Anna Ash w/ Malena Cadiz

On Saturday, March 22nd, Mama Mañana Presents welcomes Anna Ash and Malena Cadiz on tour from Los Angeles with special Santa Fe guest, Melas Leukos!

Grab your early bird tickets now and save money at the door!

Anna Ash writes songs of profound, startling, sensuous insight. Her new album, Sleeper, is infused with an emotional intelligence that conjures nostalgia with the memory of a middle school boyfriend’s cologne, and evokes a tenderness specific to L.A. in an evening full of car alarms, fireworks, and the rare California lilac. But she knows, too, that such knowledge will not spare her from heartache, from the weight of the past, from the wildfire drawing ever closer. Rueful, wise, sardonic, Sleeper plays like a Sally Rooney book if the novelist could palm-mute a Silvertone and launch her voice into cathartic falsettos.

Ash’s songs regularly feature on soundtracks (Billions, Masters of Sex) and curated playlists (Fresh Folk, Noir) and her fans will recognize that trademark textured guitar and soaring voice. On Sleeper, though, the tight pocket of previous albums gives way to more spacious arrangements and atmospherics — buoyant keys, group harmonies, pedal steel and horns. This is her fourth album, and first on Oklahoma indie label Black Mesa Records. Ash recorded the album in two sessions: The first in November 2020, amid the uncertainty of the pandemic; the second in April 2021, as the world started to re-open and gathering a band in a studio became a more viable option. The first took place in the Catskills, the second back in LA, both recorded live to tape. And you hear it on the album — there’s an urgency, an immediacy to the album, as if Ash is processing this perilous moment (and all the ones before) in real time. Sleeper, then, is a soundtrack of sorts, trenchant songs to score the moments when memories play life movies and the fire is at your door.

Malena Cadiz is a lady of the canyon waylaid at a suburban strip mall, acutely aware of how romance shines through even in the moments of grit and desolation.  There’s something Didion-esque about Cadiz’s storytelling as she crafts deeply personal vignettes that reveal greater narratives about the world we live in. The 10 songs on her 3rd full length album,  Hellbent & Moonbound are full of wit and vulnerability, capturing the strange beauty and humor of day to day life.

Growing up a second-generation Filipino-American, Cadiz bounced between living in the suburbs of Michigan with her mother and bustling Singapore with her father. “I always felt rootless, not quite belonging to either place.” This longing for home and search for center rests at the heart of Cadiz’s work.

The Fader has likened her work to Karen Dalton and NPR compared her to “an earthbound Joanna Newsom, Cadiz has a voice that grabs you within seconds.” Her songs have been featured on “Nancy Drew” (CW), “Lucifer” (Netflix), “REBEL” (ABC), among others. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Nomadic and adventurous, Melas Leukos has most recently settled in the mystical confines of Santa Fe, NM; she howls a different blues, already a troubadour of many moons. Therein lies a tangible wisdom embedded within Fable that certainly belies her youth. This ebullient six-song set finds a weathered-yet-hopeful woman seeking deeper understandings of her surroundings. She is a songstress weaving stories that enrapture, each track trying to make some sense of a world that places priority on the material and meaningless. This album finds Melas Leukos strikingly comfortable examining her own mortality, fleshing out intensely personal themes of love, awakening, and self-awareness, juxtaposed with notions of separation, fear, isolation, and death.

She is currently working on a her debut record with Tone Ranger on the boards.