I recorded these classic murder ballads for the audiobook version of Katy Horan’s newly released Murder Ballads: Illustrated Lyrics and Lore.
The book unearths the true and fictional stories behind twenty traditional murder ballads, exploring the beauty and horror of the art form through stories, lyrics, and original illustrations. These versions are stripped down, featuring just me on vocals and harmonies and Milky Burgess on guitars, and some atmospherics and riffs
PS- news of my brand new album coming very soon, xxx Marissa released May 1st, 2025
Originally released in 1991 by Slash Records. Slash records signed the Verlaines, another long-running New Zealand pop band. But where the Chills produced arguably their finest record ever for Slash the first time out, the Verlaines didn’t quite deliver on the promise of their years of indie releases with 1991’s “Ready to Fly”. On previous albums like “Some Disenchanted Evening” and the singles compilation “Juvenilia”, leader Graeme Downes blended a propulsive, brooding form of Kiwi guitar pop with some considerably more sophisticated elements, including perfectly realized string, woodwind, and brass sections. (Downes has a doctorate in music; the first Verlaines album had been recorded as part of a school project, in fact.)
The album was recorded in Sydney, Australia, It was credited that “it’s reminiscent of the Beatles without being a Beatles ripoff, and many of the songs could be show music without losing any of their pop-rock atmosphere.” The songs off “Ready to Fly” prove the Verlaines have the power trio thing down, but it’s still too concerned with tasteful rather than tasty, at its busiest and most dense, the album is still about guitars (electric and acoustic), melody with a killer hook.
On “Ready to Fly”, those two elements of the Verlaines’ music are bifurcated, with only three songs featuring the typical orchestrations, this time almost entirely by themselves, and the other nine songs being unadorned, straightforward guitar pop. This division makes little sense, but aside from that caveat, the songs on “Ready to Fly” are a uniformly strong lot, with the opening “Gloom Junky” an appropriately downcast opener for a less-than-upbeat selection of tunes.
From the original demos for the album “Ready To Fly” released May 1, 2025
Simple Minds will release, “Live in the City of Diamonds“, a new live album, in April. The performance was recorded at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome, and songs include ‘Waterfront’, ‘Love Song’, ‘New Gold Dream’, ‘Promised You A Miracle’, ‘Someone Somewhere (In Summertime)’, ‘Alive and Kicking’, ‘Sanctify Yourself’ and, inevitably, ‘(Don’t You) Forget About Me’.
The new album “Live in The City of Diamonds”, out April 25th 2025. Listen to the first track ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ now.
Recorded at a sold-out Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, this release captures the band on stage in front of 17,000 people and completes the triptych of the Live in The City series dating back to 1987.
“All we wanted was to be in ‘a great live band’ and to spend our lives taking our music with us around the world. Decades later we still relish that challenge every night on tour. “Live in The City of Diamonds captures both the spirit and fever of Simple Minds live at this moment in time.” – Jim Kerr
This release is available as a 2CD set in deluxe hardcover ‘mediabook’ packaging (24 tracks) or as a 2LP vinyl package (black and ‘clear-with-glitter’ options) which has 18 tracks.
“Live in the City of Diamonds” will be released on 25 April 2025, via BMG.
Songwriter, singer, campaigner and force of nature has died, aged 66, Mike Peters, The former lead singer of The Alarm, has died aged 66. He had been battling cancer for three decades.
In 2019, Peters was awarded an MBE for services to cancer care. Since his diagnosis, he released 10 albums as The Alarm MM++, one as the singer for Big Country, played countless gigs and led several awareness-and-fundraising treks across the world. Doctors first discovered his cancer back in 1996 after he felt “a lump in his collar-bone”. After a seemingly miraculous remission, the cancer returned in 2006. Since then, Peters has dedicated a large part of his life to chronicling his battle with cancer and raising awareness and money through the Love Hope Strength foundation.
Peters’ first band The Toilets were formed in Rhyl, Wales, at the height of the punk explosion in 1977. The Alarm followed in 1981. In 1983, their single “Sixty Eight Guns” made the UK top 20 and affirmed them – alongside peers like U2, Simple Minds and Big Country – as part of a new movement of post-punk bands.
The new breed had neither the aloofness of rock’s old guard nor the nihilism or cynicism of the punks. With albums like 1984’s “Declaration” and the following year’s “Strength”, The Alarm’s statements were bold and full of bravado. In 1999, he formed Coloursound with The Cult’s guitarist Billy Duffy. He helped pioneer fan-centric events by holding The Gathering, a annual weekend event in Wales, for Peters/Alarm fans. In 2000, promoter John Giddings signed him up to support Big Country on their final tour, and billed him as The Alarm 2000.
The following year, he formed Dead Men Walking a kind of ‘punk supergroup’, with Kirk Brandon (Spear of Destiny) and a revolving cast that included Pete Wylie (of the Mighty Wah!), Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols), Captain Sensible (the Damned) In the years between 2017-23, he released seven albums.
Personal matters and changes in musical fashions, brought the band to an end in 1991. Peters continued with a solo career, He was always a beacon of positivity, he was an inspiration to many – a force of nature who took the energy of punk and transformed its nihilism into something positive and inspirational.
The Prestatyn-born singer leaves behind his wife, Jules, 58, and two sons, Dylan, 20, and Evan, 18.
An eight-time GRAMMY winner, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and GRAMMY Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, Buddy Guy (b. 1936) has long been counted among the greatest guitarists of all time. A key figure in the Chicago blues scene, whose work as a singer, songwriter and guitarist always straddled the line of blues and rock’n’roll, Guy has influenced multiple generations of musicians (Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Gary Clark Jr. and John Mayer, to name a few) during his seven-decade-long career.
After relocating to Chicago in the late ’50s, the self-taught, Louisiana-born artist found his footing in the industry, releasing a pair of solo albums, as well as a handful of projects with harmonica player Junior Wells in the ’60s. Those lucky enough to catch Guy in concert, however, were privy to the full breadth of his talents—from his awe-inspiring extended guitar solos to his soulful vocals. Vanguard Records recognized this and sought to capture the power of his electrifying performances with 1968’s “This Is Buddy Guy!”.
Recorded live at the New Orleans House—an intimate venue in Berkeley, CA—the album puts listeners in the front row, as Guy performs original compositions (including his languid “I Had a Dream Last Night” and the funky “24 Hours of the Day”) with well-chosen covers, such as Little Willie John’s “Fever” and Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood.” Accompanied by a tight-knit band—including saxophonists A.C. Reed and Bobby Fields plus bassist Jack Meyers—Guy is truly at the peak of his prowess.
“Buddy Guy is the most dynamic and influential guitarist to have emerged from the Chicago blues scene, with gospel-shaded vocal chops to match his instrumental skills. He is at his focused best on “This Is Buddy Guy!,” writes Scott Billington. “Whether he is playing a simmering line behind his vocal, or spluttering out a solo with the frenzy of a machine gun, his formidable talents are always at the service of sublime passion.”
One of the most compelling artists of the past five years found herself fully formed in 2024. Nilüfer Yanya’s “My Method Actor” is all the promise of her previous two (highly laudable) full-length records realized with a new assurance. That may seem in contrast with the album’s themes of transition, but one has to be firm in their understanding of self to embrace such transformations — or “Mutations,” as Yanya sings on one standout track. Collaborating closely with producer Will Archer, her smoky vocals and intricate guitar work have never sounded so authentically method.
Speaking about “Method Actor” Nilüfer describes how the concept for the song came together: “I was researching method acting – and from what I read, it’s based on finding this one memory in your life, a life-altering, life-changing memory. The reason why some people find method acting traumatic and maybe not safe mentally, is because you’re always going back to that moment. It can be good or bad but you’re always feeding off the energy, something that’s defined you – and that’s what helps you become the character. It’s a bit like being a musician. When you’re performing, you’re still trying to invoke the energy and emotion of when you first wrote it, in that moment. It definitely feels like you’re having to recreate or step into that headspace.”
While writing “My Method Actor” Nilüfer retreated into the studio with her creative partner, Wilma Archer (Sudan Archives/MF DOOM/Celeste). She had toured her second album, “Painless”, for a year and entered a period of transition, between albums, between record companies, between homes. “My Method Actor” deals a lot with the idea of movement from one part of life and into another.
“This is the most intense album, in that respect,” Yanya says. “Because it’s only been us two. We didn’t let anyone else into the bubble.”
“My Method Actor”was released 13th September via Ninja Tune
“Hi my name is Ezra Furman this is the press release for my new record.
“Goodbye Small Head” is the name of this record. Twelve songs, twelve variations on the experience of completely losing control, whether by weakness, illness, mysticism, BDSM, drugs, heartbreak or just living in a sick society with one’s eyes open. These songs are vivid with overwhelm. They’re not about someone going off the rails, they are inside that person’s heart. The songwriting here is a revision to William Wordsworth’s famous proclamation that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” I can agree with that, except for the tranquillity part. This poetry, my poetry, arrived in the midst of the storm. It was written as I teetered toward the edge. (I did the edits once I was safe again.)
The band and I had had a run of records that were very communal, very first person plural. We, us, ours. I was trying to exist in and create a shared space with my audience, make anthems for taking care of one another in dark times. But there does come a time when a woman is left alone in a room to unravel. And you need music for those times too.
“GSH” also reflects a band reaching a new peak of our powers. If I were a music journalist, I would call this an orchestral emo prog-rock record sprinkled with samples. Thank goodness I’m not a music journalist! I think of this music as cinematic and intense. A friend of mine said it sounded like “the coolest movie soundtrack of 1997,” and I’m quite pleased with that description. We’ve incorporated a small string section into eight of the twelve tracks, and are using samples for the first time—nothing you’d recognize, just some uncredited singing that Sam found online, chopped into beautifully evocative bits. Other than that, this record features something that’s become nearly an anachronism: a band that’s been playing real instruments together for over a decade, intuitively in touch with each other as musicians. Four players in a room together who know exactly how to respond to one another.
We recorded in Chicago with Brian Deck producing; a return to both my city of origin and my producer of origin, since Deck produced my first rock’n’roll records many years ago (“Banging Down the Doors” (2007) and “Inside the Human Body” (2008) by Ezra Furman & the Harpoons). In some way I think I was trying to return to a much younger mindset, when all the intensity and fear and emotion of life was less mediated by adult coping mechanisms. When it was all brand new with no filter.
Though I wrote parts of it earlier, I think the making of this album really began on the morning of April 11th 2023, when I woke suddenly ill, limped into the bathroom and lost consciousness. At the hospital they gave me all the tests and told me that actually, I wasn’t sick, and I could go home now. (Thanks, fellas!) I stayed in bed for months, exhausted and in pain, no doctor offering any convincing explanation or cure.
After a while I began haemorrhaging songs. Many of these songs arrived unexpectedly and left my body violently. All of them seemed to be steeped in the helpless transcendence of being suddenly overcome, undone. Lush album opener “Grand Mal,” named after the outdated term for a major seizure, and its following companion “Sudden Storm” were written in one hypomanic sitting after talking to an epileptic friend about the mystical quality of certain epileptic seizures. “Jump Out” is a panicked rocker for realizing you are going to have to leap from a moving vehicle because the driver has no intention of letting you out.
“Power of the Moon” is an existentialist wrestling match with whoever’s in charge of the universe, and “Submission” is the combination of dread and relief felt when you realize the long-suffering “good guys” have no chance against 21st-century forces of evil. And that’s just Side A.
Is it dark? Yeah! Is it also wonder-struck, laced with psychedelic beauty, triumphant in its wounded way? Yeah again. And by the end of it, the whole thing flames out in a burst of good old-fashioned rock and roll, a desperate cover of underappreciated genius Alex Walton’s bottomlessly yearning “I Need the Angel.”
The title, “Goodbye Small Head” is a lyric from the 1999 Sleater-Kinney single “Get Up,” a phrase breathlessly, almost ecstatically intoned by Corin Tucker as she contemplates death and the dissolution of the self. There’s something about that dissolution that is both horrible and absolutely gorgeous. We fear losing ourselves and we want it more than anything. That’s where this record lives. That’s what this kind of music offers us: a look over the edge into the frightening and beautiful realm that lies beyond ordinary life. Have a look with me, won’t you?”
The Beths have signed to Anti- Records, and, with that announcement comes plenty more news. The New Zealand indie-rockers are heading out on a lengthy tour of North America and Europe, and they’ve shared a video for the new song “Metal.” It’s the first new music the Beths have released since the expanded edition of their 2022 album, “Expert in a Dying Field“.
In a statement, singer-guitarist Elizabeth Stokes said “Metal” is about living in a human body and her personal “health journey” as of late: “For parts of the last few years, I kind of felt like my body was a vehicle that had carried me pretty well thus far but was breaking down, something I had little to no control over. All of the steps in the Rube Goldberg machine of life are so unlikely, and yet here we are in it. I have a hunger and a curiosity for learning about the world around me, and for learning about myself. And despite all the ways that my body feels like a broken machine, I still marvel at the complexity of such a machine.”
She continued: “I can hold that knowledge in one hand, and yet with the other hand I can point to my reflection and just be like ‘you are shit.’ Or ‘ugly.’ Or ‘worthless.’ I can reliably respond to any suggestion that I might be able to achieve any small thing with ‘no.’ And these are variations of the ‘short word’ referenced in the song.”
The Beths are: Elizabeth Stokes, Jonathan Pearce, Benjamin Sinclair, Tristan Deck
The Beths’ tour begins in Dublin, Ireland, on September 18. From there, they’ll perform across Europe and the United Kingdom before heading to North America to perform in dozens of cities in the United States and Canada. Opening select concerts are Phoebe Rings, Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie, Squirrel Flower, and Illuminati Hotties.
Cinema Music Group and Killphonic Records have released the new Neil Young tribute album “Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young, Vol. 1”. Featured on the 14-track compilation is Fiona Apple’s cover of Young’s 1972song “Heart of Gold.” from his album “Harvest“.
Apple co-produced her “Heart of Gold” cover with Dave Palmer. The track features Palmer on piano, Reggie Hamilton on bass, and Joey Waronker on drums.
Proceeds from the compilation featuring many different artists “Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young, Vol. 1” will benefit the Bridge School, the Hillsborough, California, organization that Neil Young’s late ex-wife, Pegi Young co-founded to aid children with physical and speech impairments. A second volume of Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young is also forthcoming.
Performing in front of a crowd is fun, but there’s not much to celebrate about the loneliness that creeps up during the lulls of being on tour. Sunflower Bean debuted their new single “Nothing Romantic,” which captures those feelings of dread after being away from the stage and on your own.
Sunflower Bean have shared their new single ‘Nothing Romantic’, taken from their upcoming fourth album ‘Mortal Primetime’.
“‘Nothing Romantic’ is about rejecting the myth of the tortured artist—realizing that the joys of creativity don’t have to come from the lows of misery,” the band explain. “The video mirrors this journey, capturing our lives as touring musicians in between nightmarish performances. From green rooms to lost highways, we travel from town to town, feeling alive only in the escape of our show. There’s tension between the connection and solitude; on stage, we’re together, sharing our music with others but later isolation and the price of our sacrifices creep in.”
The band — comprising vocalist Julia Cumming, guitarist Nick Kivlen, and drummer Olive Faber — said in a statement. The Sophia Feuer and Tyler Macri-directed video captures the band walking away from some masked villains that haunt and attack the trio during the performances.
The new single is set to be featured on their upcoming album, “Mortal Primetime“, which arrives April 25th. They led the album with the single “Champagne Taste.” The upcoming album follows their EP “Shake”, which dropped in September.
“You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” Cumming said of the album. “This is ours, and that can’t be taken away by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, where we are now, is what we’ve always fought for.”
The Fat Angel Sings 