SUSTO

Justin Osborne is a singer, songwriter, and storyteller best known as the founder and frontman of SUSTO. For more than a decade, Osborne has built a body of work rooted in vivid, deeply personal songwriting—songs that wrestle with love and loss, change and uncertainty, family, place, and the complicated process of trying to make sense of a life as you’re living it. Osborne founded SUSTO in 2013 while living in Havana, Cuba, beginning a creative journey that would grow into an expansive catalog spanning studio albums, live recordings, and special releases. Along the way, SUSTO has developed a sound steeped in Southern Gothic storytelling and psychedelia, moving fluidly through rock, folk, country, and electronic influences while remaining centered around Osborne’s lyrical perspective. The project has also served as a collaborative home for a revolving cast of musicians and creative partners, including longtime collaborators Wolfgang Zimmerman and Johnny Delaware, as well as Ben Bridwell, Madi Diaz, and others. At the center of it all is Osborne’s songwriting. His work is often confessional without losing sight of the universal, turning the specifics of his own experiences into songs about the things people inevitably encounter as they move through life. On SUSTO’s My Entire Life, that approach came into particularly sharp focus as Osborne documented a period marked by major personal change, examining the end of a long relationship, family struggles, new love, and the hope that can emerge from starting over. The resulting songs blend rock, folk, psychedelia, and country-influenced storytelling while searching for perspective within both the difficult and joyful parts of life. That instinct—to use songwriting as a way of understanding the world around him—has remained a throughline throughout Osborne’s career. In his own words, SUSTO’s narrative has “always been confessional,” with songwriting serving as a way to make sense of the chaos, both good and bad. His songs find meaning not only in life’s defining moments but in the ordinary ones between them, continually returning to themes of resilience, reinvention, connection, and carrying on. That songwriting has also found another outlet through Susto Stringband, a roots-oriented extension of Osborne’s creative world that brings acoustic instrumentation and the communal spirit of traditional string music into focus. Whether surrounded by a full rock band, playing within the Stringband format, or standing onstage alone, the common denominator is the song itself. As a solo performer, Osborne brings that extensive catalog back to its foundation. Without the layers of a full band, the lyrics, melodies, and stories behind the songs take center stage, allowing material from across his career to exist in a more intimate and immediate setting. It’s a format particularly suited to a songwriter who has spent years turning his own experiences into something shared. For Osborne, writing and performing have long been inseparable from that desire to connect. As he has described it, songs can remind people navigating their own difficulties and chasing their own dreams that they aren’t alone. His solo performances offer perhaps the clearest expression of that idea: songs accumulated across years of change and reinvention, stripped back to a voice, an instrument, and the stories that started them.

Shalin Liu Performance Center

S22: conversations

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S21: roundups

Our top picks: outdoor dining, free events, spring festivals, best bars, upcoming concerts, museum parties - the latest in and around Boston.  Slug: joyraft-top-picks-best-things-to-do-boston-ma

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S28: calendar experiences

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Where

SUSTO

Website

Where?