The Bur Oak

📣Hey Madison! Check out our upcoming shows!

🎟 tickets at theburoakmadison.com

✨Just Announced✨Seasaw, Julia Minkin, and Jane Hobson are coming to the Bur Oak on November 6!

Doors 7PM / Show 8PM
$15
🎟️ tickets at theburoakmadison.com

Seasaw, a duo based in Madison, WI, is Meg Golz (drums, synth, vocals) and Eve Wilczewski (guitar, vocals). Seasaw's music is the product of two best friends continually exploring all of the ways they can construct a singular, sarcastic indie rock sound.

The band is currently releasing their first new songs since their 2023 album, Projecting.

They have performed alongside Chvrches, Thao, Shakey Graves, NNAMDÏ, Overcoats, Horsegirl, Lucius, Nada Surf, and many others

Best known for co-writing viral hit songs with French electropop sensation Kid Francescoli, Chicago-based singer-songwriter Julia Minkin steps into her own with her debut album Not Ready, co-created and produced with her husband Andrew Sudhibhasilp. Blending warm, folk-tinged vocals with dance-floor energy and introspection, Minkin “finds her own creative voice, shimmering, rhythmic, and heartfelt—both bold and refreshingly sincere” (Thoughts Words Actions).

✨Just Announced✨Joey Harkum is coming to the Bur Oak on September 17!

Doors 7PM / Show 8PM
$18adv $23DOS
🎟tickets at theburoakmadison.com

For his entire life Joey Harkum has been strumming a guitar and after a decade of touring as the lead singer and songwriter of Baltimore-based band Pasadena, he released his debut solo album, Love and Labor, to critical acclaim in 2016. Along with a relentless touring schedule Joey has most recently been working on his 5th studio album ‘One Foot In The Grave' which released on August 22nd 2025. The album will see a cross country tour to support the release from fall into winter.

Known for his deep and poignant lyrics telling stories of joy, love, loss and sadness, Joey brings the human experience to life through his relentless tour schedule that culminated in the release of Live at Buffalo Iron Works in 2018. 2020 brought new challenges but Joey responded with writing and recording new music and released his album Storyboard in March of 2021. Immediately following the release of Storyboard, he started work on his follow up album Salt and Tar which was released in spring 2022 and followed by his 4th studio album The Art Of Revenge which was released March 1st 2024.

Catch him on tour now or online at joeyharkummusic.com.

✨Just Announced✨Delicate Steve is coming to the Bur Oak on October 27!

Doors 7PM / Show 8PM
Seated Show
$20adv $25DOS
🎟 tickets at theburoakmadison.com - On sale Friday, June 19th

Take a visit to Luke’s Garage, Delicate Steve’s latest album, and you’ll discover a place where sparks of creativity fly in all directions, where melodies splatter the walls like brightly hued paint, where no idea is too simple, too ingenuous, too full of childlike wonder. The L.A.-via-Jersey guitarist born Steve Marion, whose credits include session work for Amen Dunes, Paul Simon, and Deradoorian, had no grand plan for making it: he would simply book some time at a friend’s studio, hunker down, and play. He’s always allowed intuition to guide him, composing his jubilantly tuneful instrumentals as he records them, but this time, he felt freer than ever to “keep the seams showing, and don’t polish everything, and keep it raw, and alive, and electric-feeling,” he says. He chose the title, Luke’s Garage, as a tribute to his pal and sometime collaborator Luke Temple, but also for the anything-goes adolescent innocence it conjured: the feeling of heading over to a buddy’s house, turning up the amps, and creating your own world.

In the world of Luke’s Garage, a passage of music that feels like a sketch in progress might open into a hook so finely wrought, so obviously right, that you have a hard time believing you haven’t heard it before. The two passages may in fact be one and the same. There are songs that feel destined to soundtrack memories of windows-down road trips, and those more suited to moments of hushed intimacy. A shadowy synth-pop excursion (“Light of the World”) veers into a candlelit soul ballad (“Shall Be Free”); a chugging garage-rocker (the title track, naturally) sets up an unexpected detour into slinky disco (“There Goes My Baby”). Delicate Steve’s unmistakable sensibility, his tone airy yet tactile, his lines full of poignant bends and whimsical asides, is a benevolent guide through the ever-shifting landscape, keeping a steady hand on the wheel no matter the surroundings. He has little interest in showing off, focusing instead on clarity, simplicity, and directness—more like an openhearted pop songwriter than a look-what-I-can-do shredder.

Marion played every instrument on Luke’s Garage himself—guitars, drums, keys, bass—which heightens its homespun charm. The album’s sense of music as a colorful playground for exploration may remind you of Paul McCartney’s early solo work, made at a time when he was shrugging off the weight of expectation and digging into his own idiosyncrasy, tinkering alone until he found a sound that made him feel and trusting it would do the same for others. As with the McCartney, this record’s air of easy spontaneity belies serious craftsmanship and care: the exuberantly arcing melody of “We’ll Be Friends” and the quietly hopeful one of “Die With It” didn’t just come out of thin air, no matter how natural or even preordained they may seem. To hear Marion tell it, the audible joy in his music isn’t some affect he’s choosing to put on, but an honest expression of his own delight and relief when he finally finds the right note, the right rhythm. The prevailing mood of Luke’s Garage is one of discovery, because you’re hearing Marion discover the music himself.

Another important reference point is Donuts, the classic swan song by the late Detroit hip-hop legend J Dilla, one of Marion’s favorite albums. That may be a surprising inspiration for an instrumental guitar record, but it makes sense as soon as you hear Luke’s Garage, the way it feels both offhanded and profound, its deep beauty inextricable from its casual presentation. Marion’s love for Dilla is also evident in the way he treats each track as a little universe with its own parameters, its own language and laws of physics. And in the way he flicks through them as if he’s auditioning a bin full of records for a last-minute DJ set, giving each one whatever space it needs to develop and lingering for not a second longer than that. This collage-like presentation of Luke’s Garage keeps Delicate Steve’s guitar-centric instrumentals firmly situated in the present, in subtle conversation with sample-based and electronic music even though Marion composed it entirely on live instruments. In a sense, Luke’s Garage is not “guitar music” at all, but a fizzy, brightly colored pop record that just happens to feature the guitar as its lead voice.

Luke’s Garage may seem at first like a low-key collection, and in some ways it is. Don’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t deep. Music gets asked to be a lot of things these days: a cure for what ails you, or for society itself. Luke’s Garage is neither of those things, nor does it attempt to be. It offers a simple but powerful proposition instead: in its very looseness, its embrace of happenstance, its irrepressible groove, and its joyful refusal to be anything other than itself, it’ll leave you feeling just a little freer than you did before you pressed play. That’s more than enough.