There are bands that spend forty years touring because they have no other options, and there are bands that spend forty years touring because the live show is the whole point. BoDeans, the Waukesha, Wisconsin roots-rock outfit founded by Kurt Neumann and Sam Llanas in 1983, fall clearly into the second category — which makes their current “40 Years of Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams…and Good Things” anniversary run worth taking seriously. The tour is running 100-plus dates coast to coast, the format is a two-and-a-half-hour performance with a video retrospective pulling from all 14 studio records, and the new album — titled 1983 — is dropping mid-run. This is not a band coasting on nostalgia. This is a band pressing the full weight of four decades into every room it plays.
That room in Buffalo, on Saturday, August 8, is Asbury Hall at Babeville, one of Western New York‘s more distinguished music venues.
About BoDeans
The BoDeans story begins properly in 1986, when their debut album Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams — produced by T Bone Burnett, back when T Bone Burnett producing your record meant something in the college-rock ecosystem — earned critical acclaim and an MTV Video Music Award nomination for the single “Fadeaway.” The band’s sound was guitar-driven and rootsy, built for arenas and for late-night drives in equal measure. Over the following decade they shared stages with U2, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tom Petty, David Bowie, and The Pretenders — the kind of company that tells you where a band stood in the touring world of the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Their most durable cultural moment arrived in 1993, when “Closer to Free” became the theme song for FOX’s Party of Five — a placement that introduced the band to a generation that might otherwise have missed them, and remains the song most likely to produce recognition from a casual listener today. It holds up, which is more than can be said for most TV-placement anthems of the era.
Sam Llanas, the co-founding vocalist, departed in 2011. Kurt Neumann has carried the project forward since, composing more than 70 songs for Netflix’s The Ranch, landing BoDeans music in Hulu’s The Bear (seasons two and four), and accumulating more than 70 television placements across a career that now spans five decades. The band holds a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Midwest Artists exhibit — acknowledgment that the catalog, across 14 records, mattered to the institution charged with cataloging such things.
The current tour launched January 30, 2026, in Prior Lake, Minnesota, and is running more than 100 dates from the Northeast through the Midwest, Colorado, California, and the South through October. Neumann has acknowledged the toll — “I’m starting to feel every mile and every show,” he told Ultimate Classic Rock — but he also understands what these rooms offer: something “imperfect and electric,” as he’s described it, that recording cannot replicate. The Buffalo set, running roughly two and a half hours, will draw from across the full catalog with video retrospective material threading the songs together. For a band with 14 records to account for, that approach is earned.
About the Venue
Asbury Hall at Babeville sits at 341 Delaware Ave in Buffalo — a historic music hall with a theater capacity of 750 and a standing capacity of 1,200. It is among the more serious rooms in Western New York for this tier of touring act: large enough to give the show some scale, intimate enough that nothing is lost in the back. More at babevillebuffalo.com.
Tickets & Pricing
Tickets start at $66. Showtime is 8:00 PM on Saturday, August 8, 2026. Tickets available at Tixr.