Two Way Street Coffee House Presents Mike Green

Two Way Street Coffee House is Chicagoland’s most beloved folk and acoustic music venue, presenting weekly concerts and community events for over 50 years!  The show starts at 8pm (CT) and the doors open at 7:30pm. (Suggested donation $10).  We will also host this concert virtually.  You may access the livestream on www.twowaystreet.org, on our Facebook page or on our YouTube channel.

On Friday, September 13, 2024 Two Way Street Coffee House Friday Night Concert Series presents Mike Green.

From Mike Green’s website:

“Musician bios are typically written in the third person, often written by a publicist. But I’d like to tell my own story.

As a songwriter, I wonder whether my philosophy about life may be a bit confounding to my listeners. In my songs, there’s a palpable tension between tenderness and irony, profundity and slapstick, aching beauty and fierce rock & roll. I like to tell specific stories with few words, and to create poetic alchemy by pairing words and melody in a way that is more powerful than each would be separately.

In my early twenties, I toured as a solo musician around the northeastern U.S. I then put my own music on a back burner for decades while working in service to other musicians. Since 1986, I’ve worked as a national booking agent, representing dozens of top songwriters and other folk and roots musicians. This both kept me in the center of the acoustic music world and gave me a front row seat to the craft of melding poetry and music, and to the art of bringing those songs and stories to life in front of audiences.

In the great pause of 2020, when the music business went into limbo, I finally had the time to dig back into my own music. And I began to write songs like a madman, using all of the skills I’d picked up from the great musicians I’d been working with and drawing on all of my life experience. A dozen of these songs landed on my first recording, Listening For The Bell, released in the summer of 2023. And I made my way back onto the stage to find that it felt more natural than ever.

My songs cover all kinds of ground, painting human portraits of some of my extended family members (From Here, Sparks, The Queen), hilarious takes on being stuck at home during the pandemic (Locked Down Together), a stream-of-consciousness journey that begins with housework and flies into memory and fantasy (Clean The Windows), a filthy and frustrated blues (Houseboy), and a glimpse into the life of an abused woman (Enough). Sometimes I even get political (Carnival Shitshow) and write mature love songs (Forgiveness). In concert, I like to take audiences on a wild emotional ride, showing them beauty and humor and everything in between.

I’ve also been playing guitar for more than 50 years, so by now I’m a good guitarist with a strong foundation in folk, bluegrass, rock, blues, and pop music. My solo guitar arrangements are meticulous and complete, and built around the emotional center of each song.”

If you can’t join us in person, you can still tune in virtually to catch the show! Make your donation HERE to Mike Green.  Visit www.twowaystreet.org for more information.