No. 1 in Heaven has never sounded so vintage. Home recording artist Travels With Brindle and swing fusion dance troupe Balter Dance throws Sparks' groundbreaking 1979 album back to the days of vaudeville and dance halls. Call it "music that you can swing dance to." Eliza Howells opens the show with an enchanting blend of pop melodies and classical technique. Chelsea Spear has been a music critic, a show promoter, a college radio host, and a video director… but all she really wanted to do was start a band. Not long after learning to play the ukulele, she formed the bedroom recording project Travels With Brindle. Her melodic original songs and wry, poignant lyrics have attracted a growing audience at open mics and busking pitches in the Greater Boston area. Spear is inspired by lo-fi songwriters and jangle pop acts of the 1980s and ‘90s, and her work has been compared to the Marine Girls, the Raincoats, Courtney Barnett, and Liz Phair. In June 2023, Travels With Brindle released debut album, Notes From Undergrad, led by a string of well-received singles, including “Ivan,” “Linden Street,” and “Something’s Wrong.” In late 2024, she began a Sparks covers project with the September release of “Tryouts For The Human Race,” with a full album reimagining of the art-rock band’s 1979 classic No. 1 In Heaven in early 2025.

travelswithbrindle.com

IG: @travelswithbrindle

Eliza Howells recently graduated from Tufts University with an MA in Music Composition. As a listener, performer, and composer, she partakes in a variety of vocal genres — from singer/songwriter to art song, from opera to musical theatre — and her compositional work seeks to merge these genres, questioning rigid generic boundaries. In July of 2023, Eliza attended the Trentino Music Festival where she performed the role of Dritter Knabe in a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. In August of 2023, Eliza premiered and performed her first commissioned piece, titled “I Remember Her” with the Voices Unheard Ensemble in Hopkinton, MA. When she is not composing or singing opera, Eliza performs and records her own original songs, which can be found on major streaming platforms.

IG: @elizahowells