Shawn Mendes, Cecile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner Jr. to Join Punch Brothers’ ‘The Energy Curfew Music Hour’ on Thursday

Tomorrow, Jan. 16, Shawn Mendes, Cecile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner Jr. will join The Energy Curfew Music Hour, Audible’s musical variety show. This news, which arrived via social media on Tuesday, follows the season two premiere last Saturday, Jan 11, which saw Billy Strings and Jesca Hoop join the Chris Thile-fronted Punch Brothers as special guests.

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.’”

Thursday’s 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. Tickets for the event are available now, with limited standing room rush tickets to be made available on the day of the staging. Fans can purchase tickets for future performances—Feb. 16, Feb. 18, and Feb. 24—via the TodayTix app. Special guest artists for those dates will be announced soon, as well as additional dates.