(TUCKERTON, NJ) -- The Lizzie Rose Music Room presents Laura Mann and Ben Arnold on Friday, October 2, 2026 at 7:30pm. These are two artists with strong roots in the Philadelphia music scene.
Laura Mann has spent a lifetime following songs. She picked up the guitar at eight years old and was performing professionally as a teenager. Her career took shape under the guidance of legendary songwriter and producer Robert Hazard, who wrote the original version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” As Laura's manager and producer, Hazard brought her to Philadelphia and helped launch her career, including an appearance on Star Search—the groundbreaking television talent competition that paved the way for shows like American Idol and America's Got Talent.
Over the years, Laura has shared the stage with legendary artists including Warren Zevon, Dave Mason, and Ronnie Spector. She has co-written with acclaimed songwriters Eric Bazilian, Scot Sax, Dan Navarro, and Cliff Hillis, and has enjoyed a decades-long creative partnership with Charlton Pettus, guitarist, songwriter, and producer with Tears for Fears.
In 2018, Laura founded The Living Room, the award-winning listening room just outside Philadelphia that became a beloved home for songwriters and music lovers. For six years, she built a community where listening mattered and every performance was treated with the respect it deserved.
When it was time for a new chapter, Laura closed The Living Room, sold her home, packed up her Winnebago with her two Goldendoodles, and set out to travel the country—not to leave music behind, but to find her way back to it.
Today, that journey continues through a new season of writing, recording, and performing. Her songs are rooted in honesty, connection, and the belief that music is at its most powerful when it makes people feel something. Laura is exactly where she’s always belonged—following the songs wherever they lead.
Ben Arnold is a lifer. For decades, he's been creating his own version of amplified American roots music, broadcasting that sound from venues across America and Europe. He turns a new page with XI, a roots-rock record that finds the road warrior bridging the gap between personal insights and universal statements. Intimate one minute and anthemic the next, XI highlights just how wide-ranging Arnold's songwriting has become over the past quarter-century.
"I laid myself bare with this record. There's relationships and compromise. There's places where you have to give up or give in. And there's places where you have success as well as failure," says Arnold, who signed a major-label deal with Columbia Records in the 1990s before embracing the freedom of hard-won independence during the decades that followed.
Along the way, he also released albums with collaborative projects as diverse as US Rails and Pistol For Ringo, continuously exploring music from new angles, establishing himself not only as a solo artist, but as a bandmate, co-writer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and educator, too. By the 2020s, he'd already contributed to more than 30 albums. When the Covid-19 pandemic brought everyday life to a halt, though, Arnold found himself stuck at home, unable to continue collaborating with others. Looking to make sense of an unsteady world, he dug into his craft — and into himself.
"There's everything from Bob Dylan to Buddy Holly to Bruce Springsteen to a little bit of the Beach Boys in there," Arnold says of the record, whose arrangements make room for electric guitar, swirling organ, heartland hooks, and the warm, worn-in rasp of his own road-tested voice. "I used to feel nervous about honoring my influences, but I've become less on-guard about it over the years. It's all folk music. This form of American popular music has been handed down over generations, and we're all privy to it. We all own it."
Tickets are $35 and available for purchase online. The Lizzie Rose Music Room is located at 217 East Main Street in Tuckerton, New Jersey. Free parking is available.
Get ready for one of the hottest young voices in contemporary blues. Selwyn Birchwood, the award-winning Alligator Records guitarist, vocalist and lap-steel master, brings his high-energy blend of deep blues, funk, Southern soul and psychedelic rock to the LRMR.
Few artists have traveled as many musical roads—or done so with as much authenticity—as Maria Muldaur. Best known for her Grammy-nominated 1974 hit “Midnight at the Oasis,” Muldaur's remarkable career spans more than six decades and encompasses blues, folk, gospel, jazz, jug band music, R&B, and Americana. Emerging from the vibrant Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, she performed with the Even Dozen Jug Band and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band before launching a successful solo career.
Ali Tod>Scottish guitarist and singer Ali Tod blends modern percussive fingerstyle guitar techniques with classical training and loop-pedal mastery, to create a live acoustic experience that gets hands clapping, hips shaking and feet stomping. If Rodrigo y Gabriela and KT Tunstall combined to make a one-woman show, it would be Ali Tod.
Laura Mann has been following her passion for music since picking up the guitar at age eight and performing professionally as a teenager. Guided by legendary songwriter and producer Robert Hazard, she launched her career in Philadelphia and appeared on Star Search. Throughout her career, Laura has performed with artists including Warren Zevon, Dave Mason, and Ronnie Spector, collaborated with acclaimed songwriters, and developed a long-standing creative partnership with Charlton Pettus of Tears for Fears.
Popa Chubby has been hard rocking the blues in his fierce and soulful way for more than 30 years. Over the course of a career that dates back to 1994, he has been a force to be reckoned with on the guitar, and his tempestuous, soulful playing has never been more powerful. An imposing figure with a shaved head, tattooed arms, a goatee and a performance style he describes as “the Stooges meets Buddy Guy, Motörhead meets Muddy Waters, and Jimi Hendrix meets Robert Johnson," Popa Chubby is an endearing character who is one of the genre’s most popular figures.
