Babe Lewis Live, Presented by Third Rail
By WTJU Rock
Date: 07/19/2025
Time: 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Third Rail is pleased to present mercurial psych-shoegaze project, Babe Lewis. This will be an off site concert at The Rabbit Hole, a bar & stage area next to IX Looking Glass. The event is free and open to all with plenty of parking around the IX Art Park. You can also listen on 91.1 FM, stream via wtju.net, and video stream on WTJU’s YouTube channel.
Babe Lewis is the solo project of Harrisonburg, VA-based multi-instrumentalist Joseph Harder. Drawing influence from dream pop, shoegaze, and psychedelia, Harder paints his songs with an ethereal sonic palate. Check out the 2025 Babe Lewis release, Sunspot, on Charlottesville’s WarHen Records.
Third Rail is supported locally by Hello Goodbye Records, now at their new location, 108 4th Street, Northwest, in Downtown Charlottesville. Learn more at hellogoodbyemusic.com
Inspired by the guitar stylings of bands like My Bloody Valentine and Helvetia, the hypnotic lo-fi pulse of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and the mysticality of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Babe Lewis inhabits a niche at the overlap of myriad eras and modes of psychedelic music. For live performances, Jo is joined by bassist Valentin Prince and drummer Dane Ludwig, offering punchy and playful shows.
Says Jo Harder, “Sunspot depicts an era of change for the Babe Lewis project. A lot happened between starting and finishing this album; when we began tracking for this, I was setting out largely just to prove to myself that I could put together a full album. I didn’t have a band. Since then I’ve pulled together a band, toured a fair bit, and written much, much more music. To me, this album is akin to an ‘ecotone’ — the meeting point of several ecosystems. It is a marker of my changing taste and creative desires, the fruit of melding several loosely overlapping sets of ideas into one set of songs.
In keeping with this patchwork approach to songwriting, the recording process for this album was left up to chance as much as possible. My engineer Danny Gibney and I wrote down all of our gear — amps, mics, preamps, etc. — on slips of paper, then put all of them into a bowl. For each track we recorded we would reach into the bowl and draw out gear that we had to use. This added a delightful levity to the process, and was a great source of new ideas: we tried things and created sounds we otherwise likely wouldn’t have considered.
I find it important to make sure that the music I create travels well: I want it to hold a certain openness, a drive for exploration. I worked to bake this into the process of creating the album as much as I could. A lot of the lyrics for this album were written on one particular hike — Fridley Gap — near my hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia. Whenever I was feeling stuck during the writing process I would drink a bunch of coffee and then hike as fast as I could, jotting down any words that floated through my mind. Something about the forward momentum of hiking got my mind moving in fruitful ways.”
