Leah Brooke - Royal Jelly album release with Karen Wheelock and Dana Perry

Art in the cafe...

Laurel Statz


"The Spectator"


December 2025



Laurel Statz is a painter and Madison area native. Her work, while figurative, is influenced by abstraction and minimalism. The paintings often have a quick and instinctual nature, capturing just what’s needed. While she often times herself to eliminate extra details and over-precision, she has ventured into more detailed works as well. Laurel does not attach narrative to her pieces. Rather, she thinks of them like a journaling process for her scatter-brained psyche. The figures in the pieces are meant to be processing tools for the artist and the viewer. She hopes that seeing these figures helps the...
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Friday, February 12, 2016
8:00 pm

Wisconsin Indie Rock artist, Leah Brooke, is an artful arranger of poetic oddity. Brooke's lyrical compositions are disenchanted portraits of the world around her studded with dry wit and gentle sarcasm. Brooke's haunting vocals saturate each song leaving listeners suspended in a state of wistful longing. Her latest album, Royal Jelly, is formed essentially from acoustic and electric guitar foundations backed with a mixture of additional production techniques that move between traditional bass guitar and drums to electronic elements, beautifully bound together by Brooke's moving vocal performances that, at times, reach an ethereal status.

Madison-based singer and songwriter, Dana Perry, is a one-woman acoustic band who shares her music with strangers in Midwestern coffee houses regardless of the weather outside. With just a guitar, her voice and the tap of her foot on the floor, or the slap of her hand against the wood grain of her guitar, Perry delivers stripped down, soul-baring folk songs that cut through the mundane buzz of everyday humdrum life.

Karen is one of those folk artists that manages to put a modern twist on a music tradition as old as time. She actively encourages audience participation, and covers the songs of old in addition to those of other local and indie artists.
In her short time performing in Madison and surrounding areas, Wheelock has proven herself to be a force, who can hold her own at a rock show or benefit concert.