Mary Bue w/ Leah Brooke

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, April 8, 2016
8:00 pm

“Heretofore more of a tender coffeehouse balladeer, the Duluth music scene mainstay plugged in and blew off a harbor’s worth of steam while recording Mary Bue's breakthrough collection at Sacred Heart Studio (which adds a “holy” spirit to many a record). Fans of ’90s alt-rock darlings like Belly and Jen Trynin will immediately take to the rocky hooks of songs like “Candy” and “Heart’s Desire.” Bue’s ghost-confronting, demons-wrestling lyrics seep in more slowly but prove similarly alluring.” – Chris Riemenschneider, Minneapolis Star Tribune
www.marybue.com

“Solo album by Leah Brooke, Royal Jelly, is complex and lyrical, featuring intricate layers of sound and oddity. Brooke's poetic writing and haunting voice are uniquely captivating in this diverse collection of original works of art. 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 Leah Brooke's moving vocal performances that, at times, reach an ethereal status. Scheduled to release February 5th 2016”