Jonathon Linaberry describes the songs on Radio Waves as music that “lives in the night” — the sound, in his own words, “of a kitchen heavy with the leftover heat of an August day and a table crowded with drinks, of arguments and first loves and first heartbreaks.” He performs them alone, as The Bones of J.R. Jones, running guitar or banjo alongside a modified drum kit he operates himself. In a room the size of Photo City Music Hall, that description starts to feel less like press copy and more like a precise invitation.
About the Show
The Bones of J.R. Jones is a project Linaberry launched in 2012, after trading in his earlier life in hardcore and punk for the rural American blues and folk he’d discovered in Alan Lomax’s field recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. He grew up in central New York and now lives in the Catskills, and his music carries both places — a roots noir that the artist’s own site describes as blending Southern Gothic and transcendentalist threads, with debts to Bruce Springsteen, Bon Iver, J.J. Cale, and James Murphy.
Radio Waves, released June 20, 2025 on Tone Tree Music, is his sixth studio album and the first he’s recorded with an outside producer. That producer is GRAMMY-nominated Robbie Lackritz (known for his work with Feist and Bahamas), and the pairing brought something new into Linaberry’s sound: retro synthesizers and drum machine foundations laid alongside the fingerpicked guitars that have long been the center of his work. Linaberry has said that after twelve years of touring, he went into the record wanting to recapture the feeling of the albums that first transformed him — aiming for simplicity, letting melody and vocals come through. Spill Magazine gave it four out of five.
The lead single, “Savages,” is described as “a driving anthem that revels in the reckless abandon of young adulthood.” His music has been licensed in True Detective, Suits, Daredevil, Longmire, and Graceland, and he has shared stages with The Wallflowers, G. Love, and The Devil Makes Three.
Venue & Logistics
Photo City Music Hall hosts the show at 543 Atlantic Avenue in Rochester — a 400-capacity club on the western New York circuit that knows what to do with this kind of night. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. The event is limited to ages 16 and up.
Tickets
Tickets are $25. Buy tickets