Marcus Striplin Returns to Dallas for Two-Night Stand Between Pleasant Grove Recording Sessions

Pleasant Grove singer Marcus Striplin will give two solo performances tonight and tomorrow night, both at 9 p.m., at Bolsa, a new café and wine bar in Oak Cliff. (Full disclosure: my wife works there part-time.)

Striplin, who moved to Brooklyn earlier this year, is recording new material with Pleasant Grove bandmate Bret Egner in Austin. To hear him describe it, they’re making some serious changes to the band's sound. What exactly those changes entail isn’t so clear.

“We’re really focusing on what we’re doing with our live shows, figuring out what we’re going to do with the songs,” Striplin says.

And what will they be changing?

“Just the instrumentation and approach to songwriting,” he says. “It’s not going to just be the standard approach of guitar, bass, drums. There will be other elements. We’re bringing in other sounds, and just getting back to the quiet songs… We’re still experimenting with it.

“Bret and I are going back and forth to figure out what we’re going to do, how we want to record it and then play it--as opposed to recording it and playing it the exact same way, which gets repetitive.”

The two shows at Bolsa will be an opportunity to hear new Pleasant Grove material, including some laptop material, Striplin says. It will be his only area performance during his stay in Texas, he says. -Jesse Hughey