Messa - Live at Nantes 2022

 Messa - Live at Nantes 2022 - Part 1

 

 Messa - Live at Nantes 2022 - Part 2

 

On March 11th, the Post-Metal world will and should be watching when Italy’s most elegant combination of Jazz and Post-Metal releases their third full-length onto a waiting world. Well, the VoS-lers surely can’t wait for Messa’s new record Close! And as we like to keep you on the edge of your seats we give you a detailed interview with the band conducted by our living library Knut who has gotten a lot of really good answers, mostly from singer Sara but also from her bandmates on several questions. Maybe this will make you as excited as Knut and us about this release because it is really a great release and another proof that elegance and force are not at all at opposite ends of the musical spectrum but really combinable!

Q: Congratulations on your new album! You have really developed your music further! After the two releases Belfry and Feast for Water, you now name your album Close. The cover of the first album has a picture of the famous bell tower in Lake Reschen, the cover of the second one is connected to water and now on this new one dancing women, I assume they are performing the Nakh dance from the video for the song “Pilgrim”. The covers on the previous album had clear connotations with the titles. So, what is the reasons behind the title Close that you have chosen for this new album?

A: The term “Close” has a lot of meanings. Actually, each of us in the band looks at it through different perspectives. We like to think that “Close” is a direct emanation of our yearning to escape. The main goal was transporting ourselves and the listener on a journey. We wanted to stand by the concept which lies behind the title of the record by creating and recording it while being physically in the same room. It is not a concept album but we always want to have that fil rouge, that thin red thread that ties the songs together, just like we did on our past albums. We came to read about Nakh once we found this 1930s picture by E. M. Schutz. The picture conveyed the sensations we wanted to express through the albums, so we decided to use that photo on the cover of Close.

Q: So, about the dance that is a traditional dance performed by women in Algeria/Tunisia and the distinct Eastern Mediterranean musical influences on this album. At the end of the second song, the heavy, fast and doom-laden music incorporates some sonics from traditional Eastern music, and the next song start with a Duduk, also connected to the Eastern music, the instrument spread through the Eastern part of the Mediterranean all through Armenia. And you incorporate Oud and Dulcimer in the sonics. And the name of the song “Orphalese” is connected to the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran. These Eastern musical elements are extremely well incorporated in your way of playing doom metal throughout the album. How did these inspirations find their way into your music on this album?

A: As previously stated, the whole idea behind Close is the journey. We did not want to repeat ourselves, so we looked for new sounds and instruments that are not typical within the metal genre. It was natural for us to search for inspiration in the musical heritage that we have as Mediterraneans. Arabian music is very evocative as it can transport the listener to a different place. Alberto had to learn how to play the Oud - which has 11 strings and is a fretless instrument, which allows you to play microtones – and it was not easy for him. Another challenge we had to face was incorporating these different acoustic instruments while keeping Close a metal album.

Q: Let us go back in time for some background. Six years ago, I found Belfry on Bandcamp, and it happened to me as with so many others; it blew me away. I tried to find other releases by Messa but discovered the jaw dropping thing that this exquisitely performed album in fact was a debut album, full-length even. So where did you come from, musically when forming Messa in 2014? What background of musical styles were fused into what became Messa? What did each of you contribute?

A: We have very different musical backgrounds and they all ended up straight into Messa’s cauldron. Alberto mostly played Prog, Rocco had many Black Metal bands, Marco played in a Dark Rock band and Sara played bass in Punk/Death Metal/Grind projects. In fact Messa is the first band Sara ever sang in. We all befriended many years before Messa started, though. In early 2014 Marco and Sara started developing some ideas, and soon Alberto and Rocco joined. None of us had played Doom before and we were curious to approach a genre that sounded new to us as musicians. Our songs are the result of our sensibilities mixed together. There are many personal elements that we introduce when we create music.

From: https://veilofsound.com/2022/03/02/Interview_with_Messa.html

 

Throwing Muses - Sun Racket (full album)

01 Dark Blue
02 Bywater
03 Maria Laguna
04 Bo Diddley Bridge
05 Milk at McDonald's
06 Upstairs Dan
07 St. Charles
08 Frosting
09 Kay Catherine
10 Sue's

2020 has been such a disaster of a year on so many fronts, we've got to take crumbs of comfort where we find them. And a brand new Throwing Muses album in 2020 was certainly a pleasant surprise to me. I got kind of obsessed with Throwing Muses a few years ago and have been working my way through their extensive discography, as well as Kristin Hersh’s solo material, ever since. Most recently, I’d been listening to their output from the late 1980s, to which Sun Racket sounds far more muscular and raw by comparison. What has not diminished one iota in all that time is Hersh’s fearless creativity; and the sound her band members kick out is as powerful and uncompromising as ever.
As always with Throwing Muses (apart from the sprawling double album Purgatory/Paradise) the record is punchy; most of the ten tracks clock in under four minutes so the whole thing is done and dusted in little over half an hour. In that time though, we’re treated to some of the most experimental tracks the band have recorded as well as a couple of thunderous rockers on a par with their early 90s heyday.
The album opens with the grungey Dark Blue, and the devastating pair of couplets, ‘If you were a sore loser, I'd be a better dreamer, And if I were a better dreamer, You'd be a dream come true’, proving the years have not blunted Hersh’s tongue - before descending into a crunchy choppy head-bobber of a tune.
As an ‘island band’, Throwing Muses’ music has always had a strong undercurrent of aquatic associations. The songs on Sun Racket were written in the aftermath of an incident where Hersh nearly drowned, having fallen asleep on the beach. This sense of slipping in and out of sleep - and dreams - and slipping underwater pervades much of the album. Bywater is particularly dreamlike, featuring a case of projected identity that only makes sense in dreams, as Hersh sings about a goldfish in the toilet...who happens to be Freddie Mercury, ‘a mustached amputee, heading out to sea’. Among such surreal poetry there's the occasional lyric that catches you with its directness, ‘Changing clothes in the kitchen’ - the context is left unexplained but it clearly implies unusual circumstances, maybe a sense of fumbling panic or of trying not to be discovered.
Bo Diddley Bridge is a song about the bridge where her son used to fish as a child and combines buzz-saw guitars over lock-tight drums and a snaking bassline. Midway through, the song breaks down, just as the real bridge also collapsed, as well as according to Hersh, their life at the time. Thankfully both have been rebuilt, as she says, “But we lived; we swam in a life sunshine somehow. And both bridges — the Bo Diddley one and the life one — were rebuilt around us.”
The trio of tracks, Milk at McDonalds, Upstairs Dan and St Charles are some of the most stark and unusual I’ve heard from Throwing Muses. As always there’s the juxtaposition of surreal imagery with the odd lyrical bolt from the blue. Kristin Hersh currently lives in New Orleans and it feels like elements of Southern Gothic have influenced her songwriting; Milk at McDonalds is a macabre bluesy dirge, one minute the lyrics have her imagining coyotes in the freezer, or turning into a pillar of salt, and then comes the naked admission, ‘I don’t regret a single drop of alcohol’ - the song manages to sound defiant yet regretful at the same time.
Frosting is a triumphant 90s-style rocker bringing the tempo back up and waking the album from its unsettled dream-filled slumber as Hersh rasps, ‘Then I wake up and see your smiling smile’. As always, we’re not sure if she’s happy to see that smile smiling at her, if the return to the ‘real’ world is relief or disappointment - as always it’s probably a combination of both.
Despite some of its more avant-garde moments, and the presence of tracks that recall their early 90s prime, Sun Racket sounds both fresh and unmistakably like Throwing Muses. The band have been through various line-up changes during their long career, and while Hersh is the creative glue that binds everything together, she and drummer David Narcizo and bassist Bernard Georges have been playing together for some 30 years. After that long it must be inevitable that they would share an intuitive sense of one another’s musical powers - and this shows in the way their free-flowing experimental tendencies are kept in check by super tight playing.
I've never heard a Throwing Muses album I don't like so I'm hardly an unbiased reviewer. Apart from 1994's University which remains a clear favourite, I tend to rate them all equally and Sun Racket is easily as strong as the bulk of their discography. Hersh's singing may have become even more gravelly with the passage of time, but her lyrical voice is clearer than ever.  From: https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/82385/Throwing-Muses-Sun-Racket/

Beautify Junkyards - Aquarius

I had the great pleasure recently of interviewing João Branco Kyron from Portugal’s excellent Beautify Junkyards. Their lovely new album Cosmorama comes out in less than a week on 15 January. This interview was conducted over email and I got some great, thoughtful answers from João. Thanks again for this opportunity.

EK: Please tell us how the band formed.

JBK: Some of the members of BJ came from a band called Hipnótica (that released 5 albums between 1999 and 2010). We started playing covers of songs we loved (mostly from the Autumn Folk period), just for our own pleasure. Things evolved and suddenly we had enough songs for an album that we thought it was worth to release, and that’s when we decided to release it under Beautify Junkyards. It was an unusual way to start a band with a debut album made entirely of cover versions, but all of them had a sense of unity soundwise speaking.

EK: What have been your biggest influences, not just in music, but in art and literature too?

JBK: We are always absorbing new artistic expressions and sometimes we find some artists/works that we feel a strong affinity with, to the point of trying to incorporate some of their elements in our own musical and lyrical language. Things change through time but there are artists that are constantly present on our minds, for instance: Os Mutantes, Glauber Rocha, Incredible String Band, Derek Jarman, Czech New Wave cinema, Broadcast, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, United States of America, Zeca Afonso, Fernando Pessoa, Banda do Casaco, Ash Ra Tempel, just to mention a few. For this new album, we also searched in more depth the visionary works of Austin Osman Spare and Vali Myers.

EK: How integrated is Portuguese culture in your recordings?

JBK: Many aspects of the Portuguese culture are part of our musical identity, but the access to some of the more recent recorded material was not an easy task but for the existence of YouTube (thats works as our collective memory). During 40 years, Portugal was under a dictatorship, so everything from abroad was filtered through the regime lenses. During that period, many artists had to exile and others faced difficult times. With the Carnation Revolution in ‘74 came an “explosion” for the senses in all the artistic fields. Then in the 80s, we had a boom of local rock bands, and nowadays I think Portugal is one of the most exciting places in Europe in terms of music creation. We love to mix our Portuguese influences and also our language in the band´s music, it’s that fusion of influences and languages that make it unique. On our live sets, we also usually play covers from artists we admire like Zeca Afonso and Fausto, and we have plans to invite some of those artists to play with us.

EK: How did you cultivate your current sound? You play a unique blend of tropicalia, dream pop, and folk. Your songs are like wandering inside a dreamscape.

JBK: It’s not a conscious process, most of the base ideas for songs come from improvised sessions that are later worked in the studio. I think all of the influences I´ve mentioned and the fact that they are from different latitudes allows us to create music with many layers. There are some aspects we invest a lot of time on: the sonic textures and the instruments that better serve each song, sampling sounds from multiple sources and times and working on the lyrics.

From: https://bigtakeover.com/interviews/AVirtualConversationwithJoaoBrancoKyronofBeautifyJunkyards

Black Mountain - Mothers of the Sun

Black Mountain's mixture of texture and force is a potent one, with the Vancouver collective drawing from a variety of heavy and pastoral sounds throughout their four LPs. Founded by Stephen McBean and Joshua Wells near the end of their previous project Jerk with a Bomb, Black Mountain evolved from a eponymous song from those early sessions into one of the most prominent of the prolific McBean's multiple projects. Their 2005 self-titled debut was a critical success, and set the template for the band (currently consisting of McBean, Wells, Jeremy Schmidt, Brad Truax, and Amber Webber), whose touring and recording was steady throughout the end of the decade. After some time spent on other projects, Black Mountain returned earlier this year with their fourth full-length album, the aptly-titled IV. "Mothers of the Sun" both serves as the album's opener and its thesis statement, a striding, miniature epic that maximizes the heavy efficacy every one of its eight minutes. Equally utilizing a sludgy main riff and eerily glowing atmospherics, the tune underscores the band's talent at balancing restraint with crunch – every element of the songs plays a distinct role, sublimely arranged with clockwork precision. (Or at least as much precision an eight-minute psychedelic jam can feasibly have, anyway.) "Mothers of the Sun" is a fantastic return, effortlessly capturing the band's best qualities and channeling them into a winding, expansive eight minutes.  From: https://www.kexp.org/read/2016/5/4/song-of-the-day-black-mountain-mothers-of-the-sun/

Wovenhand - Crook and Flail

Wovenhand is a Gothic Americana rock band formed by Colorado singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist David Eugene Edwards. Since the demise of his brooding alt-country band 16 Horsepower, it has become his full time vehicle. The music offers winding, dark, atmospheric lyrics with a fierce spiritual bent circling around elements of vintage folk, country blues, and gospel music given force by swampy rock & roll. While Edwards performed (mostly) solo on Wovenhand's self-titled 2001 debut and two subsequent albums, he expanded the studio group to a quartet for 2006's gloomy Mosaic. By the time 2010's globally acclaimed, modally structured The Threshingfloor was released, the band had become a trio. Wovenhand's sound evolved to include mutant rockabilly, surf, desert blues, and spooky prog on 2016's Star Treatment, with guitarist and future songwriting partner Chuck French. It was their last outing for six years. Edwards and French wrote, recorded, and released 2022's wildly diverse Silver Sash with a quintet.
In 2001, 16 Horsepower went on hiatus, and as the group pondered a new creative direction, Edwards launched Wovenhand, built around similar musical and thematic frameworks but with a more powerful and personal approach. Edwards initially formed Wovenhand as a trio with multi-instrumentalist Daniel McMahon and guitarist Steve Taylor (also a member of 16 Horsepower), though soon the lineup would expand to include Ordy Garrison on drums and Paul Fonfara on cello. (For live work, Shane Trost subbed for Fonfara on cello.) Edwards played nearly all the instruments on Wovenhand's first album in 2002, released by Glitterhouse in Europe and Sounds Familyre in the United States. In 2003, he reworked several pieces from the Wovenhand debut for a Belgian dance troupe, and the results were released on the album Blush Music. For 2004's Consider the Birds, Wovenhand contrasted Edwards' solo material with tracks that featured a full band, while for live shows Wovenhand was a duo consisting of Edwards and Garrison.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/wovenhand-mn0000581700#biography

Indigo Girls - Three Hits - Live 1992

1992-05: rites of passage, epic records press release:

" 'three hits' was inspired by the poems of frank stanford. a music writer friend of mine sent me a book of his poetry, 'the light the dead see', and i went crazy over it - it changed my life a little. i was reading some autobiographical notes on stanford and learned that he'd committed suicide in the early '80s at age 30 - he shot himself three times in the heart. that image really stuck with me. so i used images from his poems and his life: that he was adopted, that he left his wife behind. i started this song on electric guitar, a gibson melody maker with a gun-metal blue finish."

1992-06-07: indigo girls bring literature to songwriting, the st. louis post-dispatch:

q: you make direct references to virginia woolf on "rites of passage." you also cite a poet named frank stanford as an influence on your song "three hits." how does a poem or a novel bear on your songwriting?

a: i get a lot of ideas from what i read - more from what i read than from what i hear. i'm not going to listen to a song and be as inspired because it's the same medium i'm working in. for some reason, that doesn't work with me. the books really get me going. when something i read moves me, it first of all helps me to finish a song i'm writing, even if the song has nothing to do with the book. what i'm doing is reacting on an emotional level to what i've read and writing whatever comes into my head.

From: https://www.lifeblood.net/songs/backgrounds/threehits.html

Psychotica - Ocean of Hunger

After several label changes and finally settling on Red Ant, Psychotica recorded what was to be their landmark album. “Pandemic,” only to have it never be released.Pandemic opens with a melodic guitar/violin which shifts quickly into high gear with the open notes of the first song, “Fool’s Gold.” This song swings between frantic electric guitars and synthesized string ambience. Angelic voices back Briggs’ often brash voice. The album floats through deep swells and decrescendos having no defiantly climax or closing. In fact, the album cycles. The beginning of the first song, “Into,” picks up right where the last song, “Valentino” leaves off.Not only does the music take the listener through the gamut of human emotions, so do the lyrics. In “Oceans of Hunger,” Pat croons to the listeners, “And I wish you were the conscience lost forever in the war/Wish you were my spirit what went out with the storm/Wish you were the air that feeds the fire,” he brags in “Euthanasia,” “You were a slave in heaven/And now a superstar in hell” and assures him/her in “Contradiction,” “I used to be a feather in your headdress/But it beats the fucking loneliness /And I'm happy now.” The only disappointment was the song “Valentino,” where Briggs and band over-dramatize a refrain. It feels like a rough jolt from the serene sadness of the rest of the piece. It feels like a Broadway musical gone sour. This being said, Pandemic is a must for new listeners and hard-core Psychotica fans alike. Who knows what could have been, with this possible break-though album left in the vaults. Everyone should check it out because you sure can’t beat the price.  From: http://saltyka.blogspot.com/2007/06/psychotica.html

Eurythmics - Who's That Girl

"Who's That Girl?" is a song by British pop duo Eurythmics. It was written by band members Annie Lennox and David A. Stewart and produced by Stewart. In the UK, it was released in July 1983, several months in advance of their third studio album Touch (1983), on which the track eventually appeared. In North America, "Who's That Girl?" was issued as the second single from Touch, and did not appear as a single until April 1984.
The music video for "Who's That Girl?" features Lennox in the role of a suspecting woman demanding to know with whom her lover has been seen associating. The video became a heavily played clip on MTV, and further showcased Lennox's gender-bending image. She appears as a nightclub singer performing the song (complete with 1960s-era blonde flip wig) and also as a male member of the audience akin to Elvis Presley (as seen on the cover of the single). At the end of the video, the female Lennox is shown kissing the male Lennox.
Stewart appears in the video, escorted by a number of different women played by a variety of guest stars including Cheryl Baker and Jay Aston of Bucks Fizz, Kiki Dee, Hazel O'Connor, Kate Garner of Haysi Fantayzee and all four members of Bananarama (including Stewart's future wife, Siobhan Fahey and future group member Jacquie O'Sullivan, who was a member of the band Shillelagh Sisters when the video was filmed, and who would replace Fahey in Bananarama in 1988). The gender-bending pop star Marilyn also makes an appearance in the video as another of Stewart's escorts.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_That_Girl%3F_(Eurythmics_song)

Ben Folds Five - Army

In this song, Ben Folds is going through a life crisis and is thinking about joining the Army, since nothing else is working out. It is mostly autobiographical: Folds was in a band called Majosha that broke up, with some of the other members forming another band without Ben. He had also been divorced twice by this point ("my ex-wives all despise me"). He took some liberties in the part about dropping out of college after three semesters, blowing $15000 of his dad's money: He left the University of Miami after just one semester, but he was on scholarship. He also never had a mullet, although he later grew a mini mullet because the hair on the top of his head grows slower than the back. He didn't work at Chick-fil-A, but did have a job at a Hardee's in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Folds plays this regularly at concerts. He often gets up from his piano and conducts the crowd for the horn part, having them sing the horn lines for him. Depending on the crowd, it sometimes sounds surprisingly good.  From: https://www.songfacts.com/facts/ben-folds-five/army

Bonnie Raitt - Live at Sigma Sound, Philadelphia 1972

Bonnie Raitt - Live at Sigma Sound, Philadelphia 1972 - Part 1

 

 

Bonnie Raitt - Live at Sigma Sound, Philadelphia 1972 - Part 2 

01 Mighty Tight Woman
02 Rollin' & Tumblin'
03 Any Day Woman
04 Women Be Wise
05 Thank You
06 Bluebird
07 Finest Lovin' Man
08 Big Road
09 Stayed Too Long At The Fair
10 Under The Falling Sky
11 Walkin' Blues
12 Can't Find My Way Home
13 Richland Woman Blues
14 Blender Blues
15 Since I Fell For You

While attending Radcliffe College in Cambridge in the late 1960s, Raitt’s life changed course when she met Dick Waterman, a blues promoter who worked with legends like Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, and Buddy Guy. Through Waterman, she gained unprecedented access to these towering figures and seized the opportunity to learn directly from the masters. Following her instincts rather than a calculated career plan, she took a semester off from school to travel, listen, and play with the musicians whose records had inspired her.
After Cambridge, Raitt immersed herself in Philadelphia’s vibrant folk and blues scene of the late 1960s. The city’s Philadelphia Folk Festival was at its peak, and venues like the 2nd Fret and the Main Point hosted both local talent and national icons. For a young blues guitarist, there were few better places to develop. Raitt performed in these clubs, often alongside the very bluesmen she had come to admire. Philadelphia wasn’t just a backdrop—it was her proving ground, marking her transition from fan to performer.
Her ties to the city deepened in 1972 when she recorded a live acoustic set at Sigma Sound Studios. Backed by local musicians, the show was broadcast by WMMR, one of Philadelphia’s influential rock stations. Selections from the performance aired regularly, helping build a dedicated regional fan base that has followed her ever since. In a world dominated by male blues musicians, Raitt’s ability to play bottleneck slide guitar with confidence and soul made people take notice. While her gender may have drawn initial curiosity, it was her tone, timing, and touch that earned respect.
She acknowledged that playing “pretty good blues guitar for a girl” helped get her foot in the door—a phrase that speaks volumes about the low expectations she faced. Rather than conform to the industry’s ideas of marketable image or sound, she stayed true to what she loved: traditional blues, folk roots, and heartfelt storytelling. That sincerity resonated, especially with seasoned blues musicians who took her seriously because she took the music seriously. She wasn’t borrowing the blues—she was living it.  From: https://www.knowyourinstrument.com/bonnie-raitt-blues-journey/

 

Cat Stevens - Tea For The Tillerman - Live 1971

This DVD, coinciding with Cat Stevens’ 60th birthday, features a rare and classic performance from 1971 which captures the warmth of his studio recordings but with even more passion and depth. It also includes the delightfully animated short film by Cat Stevens entitled Teaser And The Firecat, with wacky narration by Spike Milligan. His recording career spanned 12 years from October 1966 to November 1978, and he recorded 11 albums in all, but his most creative and interesting period was probably whilst he was recording Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat during 1970 and 1971. With the hit single Wild World entering the US charts in 1971, Cat Stevens flew to America where this intimate concert, which features the best of his repertoire at the time, was recorded. After all these years, it is good to be reminded of Cat Stevens' original and creative talents and the huge contribution he made to the singer/songwriter genre.  From: https://concertsondvd.com/products/cat-stevens-tea-for-tillerman-live-studio-concert-1971-dvd

The New Respects - Trouble

The New Respects is a family affair, made up of three siblings, twins Alexis (bass) and Zandy Fitzgerald (guitar), along with their brother Darius (drums), and cousin Jasmine Mullen (vocals/guitar). The group is heavily influenced by the gospel music they were surrounded by growing up in Nashville, which extends to artists including Aretha Franklin, Alabama Shakes, and John Mayer. The New Respects showcased as an official artist at SXSW 2017 in Austin, TX and are signed to Credential Recordings.  From: https://first-avenue.com/performer/the-new-respects/

Tracy Bonham - Tell It To The Sky

The Burdens of Being Upright is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham, released on March 19, 1996, by Island Records. The Burdens of Being Upright was recorded in the summer of 1995 at Fort Apache Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Referencing this album, in 2015 Bonham said, That whole album was my experiment with getting a guitar. I was rebelling. It was just raw. I was like, ‘Just get out and do it; get behind a microphone and just scream.’ Twenty years ago I had more doubts; I thought, ‘I can’t just stand there and do that’ — which is when I knew I had to do it.
The album cover (a reference to German photographer August Sander's work "The Bricklayer") was photographed by George DuBose, who was the in-house photographer at the hip hop label Cold Chillin' Records.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burdens_of_Being_Upright

The SteelDrivers - Midnight Train to Memphis

As The SteelDrivers prepare for their highly anticipated performance at Newberry Opera House on Saturday, October 14, let’s take a closer look at their remarkable career and their continued impact on the music scene. The SteelDrivers were formed in Nashville, Tennessee by a group of seasoned musicians who shared a deep love for traditional Bluegrass music. The original lineup included Chris Stapleton (vocals and guitar), Mike Henderson (mandolin), Tammy Rogers (fiddle), Richard Bailey (banjo), and Mike Fleming (bass). Their self-titled debut album, released in 2008, quickly gained critical acclaim and introduced the band’s unique sound to a wider audience.
“Mike Henderson, our original mandolin player, is really the guy responsible for getting the band together,” says Tammy Rogers. “He is the one who knew everyone and made the calls to get everybody together at his house for an informal night of playing some Bluegrass tunes! I had no idea at the time that he and Chris Stapleton, our original lead singer, and guitarist had been writing together for four to five years at that point and had already amassed an incredible catalog of great songs.”
According to Rogers, all the individual elements from each band member along with the songs that Henderson and Stapelton had been writing created the sound and direction of The SteelDrivers. Tammy states, “We all just played the way we played and sang the way we sang! It’s a unique sound because no one was trying to copy any other players or singers.”
Drawing from their collective experiences and influences, the band members fuse intricate melodies and poignant lyrics into a harmonious whole. Their approach often begins with a spark of inspiration, whether it’s a personal story, a shared emotion, or a vivid image.
“I usually just try to sit down and write the best song I can write with my co-writer, and then I see if it’s something the band would be interested in performing,” Tammy Rogers explains. “I really value their opinion and that way they have a vested interest in what we do as a group. In the case of “I Choose You,” I was definitely thinking of my husband when I wrote that song but also of other long-term couples and how they stay together.”
Guided by their mutual respect for tradition and innovation, they combine their instrumental skills with storytelling, allowing their songs to unfold naturally. Each member contributes a unique perspective, lending depth and richness to the narrative. Through jam sessions and heartfelt discussions, The SteelDrivers’ songwriting process evolves, resulting in compositions that resonate with audiences by capturing both the essence of Bluegrass roots and the contemporary spirit of musical exploration.  From: https://www.newberryoperahouse.com/from-nashville-to-fame-the-steeldrivers-rise-in-bluegrass-music/

Rickie Lee Jones - Pirates (So Long Lonely Avenue)

The pirates first announced themselves to Rickie Lee Jones in New Orleans, in the fall of 1979, with a delivery of mysterious gifts. "I checked into my hotel and there was a dress hanging there, and a gift. I opened it up and it was a diamond necklace, an ostentatious diamond necklace," she recalled. "And they sent drugs to all the guys. All the band was very high. And I said, I can't take these gifts ... it was like a dove with three diamonds in it. I would never wear a diamond back then."
Jones was traveling in support of her self-titled debut for Warner Bros., the slinky, imaginative sui generis blend of pop, soul and jazz that had already hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200, landed her on her first Rolling Stone cover, and associated her forever with the beret. In a couple of months, she would win the Grammy for best new artist. She was almost 25.
The pirates, who were actually local marijuana smugglers, came to her concert and introduced themselves, and although she was nonplussed by their extravagant gesture, they eventually became friends. In fact, when she took an apartment on the seedier downtown edge of the French Quarter in the early 1980s — inspired partly by Dr. John, whom she'd met back in Los Angeles — she split the rent with one of them.
"It was the combination of them and Sal Bernardi's crew in San Francisco that inspired the concept of Pirates," she explained. Some of the pirates went to prison and got out. One moved to Costa Rica. One still lives in New Orleans and now, 36 years after the release of Pirates, her second album, so does Jones, although not in the Quarter: Her neighborhood is leafy and quiet, near a park where she can walk her dog and ride her bike, her freshly purple-dyed hair tucked under a helmet.
"To be really clear, I was a drug addict when I lived here," she said. "It's not possible to walk in the footsteps I walked then. I woke up late in the afternoon, and I lived at night." It was a funny thing, really, to take off to the bottom of the U.S. at what seemed like the top of a career and hang around with dope smugglers, aging artists and weird characters — she was there at Professor Longhair's last recording session, she said, and befriended the one-eyed junkie piano genius James Booker, who'd die in 1983, at age 43 — but it felt right to her, "like a refuge," she said. "For me, it was part of feeding who I was. I felt that if I stopped living that way, whatever it was that I really was would stop being authentic," she said.
New Orleans and its characters helped inspire the cinematic storybook of hip that is Pirates, with its evocative imagery — the '57 Lincolns, the slow trains to Peking, the Lolitas playing dominoes and poker behind their daddy's shacks — as did Olympia, Wash., where she started writing it in 1979, New York City, where she was also paying rent, and L.A., where it was recorded. Close to forty years later, she still plays those songs onstage. Some feel different than others — for example, "We Belong Together," the ecstatic, dreamy stream of consciousness that opens Pirates, inspired by her famous romance and breakup with Tom Waits.
"When I sing that song, to me anyway, it doesn't have anything to do with me. It's like a house I built. When I go in, I say, 'I love this room. I'm gonna sit in this room.' It's a structure of its own and I get to experience the ride when I play it. But it's not about Tom and me. It has a life of its own." "There are only a couple of songs that haven't achieved autonomy," she said. "And when I sing them, I feel like, 'I don't wear my dress that short anymore."
But 36 years later, Pirates is a dress that's not out of style, a house that still welcomes new residents. It's canon, classic, a still-startlingly singular look at America both in style — the way it seamlessly weaves threads of beatnik jazz, fluid soul and aching, theatrical balladry — and in substance, as it captures perfect images of American romance and cool like so many Polaroid snapshots. Few pop artists have ever been as effortlessly cool; still fewer have managed to create a piece of art that sounds like it could have been crafted thirty years before it was, or thirty years after. Pirates has been influential, but rarely imitated.  From: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/26/539509195/rickie-lee-jones-on-the-pirates-who-inspired-pirates-and-returning-to-new-orlean

Satin Nickel - The Shadow of Doubt

Satin Nickel is a band from New York that began as a collaboration between Samantha Aneson (vocals, guitar, banjo) and Morgan Hollingsworth (guitar, vocals, mandolin), who explored it as an intersection of Americana and folk. You can hear the Americana and folk influences on their new album Shadow of Doubt, but there are many more layers than just those two.
It doesn’t take long to figure out that this is a band that won’t allow itself to be pinned down to any particular style. The album contains subtle elements of bluegrass with the cello, mandolin and banjo. The band marries that with a healthy dose of rock – especially in the guitar. However, even the guitar tone varies from something like a Drive-By Truckers song (“Train Song”) to a spacey tone (“Good Love”) that you heard from a lot of moody bands in the 80s.
The band members do a great job of creating an atmosphere in these songs. In fact, this band is so good at creating atmosphere that each song sounds like a short-film script set to music. The impressive thing is that the band creates the feel of a song in a variety of ways. At some times, they accomplish this by featuring just guitar and vocals. At other times, like in “Last Night”, the mood is set by the spacey guitar sound and the cello. Throughout the album, the cello adds some dimension of mood to a song. In “Just Keep Running”, the fiddle adds some tension with sounds that would fit right into the soundtrack of a movie thriller.  
If you want a snapshot of this band, “The Ballad of Yankee Jim” is a good example. In less than seven minutes, the band tells the rambling story of the last man who was hung in San Diego. This is a song that blends not only Americana and folk, but also rock (just listen to the guitar in the instrumental break) and even gospel. The gospel influence can be heard mostly in the chorus that features mostly vocals and claps.  From: https://glidemagazine.com/242366/satin-nickel-marry-americana-folk-and-rock-on-shadow-of-doubt-album-review/

Richard & Linda Thompson - Sisters

1978's First Light marked Richard & Linda Thompson's first time in a recording studio after three years away from music, and it suggested they were still getting warmed up as performers; a year later, Sunnyvista found them in much stronger form and a significantly more upbeat frame of mind. Sunnyvista is the wittiest and most joyous album Richard & Linda made together; while several of Richard Thompson's trademark meditations on romance at it's least successful are on hand, "Why Do You Turn Your Back" manages to generate an unusually soulful groove, "Lonely Hearts" captures the melancholy country feel that First Light never quite caught, and "Traces of My Love" finds a winning warmth in its sadness. Richard Thompson's satirical eye gets an airing on the darkly witty title cut, and he displays his rarely aired politically conscious streak on the rabble-rousing "Borrowed Time" and "Justice in the Streets." Linda Thompson's vocals are in superb form on "Sisters," a lovely duet with Anna McGarrigle. And you'd have to go back to Hokey Pokey to hear the Thompsons having as much fun as they do on the rollicking "Saturday Rolling Around" and the wildly passionate "You're Going to Need Somebody." With a big band of Fairport Convention and Albion Band associates and top UK session players on board, and Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Gerry Rafferty, and Glenn Tilbrook contributing vocals, Sunnyvista boasts the stylistic eclecticism of the Thompsons' best work, with a healthy dose of added enthusiasm. Anyone who thinks Richard & Linda Thompson's records are always depressing have obviously never heard Sunnyvista; if it isn't quite as resonant as I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and Pour Down Like Silver, it still boasts great songs, great singing, and you can play it at a party.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/richard-linda-thompsons-sunnyvista-mw0000192175#review

Hypnos 69 - An Aerial Architect

How could I have missed out on a band from my own country that lists Anekdoten and Motorpsycho amongst their favorite current bands? With a sound that brings the spirit of early Floyd, Sabbath and Crimson back to life, this album has simply been written just for me. I don't know if there's a recipe to make the glory of the early 70s come alive again, but getting the sound right is sure one of the main ingredients. And that is exactly what Hypnos 69 achieved here. Just like Diagonal and Astra, the band combines psych-progressive songwriting with a vintage 70s sound that is natural, dynamic, rocking and that respects the true sound of all instruments. No studio tricks, no proTools cut-and paste, no synthetics, no plastic, no fake. The list of instruments is impressive: an array of drum and percussion, bass, guitars, effects, organs, mellotron, saxophone, Hammond,... Luckily not all at once but spread nicely over the plus 72 minute album length.
Another secret to make 'retro' work is to avoid being the umpteenth Genesis or Yes clone. A better approach is to combine different styles into a new mix that - even if derivative - still has a personality of its own. Some of the influences on Legacy are 1970-era Crimson, early 70s hard rock, jazz-rock, Ozzy-vocals, some Floyd, Yes and even some BJH alike vocal harmonies. Hypnos 69 have a history as a stoner band and there are still traces of that in the sound, but the songwriting has become fully Prog, offering long composed suites with spacey instrumental breaks and concise improvisations. It is fun spotting the occasional musical quotes from other bands, from King Crimson for instance (there's an echo of Indoor Games on An Aerial Architect) and from Yes (melodies from The Fish at 3.18 into The Empty Hourglass). My symphonic knowledge is limited to the mainstream bands so there may be more.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=29944

K.D. Lang - So It Shall Be

Back in 1992, singer k.d. lang released a record unlike any other. Ingénue slithered against the popular music grain with songs that drew slow, deep breaths and sighed seductively. It had an alluringly divergent sound that landed somewhere in a blurry nexus of pop, country and global folk, with accordions, clarinets and Eastern European flourishes. And lang's monumental voice, both powerful and restrained, was simply unforgettable as she sang languorous songs of love and desire.
Ingénue became a monstrous, multi-platinum hit for lang, but it was also a milestone in the '90s LGBT rights movement. Against her label's wishes, lang came out in a cover story for The Advocate three months after the album was released. Her decision helped spark a shift in the national conversation about what it meant to be gay and made Ingénue one of the first in a series of important cultural moments that pushed LGBT issues into the mainstream conversation. (Others from that period included the film Philadelphia and the Broadway play Angels In America and, later in the same decade, the television sitcom Will And Grace).
To celebrate Ingénue's 25th anniversary, Nonesuch Records is releasing a remastered version of the album on July 14, along with some previously unreleased live recordings. Last year lang recorded an album with Neko Case and Laura Veirs called case/lang/veirs. They toured together and became friends. So we asked Laura Veirs to talk with k.d. lang about Ingénue and how the album still resonates today.

k.d. lang on writing and recording an album with a sound that wasn't particularly popular at the time:

"When Ben Mink and I made Ingénue, we were consciously aware of the fact that no one was making this kind of Eastern-European dirge. ... The tempo of the record was nerve-wracking. I thought that I would just get killed for being so slow. And I did. There was a lot of criticism on the record when it first came out. But I purposely wanted to sing unornamented because ornamentation was really starting to take off in pop music. I feel like truth is centered ... it's still and it's very plain. So I really consciously went against the grain with this record. And [playing it live] we have to sit down and go, 'OK, this has to be played with absolute restraint and precision,' almost like classical music because so much about Ingénue I think is this space."

On the challenges of writing intimate and personal lyrics:

"When I worked with Ben Mink or when I work with most collaborators, we come up with the music first, which is very easy. But then that puts me as a lyricist in a very difficult spot because then I had to write lyrics that conveyed my emotion but also fit into the music and sang well, which is a lot of parameters for writing lyrics. And the lyrics were a struggle. It took me six or seven months to get the lyrics for this."

On not liking or understanding "Constant Craving," the album's final track and biggest hit, until just recently:

"I felt like it was incongruent to the rest of the record. And it's funny because yesterday in rehearsals of Ingénue, for the first time, I felt what the song's purpose was and why we put it on as the last song on the record. It's an acquiescence. It's a summation of human desire. It's like yes, OK, we all are heartbroken. We're all nervous. We're all vulnerable. We're all hopeful, but at the end of the day, constant craving has always been. And it really, emotionally, just surfaced for me, the purpose of that song. But we're doing the record in sequence on tour in Australia next week, so to have 'Constant Craving' come to the end of this very insular, quiet performance is fascinating."

From: https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2017/07/13/536522399/k-d-lang-reflects-on-25-years-of-ing-nue

Capillary Action - Gambit

Capillary Action's debut album, Fragments, was an instrumental guitar showcase brimming with virtuosity and violent rhythmic shifts. I think I could be forgiven for expecting more of the same from So Embarrassing, but holy confounded expectations, is this ever a different album from its predecessor. Are there still wicked rhythmic turns, hints of jazz, and mind-bending guitar runs? Sure, but this time they're all subordinated to songs-- the first thing you hear on this album is guitarist Jonathan Pfeffer's voice, singing over a breakneck but fairly straightforward rock beat.
Pfeffer is now clearly playing with the tension between straight-ahead indie rock and spastic, mathy composition. Opener "Gambit" has those basic verses, but breaks them up with ragged odd-metered riffs, alternating in a way that makes each new 4/4 verse sound even more propulsive. A similar approach guides the album's best song, "Elevator Fuck". The band uses a string synth and what I think is a real trombone to inject sweetly melodic but rhythmically strange phrases between verse lines that seem as though they should disrupt the flow of the song but don't.
Whereas the band's first album reserved the middle for its most introspective moments, this one gives us the aggressive experiment "Badlands", which features the sounds of Pfeffer's breathing cut up and made into a brutal rhythm. It's one of several tracks to use extreme dynamic range to great effect. "Pocket Protection Is Essential", for instance, sets quietly melodic sections against the heaviest, loudest bits on the album-- it's genuinely startling the first time the shouted vocals and pounding drums crash in, and not much less startling each time after that. Closer "Self-Released" uses all these techniques to create a collage of a song that has the pacing of a brawl, with quiet moments to catch your breath followed by furious passages of pounding rhythm and dissonant swells.
The album as a whole extends the collage feel, with each track flowing easily into the next to make a kind of suite. The songs aren't inseparable from each other, though; quite a few of them work well on their own, and this owes much to the band's overall stylistic re-orientation. Pfeffer's even, baritone vocals add a strong melodic center for the listener and put the instrumental freakouts in context. So Embarrassing is a bold change in direction for Capillary Action, but one that pays off as well as one could hope.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11266-so-embarrassing/