The Moody Blues - The Lost Performance - Live in Paris 1970

 The Moody Blues - The Lost Performance - Live in Paris 1970 - Part 1

 

 The Moody Blues - The Lost Performance - Live in Paris 1970 - Part 2

 

This is an amazing find, and a piece of history I didn’t realize existed until I came across it in a record store not long ago. I was traveling and as usual didn’t bring enough music to fill the evenings in the hotel, so I managed to find a record store and picked up this and three CDs. It wasn’t until I got back to the hotel that it occurred to me that all the discs I had bought were live recordings. Go figure.
This is apparently some obscure and rather amateur video recorded at La Taverne de L’Olympia in Paris during the band’s 1970 European tour supporting the release of ‘A Question of Balance’. The club setting is actually a night club, with small tables of Parisians sitting around drinking and smoking while the band performs on a small stage at the front center of the room. There appear to be at least three cameras, one of which is clearly hand-held and wobbles a bit from the back of the room. Another is on or near the stage and shows some very close-up views of the band members, while a third is positioned behind Graeme Edge and shows several unoriginal shots of his back. Not sure what the thought process was behind that one. The quality of the video is marginal at best, with the close-up shots being pretty good and the ones further away a little washed-out due to the overhead lighting. The audio is quite good though, especially considering it was recorded thirty-seven years ago and sounds like it comes from positioned microphones and not the soundboard. The subtext narration is also primitive, just simple white lettering (Times New Roman I believe) with the names of the band members flashed at the beginning, and the song titles scrolling past as each one begins. At the opening the hand-held camera tracks the band as they carry their drinks and instruments from the dressing room and through the audience to the stage. Very laid-back, and kind of charming.
The song selection is quite good, even though there is quite a bit of overdubbed music, especially the vocals. But it includes what were probably the band’s best- known tracks at that time: “Never Comes the Day”, “Are You Sitting Comfortably?”, “Ride My See-Saw”, and “Don’t You Feel Small” among them. The crowd responds enthusiastically to a great rendition of “Nights in White Satin”, as well as to “Tuesday Afternoon”. Most of the songs are very faithful renderings of the studio versions, which is a bit surprising considering the modest and informal setting. Justin Hayward and Ray Thomas keep up a small bit of banter with the audience between tracks, while Michael Pinder mostly sets off to the side playing his keyboards and a bit of acoustic guitar. This is a great snapshot of the band in their heyday, although it is quite unpretentious considering the simple packaging and pretty much nonexistent promotion behind its release. The closing “Question” is an excellent fadeout to an enjoyable sixty minutes of music.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=14532

 

MoeTar - Regression To The Mean

MoeTar were formed in 2008 by the pair of singer Moorea Dickason and bassist Tarik Ragab, who played together in the Funk band No Origin. Original formation featured also Dave Flores on drums, Matthew Charles Heulitt on guitar and Bob Crawford on keyboards, who was soon replaced by Avant Rock specialist Matt Lebofsky. The band debuted live in May 2009 at the Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco and several lives followed since. For over a year they worked on their debut 'From these small seeds' in four professional and home studios, the album eventually was released independently in 2010, re-released in 2012 on Magna Carta. Former member Bob Crawford still played Wurlitzer piano in two tracks.
The band cited Frank Zappa, Queen, XTC and Classic Prog acts like Yes and Genesis as the main influences.Do we hear these sources in the album? We certainly do. Although they sound more like a modern Gentle Giant, producing quirky, fast and intelligent music, some sort of innovative Avant Pop Prog with Punk and Classical touches. This is genuine music by any means, A.C.T. could be an appropriate comparison, still MoeTar sound a bit more retro-styled in the process, they even cross the borders of bands like Rascal Reporters or The Muffins at moments. Tracks are rather short, but the music is complex and intricate without losing much of its accesibility and freshness. Great female vocal harmonies, clever poppy tunes and progressive firepower with complicated twists, changing paces and climates in a blink of an eye, searching for the land of salvation in the genres of Jazz Fusion, Pop, Classical Music, Avant Rock or Musical. The arrangements are dense and dynamic with superb breaks and the atmosphere is extremely pleasant. Although much of the content is vocal-heavy, the instrumental background shines through, fantastic teamwork on interplays and tons of time signatures, with professional musicianship and an impressive technical level. Gentle Giant fans will love this to death; it’s modern Prog played with passion and tremendous consistency.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=6171

Everything Everything - Supernormal

Tragically underappreciated Band - Everything Everything. This band is not exactly new, yet has remained under the radar. They were founded in Manchester in 2007. They are, in my mind, the successors to the progressive rock movement, which has morphed into adjacent genres. They combine instrumental prowess, intricate arrangements, and incorporate dance and pop elements which offsets their art rock aspirations nicely.
Instrumentally, Jeremy Pritchard is perhaps the finest contemporary rock bassist(at least in the United Kingdom). Jeremy's chops remind me of Nick Beggs who emerged as a virtuoso from a dance pop band. Even a bit like Chris Squire with respect to his backing vocals which lend so much to the music.
Singer Jonathan Higgis is immensely talented and unique. He features stream of consciousness lyrics. His vocal range is considerable and he harmonizes exceptionally well with his bassist Jeremy. Higgis incorporates spoken word in a raplike patois. His lyrics range dark, deep, and languid. He incorporate lovely choruses and adds hooks to the music with his vocal delivery.
Lots to like about this band. They have one of the most unfortunate band names. During their formative years, a film with the same title "Everything, Everything" was released by a major studio. This drown out their 'searchability' on sites like Google and Amazon who were then hyping the film. Their albums contain lots of hidden gem tracks, with minimal filler.
Recommend checking out 'Get to Heaven' and 'Fever Dream' then checking out their earlier, mathrock leaning, 'Arc.' Lots of great tracks, such as 'Kemosabe,' 'Get to Heaven' 'No Reptiles,' 'Night of the Long Knives.' I first discovered them when Q Magazine highlighted their first single 'My Kz, Ur Bf.' The bassline and unusual lyrics had me hooked from my first listen. I've been listening to them now for a decade, and highly recommend giving them a listen.  From: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/tragically-underappreciated-band-everything-everything.1144437/

Devil Electric - The Dove & The Serpent

Devil Electric  are a riff-heavy, four piece rock ’n’ roll band from Melbourne, Australia. Taking musical cues from the hard rock greats of the ’70s and combining them with powerful, female fronted vocals they sound refreshingly new and absolutely essential. We caught up with lead vocalist Pip to find out all about them and the wonderful new album ‘Godless’… Apologies to the band for the lateness of the interview recorded back in November last year and just retrieved from a hard drive that died shorty afterwards.

Mark: Great to be able to chat today, when I got sent the album I wondered how the heck I didn’t know about you guys, I guess it’s because of not being able to get over East for the last two years. You’ve put an album out that’s made me want to dig into the back catalogue and I also have my eye on the splattered vinyl of ‘Godless’.

Pip: Awesome.

Mark: But it is an album made for vinyl isn’t it?

Pip: It’s is yes and I think that’s been part of the joy of this kind of music, it’s not meant to be heard in snatches digitally, it’s meant to be heard in one sitting as an experience.

Mark: It absolutely is. For those out there like me that don’t know, let’s cast things back, where did it all began for Devil Electric?

Pip: Well, we all kind of somewhat knew each other. Everything I think from the beginning of our band kind of centres around one bar in Melbourne – the Cherry Bar. We all kind of were friends or in the periphery of each other through that bar. I was playing in another band at the time when Christos, Beek (Mark van de Beek) and Tom starting talking about Devil Electric. I had just played a gig with Christos’ other band ‘The Ugly Kings’ a month prior to that and they invited me in to try out for this new band they were putting together. I knew Christos and Beek quite well, but I hadn’t met Tom yet so I met him there the first time in the recording studio. So we all just sort of came together bit I always wondered why they wanted me in the band, as it didn’t seem logical as I was sort of playing in more Punk and Hard Rock bands.  But I went in there and sung and I guess I got the job (laughs).

Mark: ‘Godless’ works so well, it’s an album that grabs you from the intro ‘I Am’ and doesn’t let go till the end, just my kind of music and I can guess a lot of the bands’ 70’s influences in there but there’s also a wonderful twist. To me it sounds a bit like a Heavier Metal version of The Nymphs, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that band from the early 90’s?

Pip: No, but I will be checking them out now!

Mark: They only did the one album before they imploded but I guess I get a lot of the mood of that band and so many others of course. Do you all have similar influences or is it as I imagine a nice melting pot?

Pip: We’re very different I think, but we do cross over in some areas, I mean you can probably hear the Sabbath influences in the band and some of that more traditional Hard Rock that we all share, but we’re all very different at the same time. I think that’s what really makes Devil Electric, Devil Electric. I think with the first album we were all pretty new and feeling each other out as musicians but this album we’ve been together a few years now, we know each other and we have a really tight knit friendship between all of us, and I think you can  really hear that in the second album. And all those little twists and turns too, like all little bits of each of us peppered through, it’s the best way to describe it. We are the same but different in our likes and dislikes and we always make sure we tell each other! (laughs)

Mark: It all comes together beautifully and heavier than I imagined. I think when I got to ‘I Will Be Forgotten’ which is one of my favourites on there we were going to let a lighter moment but it was only for a few moments…

Pip: (laughing)

Mark: I love the fact that you keep the heaviness all the way through. The album is out of course.

Pip: Yes, it’s been out a week now, and it’s really exciting for us as we started releasing it early last year (2020) as singles as we went into Covid so it’s been the longest release ever! (laughs) Over 18 months of trying to get this out, but now it is it’s amazing. We’re so happy that everyone can finally hear it because we feel like we’ve been waiting forever.

Mark: When did you start the writing? Was it pre-Covid?

Pip: We wrote and recorded it all prior to Covid, we had a whole strategy in place to release the first single and then when the next was coming out, and videos and whatever. But the weekend that we released our first single ‘All My Friends Move Like the Night’ that was when the national lockdown was put in place. That was the end of March.
Mark: I was over in Melbourne two das before that! It’s crazy! What awful timing, but it’s here now. Such a crunching sound, so moody and atmospheric, everything from the shorter songs that just grab you to ‘The Cave’ at the end which has this wonderful groove and swing to it that almost had me thinking of what would happen had Tom Waits discovered Heavy Metal!

Pip: (laughs)
 
Mark: Let’s go even further back now. What got you into music in the first place? You said the band all had their own sets of influences – what was it that first grabbed you?

Pip: I was actually born into it I guess is the best way I can describe it. My Dad is a country musician and has been my whole life, so he had a recording studio growing up so I was always around it. I think it was always an expectation I was one of those kids whose Dad would go to work at 7PM and come back at 7AM while all the other kids had Dads with normal jobs, and I wanted that! (laughs) Having the day then playing gigs and going on tour and things like that. I remember feeling as a kid like ‘why can’t I just have a normal family?’  but now I’m very, very thankful I had him I guess as my mentor to open the door to a life of bands and playing music. It’s good now! (laughs)

From: https://www.therockpit.net/2022/interview-devil-electric/

Nine Inch Nails - Reptile

On Reptile, Trent Reznor reveals the ugliest side of his persona, wounded by broken relationships he treads a crooked line between misogyny, body horror and a burning hatred for Courtney Love. If The Downward Spiral is an album that charts a narrator lost in a blizzard between the twin poles of his own egomania and self-loathing; Reptile is perhaps the song that best explores what happens when our inner pain becomes a way of seeing others.
On Reptile we hear a voice, divided, this time torn between attraction and repulsion – the narrator is caught in contradiction – he loves the one he hates. He finds a female antagonist: seductive, seemingly promiscuous and enticing, perhaps he is spurned, rejected and so he becomes the victim exploited by a cruel woman who toys with his feelings. Like the snake that seduced Adam and Eve she drips honeyed poison into his ear; so Reznor pours scorn upon her beauty, the dread weight of her attraction.
In the context of the album, Reptile confirms further loss of faith in others and relationships,  this time in the ‘goodness’ of beauty, women or perhaps even love itself. The female becomes othered and vulgar as a deceitful reptilian creature, void of form. The narrator feels so let-down by this [now] figure of hate, she/it becomes an object into which he can pour all of his gathered resentments of soured relationships. In the narrator’s attempt to find and appreciate beauty within his terrible headspace, he ends-up resenting it, seeking to destroy what he cannot have, control or contain; the reptile is some kind of monster, but the narrator’s bitterness at being denied or discarded by it, culminates in a deep self-hate projected onto other, that is even uglier still.
Onto her, he can project the true source of his pain and misery as target for blame and derision; the more he knocks her down, for making him feel this way, the better he feels about himself and the truer his feelings become until it is perhaps all women who have become monsters in his eyes.  From: https://adamsteiner.uk/2021/06/26/nine-inch-nails-reptile-reznor-beauty-and-self-courtney-love/

Characteristic of the band's mid-90s industrial rock sound, Reptile opens with an eerie and quiet machine-like sound collage sampled from the film Leviathan, which transitions into an imitative musical composition. The structure, repetitive in nature, contains three distinct but similar sections, all driven by machine-like percussion loops and undulating rhythm guitar and synthesized bass. Two looped mechanical sounds that run through the song are sampled from the film Aliens: a metallic thud from the opening scene immediately after the chamber is cut open, and a pitched-up mechanical sound from the first power loader scene. The choruses reflect a brighter mood with prominent melodic synthesizers and glimpses of guitar. The three sections are joined by two quiet instrumental breaks, a technique used later on "Even Deeper." The ascending synth melody from 5:13 to 5:20 could potentially be a reference to or an interpolation of "Laura Palmer's Theme" from the television show Twin Peaks. During this same section, there is a looped sample of a woman saying, "Kirk, help?" from the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The "gong" sound that appears midway through the track and after the bridge is also used near the end of "Hurt", but the pitch is changed. The synth melody during the outro has the same voicing as that heard during the outro of "Last". The drums used are the same as on "Fell From Heaven" by Lead Into Gold (a Paul Barker side-project, and one whose music video for "Faster Than Light" features a cameo from Reznor.) This may be strictly coincidence, given that some of the same or similar instruments may have been used, or it could be an actual sample.  From: https://www.nin.wiki/Reptile  

Kristeen Young - Your Mouth Is Going To Get You In All Kinds Of Trouble

If Tori Amos had been a feral child, she might have sounded a bit like Kristeen Young. Like Amos, Young has a broad vocal range and a fondness for exploring the upper register, and embraces the piano as her musical instrument, but there's a wildly aggressive emotional energy in her songs, as well as an intelligently transgressive mindset that marks Young as a true original. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Young was sired by parents of Apache and German descent, and adopted at an early age by a couple who had embraced Christian fundamentalism. Young's strict parents strove to keep her away from what they deemed corrupting influences, but as a youngster she developed a passionate interest in music, and after graduating from high school, she attended St. Louis' Webster University, where she studied piano. After completing her education, Young began performing with the bands November 9th and Water Works. While playing in the latter group, Young hit upon the idea of performing in a duo with just piano and drums, and after teaming with drummer Jeff White, she recorded her first solo album, 1997's Meet Miss Young and Her All Boy Band, which was dominated by Young's direct, powerful piano style and White's percussion.
In 1999, Young released a second album, Enemy, and in 2001 she and White pulled up stakes and left St. Louis for New York City, where Young began developing a following for her powerful performances and sharply satiric viewpoint. In 2003, Young approached legendary producer Tony Visconti to produce her next project; Visconti was enthusiastic about her music, and was behind the controls for 2003's Breasticles (which featured a vocal cameo from David Bowie) and 2004's X (a concept album inspired by the Ten Commandments, which included guest vocals from Brian Molko of Placebo). Young's 2006 album, The Orphans, attracted the attention of another of Visconti's production clients, Morrissey, who invited her to join his world tour in support of Ringleader of the Tormentors as his opening act; he also signed her to his Attack label and released a pair of singles from Young, "Kill the Father" and "London Cry," in the latter part of the year. Again produced by Visconti, Music for Strippers, Hookers, and the Odd On-Looker followed in 2009, and V the Volcanic, a concept EP with songs written from the perspective of various film characters, was released in 2011. Longtime fan and first-time collaborator Dave Grohl contributed drums to all of and guitar to some of her explosive 2014 LP The Knife Shift, which also featured guitar performances by Visconti, Lou Rossi, and longtime Morrissey guitarist Boz Boorer. The album led to a fiery performance of the single "Pearl of a Girl" on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson -- Young's U.S. TV debut -- where she was joined by Grohl, Grohl's former Nirvana and Foo Fighters bandmate Pat Smear, and bassist Megan X Thomas.  From: https://www.tellallyourfriendspr.com/artists/kristeen-young

Converge - Wretched World

Converge are this generation's Black Flag. This generation might not remember Black Flag, so here's a refresher. In the early 1980s, Black Flag and peers like Bad Brains and Minor Threat took punk beyond "three chords and the truth." The result was hardcore punk. It was deliberately ugly and harsh; Clash-fetishizing critics have mostly ignored it. Black Flag epitomized DIY-- they booked their own shows, handed out their own flyers, rehearsed with military discipline, and put out records on guitarist Greg Ginn's label, SST. Despite shifting lineups, their mission never wavered: to destroy.
Destruction isn't Converge's agenda. They differ from Black Flag in that aspect: They build things up, not tear them down. But they can do so because of Black Flag's groundwork. Black Flag made it okay to fight cops, to fight fans, and to do what punk always promised but rarely did: be oneself. The band was both explosive and implosive. It was destined to end.
Converge have learned from Black Flag's mistakes. They work as a team and have taken DIY to new levels. Singer Jacob Bannon runs the Deathwish, Inc. label and does artwork for Converge and other bands. Guitarist Kurt Ballou runs a recording studio and has become this generation's Steve Albini. Bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller have made waves with other bands like Doomriders and Cave In. Together, they whip up a catharsis matched by few. They play hard and wear their hearts on their sleeves. As a result, kids in droves wear Converge on their sleeves. (The band's Twitter handle is "convergecult.") No other current punk band's imagery is as iconic. The face on the cover of 2001's Jane Doe, the hand on the cover of 2004's You Fail Me-- they are the Black Flag bars of today.
The band wasn't always so potent. It took a few albums to work through a wiry hybrid of mathcore and metal. Jane Doe was Converge's watershed, honing their sound to a lean, abrasive essence. Over You Fail Me and 2006's No Heroes, it expanded to include slower, abstract sludge. Black Flag went through a similar transformation. Their landmark album My War was equal parts lightning and Black Sabbath. Axe to Fall is Converge's My War.
The album is, to quote The Exorcist and Pantera, a vulgar display of power. Bannon's howl is exfoliating. His lyrics aren't hard to parse: "I need to learn to love me"; "No longer feel anyone / No longer fear anything." Basic stuff, but it reaches deep and pulls no punches. Ballou's guitar dials up the crackle of Metallica's Kill 'Em All. It gallops, shoots electric arcs, dives down to subterranean depths. Ballou mines the upper register more than ever before, turning leads into leitmotifs. The frenzied pull-offs in "Dark Horse" are pure Kirk Hammett; the supercharged chug of "Reap What You Sow" recalls the fire of early Megadeth. Ballou isn't really playing metal-- his band is too short-haired and quirky for that-- but he's out-metalling 99% of metal bands today. The title track rotates through thrash beats, blastbeats, and d-beats like a race car driver shifting gears. It's fast, greasy, and loud as a motherfucker.
Axe to Fall isn't all axes, though. It's also anvils and stone pillows and beds of fallen leaves. The record is perfectly sequenced. It starts with three seamless barnburners, then settles into smooth toggling between slow and fast. The slow numbers likely won't get live airing-- kids prefer speed-- but they're amazing constructions of texture and friction. Near the end, piano and glockenspiel make like Tom Waits and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. They're elegiac and haunting, an inversion of the napalm death that preceded them. A huge array of guests help out, representing acts like Disfear, 108, Genghis Tron, and Neurosis. They are too many to list, but the bottom line is, they work. Whether they're yelling, singing, or laying down leads, they fit their songs. And that in itself is fitting.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13625-axe-to-fall/

FKA Twigs - Pendulum

FKA Twigs, the British musician and performer born Tahliah Barnett got her start in the pop-industrial complex as a backup dancer in music videos, a career that led, for a spell, to a strange kind of almost-fame—you walk around and you get recognized, but not for being you, necessarily, just for being that girl from the video. And so, she has said, you learn to lie: "No, that's not me. No, I get that a lot." She addresses this situation on her debut album, LP1, with the song "Video Girl". It's actually one of the album's most straightforward songs, but its chorus is unequivocal in its equivocations: "Is she the girl that's from the video?/ You lie and you lie and you lie."  And all that artifice, in turn, is a way of making truth out of the lie. Because what is her music, what are her videos, if not an elaborate way of saying, "No, I'm not that girl from the video. This is who I am"?
She hides in plain sight on the cover of LP1, wearing an expression that's—what? Coy? Distant? What exactly is going on there, beneath those strands of just-so curlicue and that weird, plastic sheen across one slick cheek? And that splash of red, what is that supposed to be—a blush, a bruise, a birthmark? Is she a teenybopper post-popped bubblegum, a cartoon character post-exploding cigar? The image expands upon the subtle surrealism of last year's EP2 cover, where her neck was almost imperceptibly elongated, and the more aggressive post-processing of her "Water Me" video, in which her eyes are enlarged, anime-style, until they threaten to pop like a Panic Pete Squeeze Toy. These tweaks are crucial to twigs' eerie, post-humanist, Uncanny Valley-girl aesthetic.
More than anything else, the image reminds me of Björk's Alexander McQueen-designed Homogenic cover, in which the Icelandic singer hovered in the middle distance between larger-than-life pop icon and superflat fantasy gloss like a digital scan of a wax figure. Listening to LP1, it's immediately clear that twigs is aiming for similar heights—and easily capable of scaling them. Quiet as it may be, this is a huge album, a monumental debut. On a formal level, it takes the kinds of risks that few pop artists, and few "experimental" artists, for that matter, are willing to take these days. As far as the making of the artist known as FKA twigs goes, it gives us a sense of who she is without shedding any of the mystique she has developed so far.
Building on her co-produced debut EP with Tic and her Arca-produced EP2, the sound throughout is a crystalline jumble of splinters and shards, of stuttering drum machines cutting against arrhythmic clatter—metronomes winding down, car alarms bleating dully into the night. Her voice, the most awe-inspiring instrument on the album, flits between Auto-Tuned artifice and raw carnality. As an acrobat, she's a natural, but she's not afraid to lean on a little digital enhancement. One minute it's a flash-frozen sigh; the next, it's a melon-balled dollop of flesh. As futuristic as her music is, no single technology dominates. Elastic digital effects brush up against 808s, and icy synth stabs share space with acoustic bass. The common denominator is the crackling sense of dread that persists when the notes go silent and the beat drops out, which is often. The overall effect is that of R&B that has been run through some kind of matter-transporting beam and put together wrong on the other end, full of glitches and hard, jutting artifacts.
The most obvious reference points, aside from the spectrum of breathy, synth-heavy R&B that stretches from Ciara through the Weeknd and Beyoncé, are first-gen trip-hop acts like Portishead and Tricky, with their charcoal-streaked affect and sumptuous sense of texture. There are also clear links to contemporary UK artists working the margins between R&B and electronic music, like James Blake, the xx, and even Sophie, she of the deconstructed Saturday-morning rave choons. Her own vocal style, or at least her stratospheric range, evokes Kate Bush and even Tori Amos. More provocative, though, is the way she and her producers wrangle a whole host of unlikely references into the mix: "Two Weeks" features blushing chords reminiscent of late Cocteau Twins and a junkyard guitar lead straight out of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. Even more incongruously, "Two Weeks" cribs a fleeting riff from Air Supply's "All Out of Love."
FKA twigs is not a masterful lyricist, at least not yet; some of her couplets feel clunky, like she's grasping in the dark for rhymes and coming up with the objects closest to hand ("If the flame gets blown out and you shine/ I will know that you cannot be mine"). But when she zeroes in on the essence of a thing, she hits hard. The brazen "Two Weeks" features lines as vivid as red welts: "Higher than a motherfucker", "I can fuck you better than her." (The Weeknd only wishes he could make depravity sound so soul-destroyingly desperate.) On top of that, there's a whole thing about pulling out teeth that tips the song into some kind of freaky David Cronenberg territory, making her drugged-up and tied-down fantasies all the more tantalizingly surreal.
If "Two Weeks" represents the album's sensual core, "Pendulum" is the epicenter of the record's underlying sense of heartbreak, with its glum mantra, "So lonely trying to be yours." Lyrically, the song finds twigs at her most plainspoken—it's a long way off from last year's similarly devastating, but far more cryptic, "Water Me"—so it feels significant that it's one of the album's most sonically out-there songs, with a rhythm built out of what sounds like a roulette wheel run amok and its wash of synthesizers like a sky full of fireflies in death spirals.
Early in the song, she sings, "Lately I'm not so present now," and the line goes straight to the crux of FKA twigs' whole identity. After all, this is an artist whose name itself suggests a fundamental displacement. Spelled out, it's "Formerly Known As twigs," (no) thanks to the lawyers of some other artist named Twigs. (Barnett earned her nickname from her habit of cracking her joints like dried sticks; is it any wonder her beats are so brittle?) That "FKA" is a way of masking the bigger question mark. Formerly known as, sure. But who is she now? Are you that girl from the video? "I can't recognize me," she sings at the close of "Video Girl", but for the rest of us, with LP1, she's zooming into vivid focus, and it's impossible to look away.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19590-twigs-lp1/

Bush - Comedown

In a new interview with iHeartRadio's JD Lewis, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale spoke about the title of the band's upcoming album, "I Beat Loneliness". He said : "Well, it's one of those weird titles. It's an infinite title because you can never beat loneliness; you can just only beat it temporarily.
"I feel that the connection with the band and the power that we have, from talking to a lot of people that see us, is people can kind of connect with the music and connect with the words and make their own narratives about it," he continued. "But we've created this blueprint for people through the years.
"More and more mental health has been sort of brought to the discussion kind of around us all at the moment — people are talking about people's wellness a lot. And I've always been into that human-condition thing since the beginning of Bush — it's like music of complaints and hopes and sort of disappointments and aspirations and all that stuff. So it's just like living.
"A lot of people are struggling so much that it's just such an ironic title, I thought," Rossdale added. "It's one of those things, when I thought of it and it just came, I was, like, 'Oh my god, it's a precious phrase.' And I just like that idea of that sense of bravado that you've beaten loneliness, because we all suffer from melancholia or whatever, and I think that's a healthy thing because it makes you reflective and sort of appreciative of the good times. And I'm not a negative person — I'm really positive — so I just think that you have to go through this sort of like storm clouds to get to the good bits. And so the title just stuck with me."
Rossdale also talked about the importance of youth mental health, especially as it relates to his three songs Kingston, Zuma and Apollo. He said: "I think it's absolutely essential, because I think that what happened is that with COVID, one of the biggest things for kids is COVID took away all that socialization. So all those two, three years where they were meant to be sort of learning how to be with their peers, I noticed with my own kids, that was taken away from them. They didn't have that time. And so I think that's been a real struggle for people, for kids especially, to learn how to adapt, how to be social, because they haven't had the same things that maybe we had. We didn't grow up through a pandemic. And so that is what really affects me. And kids are so mean — bullying in schools, ostracization, all that stuff. Kids are mean. And the way the world is set up is really scary for that."
Gavin went on to speak about the dangers of social media and how it is not an accurate reflection of society but more like a funhouse mirror distorted by a small but vocal minority of extreme outliers.
"Social media, expectations, people feeling they're not having a fulfilled life 'cause they look at Instagram or wherever and they see people with these great lives, when we all know that those lives are kind of hollow and have their have their troubles as well," he said. "But things are portrayed that people just get lost in that sort of rat race of thinking that they've gotta try and keep up with their friends. I mean, I look at Instagram and I'm always, like, 'Man, I need to live better.' I'm just, like, 'No, no, don't fall for it. Don't fall for it. Your life is fine. You have great things going on.' So I think that's where it's really difficult for kids, the sense that they're not in the right place at the right time. They're generally of the opinion that they're in the wrong place at the wrong time and everyone else is having a great time. And that's super dangerous for people to think that."  From: https://blabbermouth.net/news/gavin-rossdale-on-upcoming-bush-album-i-beat-loneliness-its-one-of-those-weird-titles

Sally Rogers - Folk Exposure / The Acoustic Cafe 1989

 Sally Rogers - The Acoustic Cafe 1989

 Sally Rogers - Folk Exposure - Part 1

 

 Sally Rogers - Folk Exposure - Part 2

 

Sally Rogers is a woman of many talents. She’s a singer-songwriter, a music educator, a collector of stories, and as though that’s not enough — she is a painter and a quiltmaker. Sally’s website is sprinkled with all kinds of quotes from the media, teachers, parents, and audience members. Imagine being the recipient of this message: “Whenever I wonder why I should keep living, I listen to your music and hope keeps me moving.” It sure seems to me that Sally is quite good at her chosen profession to elicit such a response from a fan. Music is indeed a vibrant channel into people’s hearts and souls. This is proof.
After reading about your background, it sounds like you grew up in a pretty musical household. What are your fondest memories having to do with music when you were small?

My fondest memories are sitting under the grand piano while my mom played Aaron Copland’s “The Cat and the Mouse.” I would pretend I was a cat and looked through a knothole in the floor into the basement looking for my prey. . . . My sister and I also danced around the living room to Beatles’ songs. When my parents had parties, my Dad would get out his cornet and play Purcell’s Voluntary March. We lived in Brazil when I was 13 and all I wanted to be was a Bossa Nova singer, and join the Sergio Mendes band.

What’s the first instrument that you learned?

I tried to learn piano, but my mom was a piano teacher and interfered with my learning :). So I sang. I remember being in church as a little person and looking up at a very tall man who said to me, “You have a lovely voice!” I’ll never forget that one early comment. I don’t even know who it was. I started playing guitar during the folk boom in high school because it was the cool thing to do.

How did you become interested in the Appalachian dulcimer?

My neighbor’s grandmother had one of Jethro Amburgy’s very simple dulcimers hanging on her wall. When I was in high school I was introduced to Jean Ritchie’s music and remembered seeing that dulcimer. I was able to borrow it until I bought my own: a 3-string made by Thomas Deason in Corydon, Indiana. The sides were maple that came from a fence post.

Tell us the story about how Stan Rogers encouraged you to become a touring musician. (By the way, there’s no relation to you and Stan / Garnet Rogers, is there)?

No, we are not related. I met Stan through folk festivals and running the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse in East Lansing Michigan. We invited Stan and band to perform there and they stayed at our house. After hours, Stan told me about an audition for all the Canadian Folk Festivals that was happening in a few weeks in Toronto. He told me I should go and was quite insistent about it. They were specifically looking for women to perform, as they were in short supply (there were plenty of them, but the men running the festivals were blind). I took him up on the offer, borrowed a car and went to the audition in the Spring of 1979 and got hired at four major festivals, including the Winnipeg Festival.

Your career was given a big boost after your appearance on Prairie Home Companion. What was your experience like when you performed on that show?

It was a great experience and one I’m proud to have had. It happened because Lisa Null learned my song, “Lovely Agnes” which I never intended for performance (it was written for my grandmother’s 92nd birthday). She taught it to Claudia Schmidt who I had not yet met, Jean Redpath and Helen Schneyer who were all on the show in 1980. After hearing the song, Garrison wrote me a note praising the song and inviting me on the show whenever I was passing through. I took him up on the offer and was on the show regularly for about four years.

Your song “Love Will Guide Us” is very familiar to Unitarian-Universalists and Quakers since it’s in their hymnals. It’s a congregation favorite for sure. What’s the history behind that song?

I learned the original song, “I Will Guide Thee’ from Helen Schneyer’s Folk Legacy recording. But the song was a little too religious for me. So one rainy afternoon in Nevada City, CA, while I was on the road, I penned the new more secular lyrics. The Unitarians printed it in their hymnal, but they left off all but the first verse and chorus!

You have written a lot of music for children and have been a music educator for some time. What’s the most challenging thing you need to think about when writing children’s music and performing for them?

When writing for children, you can’t dumb down the message. It helps to have a singable chorus, as it does writing for anyone, if you want them to sing along.

What’s the most rewarding thing about working with children?

There is nothing more rewarding than having them honor me by singing something I wrote. I have sung “Circle in the Sun” in schools where students knew the song already. They said to me, “Who wrote that song?” My answer was, “I did.” Their response? “No, you didn’t!” Lovely.

I’m interested in hearing about the various folk operas that you have written. Do you like doing the research for these types of projects? How have they been received?

I am passionate about oral histories and used them to create the songs for the four Mennonite folk operas I composed with dramatist Jo Carson. They were all performed in Newport News, Virginia in a theater that had been the last Mennonite Dairy barn (The Yoder Barn) in the region. I learned a great deal about their community and was honored to be included in their lives. Working with Jo Carson was more fun than I knew you could have. Kind of like being on a roller coaster of words and music. I have used what I learned to teach kids how to collect oral histories and transform their stories into songs.

From: https://meandthee.org/interviews/sally-rogers/

 

Tone of Voice Orchestra - River

While I normally love bagpipes, snappy bass lines, and rhythmic drones, I must confess I was not immediately taken with this album. On my initial listen I found the vocals too redolent of the Mamas and the Papas or the 5th Dimension. And there was flute. It was too upbeat as well. I have ingrained and strong opinions, that in this case got in my way.
And then I really listened. Once I got over myself and my curmudgeonly biases, I found a jazz-inflected musical gem full of sparkle and some truly fine music. The stand-up bass and fiddle with the sax really do it for me. I felt really good listening to this. I fell for all of the instrumental parts, and the lyrics are whip smart, witty and surprising. The songs reflect on stereotypes, daily life, bittersweet love and it's clearly and strongly voiced from a female perspective. It has some really funny bits. which I appreciate. We all need a bit more of that.
Now I love it, or at least most of it. “Barking up the Wrong Tree,” “That Kind of Day” (a wry They Might Be Giants-esque narrative complaint), “Lovey-Doveyin’“ and “You Saw Yourself Out” stand out. I may never like “Heartless”- it’s too San Francisco in the 1960s for me- but I recognize that others will adore it. The hypnotic drone, the saxophone solo and close harmonies will delight many, I am sure. The rhythm is marvelous.
Tone of Voice Orchestra is a 10 piece group out of Copenhagen, and includes a cittern, bagpipes, drums, double bass, flutes, sax, hurdy-gurdy and fiddle and four singers. The members are all award winning and hyper-accomplished artists, coming together for this one album as a special project. I would be really excited to see them play live. The impact of this kind of ensemble in concert must pack a real aural wallop.
So what is the upshot here? It’s creative and sonically complex. It draws from many traditions and influences including old time, ragas, jazz and pop and is just the thing for spring-time listening. It is truly fresh, energizing and has lush textures and beats. The press release calls it “genre defiant," a term which I am tickled by; it's my new favorite genre. The whole thing is good for humming along with, with a few genuine earworm moments thrown. It’s pop music for grownups, adult but playful. I’ll take some of that.  From: https://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/tvo-22.shtml  

Traffic - Heaven Is In Your Mind

By the time Traffic’s ”Mr. Fantasy" was released in the UK in late 1967, Dave Mason had already left the band (for the first time). It was some time later that a US release for the album was to come about. The band therefore decided to reflect their current situation as a trio, erasing Mason from the album credits.
For it’s US release, the album was initially re-titled "Heaven is in your mind", and two of Mason's three songs were removed. This conveniently made way for the inclusion of three songs which had already been hit singles for Traffic in the UK. One of these, "Hole in my shoe", was in fact a Mason composition. The whimsical nature of the song lead to the rest of the band recording it under protest, but Mason enjoyed a told you so moment when it became a huge hit.
The differences between the UK and US versions were not however purely the result of political intrigue. There was a tendency in the UK for singles not to appear on albums around this time, while US record buyers were less prone to acquiring singles and therefore expected to hear such songs on a band's albums.
The rearrangement and substitution of the songs for this version is significant in terms of the balance and atmosphere of the album. Whereas the UK release had a generally serious, proto-prog feel (although for obvious reasons that term would not have been used at the time), the US album has a much lighter, psychedelic pop atmosphere. This is not simply down to the inclusion of "Hole in my shoe". The other singles, "Paper sun" and "Smiling phases", also had a pop feel to them. When this is combined with the occasional lighter moments on the original album such as "Berkshire poppies", this becomes a much more accessible album overall.
For me, while this is a highly enjoyable listen, the pioneering spirit which prevails on the UK "Mr. Fantasy" is slightly diluted here. That said, tracks such as "Heaven is in your mind" and "Giving it to you" are still very much an integral part of this release. At the end of the day, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Both versions are currently available together on a single CD on the Island remasters version of "Mr Fantasy".  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=7051

The Nields - Jack The Giant Killer

My four-year-old is obsessed with my ex-husband. “That is David Nields,” says Johnny pointing at a circle with dots for eyes, a big U for a smile, and two stick legs coming down from the circle’s bottom. He draws two more sticks coming out from the sides and attaches one to a smaller but similarly drawn figure to the right. This circle gets a tuft of Ernie-and-Burt hair. “That’s you, Mama. You are holding David Nields’ hand because he likes you.”
Johnny says, “DavidNields” as one word, like “Madonna” or “Bono.” He doesn’t seem to recognize the last name as the hyphenated part of his own. For that matter, he does not know that before I met his father––Tom––I was once married to this stick figure. He only knows that David Nields was one of the three Daves in my band in the 90s: The Nields, a folk-rock family band. For ten years, we toured the continent in a fifteen-passenger van, pulling a small trailer full of our gear, our bodies packed alongside our guitars, duffel bags, notebooks and used paperbacks. Loading in and out of rock clubs around the country was like moving into and out of a small apartment twice a day, 340 days a year.
We have the CDs to prove it. Recently, Johnny’s dragged these dust magnets down from the shelf, where they’d been filed under “N” between Nirvana and Oasis. He plays them incessantly, jamming along with his collection of cardboard guitars or his teal ukulele. All the accoutrements of my old indie-folk-rock band have become props and characters in the world of his imaginative play.
It’s a shock to hear these CDs again. My sister Katryna and I still perform as a duo in less-rock-more-folk guise. But certain songs went silent after David left both me and the band. These include the songs David wrote as well as the ones he and I co-wrote. Partly out of writerly narcissism, partly from not wanting to give him the airtime, it’s my songs we continue to play. So some of our best songs have been shut in those square plastic boxes out of earshot for decades.
Johnny pulled down our 1994 CD Bob on the Ceiling, and when he shunned “James” (a co-write) in favor of “Be Nice To Me” (all mine) I had a sweet moment of schadenfreude, quickly dashed when he turned the repeat knob to play David’s opening guitar solo, running from the music room to the kitchen to stand under the Bose speakers and hear it reverberate off the chrome fixtures, a look of pure wonder in his eyes. Tom and I exchange a look. “Do you know,” he says, “I’ve had to think more about David Nields this month than I ever did when we were dating?”
Tom and I talk a lot about second chances, the miracle of finding each other, getting to start over. I still don’t understand what I did to be rewarded by his love and the subsequent and miraculous births of our two healthy, beautiful, hilarious children. Both of us were married before, each for about a decade. Neither of us had kids. We’d considered ourselves lucky. When a marriage ends, one’s ex takes with them an entire library’s worth of shared life experiences and memories. Children might hold some of these, but without witnesses, only the couple remains the repository for those ten years, and if they never communicate, a lot is conveniently forgotten.
In some ways, forgetting can be a good thing: sometimes I’m glad Tom didn’t know my twenty-something self, bulimic and obsessed with success. He in turn is glad he had some years to learn how to stand on his own, outgrow his need for his lover to share his every interest, move through the world together in lock step. “You like biking? Wow! I like biking! Let’s get married!” is his quip about his proposal to his first wife. But at other times, when I run into a couple who saw each other across the rougher terrains of late-adolescence and early adulthood––those early mid-life crises and crucibles from which we emerge, if we’re lucky, a bit sadder, wiser and more grateful––I wish Tom and I had something tangible from those tender years, something inchoate we could find in a small box and play on the stereo.
Today, Johnny’s discovered “Jack the Giant Killer,” another co-write. My 30-year-old voice meets me in the kitchen on a tidal wave of jangly millennial guitars: Don’t laugh at me, do you see me? 
Yesterday I was afraid but that’s over. The song is triumphant––the ascendency of youth over age––and Johnny sits at the kitchen island transfixed, gazing into the middle distance as he listens. I join him, remembering the day in the studio where Moxy Früvous––a Canadian band of similar vintage––added their dissonant “la la’s” and four-part slides under the choruses. In the summer of 1999, David and I drove home from the studio every night listening to the cassette playbacks, the track getting fatter and fatter with each element we added. If I hadn’t been so competitive, wanting the songs I’d written alone to be the first cut, the single–– if I’d obeyed the first rule of the rock and roll band (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts)––we might have had a hit with this song.
When David told me he couldn’t stay in the marriage I felt like I’d been slammed with a rogue fastball I hadn’t seen coming. Our marriage was a mosaic of shared interests: music, literature, theater, but most of all, the band. There’s an image of us (Johnny recently showed me) on the inside of one of our CDs, backs turned to the camera, leaving the stage, arms around each other’s waists. We look more like teammates than lovers. It’s hard to say which caused what: the band’s failure dissolving us, or our breakup killing the band.
Thirty years of fighting tears are over.
Yeah, they’re over
Cause I’m Jack the Giant Killer.
But the band plays on, in our living room, and in the life of our family, and even still onstage, though less frequently. Johnny’s uncle is Dave Chalfant our bass player-turned-guitar player and producer––married to Katryna, the band’s lead singer. When we come over to their house for dinner, Dave pulls out his guitars and basses to satisfy Johnny’s curiosity about exactly which model played on which song. Johnny regularly calls Dave to double-check. He also calls our drummer Dave Hower just to chat. He’s been asking to call the third Dave, and I’ve sidestepped. Today, heart in my throat, I relent.
“What are you going to say to him?” I ask, tapping the name into my iPhone.
“That I wuv him,” says Johnny, as if to say, What else?
We let it ring and ring. He knows my number. “Hello?” says a familiar voice, cracking on the second syllable. Johnny deftly touches the speakerphone icon.
“How many guitars do you have?” he calls into the phone, a tiny Facebook icon of an aging David in the upper right corner.
“You might want to say who you are,” I suggest in a low voice.
“This is Johnny.”
“Oh,” says David, as if he were somehow expecting the call, and I am impressed at his quick shift to composure, his ease in speaking with a pre-kindergartener. “Four. A Martin, a big orange Yamaha that looks like a Gretch, a Dan Electro and an Epiphone bass. Why do you ask?”
“You have a fan,” I say. And Johnny proceeds to list the songs he loves. “Love and China” (my song about our breakup), “Alfred Hitchcock,” “Jack the Giant Killer.”
“Yeah,” says David. “That’s a good one.” His disembodied voice deepens, sounds more like his old self. “I remember singing through the telephone into my amp to get that crazy sound at the beginning. Cool effect.”
“We should’ve started the record with it,” I blurt, taking the phone. And then, I immediately think: But should have why? So radio would have played this disc, we would have continued playing in legendary but tiny rock clubs for a few more years, maybe gotten a Grammy nod and then broken up? Or—best-case scenario—we had the kind of career we dreamed of when we were honeymooning at Niagara. Let’s say we sang for President Obama, toured Europe, lived half the year in a tour bus, had sneakers and ice cream flavors named for us, made enough money to never have to worry about health insurance and retirement. What then? I wouldn’t have this four-year-old drumming with pencils on the counter.
“Nah,” says David. “I don’t remember anyone arguing for that. I think we all agreed on the sequence of the record.”
“Let me talk to DavidNields!” shouts Johnny, reaching for the phone. I hand it back to him and he holds the iPhone like a mic. “What guitar do you play on all the songs?”
After David finishes cataloguing his equipment for Johnny, I take the phone back to tell him about the stick figures and the replaying of his opening guitar solos. I wish him well.
Later Johnny asks if he can bring DavidNields to school for “N” week, which is coming up soon. I say he can bring a picture of DavidNields. So he draws a picture of Jack the Giant Killer—a little head with a frown and extremely long sticks for legs––and I realize he thinks, as one would, that Jack is a gigantic killer.
“Actually,” I say, bringing him in to my chest. “Jack is a little boy just like you. And he is very brave, so brave that he doesn’t let big scary monsters stop him from doing what he needs to do.”
Johnny puts his head on my shoulder. Then he bounds off. I sit at the kitchen table, fingering the frayed cover of Gotta Get Over Greta, artwork by Stefan Sagmeister, now a celebrated genius we were lucky enough to have worked with on his way up. This cover, this repository, is precious to me for so many reasons, and I don’t have a spare. The booklet is about to come apart at the staples from Johnny’s curious perusals. Should I hide it from him, or let him slowly and lovingly destroy it?
The beginning of “Jack” comes back on the speakers. I get up and creep around the corner. Johnny is standing on a chair in order to reach the knobs, holding his teal ukulele and a Beatles pick. He’s singing along, softly, completely lost in his rock and roll fantasy. He catches me watching him.
“Mama,” he says, his eyes pleading, halfway between pride and shame. “Go.”
So I do. It’s not really my song anymore, if it ever was.  From: https://losangelesreview.org/jack-the-giant-killer-by-nerissa-nields/

The Grateful Dead - That's It for the Other One/New Potato Caboose/Born Cross-Eyed

The Grateful Dead's self-titled debut album from 1967 was a casserole of folk, rock, blues and psychedelia. But it didn't quite capture the live experience. So the Grateful Dead set out to bring their celebrated concert sound into the studio on Anthem of the Sun, which was released on July 18, 1968. They traveled south to Los Angeles in November 1967 to begin work on this second album. By this time, the effects of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had legitimized rock 'n' roll as a serious art form. The Grateful Dead wanted to see how far they could push this. In the documentary Anthem to Beauty, Jerry Garcia says that the band's contract gave them unlimited studio time, an unheard-of provision back then. "Our strategy was, we wanna play in the studio, we wanna learn how the studio works," he said. "What we did essentially was we bought ourselves an education."
Warner Bros. Records exec Joe Smith also recalled the sessions: "These guys came along ... went in the studio, experimenting with sound like kids in a candy store. Whatever was state-of-the-art, they were availing themselves of it." Producer and engineer Dave Hassinger, who had worked on the Dead's debut, was brought in for Anthem, but as Smith pointed out, there was a new "element of chemicals involved. These guys were stoned part of the time, living in a fantasy world and looking for sounds that may not even be possible."
The sessions continued on and on as Hassinger grew more and more frustrated with the band, which had no finished songs or direction. They eventually moved to New York, and Hassinger bailed. The Grateful Dead were thrilled – the project was now all theirs. "Anthem of the Sun was our vehicle," drummer Mickey Hart recalled. "It was our springboard into weirdness. Now we're not tethered by the engineers or the technology of the day, we can fly the lofty peaks. And of course, we knew nothing of the studio. It was startling, it was new, it was invigorating, it was the edge."
The idea was to weave studio and live recordings into a seamless entity. Different performances of the same song, recorded on different nights, somehow melded together, then merged with studio takes, like one big sugar-cubed puzzle. Both sides of the album run as continuous pieces, and the LP's final mix was almost like a performance itself, with the mix made as the tape was rolling. "Using musical jump cuts, mixes and cross-fades, Anthem incorporated many of the techniques of cinema," said bassist Phil Lesh. Highlights are plenty. "That's It For the Other One" is a dramatic piece with four distinct sections unfolding into a tripped-out psychedelic blur colored by Garcia's killer guitar work. The shimmering mellow of "New Potato Caboose" is sheer beauty, pointing toward a direction the band would soon follow.
"Born Cross-Eyed" wraps up side one in an aggressive burst of pure rock 'n' roll led by Bob Weir. Time changes, stop-starts, blistering guitar and sweet harmonies drive it home, and just when you think you've got it figured out, a Herb Alpert-style trumpet blares in amid the late Ron "Pigpen" McKernan's swirling organ. The song first appeared as the flip side to the band's "Dark Star" single, probably the most concise song to emerge from this era of sessions. Ironically, the song was dragged to marathon lengths onstage. "Alligator" and "Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks)" wrap up the album by wandering into even more free-form terrain, as the band tries its best to replicate part of its live experience. "Anthem of the Sun was like a chance for us to try a lot of things, to see what things might work and might not," said Garcia. "Actually, when we mixed it, we mixed it for the hallucinations. Phil and I performed the mix as though it were an electronic music composition. It was pretty intense, and we performed each side all the way through."  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/grateful-dead-anthem-of-the-sun/  

Susanna Hoffs - Enormous Wings

‘Susanna Hoffs’ is the second solo album by Susanna Hoffs. The style of the album is more folk-oriented than her earlier work. Columbia Records disagreed with this style and dropped her from their roster, resulting in Hoffs signing to London Records. Three songs rejected by Columbia appeared on this album including "Enormous Wings", "Darling One" and "Happy Place". The album is much more personal and deals with issues like abusive relationships and insecurities; "Weak With Love" is about John Lennon's assassination. The album was promoted by forming a band for an extensive tour.
The album was released to enthusiastic reviews but, like its predecessor, it failed to sell as well as expected. AllMusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine stated this album is "a remarkably accomplished and catchy collection of mature jangle-pop, power-pop and ballads". Wook Kim of Entertainment Weekly noted Hoffs "performs a small act of bravery".  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_Hoffs_(album)

Kansas - Hopelessly Human

Kansas biography
Founded in Topeka, Kansas, USA in 1970 - Continued activity with different line-ups - Still active as of 2017. Original members Kerry Livgren (guitar) and Phil Ehart (drums) combined their two separate bands into one large band. Kerry's band was called Saratoga, and Phil's was called White Clover. The band changed its name to Kansas. They were from the beginning just an ordinary rock band, but were quickly compared to other progressive bands in the 70's like Genesis, Yes and King Crimson. Combining the musical complexities of British prog-rock with the soul and instrumentation of the American heartland, Kansas became one of the biggest selling and most successful touring acts of the 1970s. With huge hits like "Carry On Wayward Son" and "Dust In The Wind", they helped define the sound of "classic rock".

I- THE 1970s
The Early Days: Their self-titled debut album was released in 1974, but nationwide response was slow. Their second album, "Song For America", saw a softening of Kansas’ sound, with more classical influences evident. The third album, "Masque", featured more pop songs and was lyrically quite dark. They suffered ridicule from people around the world, because they wore overalls and had a violonist, which made people think that they were a country music group.
The Best of Times: "Leftoverture", with the popular single "Carry On Wayward Son", became a signature piece and pushed the album to platinum success. The followup, "Point Of Know Return" (1977) contained the ever-popular acoustic "Dust In The Wind". During their tour, they recorded their first live album, "Two For The Show" (1978) and the next studio album "Monolith" (1979).

II- THE 1980s
Seeds Of Change: A year later, the band followed up with "Audio Visions", the last production of the original band lineup. Walsh left the band due to creative differences. "Vinyl Confessions" had Christian lyrical content. The next album, "Drastic Measures" (1983), had some hard rock material on it, including the song "Mainstream". In 1984, the band released a greatest hits compilation, "The Best Of Kansas", which featured one new song, "Perfect Lover".
The Second Generation: The group split in 1983, only to reform in 1986 with the albums "Power" and "The Spirit Of Things" (1988). Sales of these two albums were not very strong. Thus, the second generation of Kansas came to an abrupt end.

III- THE 1990s: The Third Generation
The new lineup released their second live album, "Live At The Whiskey", and featured live renditions of their classics. In 1995, the "Freak Of Nature" album featured some powerful new studio tracks. "Always Never The Same" featured old classics and new material, done with the London Symphony Orchestra.

IV- The 2000s
Seeing the return of founder singer/songwriter Kerry Livgren, "Somewhere To Elsewhere" was released in the summer of 2000. "Early Recordings From Kansas 1971-1973" is a true gem. Another live album, titled "Device Voice Drum", is different from their earlier live albums.

From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=630

Patty Griffin - Poor Man's House

Instead of Living With Ghosts, singer-songwriter Patty Griffin could have easily named her 1996 full-length debut Nowhere To Hide. It’s a powerful album of ten songs, each featuring only Griffin supported by acoustic guitar—thus resembling the nakedness of copyright demos. It was definitely a risky move for Griffin’s first major label release. Did it pay off? Well, that depends upon whom you’re asking.
Living With Ghosts never charted in Billboard, to date it’s sold less than 250,000 copies, and it didn’t exactly set up her sophomore effort (1998’s Flaming Red) for commercial success—that album also never found a home on the Billboard 200 and actually sold less than its predecessor.
Over the years, though, Griffin has established herself as one of the most critically acclaimed singer-songwriters in music today with a rich catalog of studio albums, a lengthy list of tour itineraries, and seven Grammy nominations resulting in two wins for her 2010 gospel album Downtown Church and her 2019 self-titled folk album. Griffin’s been covered by The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Emmylou Harris and Reba McEntire. Kelly Clarkson absolutely fangirls over her.
I couldn’t care less about the lack of chart position or sales number of Living With Ghosts, to be honest. Twenty-five years after its release, I still hold this watershed album in as high regard as Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971) and Carole King’s Tapestry (1971). This is an album that, by the very nature of its sparse recording, demands two-way engagement as if the spotlight is firmly on Griffin and you’re the only one in the audience.
It also requires an ability to empathize—to slip into the well-worn shoes of every protagonist Griffin writes about who’s rolling with life’s high tides. It commands the listener to focus squarely on the small amounts of real estate where Griffin discloses big revelations about each character she painstakingly cares for within each song. Although it’s usually categorized as a seminal folk or alt-country effort due to its stripped-down sound, I’ve always felt Living With Ghosts moonlights as a bona fide rock album whose bare bones recording, muscular guitar playing, and deeply drawn incisive lyric moments challenge the perceived notions of what a rock album can be.
There’s a fiery demeanor and bristling urgency that Griffin weaves throughout Living With Ghosts. When “Moses” breaks the seal at the beginning of the album with Griffin’s pained call out heavenward for a savior (“Diamonds, roses, I need Moses / To cross this sea of loneliness / Part this red river of pain”), it’s shocking, at first listen, how freely and unabashedly Griffin erupts her anger and anguish in front of us.
In “Every Little Bit,” she feverishly sketches a portrait of a rebellious woman proud of her emotional armor (“I can chew like a cannibal / I can yell like a cat / I even had you believing that I really really like it like that”) which ends with Griffin wailing out the word “bit” several times, unraveling it into a multitude of newly formed syllables until she’s done punching it around.
Or consider the rollicking “You Never Get What You Want,” where Griffin employs a slight snarl and curled upper lip to add some leather to the cocky opening lyrics (“You first found me in my holding pen / Stopped to take a look and stuck your finger in / I bit one off and you came back again and again.”) As the song progresses Griffin gets rowdier—channeling hues of Johnny Cash and Billy Idol into her performance until the end when she releases the pressure valve with a final lyric sung in almost a whisper.
Perhaps Griffin’s moments of full throttled clamor and troublemaker tones are a result of the divorce she had just endured, the exhausting years of waiting tables and patchwork temp jobs all through her twenties, or how she learned to keep unpleasant emotions on the inside as the youngest of seven children (all born within seven years.) “Emotions like anger were not in my vocabulary,” Griffin once recalled about her childhood. “They were not welcome.”
When you hear how Griffin wields control over her blazing pinnacle vocal moments within the more somber songs on the album like “Poor Man’s House,” “Forgiveness,” or “Let Him Fly” (covered by The Chicks on their 1999 album Fly), it makes total sense that she used to cover Pat Benatar songs in her high school band (and that she grew up close to a forest in Maine and had to have a big voice to yell back towards home.)
Recently I spoke with musician and music instructor John Curtis, who was Griffin’s former guitar teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He told me when he heard Griffin’s singing voice in their first lesson together while she was still married, he was completely blown away, “I peeled myself off of the wall...one of the first words out of my mouth was, ‘You need to do this for a living.’”
What also gives Living With Ghosts such a propulsive rock energy in many of its offerings is how the acoustic guitar does double duty by adding big-heeled percussion to its job description. At the end of “Poor Man’s House,” Griffin’s forceful playing sounds like it could be a finale drum solo. Once you get to the amped-up back half of “Sweet Lorraine,” you can almost hear the cymbals in the way Griffin pulses her strings. Or in “Time Will Do The Talking,” it’s Griffin’s athletic strum that pushes her vocals into that previously mentioned rowdy (dare I say “badass”?) territory she inhabits just as effortlessly as she can corral a hushed moment with a teardrop in her voice.
The album’s raw and sometimes imperfect recording also infuses it with a rough-around-the-edges rock energy. Some of the songs were recorded in the Nashville kitchen of the album’s recording engineer, while others were recorded in a Boston apartment close to a hospital. If you listen carefully, you can hear ambulance sirens in “Forgiveness” and the album’s closing track “Not Alone.” Other songs like “Moses,” “You Never Get What You Want,” and “Poor Man’s House” flirt with mic pops or high vocal levels pushing against the limits of the recording hardware.
Releasing the album this way wasn’t the original plan when Griffin was signed to A&M. A curious pairing with producer Nile Rodgers to record tracks never saw the light of day, which was apparently not a problem for Griffin. “I love Nile Rodgers, otherwise I never would have bothered to work with him,” she told The Washington Post, adding, "Man, if there's one thing I hope does not ever circulate, it's that stuff.” Next, she recorded the songs with a band in New Orleans at Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studios with producer Malcolm Burn. A&M wasn’t happy with the results and neither was Griffin who felt the songs lacked the power and integrity of her original demos.
"l asked them [A&M] if they would release my songs as they originally heard them, namely, my guitar and my voice” Griffin recalled to Raleigh, North Carolina’s Spectator in 1997. “Realizing that they were attached to those solo performances made me appreciate the strength of them and gave me guts to ask if they'd put them out that way. And they did. I have to give A&M credit."  After some re-recording of vocals on several of the songs, along with some minimal production clean-up and sweetening, A&M released Living With Ghosts with skeletal promotional fanfare on May 21, 1996. In the liner notes, Griffin thanked Malcolm Burn and the New Orleans crew that worked on the shelved version of the album, proving at the outset that Griffin was a class act.
On Living With Ghosts, Griffin stripped out all of the noise that shrouded her intense and intimate songcraft and pushed for the album to be heard the way she wanted. “It represents what I’ve been doing for the last few years. It’s kind of scary to put it out this way,” she said at the time. “If someone wants to pan it, they’re panning me. But it’s what I do, so I’m real happy we were able to do it.” Sticking to your guns and demanding your art is only sent out into the world once it meets your high standards. I can’t think of anything more Rock ‘n’ Roll than that.  From: https://albumism.com/features/patty-griffin-debut-album-living-with-ghosts-turns-25-anniversary-retrospective

Cordelia's Dad - Texas Rangers

Strange how things come back. Got an email this morning from a friend asking if I knew anything about Tim Eriksen who's playing at The Betsey Trotwood with Steeleye Span's Peter Knight on the 20th July. Eriksen used to play in a band called Cordelia's Dad and he had a lot to do with the soundtrack to Cold Mountain. Now I just happen to have got a new hard drive and I've been moving loads of archive stuff off floppies and zip disks. And amongst this stuff was an interview that I did with Tim and Peter Irvine and Cath Oss in a cider pub in Bristol; it was cold and wintry so I reckon it was January. Anyway this piece never appeared in print and I'd forgotten that it was as complete as it was. This looks like it was ready for lay-out. So why not put it up here? Oh and by the way Cath Oss was there though she doesn't seem to have said anything and she's now Cath Tyler. So imagine yourself back in 1997 and take it from here:
In the wilds of last January I ventured to the nether regions of north-east London and a place called Highams Park. There, in an upper room. I saw three young Americans and an English friend mesmerise a bunch of middle aged unreconstructed folkies. They played a set of traditional American songs and tunes harking back to the nineteenth century, revitalising those tales of passion and intense emotion, gripping us with the starkness of their voices and the simple beauty of their acoustic instrumentation.
A couple of weeks later, at Bristol's Louisiana Club, the three Americans again mounted a stage, this time equipped for electric music. While the songs displayed unmistakably a traditional origin this was a set that was ragin' full on. Power trio stuff but with the poetry that only the finest protagonists aspire to; the balm inside the mayhem. Like Brass Monkey meeting Sonic Youth. In the hurly-burly of the extended 'Rapture Bird' my mind and my synapses were drawn back to the frenzy of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Hamburg the previous summer as they deconstructed "Like A Hurricane". It was that good.
There are things we accept you can't do and so we don't even try them. It seems like nobody told Tim Eriksen, Peter Irvine and Cath Oss, or if they did they didn't listen. These guys have, in various combinations, been playing together as Cordelia's Dad since the late 1980s. Depending on where you see them, which records you get, they are a noise band, a folk band, a folk-rock band, a folk-noise band, a hard-core band or shape note singers. There's a dozen other categories, all as relevant and as meaningless. They're a band that has steeped themselves in the folk music of America and its English origins, they search out songs and variations on songs. The afternoon of the gig you may well find them digging in the local library.
For some years now they've been disconcerting the English folk music community, or the part of it with less catholic tastes, by presenting both sides of their coinage as Cordelia's Dad. They've now decided to be two bands. Cordelia's Dad for the acoustic shows and Io (pronounced eye-o) for the electric ones. It avoids confusion but lessens the surprise. From: http://bucketfullofbrains.blogspot.com/2010/07/cordelias-dad-interview-from-january.html