The Suitcase Junket
Pile Driver

Tickets available online or by calling Signature Sounds Box office at 413-341-3317.

From the salvaged sounds of American juke joints, back porches, honky tonks and rock clubs, The Suitcase Junket conjures an entirely new sound on his essential rock collection, Pile Driver (Out April 21st on Signature Sounds).The Suitcase Junket is Matt Lorenz: artist, tinkerer, swamp yankee, one-man band. His is the road-worn voice rising over the grind of a tube-amped dumpster guitar, and the wild double pitches of throat singing. From The Suitcase Junket's penchant for thrift and ingenuity comes the full-length album -- his debut at Signature Sounds -- of original rock anthems, mountain ballads, blues manifestos and dance-hall festivity, played on instruments built of broken bottles, twisted forks, dried bones, gas cans, shoes, saw blades, a toy keyboard, and an overhead compartment’s worth of luggage.

Listening to Pile Driver, one would think that the band has four members, yet there’s only one with few overdubs made. Yes, the Suitcase Junket is a one-man band and a damn good one, with catchy melodies, imagistic lyrics that stick in your consciousness, and enough energy to impress the festival crowds for whom he’s played at Mountain Jam, Joshua Tree, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and Green River. He calls his sound and ingenuity required to construct it “Swamp Yankee.” However, Pile Driver’s’ constant is the Suitcase Junket’s remarkable songwriting, with rousing choruses underpinned with gritty, distorted guitar and imagistic, evocative verses.

Lorenz was raised in Cavendish, Vermont, the son of teachers. He learned to sing by copying his sister Kate. (The siblings are two-thirds of the touring trio Rusty Belle.) Lorenz graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2004, having taught himself to throat-sing thanks to a South Indian cooking class. On moving day, he pulled his guitar, filled with mold and worse for wear, from a dorm Dumpster. He fixed it up and started pulling songs out of it. That was the beginning.
Today, The Suitcase Junket is filling rooms and drawing festival crowds all over his native New England and beyond. With combined streams of 1.25 million on Spotify, The Suitcase Junket was also named to Spotify’s Best of 2016 Folk & Americana and Blues & Roots Rock playlists. Lorenz caught the attention of National Public Radio who chose his video session for "Earth Apple" from his 2015 album Make Time as one of the year's favorite sessions. The Suitcase Junket’s stellar songwriting with ear-worm choruses and muscular, gritty verses puts him in the company of shining lights of Americana and rock & roll like Shovels & Rope, M. Ward, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, Sam Amidon, Alabama Shakes, and The Record Company.