FLORENCE DORE
Savvy and insightful Americana songwriter returns to touring after raising kid.New Album - Highways & Rocketships
FLORENCE DORE
"I stepped away from songwriting when I had a baby, but in some ways being a mother was for me just another version of being a songwriter. Songwriting requires the same rich love and caring that makes a mother. And I’ve never stopped looking at the world like a songwriter, finding beauty in dimensions of humanity not reachable any other way. Maybe becoming a mother made me a better songwriter. I don’t know."
HIGHWAYS & ROCKETSHIPS
Produced by Don Dixon and Mitch Easter.
FLORENCE DORE
TOURING
HIGHLIGHTS
-Record named Best Americana Album of 2022 – Lonesome Highways Magazine
-Backed on tour by Mark Spencer (Son Volt), Gene Holder (The dB's), and husband Will Rigby (The dB's, Steve Earle and the Dukes)
-Extensive touring throughout the US
-Rockwood Music Hall NYC (Sold Out)
-Rough Trade NYC w/Steve Earle and Laura Cantrell (Sold Out)
-SIRIUS XM appearance Hardcore Troubadour with Steve Earle
-Mojo Nixon Airplay
-Appearance at Kilkenny Roots Festival Ireland
-Opened for Steve Earle, Southern Culture on the Skids, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, the Connells
"Touring with Mark Spencer [Son Volt] and the rhythm section from The dB’s means the show is entirely full throttle. We start high-energy and end with blistering rockers. I do weave in a couple of the quieter, pretty ones to emphasize the commitment to melody in all my songs, but being out with this band, well: it would be a waste not to rock as hard as we can."
FLORENCE DORE
PRESS PRAISE
“reflective and funny and semi-biographical, while still finding room for a little acid.”
-Since I Left You, Steve Earle & Florence Dore Live Show Review
"with smart lyrics and instantly appealing tunes... Florence Dore's melodies go straight to the heart."
-The Big Takeover
"a strong album of fresh originals"
-Top Pick, What's UP New Providence
“When you have members of Son Volt (Mark Spencer) and The dB’s (Will Rigby, Gene Holder) in your band, you can expect a blistering set. That’s precisely what we got, an all-killer and zero-filler performance that had me first in the queue at the merch desk for Florence’s new album HIGHWAYS & ROCKETSHIPS.”
- Declan Culliton / Lonesome Highway
“Each year unearths previously unknown exceptional artists to us all at Lonesome Highway; it’s one of the joys of our enterprise. For this writer, Florence Dore is most certainly one of the discoveries of 2022.”
- Declan Culliton / Lonesome Highway Magazine
FLORENCE DORE
BIO
Nashville-born, Chapel Hill-based Florence Dore’s newest record, Highways & Rocketships, recorded with Mitch Easter and Don Dixon, won Best Americana Album of the Year at Lonesome Highway Magazine. Even not counting the pandemic, the road from her first record Perfect City to Highways & Rocketships has been anything but straight. She spent a lot of time between then and now riding around on Steve Earle’s tour bus, catching up with her Dukes-drumming husband Will Rigby (also of the legendary dB’s), wrote a couple books, put on a conference at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, took a seat on the board at the Bob Dylan Institute--and had a kid. Back in 1994 the Posies covered Florence’s song “Christmas” for the Geffen release, Just Say Noel, and over the first pandemic months, when she had to suspend recording plans for Highways & Rocketships, she co-created Cover Charge, the charting compilation of NC artists to benefit Cat’s Cradle.Dore may be rocking at night, but during the day she is a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, teaching literature and songwriting classes. She keeps up with the tenure clock writing books and articles about rock. In Ink in the Grooves, Conversations on Literature and Rock ‘n’ Roll, which includes essays by and interviews with the likes of Richard Thompson, Laura Cantrell, and Roddy Doyle. Florence has been touring hard since the record came out in June, with the dB’s rhythm section, Rigby and Gene Holder, as well as Mark Spencer (Son Volt) on guitar.Florence is married to the esteemed dB’s drummer Will Rigby, and when the two had a baby in 2005 Will was touring heavily as drummer for Steve Earle & the Dukes. Parenting with a touring husband took Florence off the road until recently (kid is applying to college), but in the intervening years she figured out how to stay connected to music: the interviews and essays in The Ink in the Grooves attest to the years of conversation she’s been enjoying as Board member at the Bob Dylan Institute in Tulsa, conference planner at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and just sitting around on Steve’s bus. Steve Earle, Dom Flemons, and Lucinda Williams all appear in these pages, and, though she sadly missed the man himself, so do members of John Prine’s band. “How could I help but be drawn back into songwriting,” she quips, after being around so many amazing songwriters for so long?Highways & Rocketships, Dore’s first record since having a kid (been a minute—since her 2001 release Perfect City out on Slewfoot), hits the sweet spot between straight-ahead rock, garage pop, Americana and college radio. The hooks, ambience and arrangements are impeccable, evoking both modern-day pop sense and vintage indie rock and featuring contributions from some of leading lights of the past four decades of American popular music: Rigby (Dore’s husband) sometimes-Springsteen bassist Jeremy Chatzky, dB’s member Peter Holsapple, Southern Culture on the Skids bassist Mary Huff, Mipso fiddler/vocalist Libby Rodenbough.
Florence Dore
CONNECT
CONTACTS
BOOKING
Mitchell Drosin / S.A.D. BookingMANAGEMENT
Susan Green (w/Kathie Russell) / Redkats Management
LABEL
Propeller Sound Recordings
"There are moments on this tour when I pinch myself. To be married to Will [Rigby] is a personal joy; we have a beautiful, brilliant daughter together. To be able to also got out on the road and play with him and Gene [Holder]…well…I can’t believe I get to do it. I feel like the luckiest woman alive.Everyone is returning to touring from some kind of hiatus. My break, from raising our daughter, coincides with the return from the pandemic, so there is extra joy coming off the stage."
-Florence Dore