The next new single from Big Thief’s forthcoming effort “U.F.O.F.” (Due May 3rd on 4AD Records) has landed: the rustic “Cattails,” which follows on from the album’s gorgeous title track, released alongside its announcement in late February. “Cattails” opens on Adrianne Lenker’s jangling, finger-picked guitar and James Krivchenia’s steadfast drums before it’s later built out with a slow-rising synth hum and gleaming piano stabs. “Going back home to the great lakes / where the cattail sways / with the lonesome loon / riding that train in late June / with the windows wide by my side,” sings Lenker, her thoughts in transit somewhere between civilization and nature—she later insists, “you don’t need to know why / you don’t need to know why / when you cry,” deferring to the mysteries that run deep within the human heart.
Lenker recalls how the band’s new single came together in a statement:
“Cattails” came about while we were at the studio in Washington in the pine forest. Writing it was just one of those electric multicolored waves of connectivity just sweeping through my body. I stayed up late finishing the song and the next morning was stomping around playing it over and over again. We thought why not just record it, so James sat at the drums and we practiced, and by the time we’d finished practicing, Dom Monks—our engineer—had already sneakily set up mics and recorded it. It was beautiful that he’d captured it right away because when James and I were playing, it felt like a little portal in the fabric had opened and we were just flying. Listening back to it makes me cry sometimes.
‘Cattails’ by Big Thief, from the new album ‘U.F.O.F.’, released May 3rd on 4AD.
The Waterboys have detailed more information about their upcoming album “Where the Action Is”. To be
Released in May through Cooking Vinyl, the album’s ten tracks have a variety of influences with nods to The Clash’s Mick Jones (‘London Mick’), Robert Burns’ poem ‘Green Grow the Rashes-O’ (‘Then She Made The Lasses-O’) and Kenneth Grahame’s famous book The Wind In The Willows (‘Piper At the Gates of Dawn’) which was recorded all in one take at Real World studios last Summer. The set features regular cohorts Steve Wickham and Brother Paul, and occasional Paul Weller producer Simon Dine worked on ‘And There is Love’.
The first glimpse of the album, the single ‘Right Side Of Heartbreak (Wrong Side Of Love)’ can be previewed below. Where the Action follows up the top ten success of Out of All This Blue. Essentially now just Mike Scott and friends, it’s his 15th album, and will be available as a ten-track CD, 21-track two-CD deluxe (with remixes) and on black vinyl. The official store offers a selection of exclusive signed bundles and red/black marbled vinyl.
The band will be touring the UK across May, and Europe over Summer, as well as popping up at the odd festival such as Hay, Cropredy and Skye Live. Where The Action Is released on 24th May 2019.
Last fall, I went to Nashville and made a record. My friend Jason Isbell produced it and the 400 Unit backed me up. It was a blast to work on.
The album is called ‘Fever Breaks’ and it comes out April 26th. I’m so excited to share it! You can listen to “Old Black Magic” now.
When two of the best songwriters alive get together to make an album, you can bet your record collection we’re all in. Josh Ritter’s forthcoming “Fever Breaks” was produced by Jason Isbell and features members of the 400 Unit throughout, including Amanda Shires and her always-illustrious fiddle. The celebrated lyricist teaming up with Isbell and co. sounds too good to be true, but it’s in fact reality and from what we’ve heard so far, Fever Breaks is sure to be as stunning as anything in Ritter’s acclaimed catalogue. His wizened introspective lyrics paired with the strong southern rock of the 400 Unit is a match made in heaven—er, Nashville.
Black Belt Eagle Scout aka Katherine Paul, released one of the most arresting singles of 2018. But “Soft Stud” was a red herring. By which I don’t mean a fluke of quality, rather that it’s just one facet of her deeply rich debut album, “Mother of My Children”. Nevertheless, the grungy defiance of that single was a striking introduction to Paul’s world, one she experiences as an indigenous, queer, feminist woman.
Paul returned to her roots to record her graceful and emotionally frank debut record, both literally and spiritually. She was drawn to Anacortes Unknown Recording Studio in Washington State as she was a fan of albums made there, that and it just happened to be 15 minutes from her parents’ house. “It was just one week, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna take this as a vacation,'” Paul says. “So I just drove all of my gear up and stayed with my folks, and recorded this album.”
If Paul’s description of her homeward-bound retreat to make her debut record sounds cozy and casual, the outcome is anything but. “Soft Stud” is described by Paul as a queer anthem, one that mirrors the frustration of wanting what you can’t have, and those feelings are played out with steely-eyed intensity. “Having [had] that frustration build up so much at the end of the song I wanted to go into this guitar solo to be like ‘fuck it,’ you know?” she explains of the track’s blistering crescendo.
Although the Native American music of Paul’s childhood remains a pervasive influence, the grungy fuzz tone of the guitars hints at an additional entry point. “I was really into the riot grrrl scene and grunge music. I learned how to play guitar on ‘Doll Parts’ by Hole,” she says. Yet the emotional honesty that runs through the album appears to have its roots in her decision to return home to record it. As she explains, “It’s so beautiful up there, and I feel most comfortable where I’m from. That’s where my land is, that’s where my ancestors are from, so it just felt right to do it there.”
It’s notable that Paul plays all of the instruments on “Mother of My Children”, pointing to her tenacity as well as ownership of her experience and creativity. “It’s so personal. That’s why I do all of it myself,” she explains. “I also feel that I do all of it myself because I can, I have the ability.”
The album was made in the wake of a grueling period in her life, which included the breakdown of a long-term relationship and the death of a friend and mentor. The comfort of her surroundings ostensibly allowed her room to vent all of her grief and frustrations most fully. “One of the ways that I heal is through playing music and playing guitar, through singing, just trying to be creative and getting feelings out,” Paul says.
Happily, the tumultuous period of her life two years ago has abated, and she cheerfully reports, “I’m in a great place in my life and I feel very grateful that people will get to hear the album.”
Black Belt Eagle Scout -the album Mother Of My Children – Out now!
Chai is a band who screams yes to joy, and Punk is a record written in earnest about being yourself, loving your friends, and not caring about what anyone else thinks about the way you live your life.”
Chai released their epic second LP ‘Punk’ via Burger Records on Friday and the reviews across the board are all amazing! Check out the album below and see them here in May..at the Bodega Social.
This Japanese bubblegum disco-punk band Chai. are getting great reviews fresh off the drop of their new album Punk at SXSW they rightfully received Best New Music from Bloggers Pitchfork, each of their sets were boiling over with more glittering energy than seen on stage in recent memory. Pop perfection and iconic matching pink and orange outfits, like some sort of guitar-wielding collective of superheroes, SXSW convinced everyone if anyone’s gonna save us, it’ll be Chai.
Now they have shared a video for the album’s “Curly Adventure.” The band’s bassist and primary artistic director YUUKI designed the animated video, which was animated by LA-based artist/animator Sean Solomon.
But the most fun act of South By South West was Chai, the jubilant four-piece rock band from Japan who charmed the hell out of everyone who saw them this week. Decked out in fitting shades of pink, all four women sustained their grins for the entirety of their set, during which they played songs from their delightful, uproarious new album PUNK. Toggling between Japanese and English, Chai destroyed any premonition of a language barrier. Also, the only love song ever written is about dumplings.
The Raconteurs have announced a new album, “Help Us Stranger”, It’s their first new album in 11 years, since their 2008-released second album, Consolers of the Lonely. “Help Us Stranger” is due out June 21st via Third Man Recordings. No new music accompanies the album announcement, but it includes the remixed and remastered versions of two songs the band shared back in December: “Sunday Driver” and “Now That You’re Gone”.
The band features Jack White, Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler. The Raconteurs formed in 2005 and released their debut album, Broken Boy Soldiers, in 2006. Lawrence and Keeler were also in The Greenhornes and Lawrence has also played with White in The Dead Weather. Benson is known as a solo artist and of course so is White, who released a new solo album, Boarding House Reach, in 2018 via Third Man and Columbia. The band is known as The Saboteurs in Australia, due to another band down under named The Raconteurs.
Jack White and Brendan Benson wrote all the tracks, except for “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness),” which is a Donovan cover. The Raconteurs produced the album, which was recorded at Third Man Studio in Nashville, TN, and engineered by Joshua V. Smith. Vance Powell and The Raconteurs mixed the album at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. The album also features keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Dean Fertita (The Dead Weather, Queens of the Stone Age), as well as Lillie Mae Rische and her sister Scarlett Rische.
A special Third Man Vault edition of the album will include the album on 180-gram marble vinyl and a 7-inch featuring early demo recordings of “Help Me Stranger” and “Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying),” as well as a Raconteurs bandana designed by Keeler and an exclusive Raconteurs slip mat.
The Raconteurs Announce First New Album in 11 Years, “Help Us Stranger” Due Out June 21 via Third Man Reordings.
Brooklyn five-piece Barrie are releasing their debut album, “Happy to Be Here”, on May 3rd via Winspear. Now they have shared another song from the album, “Saturated.” Previously they shared its lead single, “Clovers” Then they shared another song from the album, “Darjeeling,” via a video for the song.
Barrie’s leader Barrie Lindsay had this to say about the song in a press release: “This song is pretty pure…. It came out fully formed, sounding mostly like how it sounds now. It’s minimal and exposed, kind of vulnerable but in a confident way. I want people to relate to that state of pure, open saturation. I want this song to feel like a crush.”
Lindsay wrote the album’s songs late at night alone in her apartment, plays various instruments on the album (guitar, piano, synth, and bass), and co-produced the album with Jake Aron (Snail Mail, Solange, Grizzly Bear). But Barrie is not simply a solo project, the band also features Dominic Apa, Spurge Carter, Noah Prebish, and Sabine Holler, who had to record her backing vocals remotely from Germany due to visa issues. The band members are from all over, having previously lived in Boston, Baltimore, Upstate New York, London, and São Paulo via Berlin, but came together in New York. The band’s pleasing dream pop/indie pop that would appeal to fans of Yumi Zouma.
“The scaffolding of this album is moving to New York and finding these people that make up the band,” Barrie says in a press release. “We’re very different, but we cover each other’s gaps personally and creatively, and are eager to learn from each other.”
Barrie’s debut album ‘Happy To Be Here’ – out May 03, 2019 on Winspear:
The Dodo’s have shared a brand new song, “The Surface.” The stand alone single is out today via Polyvinyl Records. Singer/guitarist Meric Long had this to say about the song in a press release: “Back in the fall after finishing our first tour in what seemed like ages, a bunch of ideas that were floating around seemed to converge, and this song ‘The Surface’ is the first result of that. For those guitar nerds out there, I recently acquired a Recording King parlor guitar, it doesn’t look like much on paper but it is magical and I am squeezing it like a life raft through the next batch of songs. Perhaps it is age, or just compounded cynicism, but there is an overwhelming gratitude that I feel when any small bit of inspiration sheds it’s light, and the path ahead seems relatively clear.”
Band Members
Meric Long, Logan Kroeber
The Dodos released a new album, Certainty Waves, last year via Polyvinyl. The band also features percussionist Logan Kroeber.
“The Surface” is the new single from The Dodos, out everywhere March 29th, 2019.
When Julia Shapiro flew home from a cancelled Chastity Belt tour in April 2018, everything in her life felt out of control. Dealing with health issues, freshly out of a relationship, and in the middle of an existential crisis, she realized halfway through a tour supporting her band’s third album I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone that she was going through too much to continue. “I was really struggling; I was really depressed. I felt like I couldn’t sing or be a person,” Shapiro recalls. “At that point I couldn’t even imagine playing a show again, I was so over it.”
Returning home to a newly empty Seattle one-bedroom apartment, Shapiro had wanted for a long time to learn how to record and mix her own music, and out of the uncertainty of the future of her music career and her health, she began to record the songs that would become Perfect Version, her solo debut for Hardly Art Records. What she created in the space of ten songs is an intimate and beautifully self-aware examination of feeling lost in the life you’ve created for yourself. It’s an album of shimmering guitars and layered vocals that feels vast in the emotional depth it conveys and masterful in the way each song is intentionally crafted and recorded.
Throughout the record Shapiro tries on different ways of living, all thematically centered around the idea of what it would be like to be a perfect version of yourself. “How can someone be so blindly confident/I wanna know that trick,” she wonders on “Natural,” the opening track that begins using another person as a mirror and then pans back to a bigger picture: what would it take to really love yourself? The album is peppered with ideas of what self-improvement could look like—whether it’s learning a skill and living out in the woods, going to bed at a reasonable hour, or even more playful, deeply relatable lines like “I should really delete my Instagram.”
Shapiro has a knack for turning simple images into something profound, drawing influence from songwriters like Elliott Smith to capture complicated moods. The everyday act of circling the block trying to find a parking spot becomes a metaphor for trying and feeling like you can’t quite get anything done. “All my problems feel like paper/I can finally rip them up,” she sings on the title track, describing a moment of lightness in hanging out with friends who can find humor in your failure “at least I have my friends to laugh at what I’ve done.”
Over the course of a tumultuous year of trying to find stability amidst depression and surgery, Shapiro ultimately rediscovered the parts of music that she loved through the process. Her perfectionist qualities create an album that shines in tiny lyrical moments and meticulous guitar parts. “When the rest of my life felt out of control, I felt like this was my chance to be in control of everything,” says Shapiro. She plays all the instruments (save for a mouth trumpet solo by Darren Hanlon and guest violin by Annie Truscott) and after recording and mixing the first batch of four songs at the Vault studio with Ian LeSage decided to record the final six tracks alone in her apartment, adding drums in the studio later and learning to mix them with the help of her friend David Hrivnak. Perfect Version is a fully realized vision from a gifted songwriter finding a more intimate voice. “So what comes next?” she questions on the album closer “Empty Cup” which explores the quiet satisfaction of being alone with yourself and creating a blank slate. “A lasting sense of self,” she concludes.
Julia Shapiro from Chastity Belt makes her solo debut on the intimate, deeply personal Perfect Version, out June 16th.
“Natural” is the lead single from Perfect Version, the solo debut of Julia Shapiro, singer/guitarist of Chastity Belt and Childbirth. Perfect Version is out Friday, June 14th.
“This album is representative of my life over the past couple years, so it’s a statement of who I am as a songwriter,” says Molly Tuttle. “I love songwriting and I love listening to songwriters and I love singing, so I think this album puts those two — singing and songwriting — in the forefront more than what I’ve done in the past.”
For someone with her serenely disciplined, inquisitive intellect, it probably worked to Tuttle’s advantage that she was schooled from a young age, as many bluegrass prodigies are, in family-band, fiddle-camp and communal-jam environments, receiving one-on-one instruction from her Bay Area music-teacher father. Tuttle was encouraged to pore over the sophisticated techniques of flatpicking legends Clarence White, Doc Watson and Tony Rice, and also grew fascinated with the riveting, spindly lead lines that David Rawlings has played in his old-timey singer-songwriter duo with Gillian Welch. A few years at Berklee College of Music further expanded Tuttle’s horizons with extensive studies of theory and contemporary songwriting, as well as encounters with other virtuosic, broad-minded young musicians. In Nashville, she wound her way through bluegrass, progressive acoustic, singer-songwriter, Americana and folk-pop circles, picking up collaborators and recognition in each.
Tuttle wrote or co-wrote every song on “When You’re Ready”, including “Million Miles,” an unfinished song started by Steve Poltz and Jewel in the 1990s that Poltz mentioned in a songwriting session with Tuttle. Her most personal songs, Tuttle says, usually flow out when she’s alone. But she’s also learned a lot about the writing process by working with others, she says. And there’s nothing like a set time and place, and someone else’s presence, to get things moving.
“I think usually when I get writer’s block it’s because I’m just vetoing my own ideas,” she explains, “so that’s when co-writing really helps me break out of my headspace that I’m in and start writing and become less precious with the writing.”
A number of other accomplished female writer-instrumentalists with expansive sensibilities emerged just a few years ahead of her — among them Abigail Washburn, Sierra Hull, Aoife O’Donovan, Sarah Jarosz and Sara Watkins, the last three collectively known as I’m With Her. But Tuttle has had to flesh out for herself what it looks like to do the thing that she alone does: shaping tuneful introspection around her flatpicking abilities on the guitar, a lead instrument that’s still strongly male-identified. (She was the first woman to even be nominated as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitarist of the Year, and has won the category two years in a row.)
Most of the coverage rightfully focuses on her precise and skillful playing, not her gender. But out in the world, the ghosts of “pretty good for a girl” still linger. Tuttle’s had a few “uncomfortable moments,” she says, like being skipped over in jams when she was younger or encountering teachers who “just didn’t know what to do with having a female guitar student.”
“I think what I mostly get sometimes from people is surprise or, ‘Oh, I feel extra attention on me because I’m a woman playing guitar,’” she says. “People definitely still focus on the fact that I’m a woman, which, in a perfect world I’d like to just be seen as a guitar player, not a woman guitar player.”
On When You’re Ready, Tuttle applies remarkable precision to her pursuit of clarity. That’s even a central theme of her lyrics: consciously reckoning with indecision or intuition, honestly acknowledging incompatibility, cultivating intimacy based on people seeing each other for who they are. With handsomely crafted melodies that gently insinuate themselves into the memory, she wrote some of the 11 songs alone and others in collaboration with kindred spirits like Sarah Siskind, Maya de Vitry and Kai Welch. (Tuttle’s choice of producer, Ryan Hewitt, has worked on rootsy pop projects by The Lumineers and The Avett Brothers, and her cast of guest pickers and vocalists includes Hull, Jason Isbell, Billy Strings, Nat Smith and Butterfly Boucher, all of whom speak to the flexibility she’s cultivating.)
There are moments when Tuttle bends ancient-sounding modal, Appalachian scales to her ideas, like during the slow-burning folk-rocker “Sit Back and Watch It Roll” and “Take the Journey,” a tune percussively propelled by her innovative use of frailing banjo techniques on guitar. She’s made her playing just as much a point of interest as her breathy singing. During the wistful “Make My Mind Up,” she takes liberties with both her vocal and guitar phrasing, singing dreamy curlicues that give way to cascading, bluesy six-string runs. In “Sleepwalking,” which features a cursive, atmospheric string arrangement, she exhales long, lilting lines over her crisp, rolling, arpeggiated guitar pattern.
Tuttle’s quivering, staccato delivery of the winsome hook in “Don’t Let Go” showcases her affinities for folk-pop. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call “Light Came In (Power Went Out)” the album’s power-pop track, thanks to her sly, sticky vocal syncopation over the simple, driving groove. Though she cedes the foreground to an electric guitarist for most of it, her precise acoustic notes burst through during an instrumental vamp, hurtling forward in a startlingly different rhythmic cadence. As with all of Tuttle’s licks, every imaginative note rings clear.
new album ‘When You’re Ready’ out April 5, 2019 on Compass Records
The Waterboys have detailed more information about their upcoming album “Where the Action Is”. To be
