BALLROOM THIEVES
One pair of tickets
Standing Room Only
Place: The Sinclair, 52 Church St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Time: Saturday 6/1/2024, 8:30pm (doors at 7:00pm)
https://www.sinclaircambridge.com/events

What if we could all be a little more tender? Towards strangers, our kids, and ourselves. As we all become more easily connected through social media, pop culture, and our collective helplessness over the mistakes that are breaking us down, a realization has been washing over many of us: We don’t treat ourselves or each other very well, and in order to break that cycle we need to understand why.

As two former kids, The Ballroom Thieves have some thoughts on the matter. Ten songs-worth to be exact. Their 5th full length record, Sundust, is a collection of thoughts about the human experience.

The ways our personalities emerge, our unique world view, and our capacity for compassion as adults are all formed during that delicate two decade process called childhood. Most of us don’t receive the emotional support we need in order to become empathetic adults because most of our parents didn’t receive what they needed in their own childhoods. Pouring from an empty cup seems like an inevitable condition of the human experience. If we could change that and offer future generations the gentleness they need to end this never-ending cycle of trauma, most of us would choose to, but without doing the grueling work of healing childhood wounds, falling back into old generational patterns is much more likely.

“This group of songs is self portrait of our intertwined lives” writes Calin Peters. She is the counterpart to Martin Earley, and together they are The Ballroom Thieves.

The songwriting team aren’t strangers to topics of mental health and a crumbling society. From as early as their second album, 2016’s Deadeye, the band has been musing on the pain of existing and how to cope. These days, as society trends towards self-awareness, it’s easier to sort through the mess.

Peters delves into the theme of Sundust by recalling how, late in 2023, after the record was written and all its topics were swirling in her mind, she came across “a really beautiful article by [American novelist and non-fiction writer] Anne Lamott. It was about not learning how to live for yourself in time, and there was a sentence that made me say ‘ah yes, there are so many of us who are working through our own trauma.’ Lamott wrote ‘the game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt.’ As I sort out my own childhood I come back to that idea often, and I’ve let it replace other mottos I grew up hearing, such as ‘time heals all wounds’ and ‘it is what it is.’”

If ‘it is what it is’ there would be no point in learning and evolving, and those are two pillars the pair has built their partnership on.

Sundust is about self-awareness, breaking down walls that trauma creates, and healing from harshness, but it’s also about finding the glimmers, the striking beauty of being a person, and a longing for connection with healthy people. “Even while working on the visual representation of the record there was a seamlessness and ease to each workday,” says Peters. “We would often find ourselves in deep, meaningful conversations with the talented friends we were creating with, swapping similar stories of cycle breaking and our growing compassion for ourselves and others. It seems like a lot of us are trying to heal, and it’s inspiring to make art with people who are really doing the work.”

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