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The 2025 Christmas Yarn Ball Tour w/sg Cruz Contreras
December 16, 2025 @ 8:00 pm - 11:00 pm
Yarn is an Americana, Alt-Country, Rock and Roll band founded in 2007 by Blake Christiana. Yarn evolved from its earliest days as a bar band in New York, NY to an outstanding roots band that’s shared stages with some of the biggest names in the business.
You might expect a band that calls itself Yarn to, naturally, tend to spin a yarn or two. Blake Christiana, founding member of Yarn, has the music in him. In fact, you could say that Blake is the music and the music is Blake; that’s how deeply he inhabits the songs he writes and plays. You can hear him struggling with his feelings, whether it’s on a skittering country shuffle or on a mid-tempo folk ballad or a straight-ahead rocker. His restless search for the chords and lyrics over the past 20 years has produced a plethora of memorable music, and since 2007 he’s led Yarn, a band that’s evolved from its earliest days as a bar band in New York City to an outstanding roots band that’s shared stages with Dwight Yoakam, Marty Stuart, Alison Krauss, and Leftover Salmon, among many others.
Over the years, musicians have rotated in and out of Yarn, but drummer Robert Bonhomme and bassist Rick Bugel, along with Christiana, have remained the core of the band. Yarn has definitely brought people together with their music; their devoted followers call themselves the “Yarmy,” and for the last 4 years the band has hosted a three-day music festival, Yarnival, that attracted hundreds of fans to Troy, Virginia. Along the way, Yarn has gathered accolades from festivals, The Americana Music Association, landed on the Grammy ballot four times, and placed in the top five of the AMA album charts on more than one occasion.
Yarn keeps spinning their stories, drawing audiences into their vibrant musical web, and delivering clever and resonant lyrics in memorable songs that reverberate and linger in listeners’ hearts and souls.
Cruz Contreras has spent nearly thirty years forging his path through the Americana musical landscape. He’s a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, bandleader, producer, and storyteller whose voice cuts through noise like a well-honed blade. He got his start at 15, playing guitar behind his younger brother Billy Contreras at fiddle competitions. But it was a moment in 1993 that sealed Cruz’s fate: finding himself in a room with the Father of Bluegrass, Bill Monroe. That room, that sound, that presence—it lit a fire that’s never gone out.
