- This event has passed.
Cassandra Kubinski with Pete Muller & The Kindred Souls
Cassandra Kubinski
Multi Billboard Heatseekers charting singer/songwriter Cassandra Kubinski has performed her piano-driven stories of ambition, connection, loss, and love from living rooms to Barclays Center, from NYC to LA to Thailand to Jamaica and beyond. She’s shared stages with the Goo Goo Dolls, 10,000 Maniacs, Anna Nalick, Dickie Betts, and more.
You’ve heard Cassandra’s songs on TV, from Lifetime to ESPN to ABC, including 13 songs on hit show Dance Moms. She has collaborated on songs with luminaries like the Goo Goo Dolls, Chris Botti, 10,000 Maniacs, DJ Taz Rashid, and even her personal music hero, Billy Joel.
Her songs have helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for important causes, such as “Not So Different” for Autism (performed for the NY Islanders at Barclays Center) and “You Get Me” for pet rescue (performed at Broadway’s iconic 54 Below).
A fierce advocate for women in entertainment, she was the composer and bandleader of Emmy-winning new media TV Show “The Never Settle Show” hosted by Mario Armstrong; served on the board of Women in Music for 8+ years; and serves as the youngest and only female artist on the Caffe Lena board in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Pete Muller & The Kindred Souls
Born in New Jersey to immigrant parents, Muller began playing piano as a teenager, picking up regular gigs as an accompanist while excelling enough at his academic studies to earn acceptance to Princeton University. A math whiz with a preternatural gift for numbers, he found himself fascinated with the connections between technology and finance, and within a decade of graduating, he’d helped revolutionize the field of quantitative trading, which in turn transformed Wall Street as we know it.
“Once I accomplished everything that I’d set out to do in the business world, I realized that I hadn’t nurtured the artistic side of my life,” Muller explains. “There was a six-year period where my focus was so intense that I hardly touched my piano. My work was a single-minded obsession.”
Feeling spiritually drained, Muller began drifting away from his work for a period of equally intense focus on his music: busking in the subways, playing small clubs and cafes, and writing his own songs for the first time. After releasing a pair of early albums, he married, moved to California, and became a father. While he eventually returned to the business he’d founded, he remained as dedicated as ever to his craft. In 2014, he recorded his third album, Two Truths and a Lie, which introduced him to Avatar Studios (a New York landmark previously known as The Power Station, where icons like Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan had recorded). Upon learning the studio was under threat of being sold and redeveloped as condos, Muller decided to use his resources in partnership with the City of New York and the Berklee College of Music to save, renovate, and re-launch the space as a world-class recording and educational facility. He would go on to record his next two albums—2019’s Dissolve and 2022’s Spaces—there, launching a whole new chapter of his career that would find him sharing bills with artists like Joan Osborne, Jimmy Webb, Livingston Taylor, and Paul Thorn in addition to landing festival slots everywhere from Telluride to Montreux.
These days, Muller is more content than ever, embracing AND over OR as he splits his time between the East and West Coasts, carving his own unique and inspiring path through the pair of vastly different, yet ultimately complementary worlds he’s created for himself.
“Cassandra Kubinski is very similar to the singer/songwriters of the late 70’s…proves that the genre (singer/songwriter) can still be transcendent.” – Billy Joel
“I was immediately drawn to the passion Pete brings to every performance,” says Ross-Spang, who encouraged Muller to embrace a looser, grittier approach in the studio built around live takes and free-flowing improvisation without the rigid constraints of a click track. “Joy truly abounds in his music, and working with Pete reinforced those same feelings in me. I consider myself very lucky to have helped capture that feeling on his new record.”
