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Todd Burge to release two albums at Dils Center concert

Photo Provided Todd Burge of Parkersburg will be releasing two albums at a show Nov. 2 at the Dils Center in Parkersburg.

PARKERSBURG — Singer-songwriter Todd Burge of Parkersburg will be presenting an “albums release concert” on Nov. 2 at the Dils Center, 521 Market St..

Burge recorded his first album 32 years ago, appropriately called “1986 The First Album,” and this year recorded a second album, “Your Reflection Will Kill You.”

Burge said his first album was recorded in Parkersburg by Dave Traugh but was never released.

Burge will be joined by Mike Morningstar, Morgan Leigh Stubbe, Jimmy Clinton, Ryan Kennedy and John Inghram. Kennedy is the lead guitar player for the Mountain Stage Band. Kennedy and Inghram, who recorded the latest album with Burge, are members of Bob Thompson’s jazz band in Charleston.

Doors will open at 7 p.m. with music starting at 8 p.m. in the newly remodeled Burwell Room. Tickets are available online at toddburge.com or by calling 304-422-4068.

Don Dixon recorded Burge’s latest album. He’s produced for Joan Baez, James McMurtry, REM and many others.

If it’s been discovered by man, West Virginia’s Todd Burge has written about it, according to a news release. A born ponderer and observer of life, each of his songs tells a story. Whether drawn from personal experience or a tale of poetically woven fiction, you’ll live every second of it through his songs, he says.

Burge has shared bills with Hot Tuna, Bela Fleck, Lucinda Williams, Ricky Skaggs and Justin Townes Earle, as well as playing on the stages of The Kennedy Center, Nelsonville Music Festival, Music City Roots, The Country Music Hall of Fame, and as a repeat guest of the global NPR podcast and radio show “Mountain Stage.”

He is teaching the first songwriting course ever offered at his alma mater, West Virginia University.

“When I was attending WVU back in the ’80s and writing my first album, I really would’ve loved to have had a songwriter course there that I could take. Instead, I took as much English and theater and music as I possibly could in hopes of becoming a better songwriter, and now, decades later, I get to teach the course I always wanted to take.”

Burge described his two albums being released as a “duo of now-and-then sonic bookends, both opposite and yet intertwined, as a collection of stories that brought him to where he is today.”

Burge described “1986 The First Album” as a rock ‘n’ roll record with bits of punk. The album helped him decide which songs would go on the new record, he said.

The new album, “Your Reflection Will Kill You,” shows he “is refined with time,” Burge said.

With “Your Reflection Will Kill You,” the lyrics “are really a stream of consciousness thing. It’s kind of a conversation with myself — a conversation with my younger self. It talks about looking back and if you stay stuck there, how that can poison you,” Burge said.

“Don’t Water My Whiskey Down,” the fourth track on the new album, contains some “heavy, honest words about parenthood,” he said.

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