W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

Glossary Live at Eastside Bowl (2026-01-30 & 31)

Back in August when Joey Kneiser surprise released Nothing’s Wasted on The Soul, I wrote that Joey was probably the best songwriter that pretty much 99.99% of the world doesn’t know about.  With not the least bit of hyperbole, I would place Glossary’s trilogy of albums starting with 2007’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, followed by 2010’s Feral Fire and capped off with 2011’s Long Live All of Us with any other band’s consecutive album production.  Unfortunately the band hasn’t played together since their 20th anniversary show at Nashville’s Mercy Lounge back in 2017 mainly due to longtime friend and drummer, Eric “EZ E” Giles’ inability to play any longer due to a severe rotator cuff injury.  With all of this in mind, when the announcement of a one off show was announced last November for the benefit of Nashville Public & Community Radio, a loud buzz was generated from that .01% of the world who were knowledgeable enough to grasp how awesome this news actually was.  Not all that shocking but still just a bit surprising, tickets for this show slated for Jan. 31, 2026 at Eastside Bowl in Nashville sold out in a veritable nanosecond.  A second show on the 30th was soon added and that too sold out almost immediately.  The shows would be coheadlining gigs featuring both Glossary as well as fellow Tennessean indie band The Features who also haven’t been active for quite sometime but whom experienced significant buzz back in the early aughts as Universal Records pushed them hard enough to land them spots on MTV’s 120 Minutes, Jimmy Kimmel in addition to multiple sold out international tours.

The promoters of these two shows could never have imagined when they were putting all of this together that not only Nashville, the entire southeast as well as pretty much everything east of the Mississippi would be engulfed by a winter storm and deep freeze for the ages.  Nashville itself was stricken the week before the shows with an ice storm which pretty much paralyzed the city with trees and power lines crumbling under the weight of tons of frozen ice and snow.  Of course with people traveling from all over the country, it was certainly somewhat concerning that almost half of Nashville was without power just days before the shows were about to happen.  But as the angelic voice beams down to Ray Kinsella in the movie Field Of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come”.  And come they did.  Joey Kneiser, Bingham Barnes, Todd Bean, & Kelly Smith have forged a community to which Glossary is the lynch pin.  Despite the god awful traveling conditions, Eastside Bowl was filled both nights with wayward travelers from Seattle, New York City, Minneapolis, Iowa, Peoria, New Orleans, Rochester, Florida, Chicago, Atlanta, Little Rock, New Jersey, North Carolina and Knoxville.  And these were just the places that people who I actually knew came from.

Friday night’s set commenced promptly at 8:30 PM with Kneiser greeting the enthusiastic crowd with his all too familiar greeting,  “Hello beautiful people, we are Glossary, from Murfreesboro, TN” before jumping right into “Lonely Is A Town”, the opening track from Feral FIre.   With lines like “The ghosts are out, Their dancing among the living, If you listen you can hear them howl, 

And I feel like an orphan, wanting to know, where is home” the pace had been set.  We in the crowd were the ghosts dancing amongst the living and honestly there wasn’t an orphan in the overflow room because for the next hour and change we were all part of one big family.  Not a blood family but that most wonderful family of our own choosing.  We were all brothers and sisters laughing and sometimes crying, singing and dancing, fists pumping in the air and each and every one of us falling in line as if it were 2010 all over again.  The band slowed things down a bit with “Only Time Will Tell” which was one of those emotional moments as Joey sang the poignant words “So let’s raise our glasses, For those once among us, For those who fought away fear” as there wasn’t anyone in the room who didn’t have someone who was no longer with us celebrating this Glossary homecoming. 

The set would continue with the band ploughing through “hit” after “hit”.  And as awe inspiring as the set was, one could not help but notice two things.  First was the flawed sound mix which had both Joey’s and Todd’s guitar levels way too low in the mix.  Second, would be a subtle nervousness which one could feel from the band.  Of course a certain amount of nerves had to have been expected.  This was Glossary’s first show in almost nine years and to further complicate matters, it was the first with Matt Martin filling in on drums.  Nonetheless, the band managed to fight through both issues and ultimately offered up a set which had each and every Glossie fan in the room smiling from ear to ear with a shit eating grin that could have lasted a lifetime.

Night two on Saturday evening right from the get go appeared to have a different vibe altogether than Friday night.  First of all the room appeared to be much more crowded and much earlier than it had the previous evening.  The other thing which stood out was the feeling that the room comprised a significantly larger Glossary fanbase compared to Features fans.  This could have been merely a matter of The Features fans hanging outside in the bar area waiting for “their” band to come on later on.  I do know that the previous night, many Glossary fans stuck around for a handful of Features songs before exiting for the bar.  I can honestly say that the two fan bases of each of the bands didn’t have that huge a cross over and while it is often the right thing to do in supporting the other bands playing on such a bill, it felt more of a show of respect by each fan base that the front and center area belonged to which ever band was on stage.

In any event, night two kicked off with “Only Time Will Tell” and while the version played the night before was somewhat subdued, on Saturday Kneiser and crew played it with a sense of urgency that was missing the previous night.  Right away we all could tell that whatever nervousness might have overtaken the band the night before was a thing of the past.  Each and everyone one of them up on the stage played and sang like they had a fire burning deep in their souls.  This became immediately apparent when Bingham started off the second song of the evening with his scorching bass intro to “Trouble Won’t Last Always”.  This would be a precursor to what would lie in store for the evening from Mr. Barnes.  As I was situated pretty much right in front of him, I had a perfect viewing perspective of his left hand flying up and down his fretboard with the grace of a monarch butterfly moving from flower to flower all while his right hand plucked away at those very same bass strings like they were flower petals.  And speaking of pedals (see what I did there?) late in the set, Bing would start playing through some pedal that created such wild distortion that I swore that he’d blown out his amp…but au contraire, it was a pure premeditated polyphony of noise that sounded perfect.

To make a long story short, Saturday’s set without one iota of hyperbole was one for the ages.  Joey sang and ripped on his guitar like a man possessed.   Kelly’s vocals were spot on, almost angelic at times while also being rough and ready when needed.  And then there was Bean, who appeared to be having as much fun on stage as I’ve seen him have while performing.  Well, MAYBE he exhibited having more fun on that frigid night in Mississippi at Wigenstock ‘12 when he belted out Slobberbones’s “Placemat Blues” but still, Todd was clearly having one hell of a blast on Saturday night. 

Lastly, let me just say that while Eric Giles on drums was sorely missed, night 2 proved that Matt Martin was up to the task of filling his shoes.  Friday, I thought Matt might have been a bit tentative behind the kit but on Saturday, I think he found his groove and was right there in the thick of it as the entire band put forth a set filled with fire and brimstone.

A highlight for me on Saturday came relatively late in the set when the band kicked into “At Midnight” a deep cut I’d never heard performed live before off of their How We Handle Our Midnights album.  A slow burning rocker, Midnight turned into a fire breathing jam which took the band to “Blood On The Knobs” and the room singing along with Joey and Kelly to the words “I’m still holding onto Rock ‘n Roll, holding onto rock ‘n roll” before we got the weekend’s finale of “Shout It From The Rooftops”.  What better way to end this Glossary family reunion than with the words:

But we’re going to keep on marching on

We’re going to look death in the eye

We’re going live courageously

We’re going love and not care why

We ain’t looking for any prize

At the end of all this

We won with love in our hearts

And forgiveness rolled in our fists

I’ve traveled quite a lot of miles to see Glossary over the years, from Mississippi to Coram, NY, from Little Rock to Nashville and this past weekend proved that for me and the rest of the Glossary family it is all well worth it.  I just hope that we don’t have to wait another 8 years to do it all over again.

Night One Slideshow:

Night Two Slideshow: