Songwriter Showcase Concerts & Open Mic

Songwriter Showcase Concerts
& Open Mic
Summer 2025

Join Tahoe Al for his NEXT Showcase Concerts at Unity at The Lake!

SATURDAY, July 12
Doors Open 6:30pm – Music 7:00pm
UNITY AT THE LAKE
870 Emerald Bay Road | Plaza 89 | Suites 205-208
South Lake Tahoe, CA 96150
TICKETS $15 at the Door

July 2025 Concert Guest Performers

Kristi Matal

KRISTI MATAL is a musician, singer, and songwriter, who lives in Sacramento. She grew up in a family that loved music, especially singing harmony. Kristi’s father, Cotty, who is 94 years young, has sung in a barbershop chorus for over 40 years.

In third grade, she joined her first church choir and honed her harmony singing skills as an alto. At the age of 10, she took guitar lessons, and years later, understood that leading singing around the campfire on family vacations helped introduce her to vital leadership and collaboration skills useful in musical environments and in life.

From youth to adulthood, she has sung in both church and school choirs and conducted a large inter-faith Unity church choir. She has sung the national anthem at several Kings Basketball and River Cats baseball games. She admits that the nation anthem is a hard song to sing!

Kristi is a published songwriter with a CD, Journeys, available on many digital platforms (Amazon, YouTube, etc.,). Her original song, Love Beyond Love, was arranged for choir by Mark Hayes, a notable international composer/arranger. The song is available on Lorenz.com for soprano, alto, tenor bass (SATB) and tenor I & II and bass I & II (TTBB). The song embodies the universal idea that the love and friendship we give out will return to us.

Kristi traveled with her husband, Jeff, to India and while there, enjoyed singing to the children, You are My Sunshine, and It’s a Small World.

She is delighted to be appearing in the Songwriter Showcase. In keeping with her motto, “Life is a choir waiting to happen,” she may invite the audience to sing along with her!

Michael Dean Rogers

MICHAEL DEAN ROGERS is an accomplished professional multi-instrumental musician/singer/ songwriter/ producer, philosopher and author of “The Truth About Truth.” His music combines all these aspects into songs that not only please the ears, they touch the heart.

Michael has opened concerts for Starship, Dave Mason, Firefall, Little River Band, Gregg Rollie of Santana and Journey, Air Supply, Pablo Cruz and other well-known bands. His mission is sharing a new ways of thinking through the magic of music and song. More info at truthabouttruth.com.

EDDY UNDERTOW perfoming Like A Memory in the Spring 2024 SSC, May 25

“Tahoe Al” Miller perfoming Ravens in The Rain in the Summer 2024 SSC, August 17

THE MISSION

The purpose of the Songwriter Showcase Concerts (SSCs) is to provide a curated forum where music artists from the Lake Tahoe region and the listening public can come together in an intimate setting to enjoy high-quality live music with their friends and associates, and where the public can support local creators to present songs not heard elsewhere and provide feedback to the artists. The SSC proceeds on the basis that entertainment is a basic human need, and seeks to fill a niche to provide a richer, live music experience for the listener than is generally available locally, or available through the mainstream streaming media and the club circuit, or the large concert.

Those circuits preoccupy most working musicians with playing the popular songs of others (cover songs) promoted in the mainstream. Anyone can at times enjoy that sort or nightclub / bar / restaurant scene with all the new and old hits, an occasional original song, the extraneous noise and audience inattention to the music in the “background.” The SSC is intended to be a different kind of experience, a place where audiences and performers will engage with each other in high fidelity.

The SSC is also premised on the inherent human desire for new and novel songs, songs of our time and place, and in hopes that the greatest songs are as yet unwritten (taste being in the subjective ear of the listener) or are undiscovered or mostly unheard for lack of venues. The music industry is dying and moving to Artificial Intelligence, streaming legacy-band catalogs, and live shows for big bucks, but for a tiny minority of industrial artists among many unsung musicians. Having had more fun playing music and writing and recording songs than most anything else, Tahoe Al doesn’t plan to stop. The SSC is about fostering human creativity and expression and providing a venue locally to present his own creative works, and those of other songwriters and musicians, to interested listeners. May you enjoy them!

All are invited to come out and join the fun and the celebration of original live music with your friends, neighbors, community members and peers, get to know the songwriters, and experience and foster a unique form of entertainment and social interaction in our community. Likewise, with the Open Mics (OMs) planned, it will be a set after the SSC available for anyone to present original or cover songs, music, brief readings or poetry. This will be by sign-up the day of the SSCOM and ending by around 10 pm. Bring your best!