Enjoy an evening of stunning lyrical folk music in a double-header performance from Darryl Purpose and Hana Zara!

A master of the narrative folk tradition, Purpose has earned a reputation as a top-shelf songwriter and performer with a keen eye for detail and an uncanny knack for subtle twists that engage his listeners through his unusual, beautiful melodies and personal stories.

Purpose’s love for telling stories is almost as compelling as the life he’s made for himself. As a teenager, he hitchhiked to Las Vegas and began a legendary career playing blackjack. A few years later he joined a “March for Peace” that began in Los Angeles and walked across the country to Washington, DC. He then continued on to walk in the then-Soviet Union. He began performing music on the marches, including participating in the first ever outdoor stadium concert in Russian history, produced by the legendary Bill Graham and featuring Santana, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt and others.

In his thirties, Purpose began his current vocation as a performing songwriter. He has released 8+ albums of original material. His most recent full album, Still The Birds, spent weeks at #1 for airplay on Roots Music Report. His 2021 single release, Dave Carter's “Gentle Arms Of Eden,” was the #1 played song in the world on the FolkDJ list for July 2021.

Song spinner Hana Zara weaves subconscious imagery and rivulets of melody into a place somewhere between narrative and stream-of-consciousness, transporting audiences with her into dreamscapes that illuminate waking reality—and just might change it, and us, for the better.

In her own words, “I just want to keep writing albums that break down the distance between people, make people feel like I understand them or they understand me in a way that we don’t often get to experience in an everyday interaction . . . music is my medium, and writing, but my main goal is just to break down barriers between individuals and to keep dissolving the space between people who are brought up in a world that’s ‘us and them,’ ‘me and you’.”

This event is part of the "Songs, Stories, and Social Good" performance series, hosted in cooperation between Cruces Creatives, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Las Cruces, and other local partners. The mission of the performance series is to have each performance both support the arts in Las Cruces (by bringing global performers to the city or by showcasing local talent) and serve a “social good” theme that advances other charitable missions. The social good themes for this event are peace (inner and outer) and environmentalism.