Press

Melissa Auf der Maur spent 15 years as a rocker on the road, playing bass in alternative bands like Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, dating Dave Grohl, and at times taking up residence in Janis Joplin’s old room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. But in 2006, when she met and fell in love with the filmmaker Tony Stone, she knew it was time to settle down away from the city, become a mother and raise a child in a “cozy little town with a cool kindergarten and plenty of nature.”

Basilica, Hudson’s cathedral-esque music venue, started as, quite literally, a dream.

Melissa Auf der Maur, the venue’s co-founder alongside her husband Tony Stone, had a dream about a “Temple of Sound” when she was 19. In it, a pilgriming group of music worshippers arrived at a triangular parlor that emanated sound. As told in the lyrics of “I Need I Want I Will,” a song Auf der Maur wrote about the dream, “The music entered them through their skin / Into their blood and following their heartbeat / The music became them and they became it.”

Brick walls, soaring ceilings, and historic factories reborn as romantic backdrops.

There’s something romantic about weddings held in industrial-rustic venues. These spaces are often renovated historic buildings with generations of stories echoing within their brick walls.

Musician and Basilica Hudson Co-Founder Melissa Auf der Maur shares how much commitment and determination it took to transform an industrial-era factory into a sustainable, community-centric cultural venue.