The national music industry grinds to a halt in the wintertime. Good thing we’ve got live music at home.
Each January, the Red River Cultural District, Austin’s live music epicenter, ditches the cover fees to produce Free Week, a locals-only music festival that guarantees working musicians and music venue employees get a paying gig. The Chronicle spoke with the artists we’re most excited to see this weekend – two of which play our own showcase, Jan. 10 at the 13th Floor.
As spring follows winter, Little Mazarn’s Lindsey Verrill spins life into song. For 10 years now, the multi-instrumentalist songwriter has been playing under the Little Mazarn title, borrowed from her grandparents’ address, joined by longtime avant-garde instrumentalist Jeff Johnston and prolific road dog Carolina Chauffe.
“I really saw a shift this year into: This is what we do,” says Verrill. “Like a farmer, it’s a constant practice, a nature. To move to that attitude, it took 10 years.”
Somewhere along the way, someone told the soft-spoken singer that the relentless pace and burdensome insecurities that come with musicianship would ease after a decade, in one of those pat-on-the-back adages that both soothes and irritates a frustrated upstart.
“I remember just being like, agh,” Verrill says, admitting that now, the aphorism holds true. “It’s time devoted towards something and then you are just too busy being an artist to be concerned with who’s checking it out or why.”
On Mustang Island, the triad’s third full-length album, that immersion is palpable. The haunting whistles, delicately tailored lyrics, and intricately lucid strings that reverberate through the 10 tracks are extraterrestrial: both deeply rooted in this planet and endowed with otherworldly magic. Enchanting additions by Felt Out, who will join Little Mazarn at the Chronicle’s Free Week showcase at 13th Floor, bolster the record’s sincere serenade.
The hearty seeds of Little Mazarn’s vocal-led, definition-resistant sound were planted many moons ago, when Ethan Azarian offered Verrill a gig accompanying him on cello at a Hole in the Wall residency. On the other side of the expansive songwriter sat Johnston, expertly wielding his bow and saw. It was the beginning of an animating and supportive friendship.
“It’s like we were born to do this together.”
Little Mazarn’s Lindsey Verrill
“We had really good chemistry playing together,” Verrill says. “It was always just very jokey and fun and casual between us. That inspired me to start thinking about writing songs myself or doing my own music.”
Johnston stuck around, patient and stocked with Austin lore and lessons, as Verrill meandered through experimental Guy Clark renditions and a stint on guitar, plucking her way to the sparse, strings-forward style that distinguishes a Little Mazarn song today.
The pair found Chauffe, who also plays under the name hemlock, in 2019 and convinced them to tag along on a monthlong tour that quickly bled into a longstanding, interstate collaboration, finalizing the intergenerational freak folk trio.
“We’re [each] exactly 17 years apart,” says Verrill, a sign, one among many, that the group was meant to be. “It’s like we were born to do this together.”
True to the mystical fluidity of their music, Verrill notes that each bandmember is poised on the cusp of two generations, born between two identities. The swirling combination of novelty and nostalgia so expertly captured in their tradition-waxing, innovative sound is representative of these influences, and symbiotic growth from many years of collaboration.
“I’ve learned so much from Jeff and Carolina. I get the benefit of being right in the middle,” Verrill says. Surrounded by Johnston’s five decades of Austin experience and Chauffe’s devotional songwriting practice, encountering new acts through the silver-haired sawist’s encyclopedic memory and the nomadic younger artist’s internet-informed philosophy, Verrill finds herself with inspiration aplenty, ripe to be plucked and attentively served.
Little Mazarn
Saturday 10, 9pm, the 13th Floor
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This article appears in January 9 • 2026.