Cleveland Musician Ray Flanagan Celebrates Two Years of Singles Releases

Sat 12/10 @ 8PM

If you consider yourself even slightly knowledgeable about the Cleveland music scene and you’re not familiar with Ray Flanagan, you need to think again.

You almost have to try not to run into him. The 30-year-old musician, who’s been around the scene for about ten years (we first wrote about him in 2014 when he released his debut album Same Sky, Different Space), plays solo, has a band called the Mean Machines, pops up on other people’s records and appears as a guest musician with various bands and artists, including a generation or two his senior. To hear him perform with veteran folkie Alex Bevan or mid-career rocker Brent Kirby, old enough to be his grandfather or father, respectively, is to hear the continuity of the local music scene — and rejoice in its multi-generational vibrancy.

Part of that has to do with the timeless quality of his songwriting as well as his versatile guitar playing and straightforward vocals, which plug easily into a variety of situations. As we wrote in 2015 of his previous band, the Authorities, they “would have been just as at home in the Cleveland music scene of the ’70s and ’80s as today. The quintet’s sound is firmly grounded blues and classic rock, and it’s got a frayed, workingman vibe poured into anthemic tunes that show that they’ve probably listened to quite a bit of Bruce Springsteen. And Flanagan himself is one of the hardest-working guitarists in town, frequently appearing onstage with other local artists such as the Speedbumps, Brent Kirby, Jason Patrick Meyers and Brian Lisik.”

In late 2020, Flanagan started recording and releasing singles at home while in COVID lockdown and released two songs on the first Friday of each month since then. He released the final songs “Come On Sugar” and “My Whole Life Changed” this month. So now it’s time to play out again! The new songs, in fact, were recorded live with his band (drummer Russell Flanagan, bassist Joe Botta, guitarist/vocalist Anthony Papaleo and guitarist/engineer David Alan Shaw) at Painesville’s Suma Recording.

The band will perform at a familiar venue for Flanagan, the Winchester Music Tavern in Lakewood, on Saturday December 10, to celebrate the end of the string of singles releases. Go here for tickets.

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