who she really is, she ultimately had to look out, to look in.
“A lot of musicians feel like outsiders — I do as a person,” she said. “Like, who are my people? Where do I belong? Who can I share my love with? Who can I trust?
“I think a lot of artists maybe struggle with that sense of belonging somewhere, so you kind of want to put yourself out there and say, ‘Hey, does anybody else identify with these feelings of hurt, pain? Turning pain into being strong?'”
With the release of the band’s album, “Blood Running,” in April, Ghandour said also came clarity.
“Anybody that has that spark, there was always that kind of identifying piece that you see in each other,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, we both kind of see the world differently in a way.’ You kind of can share in that and a music community can have a lot of people like that in it.”
Some of those people — specifically the engineering crew at St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin’s Zoo School Studio — helped the band finally make Elour, as we know it now, come alive.
“It was just a lot of clarifying: What is this music trying to do? What am I trying to express through it?”
Ghadnour said the goal the band had at the end of each day, was simply to connect to people through music.
“You kind of want to figure out how to be a part of something; how to belong; how to connect with people, so you don’t feel alone.”
You can catch Elour’s set at the KARE 11 Barn Window Concepts Live Music Stage on Friday, Sept. 1 at the corner of Judson and Nelson at the Minnesota State Fair.
For more information about Elour, visit the band’s website, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook pages.
Sam Ruff of Denim Matriarch
Favorite State Fair food:
Favorite State Fair activity:
Mom jeans — but make ’em shred?
“We’ve attached the whole mom jeans imagery around it, but it’s just kind of word salad,” said Sam Ruff, guitarist for Twin Cities five-piece prog rock outfit Denim Matriarch. “That’s a good metaphor for the whole band: Is there something deeper? Maybe, but probably not. We don’t think too hard about it.”
The high school friends from Hopkins who make up Denim Matriarch haven’t put much thought into band name semantics since the group’s formation around 2011, giving them more time to put their creative energy to an even better use.
“For the better part of 12 years, we’ve gotten together almost every week,” he said. “We try to carve out at least two or three hours every week that we can work on things together.”
Lately, the band’s been working together to record and turn out a fresh album, which Ruff said is coming — slowly, but surely. In a fight against time, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, its after-effects and the inevitable grind of five individual schedules, organizing time to play and perform has been a challenge. But still, Ruff said the friends forge on.
“We have about 10 songs ready to record, so we’re getting ready to go back into the studio,” he said. “Since the pandemic, we’ve kind of focused less on playing shows and I’ve really just been focusing on getting the music ready to record.”
The next time they head into the studio, the band will record its fourth album, but until then, Ruff said, they’re combing through their new stuff at practice, working to identify any potential missing piece.
“We practice in this old warehouse in northeast Minneapolis called City Sound,” he said. “It’s a nice spot if you want to be really loud and not bother too many neighbors.”
With the space giving the group the resounding freedom to riff and rage, Ruff said the guys hope to have their next record put together and pushed out by next spring.
“We’ll kind of see where it goes from there, but we’d like to circulate some more shows once we get this recorded. Fingers crossed.”
If you can’t wait for them to tour with their next album, you can catch Denim Matriarch at the KARE 11 Barn on the Window Concepts Live Music Stage on Saturday, Sept. 2.
Leng Moua of Hyooman
Favorite State Fair food:
Favorite State Fair activity:
Connecting through music, some folks might tell you, is only human nature.
“Gradually, relationships blossomed into friendships. We were, most of us, all good friends before we started this band.”
Twin Cities native and singer-songwriter Leng Moua said his friends and bandmates that make up their group, Hyooman, are generally of the same opinion: All that really matters is that everybody’s having fun.
“When you’re trying to participate in the music industry, it kind of like feels mechanical at some point, or it feels very draining,” Leng said. “When I was writing music for Hyooman, I was just thinking I wanted it to be fun again. I stopped having fun with music at some point.”
Now solidly into the process of recording their second album, Leng said he and his buddies in Hyooman unreservedly started to challenge the limits of each internal status quo.
“Things are coming out a little bit more organically musically,” he said. “I mean, the first album I had written the songs already … we already kind of had a script to follow,” he said. “The second album is so much more challenging. We’re writing as we go; we’re trying to do different things.”
With a fresh batch of tracks forthcoming on album No. 2, Leng said the band is busy closing in on the near-complete experiment in northeast Minneapolis’ Casino Time Recording Studio, which happens to be operated by Hyooman’s drummer, McCoy Seitz.
“There are no windows so you’re not really quite sure what time it is,” Leng said of the studio.
And as they say: Time flies when you’re having fun.
“It’s just a lot less focused in on a particular idea, so it’s fun, but it’s also challenging… We don’t really know,” he conceded. “We’re trying to see what sticks.”
Hyooman plays the KARE 11 Barn Window Concepts Live Music Stage on Sunday, Sept. 3. The music starts at 2 p.m.
For more information about Hyooman, visit their Bandcamp. You can also find them on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
For a recap of artists who hit the stage during the first week of the fair, click here.
WATCH MORE ON KARE 11+
Download the free KARE 11+ app for Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV and other smart TV platforms to watch more from KARE 11 anytime! The KARE 11+ app includes live streams of all of KARE 11’s newscasts. You’ll also find on-demand replays of newscasts; the latest from KARE 11 Investigates, Breaking the News and the Land of 10,000 Stories; exclusive programs like Verify and HeartThreads; and Minnesota sports talk from our partners at Locked On Minnesota.
Watch the latest local news from the Twin Cities and across Minnesota in our YouTube playlist:
“Could be a dry September to dry October, back to back,” Brennan Dettmann, a meteorologist at NWS Twin Cities, said.
CHANHASSEN, Minn. — Rain has been more than difficult to come by recently – it’s been almost nonexistent.
The National Weather Service Twin Cities reports that it has measured barely a trace of precipitation, marking another stretch of dry weather.
“Could be a dry September to dry October, back to back,” Brennan Dettmann, a meteorologist at NWS Twin Cities, said.
“There’s been periods of normalcy, but certainly has been a lot of record-setting conditions that we’ve seen this past year,” he continued.
This past year has seen many records added or broken. December to February was the warmest winter on record. March to May was the 10th warmest spring.
Last month was both the warmest and driest September ever in Minnesota.
Those trends also include a shift from the heavy rains we saw over the summer to dry conditions right now.
“We’re not alone in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but certainly, yeah, it has been a quick uptick from what it’s been from the spring and early part of the summer,” he said.
The U.S. Drought Monitor shows 97% of Minnesota under abnormally dry conditions.
That’s why NWS Twin Cities issued a red flag warning for nearly all of Minnesota Thursday.
“With the drought, you know, there hasn’t been any precipitation in a while, things are just generally dry,” Dettmann said. “So you get something to spark, it can very quickly spread with the aid of those gusty winds pushing in, you know, any fires that form. So that’s the main reason for having the red flag warning.”
If you’re looking for relief, don’t count on it coming anytime soon.
“Expecting it to stay dry into the end of October,” Dettmann said.
With little precipitation coming soon, expect to see these reminders of fire danger continue – whether there’s a warning or not.
“You’ll likely see that continue into the end of October and November, as long as there’s no major precipitation that falls during that time frame,” Dettmann said.
According to the CDC, 40% of students experience sadness and hopelessness on a regular basis.
ST PAUL, Minn. — At this year’s Minnesota Educators’ Academy (MEA), the main focus was how to better students’ mental health. MEA is the largest development opportunity for educators in Minnesota, and gives teachers the opportunity to learn ways to improve in the classroom and handle the forever-changing needs of students.
“We need more counselors, we need more social workers, school psychologists, school nurses, people who really know their stuff,” said Education Minnesota President Denise Specht. “There are some schools that only have a counselor one day a week. We simply need more teams to address the needs.”
Specht also said having smaller class sizes would help teachers build stronger relationships with their students, potentially bettering their mental health.
According to the CDC, 40% of students experience sadness and hopelessness on a regular basis. Student teacher Caitlin Efta feels social media is playing a large part.
“There’s a lot of bullying and other things that happen online, and a lot of kids are just falling victim to that,” Efta said.
Minnesota’s 2024 teacher of the year Tracy Byrd says to improve students mental health, we need to take the stress off of them.
“Just by letting them know, relax, you are enough, you are okay,” Byrd said. “Don’t put too much pressure on this one assignment or this one test or this one book.”
Women’s Advocates opened in 1974 in St. Paul and is renovating 19 new apartment units to increase shelter space.
ST PAUL, Minn. — Women’s Advocates is considered the first shelter in the nation for survivors of domestic assault. It opened in St. Paul in 1974 and on Thursday, it’s hosting its 50th anniversary gala at the Landmark Center.
The tickets are sold out.
The organization is in the midst of a campaign to raise $14.25 million to acquire and renovate two new facilities in St. Paul to better serve the public. It includes 19 new individual apartment-style units totaling 58 beds for adults and children.
The space would also allow survivors to live with their pets 24/7, increase mental health support, and be ADA-compliant for all genders, sexualities, and abilities.
“It’s hard because we want to work ourselves out of a job, we want to be in a scenario where there’s not violence present in our community, but until we get there, we’re here as a support system for folks needing that,” said Executive Director Holly Henning.
Women’s Advocates currently serves about 50 adults and children, sometimes for three months at a time. It offers services ranging from mental and chemical health to legal advice and financial support.
The organization originally started as a hotline to guide people going through divorce.
“What they were finding when those calls were coming in was much different than, I just need a divorce,” said Henning. “It was folks who were in immediate danger and really needed help beyond that.”
Nowadays, the organization often has to turn people away. Other organizations actively work to find empty beds across the city for survivors in need. But Henning says, that sometimes, the violence people are experiencing is also more severe.
Violence Free Minnesota says that the 40 people killed in domestic violence situations last year is the most in more than three decades of record-keeping.
“It’s about compassion and empathy and I think it’s OK to have emotion, it’s OK to see people human to human and they’re continuously reminding you of why the work is so important,” said Henning.
Henning is also hoping to raise $125,000 during October, which is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. If you’d like to donate, you can find more information about the capital campaign here.
There’s also more information about services and ways to connect with someone through the Women’s Advocates 24/7 crisis resource hotline here.
Nearly all of MN is abnormally dry
Israel’s proxy war with Iran leaves young children in Gaza and Lebanon burned from head to toe
Charges dropped against Tyron McAlpin, deaf Black man with cerebral palsy whose Phoenix arrest video prompted outrage
Nearly all of MN is abnormally dry
Israel’s proxy war with Iran leaves young children in Gaza and Lebanon burned from head to toe
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings