$15 / All Ages / Doors 6pm, Show 7pm / Americana, Indie-Folk, Singer-Songwriter, Vintage Jazz / Buy Tickets Here
The Witch and The Burro is a home for the melodies, art, short films, poetry, and other collaborative creative endeavors of Vic Ruggiero & Lauren.Napier.
Vic Ruggiero is known for his distinct Bronx accent that has a deep, raw quality to it. His lyrics follow several themes, including the apocalypse, dark humor, political distrust, paranoia, murder, irony, romance and loneliness. His songs range from narrative ballads to whimsical tunes inspired by Beat generation poets, authors and songwriters, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon.
Never really having roots in one geographic location, lauren.napier has tailored her many creative interests to suit her ever-changing address. Writer. Singer. Cellist. Model. Painter. These are labels that can be indulged whilst traveling.
Lauren finds solace in the written word, inspiration in the frequencies of her favorite music, and creative tranquility in being able to have her visions and a part of her being captured on film. She has lived in many different stateside locations as well as European countries throughout her life; her studies and experiences have aided her in crafting a creative and global perspective outside of the traditional American schema. A degree at Bowdoin College with a stint at Humboldt University in Berlin found her delving into Medieval Literature and the German language.
Over the last ten years, lauren has been a writer for such outlets as Smash Magazine, Tinsel Tokyo, Berlin Beat, Sugarhooker, Music Zeitgeist, NPR Berlin, Tacoma Volcano, Gestalten, and many others. She has acted as a tour manager for both club and festival circuits, a booking agent for national tours, a programming director and station manager for Bowdoin College’s radio station, a publicist for large scale music industry and publishing campaigns, a print and runway model, and as an editor for various texts including screen plays, lyrics and news articles. Her current project is a collection of short stories and melodies.
It all comes down to the fact that lauren is inspired and excited by a challenge, an excess of glitter, the scent of whiskey, and the unpredictability of a creative life.
With Ashland-based opener Josh Gross: Musician/writer/performer Josh Gross is best known for creating nationally celebrated musical horror-comedy troupe Puppeteers for Fears. But in 2020, that group was all but dead, its close working quarters a casualty of Covid. Rather than despair, Gross chose to view the pandemic quarantines as a gift of time, and spent the months in which the world was closed wandering the Oregon hills strumming an acoustic guitar and daydreaming of what would come on the other side. Though he’d spent the previous years diving deep into complex, often synth-heavy projects like Iconoplasty, and Astrofauna, Gross found a renewed love for stripped-down acoustic songwriting, and emerged from 2020 with binders full of new tunes combining the deft lyricism and melodic hooks that propelled Puppeteers for Fears with the emotional gravity of the Covid era. Some became the source material for Thunderchud (the power-pop band Gross has fronted since 2022) and others the foundation of a new collection of folk ballads that combine storytelling, regional history, and fearless gazes into the abyss, which Gross now regularly performs solo between tours with Thunderchud and Puppeteers for Fears. A full solo album, “Songs My Band Won’t Play,” is on the way in 2026.