David Crosby has announced the release of his first live solo album, David Crosby & the Lighthouse BandLive at the Capitol Theatre. The CD plus DVD package arrives November 25th, 2022, via BMG Records. The 16-song collection, recorded in 2018, draws largely from his late period renaissance as a solo artist and also touches on his career as a member of Crosby, Stills & Nash and CSNY. Listen to “1974,” a long-lost demo track that Crosby has had “sitting on my computer for 40 years,”.
The two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer is a co-founder of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Crosby is continuing to forge new paths in his eighth decade, Crosby again joins forces with Becca Stevens, Michelle Willis and Michael League, the three musicians known as the Lighthouse Band, who he’s been working with since 2016’s “Lighthouse” album.
Far from just a solo live album/DVD, working with his first new band since CPR (Crosby, Pevar and Raymond), Crosby and the Lighthouse Band quickly discovered their chemistry and took a collaborative leap during their 2018 tour together in support of Crosby’s seventh solo album, “Here If You Listen”.
This live set was recorded and filmed on the last night of the run at the historic Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY. The setlist includes “Déjà Vu,” “Guinnevere,” and “Woodstock.”
Vocalist/guitarist League shares, “I found the demo and I listened to it. I fell in love with this and I thought, you know, Crosby should finish this and he said, ‘Man, it’s been sitting on my computer for 40 years, so you know, whatever, sure’, so I sent it to Becca Stevens and she was like, ‘give me a crack at it’ – so she came in a couple of days later with four-part harmonies for the entire song, lyrics for the entire song, and we sat down that day and kind of fine-tuned things, and so 44 years after it’s… conception a song was born.”
Arriving November 25th, 2022 via BMG, the folk-rock legend and cultural force for over fifty years, continues his late period renaissance with the release of “David Crosby & The Lighthouse Band Live at the Capitol Theatre“.
“From The Hill’ is a song reflecting on times when friendships fall apart over romantic entanglement, accompanied by the sensation that you’re somehow watching it happen from above with a more zoomed-out perspective,” says Nation of Language’s Ian Devaney of this new dreamy single by the band. “It can feel at times like certain parts of life are a story with which you’re just following along – the characters enter, they play their role, and then they leave. Often it’ll feel sudden and catch you off guard, and other times you’re able to see that it’s the only way things could have played out despite what you may have wanted. For us, we’re in a moment right now where it feels good to get this out into the world.
It’s one that didn’t really feel like it fit the vibe of A Way Forward, nor is it any real indication of where the next record is likely heading. When that situation arrives we like to use these 7″ releases to step outside the larger framework that the albums provide and just release a track that we love, so this is us doing that once again.”
7” single featuring the standalone single ‘From The Hill’ and includes an exclusive to 7” b-side ‘Ground Control’. ‘From The Hill’ is soothing vocal over a synth-pop dream
‘Desperately Imagining Somewhere Quiet’ is the second album by Wisconsin band DISQ. Their music mixes a whole bunch of styles from indie rock, to synth rock to power pop. Lead single ‘Cujo Kiddies’ was written by bassist Raina Bock as a self-help tool to get out of a drug hell and loneliness spiral. It worked, and now the band have this sprawling power pop weirdness to share with you.
Though initially formed as an extension of the lifelong friendship between guitarist Isaac DeBroux-Slone and bassist Raina Bock, Disq has evolved into a far more democratic and egalitarian organization, as “Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet” finds guitarists Logan Severson and Shannon Conor splitting singing and song writing duties with the aforementioned DeBroux-Slone and Bock. Such an approach could have easily fallen into the trap of “satisfying everyone, pleasing no one,” resulting in committee-approved music devoid of any personality or rough edges, but happily, the opposite is true.
Pushing play on “Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet”, it is easy to imagine that it is the year 1998, and your cool older sister has returned from her freshman year at college only to hand you the sort of mind-altering mixtape out of which lifelong rock fanatics are born. It is the sort of record Beck might have made in his prime, if you swapped out the hip-hop and delta blues of Odelay for midwestern emo, Scottish power-pop, and the sort of all-American indie that functions as “classic rock” for this cherubic cohort.
Wrangling a melange of styles such as this is no simple task, but the record is held together by the powerful yet nimble rhythm section of Bock and drummer Stu Manley, whose muscular and hyperactive playing alternately keeps these adventurous compositions tethered firmly to the Earth and sends them soaring into stratosphere. Producer Matt Schuessler (the recording engineer of Collector making the most of his promotion) rarely lets a verse or chorus go by without adding some new sonic sparkle, keeping the arrangements an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of textures and moods. If there is a record in 2022 which squeezes more ideas into 41 minutes, then that record could surely only be the unlistenable mess that “Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet” avoids becoming so deftly.
Things being how they are in the world today, the idea of finding “Someplace Quiet” feels like an increasingly remote possibility, and the act of imagining such a place does, indeed, feel more and more desperate. Listening to Disq navigate the myriad twists and turns of their new album can feel akin to an attempted processing of our endless poly-crisis, where each new catastrophe and atrocity jostle for position at the top of the timeline. With their new album, Disq take a valiant stand against the temptation of complacency. As for that “Someplace Quiet?” It will have to wait… it’s about to get loud in here.
Indigo Sparke’s 2021 debut, “Echo“, was a minimalist yet evocative collection of folk songs that resonated for its intimacy as much as its intensity, each vibration captured deftly by the simmering production from Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker. The Australian singer-songwriter’s poetic song writing already seemed to edge toward a vast infinity, but on her sophomore full-length, “Hysteria”, Sparke has broadened horizons, fleshing out and expanding her sound with help from the National’s Aaron Dessner, who brought a similar warmth and fullness to Taylor Swift’s latest records. Far from abandoning the elemental, cosmic pull of her earlier work, Sparke stretches her muscles, tapping into a raw fury that allows her to untangle a complex web of emotions that feel at once deeply personal and ancient.
The result is a sweeping 14-track effort that reclaims familial and patriarchal histories while reflecting on the nature of love, following waves of feeling and crashing, rather unexpectedly, into a kind of spiritual transcendence. “Hysteria” is an album that extends beyond the self, that reaches for the ocean but always finds its way back to shore, holding enough fuel to keep a fire through the night and fall back into dreams. ‘Hysteria’ is the second album by Australian singer-songwriter Indigo Sparke. Sparke plays a brand of quiet, indie-folk – the kind of mesmerising sound that demands you be quiet and listen. Comparisons can be drawn with the likes of Vashti Bunyan and Aldous Harding. ‘Hysteria’ was produced by The National’sAaron Dessner.
I never, until this year, ever in my whole entire life – I never wore the colour blue. I really didn’t like it, I had massive resistance to it. I mean, I’d wear blue denim or whatever, but never blue clothing. And I don’t know what happened, but I think reclaiming that part of my name and my history and everything associated with blue or indigo became this really beautiful, joyful thing. And now I’m wearing blue all the time. I’m loving blue, everything blue at the moment. [laughs] I know it’s quite esoteric, but I think I’ve just been healing, and this is a part of my strange and nonlinear healing journey.
I really wanted for the record to be this journey, and I think that song is where I re-emerge from the underground or the underworld or something, coming out. Even though there’s a lot of similar themes in the lyrics of history and trauma and love, it’s paired with these major chords, which gives it this really strange – it’s always felt like my Neil Young song in some way. You get that pang and that hit of nostalgia and expansive existential beauty and melancholy and just life, and it feels good, it feels open and you feel the light, and somehow you also simultaneously feel the ache of what it is to live and love and long for things.
I had done my first recording session with Aaron in summer, and then went back in the fall for the next session. And then someone in the circle got COVID, so we all isolated and that session didn’t happen. And when we came out of isolation, he was like, “Just go home and keep writing.” Even though we already had more than enough songs – we had too many songs, actually. But I went back to New Mexico, I was living in Taos at the time, and I just kept writing and writing and writing. And ‘Pressure in My Chest’ was one of the songs that I wrote living in New Mexico in Taos.
So when I went back for the next session, which was middle of winter. And it was really funny because writing the song, it was another one of those ones that just kind of sprouted out of nowhere and came through. I was recording it on a voice memo and I was like, “Aaron’s gonna love this song, this is going to be Aaron’s favourite song.” I just had a feeling, I don’t know what it was. And then I went and I played it for him. I had a bunch of new songs, which most of them ended up making it onto the album. But that’s where that song came from. And in the end, he was like, “I love this song so much.”
I wrote this song initially about a woman – I thought I was writing it about a woman that I had been in a relationship with. And there was a period of time when I was living in Minneapolis, and there was a lot of emotional chaos unfurling in the space between us. It was actually quite magnificent and beautiful – how things unravel themselves in love is so stunning in some ways, and terrifying in other ways.
Inspired by the woman that I was with and deeply, deeply in love with, but then I came to realize, this is actually about me – and all of us, in some way. We are the physical embodiment of prayer, that’s what we are. It’s so unique and so special, and it just happened that at that in that point, I was like, “God is a woman’s name.” Because this person that I was in love with was a woman and identify as a woman. In some way, I was like, this is cool, breaking the construct of, what is God? What is it to pray? What is it to be alive? What is it to feel all of these things – it’s really hard to put such a big concept or philosophical rumination of spirituality and religion into something really, again, esoteric and existential. It’s hard to put it into words, but definitely, the feeling is expansive.
It’s one of my favourite songs to play live. And it’s really inked in my heart, this song. I wrote it slightly differently, with a different strumming pattern, and then Aaron started thinking of finger-picking it and I was like, “Wow.” And then he just kept layering guitars on and I was like, “This is perfect for the emotional narrative of this song.” I think this one, again, is about love and mental health. Actually, not so much my mental health in this song, but another person’s mental health, and how as humans we do tangle and we weave together in these really complicated ways. I don’t know quite how to put it into words either, this song, but it feels kind of like falling rain or something.
It was the first time in a long time that I had started to feel love again with someone and for someone and I’d just kind of given up. It was all very fleeting and beautiful and felt kind of nostalgic. We were listening to a lot of Jeff Buckley, and that was infused in this song. But it kind of followed itself into something new and morphed with Aaron’s production on it. I wasn’t sure at first. I was kind of like, it’s just too emotional ballad or something. And Aaron’s like, “No, it’s one of my favourites, it’s stunning.” And then I listened to it a few more times after taking a little bit of space from it, and I was like, “Oh, I love this song, this is so beautiful the way it turned out.”
This song felt so circular to me, in its lyrical world and its production, everything. It was totally born out of a re-cycle of relationship that I’d had years prior that I had entered into again, which was really, really bizarre. There’s so many layers to this song, and a bit of mythology in it too. I was thinking a lot about the Oracle of Delphi in Greek mythology, and I was thinking a lot about consciousness and how children come through with this innocence, without the layers of fear and judgement and history that we accumulate as we get older.
I think that’s been my life, really: a constant cycle of navigating those themes inside of myself. And not finding the balance at times in those things – being in one of them more so than the other, you know, has nearly killed me. Like, holding, holding, holding, holding – it’s so intense in my body. And then falling, falling, falling: falling in love, falling through, falling, so many different iterations and metaphors in that. Melting… Yeah, I don’t even really need to fully go into that. I can leave that open for interpretation, everyone has their own understanding of that. I love this song, it might be one of my favourites on the album.
It is about waiting, it is very much a longing song. It was one of the earlier ones that I had written in COVID, and has deep yearning and grief. I think the changing time signature, slowing down definitely helped create a sense of space or a break. It starts off in that faster finger-picking thing in some way, and then everything slows down. But it wasn’t intentional at all. I didn’t sit down and think, I’m going to try and create this sense of waiting or space, although that is in there for sure. I think sticking with the repetitive chords, which I do in a lot of my songs anyway, but specifically with this, it’s back and forth on those two chords the whole way through, so that helps give a sense of a repetitive waiting.
I think Aaron and I just kept listening to it and we were like, “This is so good.” There’s some other songs that didn’t make the album, which will come out on a B-sides soon. I guess it also ended up coming down to sequencing, trying to navigate which songs flowed together more as a world or as a family for the record. It was really hard, but it just ended up being one of the ones that we were like, “This has got to stay on there.”
I was definitely having the experience of feeling rage in my body as something that was so intense in my solar plexus that felt like fire. It felt like I was being burned alive from the inside, and I was like, “How the fuck do I process this emotion?” And it felt so ancient, so old. It felt like it was just getting triggered in present-day situations, but it wasn’t actually to do with those situations.
It was definitely hard to sing this one. [laughs] Just goes straight into it and so high and pretty full-on. I had a form for this song, Aaron and I wrote the bridge. It was another one that was nearly ditched but I felt really attached to it. I was holding on, I guess. [laughs] Another holding song. But yeah, I don’t totally remember more than that, apart from that it was really intense to sing.
you find yourself sometimes in these bizarre situations tangled in lies or versions of yourself that you’re presenting to someone else to stay safe, but that’s not who you actually are. And so, you find yourself “in love,” but it’s all just a lie. You’re further away from yourself and you’re further from that person. It’s not love at all, you’re so far from love. But that’s why I was alternating that line in ‘Time Gets Eaten’, “Love is still alive/ Love is a lie.” They both exist, and it’s like, which do you occupy? And how do you navigate it? How do you feel the difference, reconcile it?
Fever dream, that’s a really good way of putting it. It did in my mind feel like the perfect bookend to the album. Also, like you said, really autobiographical. Even just the last lines, “Please don’t wake me up/ Just tell me it’s okay to dream.” I remember putting it at the end thinking it’s kind of funny because I’ve just gone through this huge wave of expressing this whole range of emotion, this very vast weather pattern, and then at the end I’m just like, “I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it.” I wrote this song actually in Minneapolis as well, this is another Minneapolis song. It’s been written for a while, actually. I played this song on my Tiny Desk, it was the last song, and at that point, it didn’t even have a name. Indigo Sparke From the album “Hysteria“, out October 7th 2022, via Sacred Bones Records
‘Rolling Golden Holy’ is the second album by Bonny Light Horseman. The alt. folk trio consists of singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman and Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats. Their self-titled debut was a beautifully performed set of ancient folk songs. On their second outing, the songs are all original but are formed with the same folk heart and history running through their construction.
Bonny Light Horseman’s debut was a folk masterclass, re-imagining centuries-old standards with effortless grace and wonder. Those Grammy-nominated, list-topping songs not only suggested renewed possibilities for aging songbooks but also marked the arrival of a trio fully capable of reorienting the wider folk landscape. “Rolling Golden Holy” marks their return with preternatural beauty, charm, and imagination. This is a band working at the edge of modern folk. The band thrives in rendering fresh wisdom and insight from old models, whether scraps of ancient songs or the spark of entwined voices. Theirs is a space created for sharing, learning, risking, singing, and playing as one.
The new album is the band’s testament to interdependence, partnership, and trust at a moment when we crave such connections so much. Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman and Eric D. Johnson as a trio fully appreciate what they have found in one another through Bonny Light Horseman; on “Rolling Golden Holy”, we get to live inside that magic, too.
the upcoming album Rolling Golden Holy, out 7th October 2022 with 37d03d Records.
‘Anywhere But Here’ is the second studio album from North London band Sorry. Produced by Portishead’s Adrian Utley and spearheaded by the romping lead single ‘Let The Lights On’, this record paints a much darker and harder picture of life than debut album ‘925’, its collage of lyrics constructed from snippets of texts and overheard conversations from around London and evoking a sense of frustration and alienation.
Sorry – “Let The Lights On” from the forthcoming album ‘Anywhere But Here’ out 7th October 2022 on Domino Recordings.
In a week absolutely stacked with returns that we’re very excited about, our Record of the Week is “Tableau”, the return of The Orielles… A return that we’re very excited about!
Halifax’s The Orielles’ third studio album (or fourth, depending on how you specifically categorise the excellent La Vita Olistica soundtrack) is self-produced and feels very much like a band that have realised they are limited only by their own imaginations. Flowing freely through genres and styles, it is hugely impressive in its scope. A proper ‘album’ experience of sonics and emotions, really highly recommended.
Ok this could be interesting. In 1977 The Carpenters presented ‘Passage’ their first truly experimental work. It was an almost total disaster and pretty much killed their career. Cut to 45 years later and similarly winsome Halifax three piece The Orielles break out the experimental double album with ‘Tableau’. We are promised holistic jazz practices, tape loops, experimental electronica and (warning) auto-tuned vocals. Could go either way this one but it’s going to be a fascinating journey nonetheless.
Steve Earle is one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of his generation, a worthy heir to Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, his two musical mentors. Earle has distinguished himself as a master storyteller, and his songs have been recorded by a vast array of artists, including Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, the Pretenders, and more. This is the best I’ve heard from Steve Earle in a long while. It’s a tragedy that Justin Townes Earle is gone and such a terrible loss for his family. You sense the loss but even more so love from father to son. The songs have an earthier tone and a softer touch with an appealing palette of country, blues and bluegrass. It all seems to work and IMO presents Steve at his best. It reminds me of some favourite earlier records, “I Feel Alright” & “Train a Comin”.
Steve Earle – Guitar, Mandolin, Octave Mandolin, Harmonica and Vocal Chris Masterson – Guitar, Mandolin, 1 Finger Piano and Vocal Eleanor Whitmore – Fiddle, Mandolin, Organ and Vocal Ricky Ray Jackson – Pedal Steel Guitar, Dobro and Vocal Jeff Hill – Acoustic and Electric Bass, Cello and Vocal Brad Pemberton – Drums, Percussion, and Vocal
Arny Margret prepares for the release of her debut album, ‘they only talk about the weather’, with her beautiful new single of the same name. With poetic proficiency and a knack for composing melodies that bury themselves deep into the subconscious, Arny writes of loneliness and existentialism with stark relatability.
Taken from new album ‘they only talk about the weather’ out on October 21st
Babehoven have shared the final single from “Light Moving Time”. “Often” is a stunning and reflective tune on grief. If you’ve seen the band live, you know the sheer power of this song. Watch the video by Kevin Prince and read a statement from songwriter Maya Bon below.
“‘Often’ is a song about grief, about holding love for a person I’ve lost, about trying to let go and find new paths for myself. This song changed my life when I wrote it and has provided clarity for me in times of chaos. I hope that, through sharing it, others will find in it comfort and clarity, too.”
Each single showcases Maya Bon’s multi-faceted song writing and her lush instrumentals along with producer/bandmate Kevin Albert. “Often” is a salve for sour times, something that Bon and Albert created a lot of on last year’s “Nastavi, Calliope” EP.”
“a spacious acoustic ballad veering from the woozy alt-country and upbeat folk-rock previewed on ‘I’m on Your Team’ and ‘Stand It.'” —FLOOD Magazine
“There are often just muted guitar strings and a singular high synth to guide you through the sorrow of this song. The resolution it reaches is half-hearted, the kind of forgiveness where you have to make peace with it because you know it will happen again, with Bon singing, “Now this isn’t so bad / I’m not hurting like I was hurting for some years.” —Paste Magazine
Babehoven’s debut album ‘Light Moving Time’ available everywhere on October 28th, 2022 on Double Double Whammy
The Fat Angel Sings 