Prince Quail, Eliza Novella, Maraluso
Orange House
101 Nassau St.
Charleston, South Carolina
Oct. 30, 2025
Following his utopic DIY tour of the North East corridor documented in Midbrow here, Philadelphia-based musician Tyler Maxwell is headed South on a less idealistic mission: To survive as a working artist amid housing hardships and financial uncertainties at home. Follow along here as he writes about life as a performer and audience member traveling through Georgia, West Virginia and the Carolinas over the next few weeks in search of new sounds and scenes — and in lieu of, at times, a sense of security or stability.
Another two weeks of travel, and a good mix of shows both performed and attended (some, but far from all, documented here), came to a close as I coasted into Charleston. On Thursday night, I attended a proper house show in downtown Charleston. For ten years I’ve been hoping to find this sort of thing here (my parents live nearby, in Mount Pleasant, and I visit regularly) but never managed it until now. There’s great musicians here, but generally – notwithstanding a local showcase at the Pour House last month, featuring Mechanical River and the Shrimp Records Family Band (featuring Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst, aka Shovels & Rope), a quirked-up, costume-laden, rock-n-roll revue and totally fantastic show from top to bottom – I haven’t quite found anything that’s really my thing here until Orange House.
Prince Quail’s performance closed out the night and was, for me, an immediate hall-of-fame highlight of all my years of coming to Charleston. The band is the green songwriting outlet of Claire Solomon, a New York native whose pre-performance, self-introducing monologue about her relative inexperience with this sort of thing belied her immense, advanced musicality, and the utter ease with which she played and sang. I was hooked, netted immediately by these songs; often introduced by Solomon with stories detailing their inspiration – something about a TikTok trad-wife video, for one of them – it was like she was lulling me into a false sense of low expectations, then performing a song so enveloping I’d forget myself. Accompanied by Ben Somerville on electric guitar and close-following vocal harmonies, I was floored by the sheer inventive virtuosity with which they played and sang together; this wasn’t simple stuff, but dense, with unexpected yet inevitable rhythmic, harmonic and melodic turns on the regular. I couldn’t believe it, frankly, and was down to hear a lot more than we got.
I learned, to no great surprise, that Solomon is a professional classical cellist of great skill, with a regular chair in the Charleston Symphony. Her newness to songwriting notwithstanding, she is clearly a devout student of the greats and knows exactly what she’s doing. Asking her after the show about her tastes, she shared an affinity for Radiohead, Adrianne Lenker and Punch Brothers; I heard touches of Vashti Bunyan and The Roches, and a predilection toward clever, somewhat askew musical pattern-making. To heighten things even more, Solomon’s friends Emma and Caroline joined in on harmonies for a few songs, producing something genuinely like CSNY or the aforementioned Roche sisters. Encountering music like this has, in my experience, been altogether unfathomable in a place like Charleston (more of a jam-band scene), and in my decade of extended visits I’ve never once seen anyone play such an arresting set while simultaneously cultivating such a charming, endearing atmosphere.
At one point, a long, dilatory breeze passed overhead, touching seemingly every inch of a bough fanning out from above the house, as if it were an instrument. Hardly an intrusion, more like a signal from the open air that nature wanted to participate. The show was in the back deck of Orange House, unpeeled and open to passersby, and this was the very first show, their inaugural event. Despite having not done this before, their approach to hosting and organizing is already very dialed in, with an official website providing information about parking, costs and availability of food and beverage; the ground was ornamented with rugs Solomon had sourced recently, just to make the space more special, and she’d enlisted several friends to help in myriad ways, from MC-ing to selling and serving spiked apple cider and mulled wine. There were even gift bags for guests, an unnecessary and therefore totally necessary over-the-top gesture that I loved. All of this, and the show was free, with only a suggested donation to cover costs. I, for one, am thrilled to finally find a space like this in Charleston, filling a void I’ve felt every time I’ve been here.
