I feel like Irish singer-songwriter Foy Vance has been the quiet achiever of the folk scene in recent years. But with the release of his latest album The Wild Swan, the massive success of its lead single “She Burns” and his association with Ed Sheran, Foy Vance is finally getting the recognition he deserves. The Wild Swan is a melting pot of tone and style – anyone expecting 12 songs all like “She Burns” might be a bit shocked with the blues of “Noam Chomsky is a Soft Revolution” or the Bryan-Adams-like balladry of “Ziggy Looked Me In The Eye”. This is an album that deserves to be listened to from start to finish.
Live acoustic version of “She Burns,” a new song Foy is recording in the studio for his upcoming album.The Wild Swan. Recorded at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, TN.
Available now for free download when you sign up to Foy’s mailing list: http://foyvance.com/
About a week ago Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Mangan surprised everyone by releasing an unannounced EP Unmake.
“I’m writing up a storm at the moment, putting my mind and heart into another LP,” Mangan explained in his regular newsletter. “But I’ve also been busy as of late just messing around in the studio. It’s been wonderfully cathartic to just record little bits and bobs of things with no big huge album campaign to think about. Just gratuitous fun. So here it is, 5 songs. And as an experiment within this digital age of audio, I figured it would be interesting to try an exclusively digital release.”
1. Whistleblower
2. Hang With Me (Robyn Cover)
3. Race To The Bottom
4. Forgetery Redux (Feat. Tegan Quin)
5. Kitsch Redux
Dan Mangan performs “Whistleblower” live at Indie88 in the Collective Arts Black Box
I discovered Allman Brown by accident. Opening Spotify late one night I noticed that my friend, who had been using my computer earlier that evening, had been looking at Allman Brown. So I played the first song on the list. It was “Sons and Daughters.” I was enthralled. Little did I know that listening to Allman Brown was somewhat of a badge of honor among my indie music–loving friends.
Allman Brown writes what he calls “chilled out folk pop,” and his music certainly has a very relaxing feel. Nevertheless, he paints a very realistic picture of life—both the inspiring and the mundane.
Afternoon all, it is my EP launch this evening at St Pancras Old Church! Come on down at 9pm if you fancy hearing some songs in one of the most beautiful venues in London. The new EP is online and avaliable in all the usual places. It is a featured release on the Songwriter Page of I-Tunes which made me grin like a Cheshire Cat for a few hours! The Hollows music video is locked and ready to roll so hopefully I will be able to share it with you all soon. Until then, thank you as always for your support
Have you ever been to a party and wondered what all the other insecure and troubled souls are feeling around you? Standing in a corner wishing you had stayed at home or reflecting that the big spot on your nose is pulsating like a simmering volcano? This is the theme of Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Shauf’s third album “The Party” which seeks to articulate the perspective of different attendees to such a gathering in the form of individually dedicated songs. Shauf clearly leans to that era of seventies soft rock and is often viewed as the “Saskatchewan heir to Elliott Smith”. After listening to this fine album over the past days the nearest comparison is probably Josh Rouse. He also is a singer who can pen a fine melody that after repeated listens seem like they have always been part of your musical upbringing.
It came as no surprise when Andy Shauf’s new album The Party was released that it would be so much more than just a group of songs put out to be listened to. As the genius songwriter that he is, he created each song as a character at The Party. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; this album is a masterpiece that will ring out for years to come as we all come to realize we are dealing with one of the next true greats of song writing in Canada.
“The Magician” by Andy Shauf from the album ‘The Party,’ available now on Anti (World Excl. Canada) and Arts & Crafts (Canada)
As young songwriters go Billie Marten, who has just turned 17, continues to display remarkable depth and prowess in her craft. Her lyrics are more than just observational inkling’s into her psyche and how she understands the world around her, they are spun of the purest feeling, the richest of truths – each representing life in all its wonder and all its unpredictability.
‘La Lune’ is a song inspired by Marten’s personal experiences, the acoustic ballad delivers resonant impact and delicate reflection of family summers and a happy childhood, as depicted in the accompanying home video footage. Speaking of the video Billie says, “I found these old VHS’s at home and I remembered there was a load of footage of our family wandering around Whitby beaches and BnBs. The song’s all washy and dreamy and it instantly made me think of that. We borrowed some friends film camera for a few months but also managed to capture a lot of sentimental moments too. I love watching it.”
Artists like Billie Marten don’t come along often, her way of self-expression doesn’t just stop with her, it is a starting point for connection with others, and ‘La Lune’ is a perfect example of this.
‘La Lune’ is available on 7″ vinyl, alongside previous single ‘Milk & Honey’, through Chess Club Records and RCA.
Album opener “Perfect Strangers” is a work of friskily acrobatic, cinematic orchestration that traces initial infatuation to inevitable antipathy. The protagonist’s wryly bleak prediction? Getting to know a lover intimately is bound to ruin everything.
A couple of tracks later, in the fetchingly broody “California,” Ellis zeroes in on a woman depleted by rearranging and relocating her life for her partner, only to be left alone. “Maybe I’ll move to California, with the unbroken part of my heart I still have left,” he sings in a keen, reedy tenor lost in listless daydreaming. “Maybe I’ll fall in love again someday; I’m not gonna hold my breath.”
Ellis can’t decide exactly how fatalistic the vignette is. “Sometimes I hear ‘California’ as very hopeful: ‘In the wake of this tragedy, I have all these opportunities, things that I can do.’ Then other times I hear it as almost sarcastic, like she’s really saying, ‘I don’t know what-the-fuck I’m supposed to do.’”
The musical liveliness of “Drivin,’” propelled by a light-footed train beat and beelining acoustic and electric guitar licks, belies the lyrics’ vivid portrayal of passivity—a man cowering from mutual dissatisfaction in his marriage. “Oh, I just wish you’d go to bed,” Ellis whines impatiently, “without the expectation that I’ll come up there and say something to help you feel like things aren’t such a mess.”
In “You’re Not the One,” “It’s Not OK” and “Elephant,” the protagonists tie themselves in knots. One strains against the stranglehold of lust for a forbidden woman. Another is tormented by the pattern he’s fallen into: undermining the partnership he’s supposedly committed to by indulging in the trysts he craves. But the album’s most conflicted character appears on “Elephant.” Over a tense, prickly guitar figure, Ellis plays a man who’s lost faith in the model of marriage he once agreed to—not to mention in his own conscience—and for whom the idea of loving, monogamous devotion has mutated into something more like imprisonment.
Ellis has no trouble naming the emotions that color these deftly executed songs. “There’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of insecurity and guilt,” he says, “and sort of struggling with, ‘Should I feel guilt about things?’”
But that’s about as far as he’s willing to go. “I’m not sure if the characters are likable,” he offers with a small laugh. “I’m sure that’s up to the listener, and whatever they’re going through.”
“I’m sure every writer puts themselves into their material somewhere or another,” offers Ellis, “but I’m not gonna discuss details of my marriage with anybody. And I’m definitely not going to, in my opinion, ruin the surprise of connecting with these songs in a way that’s meaningful to the listener. And it’s not really even to protect me. Like, I don’t give a shit. I don’t mind talking about my life to people that I know. I think the strength of these songs is that they can be kinda ambiguous. If you just listen to ‘em and connect with them in that way, I just think it’s a much better experience. I think if you listen to the songs on here, there’s not one side.”
Alright is taken from Keaton Henson’s new album ‘Kindly Now’. Released September 16th,
Poet, composer, visual artist and songwriter Keaton Henson, is perhaps unsurprisingly a busy man. That might well go some way to explaining why his upcoming album, Kindly Now, has been four years in the making. Keaton has described the record as his most emotionally stripped back record to date, and has hinted it’s, “an unheroic and unsettling examination of past loves, the role of the artist, and owning up to your own destruction.”
While we won’t here the fruits of Kindly Now’s recording until September, this week he has released the first taster of that music in the shape of new track, Alright. Venturing into new music from an artist as versatile and prolific at Keaton is always a thrilling prospect, but what truly shines on Alright is the beautiful simplicity of it all. There’s little more to the track than an echoing, raw piano, and Keaton’s arresting vocal, other instruments drift in and out of earshot, but the star is Keaton himself. Keaton has suggested the track is about the perils of success, the, “very English way of grinning through the pain” at having to be on display to earn the opportunity to make the music he wants to, as he sings, “don’t make me go outside, god knows what out there lies, I’m hoping I don’t die after you.” Emotionally honest, beautiful performed, it’s one of the most atmospheric and beautiful tracks we’ve heard all year, and ironically one that is only going to project Keaton Henson even further into fame’s unerring spotlight.
Kindly Now is out September 16th via Play It Again Sam. Keaton Henson plays London in November,
There were singer-songwriters before Joni Mitchell , but with her 1971 masterpiece Blue, she pretty much set the template for almost everything that came after it.
Leading up to the album’s release on June 22nd, Joni Mitchell had released three albums, each an improvement — commercially and creatively — over its predecessor. Her 1968 debut, Song to a Seagull, barely cracked the charts and was short on any signature song. But by the following year’s Clouds, she was in the Top 40 and writing and recording numbers like “Chelsea Morning” and “Both Sides Now,” two of her earliest classics.
With 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon she cracked the Top 30 for the first time and scored three more of her most enduring numbers, “The Circle Game,” “Woodstock” (which Mitchell’s ex, Graham Nash, took to the Top 15 with his groupCrosby, Stills, Nash & Young and “Big Yellow Taxi,” which gave Mitchell her first sorta big single with its influence over the years looms way larger.
But Blue was something different, a hyper-personal collection of songs that sounded like they were ripped straight from Mitchell’s diary. The spare performances — most times it’s just Mitchell and her guitar or piano — add to the album’s intimacy, sparking a revealing listen that at times comes off like something maybe you shouldn’t be hearing. There are confessions, slipped-out secrets and the sense that the heart on display here was temporarily caught off guard.
When she first started recording the album in Los Angeles (with famous friend Stephen Stills and then current boyfriend James Taylor helping out on a handful of songs, along with pedal steel player Sneaky PeteKleinow and drummer Russ Kunkel), Mitchell was unsure which direction her fourth album was heading.
Songs were recorded and later cut from the album, replaced by newer numbers that better reflected her state of mind at the time. Blue is as much about her breakup with Nash as it is her relationship with other men of the period, including Taylor, even though the couple was history by the time the album came out. The pieces come together like a fractured heart trying to mend itself.
Joni Mitchell didn’t try to hide any of this. The hurt you hear in some of the songs came from a very real place, as did the joy found in others. In songs like “Carey,” “California,” “River,” “A Case of You” and the title track, Mitchell paints a portrait of a life in shambles, in heartbreak, in excitement and in love. (Many of the joyous pieces were written about a man Mitchell had met during a quick retreat to Greece in 1970 after her breakup with Nash.)
But there was more to Blue than just veiled accounts of Mitchell’s flings. There were songs about the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965 (“Little Green”), homesickness (“California”) and her early marriage (“The Last Time I Saw Richard”). Nobody ever opened up so much on record before. Not even Carole King, whose equally game-shifting singer-songwriter album Tapestry was released just four months earlier, and certainly not any of her male contemporaries.
Blue became Mitchell’s highest-charting album at the time, “Carey” and “California” were both released as singles, with only the former charting, But its influence was almost immediately felt. Her friends and peers celebrated her openness, her complex guitar tunings and her willingness to take music into a bold new direction.
With the charts dominated by macho braggarts like the Rolling Stones‘ Sticky Fingers and Rod Stewart‘s Every Picture Tells a Story, both of which sandwiched Tapestry in the No. 1 spot in 1971, Blue not only revealed rare vulnerability, it was willing to take responsibility for its creator’s f—-ups. Nobody else was doing that. All these years later, singer-songwriters of all sorts (sensitive, insensitive, confessional, regretful) can be traced back to Mitchell’s masterpiece.
After the horrific shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub that left 49 dead and over 50 injured, people have tried to find a way to cope with the feelings that left them reeling from the senseless killing. Melissa Etheridge was equally heartbroken when she heard the news while on tour, and then proceded to write a song in response
“I’m dealing with it the way I deal, which is, I wrote a song,” she said. “I just sat here, and I just started writing a song… That’s how I first started to cope because, as a singer songwriter, I feel very… I’ve done this before. I feel called to speak; to do what musicians do. We’ve been the town criers for hundreds of years. We’re mirrors of society. We want to try to make sense. We want to try to heal. We want to bring some meaning, some purpose. We also want to put it down forever in history. That’s how I’m coping.”
She went into the studio with producer Jerry Wonda on Monday and laid down this heartbreaking track. She said she titled the song “Pulse,” after the name of the club, because “there’s just something very poetic and very meaningful about the name… You just start thinking about your own pulse. It’s the way I’ve always felt about the gay movement, the gay issue. Here we are – people who are loving; we are fighting for who we want to love.”
The anthemic ballad begins with the lines: “Everybody’s got a pain inside/ Imaginary wounds they fight to hide/ How can I hate them, when everybody’s got a pulse?” and the refrain reinforces the need for unity in the face of hate as it repeats: “I am human; I am love/ And my heart beats with my blood/ Love will always win/ Underneath the skin, everybody’s got a pulse.”
Perhaps the most chilling moment comes in the stanza in which she seems to be addressing Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old man who killed and injured so many: “Who you gonna hate now?/ When there’s no one left but you?/ Who you gonna gun down?/ If you can’t kill the truth/ That it’s inside of us/ Inside our blood/ Inside our pulse.”
The song will be made available for purchase soon and Melissa Etheridge says all proceeds will be donated to an LGBT charity.
Chicago-born-and-bred singer-songwriter Michael McDermott, who released his major-label debut 620 W. Surf back in 1991. Michael has a new song and album titled “Willow Springs,” the forthcoming album of the same name, which drops June 17th
Writer Stephen King is a mega fan of McDermott’s,even going so far to say, “Not since I first heard Bruce Springsteen singing “Rosalita” had I heard someone who excited me so much as a listener, who turned my dials so high, who just made me feel so fucking happy to have ears.”
“Willow Spring” is a place that I had moved to in order to extricate myself from the things that were killing me. To confront myself: my morality, my mortality, fatherhood, losing my own father, addiction, sobriety. It’s for the hustlers, the harlots, the harbingers, the foolish, the forsaken, the underfed, the lost, the downtrodden, the misdirected, the resurrected, the confused, and the abused. For those who are just dog-tired of feeling dog-tired and those who come to the realization that at the heart of it all, the answers were right there all along.”
The Fat Angel Sings 