I started Alchemy Chapel out of my parent’s living room early 2022. It almost certainly wouldn’t have come into existence without my friendship with Randy and Doralee Gordon who run Front of the Tapestry in Cleveland, TN. I started attending their house shows in 2019, and became quite enamored with their model of serving home-cooked dinners where artists and guests eat together beforehand, and enjoy a long-form concert followed by dessert, coffee, and a bonfire. Our exact models are a bit different these days due to scale, but the DNA remains the same.

Alchemy Chapel’s mission is pretty simple: serve artists and guests. Of course that quickly expands to a number of adjacent goals but it all comes back to those two things at the end of the day. The shows are unique in that we have a community dinner time (bring your own dinner) where the artists and guests all eat together. After dinner, the artists get around 1.5-2 hours to play through a substantial portion of their catalog. After the show, everyone hangs out over coffee and tea, and has the opportunity to support the artists by purchasing merch if they so choose. Doing shows this way benefits artists and guests because it breaks down the separation that exists at normal shows where there is no interaction without backstage or VIP passes. It’s a time commitment as the evenings generally go from 6-10pm, but it makes for an experience you can’t get at many other concerts.