Cowboy Sadness
Finally seeing a set by my favorite new band of the 2020s.
Last night I finally got to see Cowboy Sadness perform at The Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the museum's Free Friday Nights series. I've been waiting for this one for a long time. Cowboy Sadness has quietly become my favorite band of the 2020s, topping my annual Spotify Wrapped year after year. Their music lives somewhere between ambient music and slow-burn Americana, where reverberant guitars and unhurried rhythms stretch out into wide-open space. It's music for big, open desert skies—patient, contemplative, and quietly expansive. Yet somehow I'd never managed to catch them live.
Cowboy Sadness brings together David Moore of Bing & Ruth, Nick Principe of Port St. Willow, and Peter Silberman of The Antlers. Each of them has built a remarkable career with their own projects, so seeing them together in such an intimate setting felt like one of those rare musical alignments that probably shouldn't be taken for granted.
The performance felt less like a concert and more like inhabiting a space for an hour. The was free and in a museum, so the audience was unlike the typical concert crowd. Families wandered in, and a handful of little kids spent parts of the set dancing, twirling, and chattering throughout the set (they might have been friends of the band). Under almost any other circumstances, that might have been distracting. Instead, it somehow fit. Their uninhibited joy became part of the performance itself—a gentle reminder that music doesn't always demand reverence. And maybe we all should be a little less inhibited, like kids.
I love ambient music and listen to a lot of it; sometimes it all blends together. But then a gem comes along like Cowboy Sadness’ Selected Jambient Works and it all feels new again. I love this group, I can’t wait to see them again, and can’t wait for their next album.
Here are few photos I took with my vintage digital Olympus XC-10. I love this camera’s perfectly imperfect grainy, soft images.
