Stef Chura – Dancing Alone On The Concrete

Detroit-based singer and songwriter Stef Chura announces her new album, Dancing Alone on the Concrete, out October 2nd via Saddle Creek and shares its lead single, “Danny.”

It’s been seven years since Chura released her last album, Midnight. Plenty of dramatic and life-altering things happened in those years: She broke off an engagement, left Detroit, gave birth to her first child, and ultimately returned to Detroit. But those events are not the true story of Dancing Alone on the Concrete. The true story of this album—the experience that gives it its thematic and aesthetic shape—is more simple than that. Here’s what happened while Stef Chura was writing the songs that would eventually become Dancing Alone on the Concrete: She practiced the piano and the guitar a whole lot, and she went on dates.

Single for the first time in years, Chura used the 2020 Covid lockdowns as an excuse to start over in New Orleans, where, like everyone else, she was mostly stuck indoors, unable to tour or play locally. “I was just writing and practicing,” she says. “By playing the piano more, I was learning more about transposing chords and things like that. I was going back and forth, playing songs on the guitar and the piano, and it lent itself to the writing process in a nice way.” Chura’s singing voice has always been unique—it’s brassy but contained, like a muted trumpet, and on Dancing Alone on the Concrete, she plays around with little hitches and lilts.

To record Dancing Alone on the Concrete, Chura went to Athens’ Chase Park Transduction studio, teaming up with producer Robert Schenider of Apples in Stereo, engineers, and session musicians David Barbe (Sugar) and Andy LeMaster (Now It’s Overhead), who played nearly as big a role in shaping the album as Schneider. They enlisted R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Mike Mills, who play together on today’s single, “Danny,” which sounds a bit like John McEntire producing an Americana record. “Robert was like ‘Wouldn’t this sound great with Mike Mills playing bass on it? So he called him up, and he and Mike Mills and Peter Buck ended up playing on that song just from shooting the shit,” Chura comments. Squint and you might hear a bit of Michael Stipe’s bittersweet sensibility in the melody, too, but the song itself finds Chura at her least conflicted. It is a moment of pure longing: “Please don’t make me chase you all the way to New York City,” Chura sings to a person whose kindness seemed to offer her a way forward in a confusing time. “I met someone who was traveling through New Orleans,” explains Chura. “We had an instant rapport and an easy chemistry, and it reminded me what excitement could feel like. I wrote ‘Danny’ as an ode to the fantasy of meeting someone who could sweep me off my feet when I felt like I needed rescuing. He invited me to a party, but I stayed home and watched the clock tick instead. Afterwards I couldn’t stop imagining the version of myself who had gone, who had seized the moment.”

Stef Chura’s been through a lot in the last seven years. Maybe you’ve been through similar things. If you haven’t, it’s likely you will soon; everyday difficulty is the primary source here. But Dancing Alone on the Concrete’s key is right there, the adverb in the album’s title: alone. Not loneliness, but personal comfort, self-affirmation, healthy solitude. Not that you’ll find such therapy-speak on this record; it’s too embodied, too rich with experience. It’s clear that these songs come from a place of pain or confusion, that their genesis is in various forms of suffering—you can feel it. As Chura says, they’re about the search for love. And while they never quite arrive there, the rightful object of her affection is right there in every song, in the form of the person singing them.

Stef Chura Tour Dates (all dates w/ Dinosaur Jr.)
Fri. June 24 – Lansing, MI @ Grewal Hall at 224
Fri. Oct. 9 – Las Vegas, NV @ Brooklyn Bowl
Sat. Oct. 10 – Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre
Sun. Oct. 11 – Solana Beach, CA @ Belly Up
Thu. Oct. 15 – Anaheim, CA @ House of Blues
Fri Oct. 16- Los Angeles, CA @ Bellwether
Sun. Oct. 18 – San Francisco, CA @ The Castro Theatre
Tue. Oct. 20 – Sacramento, CA @ Ace of Spades
Thu. Oct. 22 – Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall
Fri. Oct. 23 – Seattle, WA @ Neptune
Sat. Oct. 24 – Seattle, WA @ Neptune
Mon. Oct. 26 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Complex
Thu. Oct. 29 – Denver, CO @ Ogden
Fri. Oct. 30 – Fort Collins, CO @ Washington’s
Mon. Nov. 2 – Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
Wed. Nov. 4 – Houston, TX @ House of Blues
Thu. Nov. 5 – Austin, TX @ Stubbs
Fri. Nov. 6 – San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger
Sat. Nov. 7 – New Orleans, LA @ Tipitina’s

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