Music in Your Gardens:
Skylar Gudasz

Wednesday, July 8, 2020 | 7:00 pm

We’re proud to present Skylar Gudasz as a part of Music in Your Gardens, a free eight-week online concert series showcasing nationally renowned artists who call Durham and the surrounding area home. The series shifts Duke Performances’ longtime summer series, Music in the Gardens, normally held outdoors at Sarah P. Duke Gardens on Duke’s campus, to an online format in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On July 8 at 7 PM ET, we’ll premiere a new, specially recorded performance by Skylar online, free of charge, on our website and on our YouTube page. The film, pre-recorded in a socially-distanced manner, will be accompanied by a live YouTube chat with Skylar, who will answer questions from viewers. Before sitting down to watch the performance, click here to read our chat with Skylar on the intertextual imagery of her album, Cinema, and her recent obsession with verbs.

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Durham-based singer-songwriter Skylar Gudasz has “a voice that attracts metaphors about hypnotism” (Pitchfork). Gudasz performed at Duke Performances’ Music in the Gardens in 2016, after the release of her acclaimed debut Oleander, a record of stripped-down songs that drip with mid-century melancholia. This time Gudasz is fresh off her second album, Cinema, released amid quarantine in April 2020, and she’s no longer a local secret. Sultry, sardonic, and self-reflexive, Cinema catapulted Gudasz into national outlets, with features in The FADER and NPR’s All Things Considered. On Cinema, her songs take on a noir tint, like Marlene Dietrich lip-syncing to Joni Mitchell: a performance about performance, suited for the camera.

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"[T]unes about the weirdness of love [that] by turns whisper, then snarl, then make you wonder if Gudasz is the Joni Mitchell the South never had."