AMERICAN singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Laura Gibson plays The Crescent Community Venue, The Crescent, York, on Saturday night, after heading north from her Green Man Festival appearance in Wales tomorrow.

Gibson, 38, released her fifth album, Empire Builder, in April 2016 on the City Slang label. Marked by elegant story-telling and low-key but captivating melodies, the record found her in flux, having moved from Portland to New York to study creative writing but soon losing all her worldly possessions in a house fire.

Raw and literary, wise and vulnerable, the songs captured a life blown open; an individual mid-transformation. Applying clear-eyed honesty, urgency and warmth, Gibson caught the moment between loss and rediscovery.

Sharing Saturday's 8.30pm bill with Karl Blau, she will perform those songs among other material old and new, maybe including her new number Animals, the B-side to her April single The Easy Way.

Should you be wondering, Gibson has now completed her MFA course in Fiction Writing at Hunter College and latterly she has collaborated with French artist The Avener on the single You Belong, featured in a worldwide advertising campaign for Zadig & Voltaire.

Co-headliner Karl Blau is a singer, multi-instrumentalist and DIY one-man music industry who has helped to turn his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, into an indie-music mecca. He has made more than 40 records in 20 years, many self-released in handmade packaging and mailed to subscribers and others on indie American north west labels K and knw-yr-own.

Blau, who has toured and recorded over the years with Laura Veirs, The Microphones, Little Wings, D+ and Earth, will be promoting his Introducing Karl Blau album, his new vision of country music.

York Press:

Karl Blau: co-headliner at The Crescent on Saturday. Picture: Jason Quigley

Produced by Tucker Martine, the record channels darkness and hope in a cinematic reinterpretation of Nashville country hits, wherein Blau is joined by a host of guest contributors: My Morning Jacket's Jim James, Laura Veirs, Jon Hyde, Lake's Eli Moore and Earth and SunnO's Steve Moore.

It all started with Blau cutting a single, a cover of the 1969 Tom T. Hall hit That’s How I Got to Memphis. Blau, whom Martine had come to know from sessions with Laura Veirs, asked if he could try singing it. "I knew what a special artist Karl was, but I had no idea what a powerful interpreter of songs he was," Martine says.

The collaboration, pairing Blau’s deeply sonorous voice with Martine’s warm, modern arrangements, recast the Nashville hit in a new light. The album ensued: a crate-digger’s feast of forgotten hits and deeper cuts, most of them from the Nashville country-soul renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Works by Tom T. Hall, Bobby Bond and Allen Reynolds were joined by The Bee Gees' To Love Somebody, Link Wray's Fallin’ Rain and Townes Van Zandt's If I Needed You in a labour of love for Martine, the son of a Nashville songwriter, who grew up listening to many of these songs.

Known for his distinctive production work for My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists and Laura Veirs, Martine was first introduced to Blau’s early music by Veirs. "I was transfixed by Karl’s voice and completely absorbed by the world of sound he had created," he says. "I felt like I had been shown one of the great hidden treasures of music.”

Tickets for this Please Please You gig are on sale at £9 via pleasepleaseyou.com or in person from The Crescent, The Inkwell, in Gillygate, York, or Jumbo Records in Leeds or on the door from 8pm.