Danny Kiranos has been writing songs about death since 2010, and somewhere along the way the discomfort gave way to something stranger and more useful — a kind of dark tenderness, a willingness to sit with the worst of human experience and find the human being still there. “I’m terrified of death and I would love to not be,” he told the Austin Chronicle, “but because it’s such a confusing and terrifying concept to me, it’s the easiest thing to write about.” Under the name Amigo the Devil, the Miami-born singer-songwriter built that voice through years of performing in San Francisco, and the following he gathered along the way has taken his music to festival stages and listening rooms across the country. He brings the latest chapter to Empire Live in Albany on Tuesday, September 15, at 7:30 p.m.
About the Show
The centerpiece of this fall run is Yours Until the War Is Over, Kiranos’s third album, released in February 2024 on Liar’s Club Records and Regime Music Group. Co-produced with guitarist David Talley, it marks a turn inward: where earlier records had Kiranos narrating the infamous misdeeds of others, this one grapples with trauma, relationships, and what Americana Highways called “more existentialist fears and questions.” The production draws from an unusually wide well — Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Gogol Bordello, Mexican singer Chavela Vargas — and the resulting sound is percussive and unvarnished, his banjo at the center of it, his voice pulling each song toward its reckoning. The full band includes Kiranos’s sister Katerina on keyboards and backing vocals (she also performs as Katacombs), alongside Talley on guitar, Jason Dietz on bass, and Carson Kehrer on drums. A new single, “New Kind of Lonely,” is out now. Opening the evening is Liam St. John, a Spokane-born, Nashville-based blues and Americana artist whose 2025 debut album Man of the North (Big Loud Rock) features collaborations with Molly Tuttle and Houndmouth. St. John appears on three dates of this fall tour leg.
Venue & Logistics
Empire Live occupies two floors at 93 N. Pearl Street in Albany, a standing-room space that holds up to 1,000 people in the capital region. Kiranos has played festival stages at Aftershock, Riot Fest, and Louder Than Life; a room this size is where his storytelling-focused material tends to land with the most weight. Show time is 7:30 p.m.
Tickets
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