“Hypochondriac” is a buoyant and at times ambient indie-rock ballad, full of loping guitars and criss-crossing drum beats. With a little of TORRES-style slanted vocal delivery and a jammy rock flair, “Hypochondriac” is far more upbeat than the song’s subject matter may suggest. In the bridge, Fenne Lily continually tells herself, “Look alive,” before a chorus and a startlingly pretty key change take center stage. She ends the song with the relatable (especially during potentially overwhelming times such as these) line, “I’m waiting for a moment to stop and not feel so much. My newest single, released via Dead Oceans, is out now Hypochondriac is the title, preoccupation with death is the theme after a while of silence it feels good to be back – I hope y’all enjoy and keep washing your hands.
Light and airy folk-pop from anxious British songwriter Lily who finds herself sick and “freaking out,” while “waiting for a moment to stop and not feel so much.” Play it on a loop while you wait for the same outcome
“Hypochondriac” by Fenne Lily, out now on Dead Oceans.
Speaking of songs fans of Feist might enjoy, Vancouver artist Hannah Georgas has shared a new single, the first taste of a collaboration with The National’s Aaron Dessner. “This song is a portrait of one particular way that emotions can build up inside,” Georgas says. “You’re going through the motions, suppressing how you really feel, and pretending things are ok — but your body knows…that deep down life and worry can weigh you down in ways your head might not acknowledge. This song was inspired by the feeling of hiding emotions you would like to express but feeling alone. Over the course of the last decade, the Canadian songwriter Hannah Georgas has earned a lot of accolades in her home country.
Along the way, she caught the ear of AaronDessner, and she wound up spending much of last year in the National’s touring band for their I Am Easy To Find shows. But before that, she and Dessner had already started working together at Dessner’s studio in upstate New York, resulting in new work from Georgas that will presumably be out soon via her new homes at Brassland and Arts & Crafts.
Find a quiet moment today to absorb this new single from the incredible Hannah Georgas. “That Emotion” is a soft but insistent song that charts emotions beginning to pile up and surface. Produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner at his upstate New York studio, “That Emotion” is the first new material to be taken from a new album, currently scheduled for release this summer
Promising young musician Brooke Bentham quickly exploded after her singles ‘Heavy And Ephemeral’ and ‘I Need Your Body’ started to get heavy rotation on both BBC Radio 1 and 6music. Having established a widespread following, the South Shields songwriter now drops her debut album ‘Everyday Nothing’.
Despite her early success, Bentham began to experience writer’s block which was triggered by underlining problems hampering her creative process; “I felt very empty and numb. There wasn’t a sadness to it, there was a nothingness to it which I guess is what people say depression is.”
Bentham was able to address her problems and channel it into the music with aid of Bill Ryder-Jones, who produced the record and was able to help her create a masterful first album which feels like a fresh take on grunge influences.
“I’ve worked with some amazing songwriters in my career. I think Brooke at 23 is well on her way to being up there with Alex (Turner), Saint Savoir, Mick (Head) and James (Skelly). Her lyric writing will be overlooked because of her voice but it is her words that will set her apart from others.” – Bill Ryder-Jones
Big-hearted Americana singer/songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews has announced her next album. “Old Flowers”, a follow-up to 2018’s May Your Kindness Remain (one of our favourite releases from that year), is set to arrive June 5th on Mississippi indie powerhouse Fat Possum Records. “I learned to love the worst parts of you,” Andrews sings on “If I Told.” It’s a Dolly Parton-esque country song tinged with regret and curiosity in regards to the serendipity of relationships.
“These songs came to me alone, late nights in Bisbee, Lisbon, Nashville, and London. Sometimes I’d just cry and sing, and a song would come out. I drank too much wine while writing this record, lit too many candles. You could say this was my attempt to summon the muse, but she was just standing there naked looking me in the eyes. So I told her the truth.
“This is my story of the most heartbreaking, but soul-revealing, year of my life. I drove myself mad. I drove to the smoky mountains just to drive back. I danced with a Portuguese boxer and cried on his shoulder in a Fado cafe. I did everything an artist is ‘supposed to do’. But at the end of the day, beyond all the romance, these songs are my truth. I think they might be yours too.”
With tears of joy, I am here to announce, my new album, ‘Old Flowers,’ will be released on June 5th. In these songs, I am grappling with saying goodbye to a nine-year relationship. I am voyaging closer to myself and to my work. I am vulnerable as hell, and it’s scary as hell. Love, CMA
P.S. I’ll be returning to the UK to play these new songs this June, as well as two album release shows in Brooklyn and Nashville. All the new dates are below and you can find more info at courtneymarieandrews.com. I can’t wait to sing these with you.
May 6—Manchester Center, VT—Billsville
June 5—Nashville, TN—Analog
June 9—Brooklyn, NY—Union Pool June 16—Birmingham, U.K.—Hare & Hounds
June 17—Pocklington, U.K.—Pocklington Arts Centre
June 18—London, U.K.—Omeara June 21—Nottingham, U.K.—Metronome
June 22—Oxford, U.K.—Wesley Memorial Church
Brooke Bentham’s “Everyday Nothing” chronicles the inertia of life as an artist post-graduation. Guitars veer from spectral one minute to menacing the next. Her lyrics are both personal and elliptical, flashing relatable truths. Confronted with the mundanities of life and caught between two jobs in London, Brooke finds intense lyricism in the struggle for purpose and direction.
“There is so much frustration in being young and unsure of what you want, especially when your path is creative,” says Brooke. “You can only hope that it leads you to something fulfilling, so you cling on to the everyday details – burning candles in your bedroom at three AM aged sixteen, or having a bath in the evening at twenty three, or watching your breath when you step outside in winter. I was reflecting a lot when I wrote these songs, romanticising those moments.”
Written entirely by Brooke, with a few contributions from producer Bill Ryder-Jones (who’s own album YawnyYawn was showered with 4 and 5 star reviews last year), “Everyday Nothing” documents a fast-rising 23-year-old looking to make sense of her existence.
Widely acclaimed for a debut single released during her first year at Goldsmiths University and signed (to AllPoints) in her second, Brooke began Everyday Nothing as soon as her studies were over.
“I was supposed to start, but mostly I lay in bed,” she says of those first few months after graduation. “I read a lot of books and I wrote a lot of notes, but I didn’t come up with a single song. I didn’t have a job. Nothing was going on. I had fuck all to write about.”
In need of more income, she hauled herself out into the world of work and started again. With routine re-established by getting a job in a shoe shop, her notebooks were soon filled with everyday images: dead flowers on a window sill, the feel of keys in her hand as she approached home, snippets of conversations, scenes from the rom-coms, novels and poetry she’d been reading. These shards captured the essence of her internal life at the time.
“Sometimes I wish I could keep music as a hobby,” she says and refuses to give up either of her two jobs despite all the time she has to take off to tour. “If I didn’t have a real job I wouldn’t write,” says Brooke. “I need structure and deadlines or I get nothing done.”
Everyday Nothing soundtracks the reality for many young people today. One in which hopes and dreams play out in a haze of confusion and frustration. Brooke captures this existential vulnerability, the baffling day to day-ness of a young life in the most relatable, poetic and compelling of works.
“A lot of life is boring and predictable, but I hope this album is a way of saying that with some charm.”
With her strikingly beautiful voice and emotionally direct songwriting, Chloe has captured the attention of rapidly growing UK and US audiences. With the release of her singles ‘Asylum’, ‘Flaws’, ‘Oh You Are Not Well’ and ‘In The Middle Of The Night’, she has accumulated over 10 million plays on Spotify, as well as earning the praise and airtime of the likes of NPR Radio’s Bob Boilen and the BBC’s Steve Lamacq. She was named a 2019 BBC Introducing “One To Watch”
The songs on Chloe Foy’s just-released EP “Callous Copper” are each accompanied by a string quartet, and “Never Be The Same Again” is one assured and exquisite example of what you’ll find on it.
Next month she will be touring throughout England with the string section, and you can find out where she’ll be on her website.
If alt-country seems inaccessible, let Faye Webster ease you into the genre with an R&B saxophone yawn or rap verse courtesy of Father. The Atlanta singer-songwriter didn’t turn alt-country on its head with Atlanta Millionaires Club, but she did dress it up enough to give folk-pop and soft-rock fans a natural in to the genre. Maybe it’s her breathy lilt. Maybe it’s the moderation of slide guitar. Whatever the trick is, Webster knows it makes her songs irresistibly coquettish.
It’s hard to believe musician and photographer Faye Webster is only 21 years old and has released her third album and one that just drips with a pensiveness of someone twice that age. The singer does have a way of writing serene indie folk that is perfectly balanced for any time of day. She immediately throws you into her world and it’s one that is fully realized and achingly alluring.
It’s worth asking Faye Webster about the origins of her song, “Pigeon.” In addition to being a musician, Atlanta-based Faye Webster is a photographer and a yo-yo whiz, even going so far as to craft her own custom yo-yo that she dubbed “The Pigeon.” But there’s something else.
“I sent this dude in Australia a pigeon with a note on its leg, a carrier pigeon, because I liked him,” Webster explains. “I sent him a note. It was the first time I ever sent somebody a pigeon, so I had to write a song about it.”
Before their show at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis, Faye Webster and her band stopped in The Current studio to talk to host Jade and to play songs from Webster’s album, Atlanta Millionaires Club.
Faye Webster performs ‘Room Temperature’ from her 2019 album, ‘Atlanta Millionaires Club,’ live in The Current studio.Webster’s songs have a warm, dreamy and nostalgic quality, the origins of which aren’t quite so enigmatic. “I listened to a lot of Western swing and old country music just because my mom’s from Texas and her whole family is musical,” Webster says. “So I grew up around that a lot, just that [music] playing in the car or in the house. And then I guess I found my own music that I liked when I grew up, but I think that [influence has] always kind of been there.”
Songs Performed:
“Room Temperature”
“Pigeon”
“Kingston”
All songs from Faye Webster’s 2019 album, Atlanta Millionaires Club, available on Secretly Canadian.
“Off My Mind” follows “Shaking,” which English released back in November 2019, and like that track before it, the new song finds her moving from muffled dream-pop to polished, nostalgic rock that still overflows with breathy melody. “Every time we talk / I just don’t know what to say ‘cause / I’m caught in a moment in between,” sings English over chiming guitars, marching drums and soft electric piano stabs—meanwhile, the video’s whimsical retro footage takes us back through the decades, to simpler, sunnier-seeming times.
For Off My Mind I made a video using archival footage. I wanted to juxtapose scenes of mundane and repetitive activity with moments of pure joy and spontaneity to show the value of creating authentic experiences in our own lives.
Orla Gartland’s upcoming EP “Freckle Season” features “Heavy,” a gracefully delivered breakup song. Soft piano accompanies Gartland’s beautiful, stirring vocals in what initially sounds like a classic, lofty lament.
However, a closer look at the lyrics suggests that this track is concerned with the somewhat more secondary side effects of a love lost. Longing to do things like “hang with you / and watch Grand Designs” and wishing that “your mum and I could be friends / I think about her now and then / How we drove up to her house / I’ll never see that dog again.” Gartland eventually reaches the titular question, delicately asking “So tell me why this has to be so heavy / Tell me why this has to be / ‘Cause I really thought that we’d be cool / Some exception to the rule”. This song wisely embraces one of the duller pains of parting ways: the loss of all the little things that one can find solace in. We all wonder, do we really have to let these things go all at once? Does it have to be this heavy? Gartland answers, “But honestly, I think it has to be this heavy.”
listen to ‘Heavy’ from the upcoming EP ‘Freckle Season’ now
Jeffery’s first two offerings, especially the majestic “Stripping Cane” I am happy to say that “Ghost Repeater” is also a fine album. Following on from Stripping Cane was always going to be a challenge, but by adding a country twinge to the album whilst still including the crisp poetry and imagery of the previous two he has created an excellent, well balanced collection of songs.
When you set out to carry on a tradition as deep rooted as folk music is, you’ve got to have your story together. You’ve got to study, and have a foundation. Jeffrey Foucault has that foundation and you can hear it in his voice, and feel it in his music. He’s got an understanding that you don’t hear that often.’
Holed up in Iowa City for the coldest week of the year, Jeffrey Foucault teamed with blues guitar player and producer Bo Ramsey (Greg Brown, Lucinda Williams) to create “Ghost Repeater”, a country and blues album at the crossroads between love and lament, exploring the hopefulness of new love and the seasickness of contemporary American living. Ghost Repeaters are empty radio stations scattered around the USA to re-broadcast demographically tailored playlists, endless echoes of American market culture, from thousands of miles away. Epidemic sameness, big-box stores, and the retail news cycle of ghost prisoners and God On Our Side create the context in which the songs on Ghost Repeater unfold a story of love and uncertainty. Against the broadcast echoes of an America long gone,
Foucault lays out the particulars of love in a country contending with its own ghost. In addition to Bo Ramsey’s inimitable sound Foucault has the backing of Rick Cicalo and Steve Hayes (Greg Brown) on rhythm, along with special guest appearances by Iowa legend Dave Moore on harp and accordion, Eric Heywood (Son Volt, Richard Buckner) on pedal steel, and Kris Delmhorst on backing vocals.
The Fat Angel Sings 