Maxwell Hughes is a Grammy-nominated songwriter and former guitarist of The Lumineers. He is an imaginative songwriter and a daring composer. In performance, he's a warm, charismatic presence, able to hold audiences spellbound with nothing but his genial manner and his six-string. As he's demonstrated during his time with the internationally-famous Lumineers and Denver favorites Edison, he's an excellent accompanist and musical collaborator, too. But every conversation about this unique artist must begin with his mesmerizing instrumental talent.
While Hughes has his antecedents and happily acknowledges their influence on what he does, it isn't hyperbole to say that there's nobody out there who approaches the instrument in the same way that he does. His driving guitar-playing -- with its dazzling fusion of finger-taps, picking, strumming, deftly-caught harmonics, and rhythmic raps on the body of the instrument -- creates a musical language heretofore unheard. And by the time a listener is through listening to one of his records, or seeing him play a live show, he or she will be fluent in it.
With opener Dustin Morris