Dave Grohl and producer Greg Kurstin closed out their Hanukkah Sessions covers series on Thursday night with a cover of “Rock & Roll” by The Velvet Underground, the iconic New York City art rock band fronted by nice Jewish boy Lou Reed.
Launched on the first night of the Festival of Lights last Thursday, the series features Grohl and Kurstin covering a different song by a different Jewish artist each night. Throughout the last eight days, the duo has paid tribute to Beastie Boys, Drake, Mountain, Peaches, Bob Dylan, Elastica, and The Knack.
This project, which initially began as a silly idea, grew to represent something much more important to me. It showed me that the simple gesture of spreading joy and happiness goes a long way, and as we look forward, we should all make an effort to do so, no matter how many candles are left to light on the menorah.
Toda Raba to Greg for being a musical genius and spending 2 1/2 days barnstorming through these songs together. You never fail to amaze me. Big round of applause for Markus Rutledge, the poor soul that had only 24 hours (8 days in a row) to churn out each of these videos for us! You deserve a medal for sleep deprivation! Huge hearts for the force of nature known as Peaches! You brought the real. And, of course to all of you for joining in on the fun. I hope that you enjoyed watching.
The relaxed take begins with a bit of levity, as Grohl counts off the song only to quickly drop on of his drumsticks. Unfazed, the camera keeps rolling and the two try again and nail the classic Loaded track—kudos to Dave for that fine, fine falsetto. As the duo leans into the song’s final “it was alright” refrain, we see a clip show of sorts from throughout the last eight days showing everything from the editing and recording process to Grohl posing with a menorah.
Along with the final video of the series, Grohl offered up some reflections and thanks laced with his impressive new arsenal of Hebrew phrases. Read the note from Dave Grohl reflecting on the Hanukkah Sessions. As 2020 comes to a close and another Hanukkah ends (my first!) I am reminded of the two things that have gotten me through this year: music and hope.
So, sing along one last time to “Rock and Roll” by The Velvet Underground, a song about music and hope, and let’s keep spreading the joy and happiness. It goes a long way…..
Pedro the Lion has always been David Bazan, but it took a long time to get back there. In August 2016, during what he now recognizes as his lowest point, Bazan was touring the country alone in an aging minivan and found himself in his hometown of Phoenix, AZ. In need of a break from the road, he spent a night off at his grandparents’ house instead of driving on to San Diego. Before leaving town the next morning, after realizing that even the most familiar places can become unrecognizable, Bazan gave himself the gift of a quick detour past the house he grew up in, and on the way, experienced a breakthrough – one that would lead him both forward and back to another home he had built many years before.
From the beginning, Pedro the Lion didn’t work like the bands Bazan had played drums in, where each player came up with their own parts. Instead, like scripting scenes of dialogue for actors to play with, Bazan recorded and arranged all of the skeletal accompaniments for his obsessively introspective lyrics and spare melodies. Each player would then learn their parts and, together as a band, they brought the skeleton to life. While bandmates played on a few recordings, Bazan often played all or most of the instruments himself.
“I found so much joy working this way,” Bazan remembers. “It came naturally and yielded a feeling and a sound that couldn’t have existed by any other process. At the same time, I was also aware that not everyone wanted to play in a band where the singer wrote all the parts and might perform them on the record. Someone even suggested it might not be a valid approach to having a band in the first place. Being insecure and wanting to find camaraderie, I became conflicted about my natural process.”
By 2002, after recording Control, the high rate of turnover in the band finally caused Bazan to ditch his “natural process” in favour of a collaborative writing process. When, after a couple more years, this move did nothing to stabilize turnover, Bazan was perplexed. In November 2005, Bazan decided to stop doing Pedro the Lion altogether.
Ironically, Bazan didn’t see “going solo” as a chance to revert back to his original process of writing and playing all the parts. For the next decade Pedro the Lion felt off limits, even forgotten, like a childhood home Bazan had moved out of. He pushed forward with releasing solo albums & relentless touring in living rooms and clubs, through every part of the US and beyond, sometimes with a band, but mostly on his own. It took a toll on his family and more acutely on himself. By the summer of 2016, he still hadn’t found the personal clarity or the steady collaboration he’d been seeking and was at the end of his rope.
“I had abandoned my natural way of working in the hopes of creating space for a consistent band to write with…and it hadn’t worked. So I got a rehearsal space, mic’d up drums, bass, and guitar, and really leaned into my original process again. It immediately felt like like home. Before long I realized it also felt like Pedro the Lion.”
In June 2018, with Bazan on bass, vocals, and arrangement writing, Erik Walters on guitar and backing vocals, and Sean Lane on drums, Pedro the Lion went into Studio X and Hall of Justice with producer Andy Park to create Phoenix, the first new Pedro album in 15 years.
The songs themselves are the result of mining your past for who you are now. On opening track “Yellow Bike,” Bazan encapsulates a core ache he’s been exploring since 1998’s.
“Phoenix” also deals with having to be better to yourself in order to be better to others on “Quietest Friend,” and harkens back to Control’s “Priests and Paramedics” with a story about EMTs facing a gruesome scene, and storytelling as coping mechanism, on “Black Canyon.” It bears witness to both what was around and what was inside, with the signature kindness and forgiveness that lightens Pedro the Lion’s darkest notes.
The result is a twisting, darkly hopeful introspection into home and what it means to go back, if you ever can. It is rock and roll wrapped in tissue paper, its hard edges made barely soft. Every melody is careful, a delicate upswing buoyed by guitar lines that hold each tender feeling together like string before ripping them apart to see what’s inside. It is an ode to the place he still loves despite how alien it can appear to him now. It is the story of a life from the beginning, but not a linear one. This life is a circle, and Phoenix goes back to that first point, to show that when we are looking for home we’ll eventually run into it again, whether it’s in the desert, in a rehearsal space, or on a stage.
Cory Hanson has led the Los Angeles psych-rock band Wand for the past seven years, and they just released their Laughing Matter album last year. But Hanson also makes music without his band. Hanson released his solo debut The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo in 2016, and he got together with his friend Ty Segall to drop a couple of benefit tracks earlier this year.
Hanson’s has a new solo album due out next year is called Pale Horse Rider, and it promises a way-out take on country-rock. First single “Paper Fog” is a warm, strummy chug that slowly piles on more and more spacey effects. Hanson’s voice is a relatively plainspoken tenor, but his guitar aims for the astral plane.
Setlist: Wonder [Wand, Laughing Matter] – 0:21 Blue Cloud [Wand, Plum] – 5:25 The Trap (just the intro) [Wand, Plum] – 8:50 Ordinary People [Cory Hanson, The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo] – 9:58 Cosmic Dancer (cover) [T. Rex, Electric Warrior] – 13:00 Morning Rainbow [Wand, 1000 Days] – 18:47 Rio Grande [Wand, Laughing Matter] – 22:10 Candy Says (cover) [The Velvet Underground, S/T] – 26:02 Growing Up Boys [Wand, Ganglion Reef] – 30:13
Go buy all his albums on bandcamp!!! Laughing Matter (LP, out 4/19/19) Perfume (EP, 2018) Plum (LP, 2017) 1000 Days (LP, 2015) Golem (LP, 2015) Ganglion Reef (LP, 2014)
ZEBULON SESSIONS PROUDLY PRESENTS A SANS AUDIENCE PERFORMANCE BY CORY HANSON PREMIERING JULY 9 2020 AT 7PMPST FILMMAKERS / BRANDON KELLY & MATT DOYLE & KEVIN LUNA & CHRIS SLATER & BRIAN LEE HUGHES
“I’ve been driving through the darkness…through the smoke and fire on the ground”
Lingering at the remains of a campfire before dawn, with the politics of the personal burnt into ash, running his stick through what’s left, Wand singer/guitarist Cory Hanson is reflecting on moments of stepping further into himself, finding the ultimate big sky country on the inside of his skull. It’s a combination of songs and sounds that journey through bleak and broken territory and places of sweet, lush remove and it adds up to the best record he’s been involved in yet: his second solo album, “Pale Horse Rider”.
The session was loose and flowed onto tape well. First takes were mostly best takes. Fuelled with DNA lifted from country-rock cut with native psych and prog strands, Cory Hanson guided his craft toward the cosmic side of the highway, a benevolent alien in ambient fields hazy with heat and synths, early morning fog and space echo spreading the harmonies wide. Pale Horse Rider eyes the city, the country and the fragile environment that holds them both in its hands – a record as much about Los Angeles as it can be with its back to the town and the sun in its eyes; as much about nostalgia as new music can be with the apocalypse over the next rise…
On “Pale Horse Rider”, Cory Hanson moves ceaselessly forward. The old myths weave and waft, the shadows of tombstones flickering in the mirages and the light that lies dead ahead. Watch the video for “Paper Fog” now and get ready to saddle up and ride – reserve your copy before it touches down, on March 12th, 2021.
Hanson directed the “Paper Fog” video with Casey Hanson, and it’s a weird one. In the video, Cory Hanson stands on a sand dune, playing his acoustic guitar and looking nightmarish, with red face paint and unnatural contact lenses. Meanwhile, a disoriented Santa Claus wanders through the desert and then rips his own skin off.
Pale Horse Rider released March 12th, 2021 through Drag City Records
A dark and tattooed attitude with a dance floor punk throb. All hail Viagra Boys. Sweden’s finest.
A re-release of the Stockholm sextet’s debut album with extra tracks. Produced by Daniel Fagerstrom (Skull Defekts, Chronic Heist) and Pete Gunnerfeldt (The Hives). Sebastian Murphy (vocals), Henrik Höckert (bass), Benjamin Vallé (guitar), Oskar Carls (saxophone) Martin Ehrencrona and Tör Sjodén (drums) deliver a satirical punk-rock take on masculinity. Caustic and caustic with powerful dance-floor devastating rhythms of pounding motoring beats that are powered by churning bass, swinging broken-glass formed guitars and of course the drums – the relentless no-prisoners-here drums. A theatrical, passionate vocal shower storm of proclamatory emotional outbursts cajole and entreat you and always carry you away. An intense, unusual and captivating blend of theatrics, rockabillyroll, post-punk and dark power.
‘Just Like You’ from our debut album ‘Street Worms’.
Eight of the finest performances from Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 tour are now available in a limited, collectible box set. This 24-CD set contains all five of the legendary radio broadcasts on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour: The Roxy in L.A., The Agora in Cleveland, The Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ, Fox Theatre in Atlanta and Winterland in San Francisco. Rounding out the collection are the second shows in Passaic and San Francisco, plus the December 8th show in Houston, Texas. A limited number of empty boxes are also available to hold previously purchased CDs.
By Erik Flannigan
I’ve written before about the role the Darkness tour radio broadcasts played in the career development of Bruce Springsteen. Broadcast live from the Agora in Cleveland, the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, The Roxy in West Hollywood, and Winterland in San Francisco, those concerts were recorded off air by thousands of people listening at home in 1978. In the years that followed, many wore out their tapes, playing them again and again as the only “official” live Springsteen product until Live/1975-85 was released in 1986.
Through the “magic of bootlegging,” home recordings wound up on illicit vinyl pressings like Piece de Resistance and Live in the Promised Land. Copies of those LPs made their way to Europe, which wasn’t visited by the Darkness tour itself, so overseas fans at least got to hear Springsteen on stage. He and the band wouldn’t return to those shores until 1981; for such Bruce-starved fans, those recordings were manna from heaven. Without question, the familiarity fans have with the broadcast recordings of shows like The Roxy and Capitol Theatre cemented their status among Bruce’s greatest performances ever. But what if there were another?
It would be an exaggeration to call Atlanta 9/30/78 “the lost broadcast.” But compared to the other four, which were pressed multiple times on vinyl and CD bootlegs, Atlanta is the least familiar, having no meaningful history on bootleg vinyl and a limited one on CD. Originally broadcast live on radio stations across the Southeast, Atlanta 9/30/78 is the fifth and final Darkness tour transmission released in the Live Archive series. While not as familiar to fans as other ’78 broadcasts, the blistering Atlanta performance more than holds its own and is newly mixed from Plangent Processed, multi-track analogue master tapes. The 23-song show presents a potent core Darkness tour setlist augmented by the yet to be released “Independence Day” and “Point Blank,” plus special additions “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” “Raise Your Hand” and the only performance ever of James Brown’s “Night Train.”
The home recording enthusiasts alluded to above were certainly more plentiful in the Tri-State area, for the Passaic broadcast, than in the Southeast for Atlanta. Other broadcasts got wider distribution (the Agora show was syndicated to FM rock stations around the country after the fact) or were simply bigger events to begin with (Bruce’s Roxy appearance was the most buzzed-about show in Los Angeles in 1978). On the other hand, Atlanta and the Southeast were more of a development opportunity for Springsteen that year, and legend has it, stormy weather in the region on 9/30/78 caused reception problems for those who did record.
All of which explains why, as fans traded tapes and bought bootlegs in the ’70s and ’80s, the quality of the Atlanta broadcast, if it could be found at all, was inferior to the other four broadcast recordings, hence its outlier status. But one listen to Jon Altschiller’s new mix from Plangent Processed, 24-track analogue master tapes and Atlanta is an outlier no more.
The 9/30/78 set captures the Darkness tour “picked at the peak of freshness,” as the old commercial used to say. It’s like getting a lost episode of Seinfeld, shot but never aired during Season 5. The official release of this Fox Theatre show gives us the chance to fall in love all over again with a spectacular slice of Springsteen ’78.
After a great intro to the stage, the show smashes to a start with “Good Rockin’ Tonight” straight into “Badlands.” Each E Street Band member quickly shows they are in it to win it this night, with first-among-equals Roy Bittan carrying the melodic load with aplomb, as he will throughout the night. “Spirit in the Night” sets the band-fan tenor. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is flawless, and Bruce sings with total conviction — no more so than on a subtle lyric change, replacing “Where nobody asks any questions or looks too long in your face” with, “You can drive all night, and never make it around.”
Sonically, Atlanta offers crystalline clarity. In the stately “Independence Day,” which Bruce introduces as the “flipside to ‘Adam Raised a Cain’,” the level of instrumental detail — from Danny’s glockenspiel to Max’s hi-hat, Garry’s bass to Stevie’s delicate strumming — is breath taking and immersive. It pulls you into what just might be your new favourite version of “Independence Day,” a sentiment you are likely to feel across several Atlanta performances. Yes, the audience is mixed just right, too.
The rest of the first set holds to the same gold standard as we move from a faultless “The Promised Land” to a scintillating, extended “Prove It All Night” that’s as good if not better than any version you’ve heard from this tour — and that’s saying something.
The same goes for “Racing in the Street.” Listen for a gorgeous and distinct bit of interplay between Danny and Roy around the 2:05 mark. The first set wraps with the peerless pairing of “Thunder Road” and “Jungleland.” It doesn’t get any better than this.
“Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” opens the second half of the show in jolly spirits, and because the fake snow that fell needed to be swept up by stagehands, Bruce and the band vamp by paying tribute to one of Atlanta’s adopted sons, James Brown. They play the Godfather of Soul’s “Night Train” so well, one would think the song was in the set every night of the tour. In fact, this is the only performance ever of “Night Train.”
“Fire” extends the frivolity before the tone turns dramatic via “Candy’s Room.” Danny and Roy again weave around each other in stunning fashion in the long intro to “Because the Night,” which includes a superlative guitar solo in yet another “name a better one” version. The second River preview of the night, “Point Blank,” surely sent anticipation soaring for Springsteen’s next album, with Danny and Roy intricately swirling behind the striking original lyrics.
E Street Band vocals in the “Not Fade Away/Gloria” intro to “She’s the One” have never sounded livelier, the guitar licks never more Link Wray than this terrific extended reading, another reminder of how special it is to re-live such a beautifully recorded document of the tour. “Backstreets” provides a tour de force denouement, with the middle section a Van Morrison-inspired, mind-blowing melange of “sad eyes,” “Drive All Night,” “you lied,” and “we’ve got to stop.” Listening to the Atlanta version will reaffirm everything you love about the song, this tour, and these musicians.
Even venerable “Rosalita” gets an intriguing instrumental introduction more than two minutes long. There are so many moments in Atlanta 9/30/78 that are just a little different from the Darkness shows we know best, and it is all the more compelling because of it.
The traditional but no less exceptional Darkness tour encore of “Born to Run,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-out” and “Detroit Medley” brings us home, and the night ends with one of only eight tour performances of “Raise Your Hand,” far fewer than you’d guess because all five broadcasts are counted among those eight renditions. With the release of Atlanta, the quintet of 1978 broadcasts in the Live Archive series is now complete, representing not only some of the greatest Bruce Springsteen performances of all time, but arguably the greatest live concert recordings in rock history.
8 Complete Shows On 24 Factory-Pressed CDs. • 7/8/78 The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA • 8/9/78 The Agora, Cleveland, OH • 9/19/78 Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ • 9/20/78 Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ • 9/30/78 Fox Theatre, Atlanta, GA • 12/8/78 The Summit, Houston, TX • 12/15/78 Winterland Arena, San Francisco, CA • 12/16/78 Winterland Arena, San Francisco, CA
Listening back to this year’s Gold Record, is a sentimental journey; once again, one hears the intuitive coming together forming richly behind Bill Callahan’s titanic voice. Across the stereo spectrum, the gentle conversation of Bill and Matt’s guitars, the subtle percussion of bass and drums, striking notes both decorous and discordant, like the naturally occurring sound meant to accompany and express lives lived everywhere. A fitting addition to Bill’s encompassing vision of our lives together and apart is this new vid for Gold Record track “Breakfast”. Dave Bryant’s colour-saturated video footage vision of digitally distorted interactions plays like like art and life, and the static and disconnect on our screens acts as an unexpected visual analogue to Bill’s tale of a dissolute domestic partnership. Compare and contrast for yourselves! And don’t forget to eat your brekkie! It’s still the most important meal of the day.
“Breakfast” is a track from “Gold Record,” released September 4th, 2020 on Drag City Records.
William Fussell has been in a number of dreampop bands over the last 10 years (Mood Rings, Promise Keeper) but really found his voice as cosmic country crooner Honey Harper. “Starmaker” has one boot in the ’70s (Glen Campbell, The Carpenters) and the other in the ’90s (Slowdive, Cocteau Twins) and with great songs, perfectly swoony production and his heartbreaking voice, it’s a magic combination for sure. Starmaker’s title track is brilliantly weepy, featuring great pedal steel and Sebastien Tellier. “Ambient, ambitious songs like ‘Something Relative’ and ‘The Day it Rained Forever’ reveal a songwriter revelling in odd turns of phrase and a singer delivering them with an eccentric, celestial twang.
“When I turned eighteen I moved out of my parents’ house the day I legally could leave. my friends and I moved into a house together, there were six of us. We moved into this place where we made music and wrote together. Eighteen year olds thinking we were more special than we were. We were writing all the time on our typewriters, thinking we were surrealists or something… But it was a super formative part of my life. We spent all our time together doing all those things. A wild bunch of kids getting into a bunch of different stuff.
It took a while before we found out that one of our friends was getting into heroin and that ended our relationship with him when I was around 20. From 18 and onwards we were quite close, our group of friends. Then we just stopped talking. The song is a little bit about finding out about him and how it made us stop talking. It’s a bit of regret in thinking it’s not really your fault for leaving. It was intuition.
It was the first thing that came into my mind when another friend called me and told me what had happened. Then there was the funeral and I couldn’t come because it was in Georgia and I was living in the UK. I wasn’t able to fly down for it. The song is about that phone call, basically, hearing my first thoughts about what emotions I had on the phone. About what he had gone through and what was happening. I won’t go into too much details on what happened to him, I think you kind of understand. I wasn’t trying to romanticize the situation, but just trying to write down what I was feeling in the best way that I could.
The idea wasn’t originally to write this as a sad song. I like a bit of contradiction and my wife and song writing partner has helped me a lot with that. When writing the song, the first bit was very optimistic with a lot of major chords and it was going to be something else. Then I found a couple of lines that I had written about how I felt about my friend so I started putting it to it. Trying to bring some light into something that’s dark, I think. The chorus slips into the darkness a bit more. I began writing the verse and by the time I had figured out what the lyrics were I had changed and gone into the chorus and entered this minor, dark place. So I wrote some of the lines down without intending it to be a song. Just therapy. When I found them it worked well in the song.
I don’t know if I got everything out on the record that I wanted to, but in my mind the point was to try and change the ideas of – and I don’t mean to make this sound more grandiose than it is – just what determines country music. I wanted the arrangement to be a bit like John Denver. I tried multiple different things with acoustic guitar, bass and synthesizers. When I started working with a string arranger I realized that this was a song that could be made so beautiful by the situation. So we turned the synth arrangements into string arrangements and wound up with the strings on the song.” Honey Harper
Something Relative is from Honey Harper’s debut album “Starmaker” out now!
Canadian group The Besnard Lakes have shared new song “Our Heads, Our Hearts on Fire Again” as the second single from their first album in nearly five years, The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings.
“Our Heads, Our Hearts on Fire Again” follows October’s lead single “Raindrops”. Discussing the new release, the band says, “This song has been floating around since the Roaring Night era. We could never figure out how to finish it. Well, we figured out how to finish it. It has that 3/4 waltz we love so much, the same 3/4 waltz that “Disaster” rested upon. It’s also a bit of a lament about how sad we were when we parted ways with Jagjaguwar.”
They add, “This is the second time Oggy’s lyric “On the other side of the world” is used; here it is to detail the comparison between geography and forensics, and that human beings are detectives of time.”
When asked for some insider knowledge about the production of the video, Dr Cool had this to say:
“So the video is basically a combination of things I assumed the band is into. I noticed they once had a horse on one of their covers so I quickly learnt to draw horses. I also heard from someone that they like bright flashing neon lights so I added some of that. And then I just sorta assumed they must be into goofy looking buildings that dance around the screen so I threw some of those in and it turns out they like that quite a bit.
“I can’t explain what the video is about but I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.”
The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings will be their first LP since 2016’s A Coliseum Complex Museum. The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings album will arrive 29th January 2021 via Full Time Hobby.
Half Truths is out today! I’m excited to see the singles I’ve released have a little family around them, they feel like they are at home now. They were all written in a similar time and I see them as me throwing off expectations I had of who I am as a person, woman, what my music is meant to be, what life is meant to be. I hope they can bring something new and cathartic to your worlds.
Newcastle-singer songwriter based Grace Turner’s ‘Half Truths’ is a poetic six-song collection that cuts through the noise, making sense of her thoughts by simply singing them aloud.
Powerful and poetic is Grace Turner’s “Half Truths”, her first EP released August 7th, 2020. Written and recorded over the past three years in collaboration with good friends, this six-song collection sets Turner apart, cutting through the noise and making sense of her thoughts by simply singing them aloud. “I wrote ‘Disdain’ while driving and singing and crying – a terrible combination. I wasn’t driving anywhere in particular, just to feel like I was physically able to leave what I was going through in my life. The original opening line was ‘I want to watch the blood drain from my body’. I sung it live once and my Dad was in the crowd and I just couldn’t do it, so I found a new line which I think is better anyways.
Though based in Newcastle, Australia, Turner wrote and recorded Half Truths in a variety of locations, from bedrooms to studios. And even still, the EP is remarkably cohesive, with key embellishments from her friends Mat Taylor and Shanna Watson, among others; glueing it all together is Turner’s trademark lyricism and self-introspection. “I write music because of the continual untangling of mind, emotions, experience and trying to understand the world at all its micro, meso and macro levels. Sometimes I feel with this collection of songs I am earnestly screaming something at the world and at the same time trying to take it all back again,” Turner says.
Intensely personal, Half Truths echoes Turner’s sentiments and intent. The EP begins poetically and drum-driven with “Disdain,” sparking the vision of a late night drive, and the feeling of darkness dissipating, replaced by some sense of gratitude for the ordinary. ‘Disdain’ is such an intense word and meaning and I’m glad to have gotten it into a song. To think of oneself as unworthy. Eventually I took it to a jam with my drummer and he encouraged me a lot that it was a keeper. My guitarist wrote the killer riff for this one. We think it’s so good that when we were in the post production phase of making the record we decided to repeat it after every vocal chorus making it a kind of instrumental chorus. I think it really makes the song.
The chords don’t ever change in this one and melodically it’s pretty subtle in its movement. In post production we also decided to cut the band out in the bridge. I like bringing more intensity to the line ‘what a time to be alive, steadily walking towards our demise’. It feels pretty apt for 2020. I like having a heavy song lyrically that is up beat, it’s really cathartic to play this one with the band. It’s one of my favourite tracks off the record and I’m glad that it’s become a favourite for people too.”
Standout track “Half Light” is instrumentally steady, while Turner belts a brilliant kind of diary entry about the way life is often made up of parts that don’t always fit together. And triple-j featured “Dead or Alive” brings the EP to its most upbeat point; though the lyrics are relative dark, the danceable chorus acts as a push out of that darkness and into warmer, brighter days.
“I chose the title Half Truths as I was going through such a turbulent time and the songs were written whether I stood by what they meant or not, they were spat out of me. I was shedding off expectations of who I thought I was as a musician, woman, friend, lover; questioning it all,” Turner says of the EP. While the six songs on Half Truths do question the world extensively, they also powerfully declare hope for the future. Ending with these words on “Get Your Head Straight,” “try to be good try to be kind, do your best to find peace of mind,” Grace Turner leaves us, and herself, in the sunlight.
Experience Half Truths wherever you listen to music, and take a peek into the full EP
Grace Turner “Half Truths” Released on: 2020-08-07
