Audible Reveals Special Guests Billy Strings and Jesca Hoop For Season 2 Premiere of Punch Brothers’ ‘Energy Curfew Music Hour’

This Saturday, Jan. 11, Billy Strings will join the Punch Brothers as a special guest artist for the season two kickoff performance of The Energy Curfew Music Hour, a musical variety show hosted by Audible, Inc. Along with the beloved bluegrass icon, fellow singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop is also set to share the stage with the Chris Thile-fronted Punch Brothers. The show, and all future performances for the beloved series, will be recorded live at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre and released as an Audible Original. 

The Energy Curfew Music Hour is a Thile and Claire Coffee-spearheaded project, with Thile and fellow Punch Brothers Brittany Haas, Noam Pikelny, Chris Eldridge, and Paul Kowert serving as the musical hosts. The immersive event is themed around an intriguing fictional premise: in an imagined near-future, the government enacts a weekly curfew to conserve energy by shutting down the electrical grid completely for twenty-four hours. Listeners across the country tune into the national broadcast of acoustic music in the final hour of power to usher in the great unplugging.

“The forces of the show are geared towards transporting all of us–the listener, the participants, the guests and us,” Thile detailed in a feature for the December 2024 issue of Relix. “There’s such an emphasis on collaboration and an emphasis on playing acoustically, regardless of what you normally do. We wanted to run the gamut, in terms of musical approach–not just over the course of the season but across each episode. We selected guests not only based on their prowess but also because they are all very natural collaborators. Part of the plan was, ‘Let’s see if one and one can make three.’”

This announcement arrives following the success of season one, which featured notable guests like Lake Street Dive, Madison Cunningham, James Taylor, Jason Isbell, Sylvan Esso, Norah Jones, Kacey Musgraves, and Jon Batiste. All eight existing episodes of The Energy Curfew Music Hour are available on Audible and elsewhere as podcasts. 

A limited number of tickets for Saturday’s performance are still available both online and in person at the Minetta Lane box office. Also on Saturday, Jan. 11, beginning at 9:00 a.m., fans can purchase tickets for upcoming performances—Jan. 16, Feb. 16, Feb. 18, and Feb. 24—via the TodayTix app. Special guest artists for those stagings will be announced soon, as well as additional performance dates.

Tune into season one of the The Energy Curfew Music Hour here.