Friends,

I have a hometown show to tell you about, and it is the first headline I have booked under the Cú Chulainn II cycle. Friday, August 7, at Var Gallery in Milwaukee. I am bringing a friend up from Nashville to open it, and the night has a shape I have wanted for a long time: two songwriters, one room, two cities in the same set.

The show

I am headlining, about an hour, solo with the looper the way I play at home. Folk-electronic, the primal vocal, pulling from across seventeen albums and leaning hard into the Cú Chulainn material, including the piece I will tell you more about below. This is a Milwaukee room, and I intend to treat it like one.

Opening the night is Jon Worthy, down from Nashville. Jon is four albums deep in americana and rock with more than 400 sync placements to his name, Netflix, Hulu, NBC, FOX, and MLB among them, and he is routing this through the middle of an international touring run. His half hour is the Nashville side of the bill. Mine is the Milwaukee side. That is the whole idea.

Hear it on the radio first: WMSE Local/Live

Three days before the show, I am doing WMSE’s Local/Live on Tuesday, August 4 at 6 PM, 91.7 FM. So the week runs radio on Tuesday, gallery on Friday. If you want a preview of the set and the stories behind it, tune in Tuesday, then come stand in the room Friday.

The song you will hear live: inside Danse L’Intervention

The closing track of Cú Chulainn is called Danse L’Intervention, and it is the most personal thing I have ever recorded. I shared the film a couple of months back. This is the deeper cut on how it was actually built.

The seed is my mom. In January 2016, Ginny had a massive stroke while playing forward for her Women’s Soccer Club team. She was 54. Froedtert Hospital ran a then-pioneering mechanical thrombectomy and gave her a near-full recovery, and she went back to nursing as a vascular neurology stroke specialist at the same hospital that saved her. Years later, the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Project Wonder team asked me to score a film about the intersection of music and medicine. I asked if I could put the piece inside Cú Chulainn. They said yes.

Why Danse Macabre

The track is seven minutes and eighteen seconds, and it is a full reworking of Camille Saint-Saëns’ 1874 Danse Macabre. Saint-Saëns wrote his about Death playing fiddle at midnight, raising the dead for one last dance until the rooster crows them back down. I kept that bones-and-violins skeleton and rebuilt the story around what happens when a stroke hits and a hospital fights to undo it. The through-line I held onto the whole time: the dance never stops. It starts in the album’s opening warrior-rage and walks all the way out to the operating room, the recovery floor, and the slow walk home.

The room and the hands

The live strings are the Brusubardis Family, three siblings, Sonora on Violin I, Kristian on Violin II, Viktor on cello. Siblings play together the way nobody else can, and you can hear them breathing together in the takes. Josh Evert recorded them at Silver City Studios here in Milwaukee. The film was directed and edited by Wes Tank of TankThink, the same Wes who went viral rapping Dr. Seuss over Dr. Dre beats in 2020, produced by Alex Boyes and the Project Wonder team. The ribbon dancer is Mie, one of the other artists on the Awen network. We shot on location at Froedtert Hospital, Cudahy Middle School, and Washington Park Media Center. I am in it. So is mom.

The part I still cannot get over: the hospital that saved her life is the same institution whose Project Wonder program now hosts the film about her. Her story has been featured by WISN and Froedtert & MCW as a testament to the research happening there. You can watch the full film at Project Wonder anytime.

What people are saying

A few reviews of Cú Chulainn have landed recently, and they keep circling the same thing this song is about.

“A heart-racing baroque string piece.”

“Nothing is off limits for Cullah creatively, and it may be his strongest asset as an artist.”

If any of that pulls at you, here is how to take the record home. The music is free and always will be under Creative Commons. The objects are how you keep the lights on for the next one.

• $35 · Vinyl, signed on request — order the vinyl
• $10 · Jewel Case CD — get the CD
• $25 · Digital Collectible — collect it
• Free · Full download, CC BY-SA — download it

Prefer to just listen? Stream the full Cú Chulainn cycle or grab Danse L’Intervention on its own.

And next: Cú Chulainn II

The closing half of the cycle drops April 27, 2027, and the preorder is open right now. If Var is where you meet this music live, the Cullective is where you help build the next record. Every tier includes the album, and every name goes on the credits page.

Reserve a tier →

See you August 7. Come early, the room is small and Jon is worth catching from the first note.

Cullah