Grammy Award winning singer Kathy Mattea excited about Pocatello concert at ISU  

“I am excited to get back to Idaho, I haven’t been there in a long time,” said Mattea, who is based in Nashville and has just recorded a session on Mountain Stage, a music program produced in West Virginia and distributed by National Public Radio that will be broadcast later this spring.

Her concert, part of ISU’s A Season of Note, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Stephens Performing Arts Center.

Mattea and Cooley have been playing together for 28 years.

“We’ve done so many songs together I can’t even count them, Bill has played with me so long,” Mattea said. “Sometimes someone will ask for a song that we haven’t played for a while and then we get to rediscover it. We do a lot of songs people know and some new songs to keep it fresh. Because we won’t be playing with a band, there will be room for more spontaneity.”

That spontaneity could include an impromptu guitar solo by Cooley or a musical trip down memory lane.

The concert will feature the duo’s beloved classics including songs such as “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” “Where’ve You Been?” and many other hits, plus a handful of more eclectic and often requested tunes from her extensive catalogue, and a sprinkling of brand new material, all reinterpreted for the duo format. Her 18 albums are woven through with bluegrass, gospel, and Celtic influences, and have garnered multiple CMA, ACM, and Grammy Awards.

“It will be a pretty wide-ranging concert because we have a lot of material to choose from,” she added.

Mattea draws inspiration from her Appalachian roots and is a torchbearer for often overlooked musical legacies like those of Hazel Dickens and Jean Ritchie. Her most recent album, “Calling Me Home,” is a collection of songs that celebrates the Appalachian culture of her native West Virginia and expands the vocabulary of acoustic roots music that has always served as her artistic center.

Mattea has another album coming out in September and is hoping to launch a podcast by mid-summer with a tentative title of “How Music Saved My Life.”

“I’ve heard so many stories of people that got hit with a hard time and how music got them through it,” Mattea said. “I want to talk about the gift music is to all of us.”

For more information on Kathy Mattea please visit kathymattea.com.

Prices are $26 for main seating and $22 for upper level sitting. Tickets are available at the ISU Box Office in the Stephens Performing Arts Center (1102 Sam Nixon Dr.), by phone at 208-282-3595, online at isu.edu/tickets or at Vickers Western Wear.