SHOWS featured, King Tuff, ojai valley women's club, ty segall Rob Shepyer March 4, 2025 0 Comments

T.Y. Ojai: Ty Segall at Ojai Valley Women’s Club

With MTV’s Unplugged catalogue hitting Paramount+ recently, I’ve been on a bit of an acoustic kick. When a popular artist goes acoustic, it’s a sign of a deeper appreciation and commitment to their fans and music than standard touring, writing, and recording cycle an artist goes through.

Choosing to go on an acoustic tour, like the one Ty Segall and King Tuff are currently collaborating on throughout California, presents a challenge to a musician that really tests their artistry. It strips them of all the bells and whistles fans expect from their songs and live show, forcing the artist to compensate with pure charisma and sonic bravado.

Both King Tuff and Ty Segall exhibited powerful charisma as acoustic artists, taking advantage of the silence between and around their songs to amplify the meaning of every lyric and note. The result of which is that audiences that were lucky enough to catch these shows may not have had their socks rocked off like they would in a Ty Segall and The Muggers show, or a Witch (King Tuff’s metal band) show, but we did experience the full fleshed out power and message of Ty’s songs like no other fans ever have.

related content: King Tuff and The Shrine in Venice for Red Bell Sound Select

You can read the lyrics of a song, you can listen to it on repeat a thousand times, until you read the feeling and the room between the lines of hearing the song live, you really can’t digest what the song means to an artist or an audience.

The Ojai Valley Women’s club has a certain charm and mystery surrounding the space. When a show comes through with a larger artist, it’s usually a banger like this one that drives every local hipster and artsy fart, out of the hippie-dippy woodwork and into downtown Ojai for the show.

Then once you enter the main room, the plainness of the space only enhances the power of the performance. In the case of this show, it was a family gathering and an artist collective all in one. The night began with King Tuff, who’s maladies about hitting 40 and finding out how to properly live in your own skin rang true to every ear of every age in the Women’s club. His songs were had a psychedelic, garage rock charm to them, though they featured adolescent rhyming and feel, they captured the sort of eternally young vibration that defines millennials and generation Z alike. King Tuff noted he came from a town that reminded him of Ojai, though he assumed the inhabitant of the valley were probably richer and better looking. Still, he had the correct sense to know that the fans in attendance had the same yearning to be moved and lulled by music all at once.

Ty Segall is known across the world as one of the fuzziest, most electrifying guitarists of his generation. A seminal artist in psych-garage world and certainly a pillar of Los Angeles music. That aura extends far beyond Ojai, and as many Angelino’s have certainly moved out to Ojai in search of a more natural lifestyle, Ty’s acoustic offering must’ve satisfied their nostalgia for LA and their need for a quieter vibe.

Ty’s set was absolutely thrilling without all the amps or backing band, purely as a consequence of his chops as a musician, even beyond his playing, like how he hummed and used his voice as an instrument, as well as the depth of his lyrics. Songs like “Californian Hills” were given the room to breathe so that audiences can absorb their meaning and reflect on the state of living in western civilization in 2025 like they might not have been able to if the song were blasted in their faces out of an orange amp.