…includes two new covers and two French-language versions of standout tracks from the original album.
Rarely are there albums as openly vulnerable and sparse as Clara Mann’s Rift. Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch comes to mind for its intimacy, but that latest LP still has an underlying gloss.
Mann’s record is rawer, every minuscule movement picked up by the microphones. Along with her unique vocals and songwriting, these sounds allow the listener to develop a connection with Mann to better understand the hard times she’s gone through. The Franco-British singer-songwriter characterizes her music as “almost folk,” because even though her music is rooted in the tradition, additional unconventional choices separate…
Category: singer-songwriter
The rise of Tobias Jesso Jr. feels vintage, the stuff of American dreams. Born in Canada, Jesso tried to make it in L.A. in the early 2010s, writing songs for others and playing bass; just when he gave up, a series of buzzy singles, released under his own name, caught the attention of a previously impenetrable industry. He made his 2015 full-length debut, Goon, in a bleary, nostalgic Laurel Canyon mode, brooding over personal hardships and slotting himself into a long lineage of L.A. singer-songwriters. Jesso’s chronicles of dashed dreams served as his own last-ditch audition; he immediately became a coveted collaborator, writing for everyone from Harry Styles to FKA twigs and nabbing the inaugural Grammy for Songwriter of the Year in 2023.
As the Neighbors Tried to Sleep begins with a real swagger. ‘Pistol and a List of Demands’ opens with great energy: piano and guitar with a pulsing beat lead the way in a romanticised tale of a renegade on the run. Dillon Warnek casts himself as a man living large, ready for a big payday or a bloody end. “There’s enough dynamite in my pockets/To blow you all through the roof” sings Warnek with a confident drawl which, apart from the obvious Freudian interpretation, sets the scene of a man willing to take on the law. There’s real defiance in the song too, “The judges want to lock me up/And throw away the key/It drives them crazy knowing I’m freer/Than they’ll ever be”. But there’s a desperation behind the bravado, “It’d probably look like the goddamn Alamo…
…Featuring 4 additional tracks (‘Sweet Thames Flow Softly’, ‘Yellow Triangle’, ‘Music to Our Ears’, ‘Butterfly’) and a re-imaged version of the track ‘The Big Marquee’ which featured on the original album.
The title, borrowed from WB Yeats’s poem Easter 1916, and the cover, a landscape with an ominous fiery glow in the distance, suggest a confrontational, political record.
There is indeed some score settling on the 25th studio album from a singer who, at 79, remains one of Ireland’s national treasures, but Christy Moore has ever been a nuanced artist, offering the full emotional gamut in the songs he writes and curates. Humour, rage, empathy, sorrow and joy roll seamlessly into each other, united…
…featuring unreleased demos and a pair of previously unheard tracks from the original sessions.
Life in Slow Motion is an appropriate name for David Gray’s sixth album, since this languid, deliberate album crawls out of the speakers at a speed that suggests everything is stuck in molasses. Not that this is a bad place for Gray to be, or that it is even a big change of pace for him. As the years passed, he’s trimmed away the faster tempos from his music, leaving behind an even-keeled, meditative, soft reflective folk-pop that brought him a hit in 2000 with “Babylon” from his fourth album, White Ladder.
Life in Slow Motion isn’t too far removed from that album, although it does lack…
Paul Kelly is 70 and has never been bigger. He has just headlined his first arena tour – which sold out. In an industry as ageist as Australian music, it’s a remarkable career trajectory; there’s been no sudden revival of interest, nor a belated rediscovery of his vast catalogue. Slowly, over a career spanning 50 years, Kelly has become ubiquitous.
Overfamiliarity comes at a price. There are people who have never listened to Kelly who appear to loudly resent his success. Much of the pushback seems to stem from the annual celebration of How to Make Gravy, Kelly’s Christmas perennial-from-prison. They never want to hear another word from Joe, the fuck-up who was already the subject of what is now probably Kelly’s second-most famous song, To Her Door.
Frank Turner’s The Next Ten Years is a limited edition set which comes as a follow up to the highly coveted The First Ten Years (2015) box set.
Spanning 29 non-album tracks, including live and radio sessions, covers, acoustic versions, and collaborations, this collection fills the gaps between studio albums over the past 10 years with treasured rarities – some of which are previously unreleased, and many pressed on vinyl for the first time.
I write this from a car park in Glasgow, working my way through the warm-up shows before Lost Evenings hits Edinburgh for its 8th (eighth!!!) instalment this weekend. Band and crew are humming like a well-oiled machine, I’m tired and my head is full of words for obscure songs, but life is good.
Well, unless you are an aficionado, it would not be surprising if you had never heard of Alice di Micele. Reverse the Flow is her 18th album in a career going back nearly 40 years. Di Micele, who lives in Oregon, appears not to have particularly sought commercial success and her touring schedule has hardly touched these shores, yet her fan base has developed over the years based on her fine songwriting and her exceptional voice, a five-octave instrument that adds emotion and variety to many of her songs. She is typically categorised as folk/americana, predicated on her lyrical themes (anti-establishment, nature, the modern world, LGBTQ etc) but her vocal styling is so diverse that it is often wrapped in jazz or blues instrumentation, always empathetically surrounded…
The first time we hear Bob Dylan on this fabulous 8CD, 165-track boxset, it’s Christmas Eve 1956. Dylan’s high school trio, The Jokers – Bob Zimmerman (vocals and piano), Larry Keegan and Howard Rutman (vocals) – are whomping through Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” in a version recorded on a 78rpm acetate at the Terlinde Music Store in St Paul, a bus ride from the 15-year-old Dylan’s home in Hibbing, Minnesota.
It’s barely a minute long, not much more than a gloriously raucous din, but there distinctly is the young Bob, hollering his head off. The last time we hear him, it’s October 1963, at the end of his first headlining show at a sold-out Carnegie Hall, Dylan in full command of 3,000 hip New Yorkers who’ve just been profoundly wowed…
…Born and raised in Toronto’s East End, singer-songwriter Jerry Leger has built up a remarkable body of work over the last two decades, culminating in fourteen studio albums that have seen collaborations with americana icons such as Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins and Grammy winner Mark Howard.
Earlier this year, Leger released a solo album entitled Lucky Streak: Latent Lounge, Live from the Hanger, produced by Timmins at his studio, ‘The Hanger’ in Toronto, where he revisited a selection of his back catalogue and gave them a more modern feel. This time around, he is reunited with his band and, taking advantage of a short break whilst touring Europe, stopped off at Cologne’s historic Maarweg Studio to…
After seven years of unprecedented success following 2018’s By the Way, I Forgive You, 2021’s In These Silent Days, her recent collaborations with Elton John, Joni Mitchell and increasing mainstream recognition — Brandi Carlile draws a line in the sand, returning with an album that feels like an extended conversation with mortality, love, and the fundamental human need for connection.
Returning to Myself finds the singer-songwriter at her most philosophically engaged, wrestling with the finite nature of existence while celebrating the messy beauty of interdependence. The title track establishes the album’s central paradox immediately. Despite its name suggesting solitary introspection, Carlile hints at co-dependency and togetherness.
Joni Mitchell‘s Hejira is the last in an astonishingly long run of top-notch studio albums dating back to her debut. Some vestiges of her old style remain here; “Song for Sharon” utilizes the static, pithy vocal harmonies from Ladies of the Canyon‘s “Woodstock,” “Refuge of the Roads” features woodwind touches reminiscent of those in “Barangrill” from For the Roses, and “Coyote” is a fast guitar-strummed number that has precedents as far back as Clouds‘ “Chelsea Morning.” But by and large, this release is the most overtly jazz-oriented of her career up to this point — hip and cool, but never smug or icy.
“Blue Motel Room” in particular is a prototypic slow jazz-club combo number, appropriately smooth, smoky, and languorous.
It seems difficult to believe that this is Rianne Downey’s debut album. Having stepped into some formidable shoes as Paul Heaton’s vocal foil at arenas and festivals across the country, Downey is now establishing herself as a singular vocalist in her own right. That talent is showcased across ten tracks which wear their heart on their sleeve and have an unmistakeably Scottish flavour.
It’s a polished album, though the lush strings never get in the way of Downey’s soaring vocals. Standout track ‘The Consequence of Love’ deals with difficult subject matter, without straying into self-pity. It has a clear echo of New Slang by noughties indie favourites The Shins, and like them you can imagine Downey’s music featuring in a pivotal scene of a heartfelt Hollywood flick.
‘Trouble in Paradise’ (Expanded Edition) features a newly remastered version of the original, a rare live recording making its U.S. debut, and 13 previously unreleased demos for tracks like “Christmas In Cape Town” and “My Life Is Good.”
…Like Little Criminals (which introduced “Short People” and “Baltimore”) Trouble in Paradise was heavily influenced by the Los Angeles scene and, as a result, often resembles a sequel to that 1977 effort. (1979’s Born Again, a darker and more prickly set, came in between.) Co-producers Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker enlisted Rickie Lee Jones, Linda Ronstadt, Jennifer Warnes, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, Don Henley, and Bob Seger to provide vocal support for some of Newman’s strongest compositions…
Named for a street in Birmingham, the site of Swordfish Records and where the teenage Jon Wilks would busk, while not rooted in his hometown, Needless Alley is formed from his musical influences of the time, among them Paul Simon, Pentangle, Nick Drake and Bob Dylan, whose Highway 61 Revisited sparked the idea of what might happen on the titular thoroughfare. Described as a patchwork of memories and marking a more autobiographical approach to his writing after previous trad folk-inclined material, he’s backed by his regular Grizzly Folk cohort of Jon Nice (keyboards, guitars), Rich Davies (bass) and Laurence Hunt (drums) with Albert Hansell on melodeon.
Jackie Oates and Joe Sartin on backing vocals,…
37 years after the release of her multi-million selling debut album ‘Ancient Heart’ Tanita Tikaram release the sequel entitled ‘LIAR (Love Isn’t A Right)’. The long-awaited new album reveals the emotional and societal differences between the woman Tanita was at just 18 when she made ‘Ancient Heart’ to the woman she is today, taking in four decades of life experience. ‘LIAR (Love Isn’t A Right)’ is released via Cooking Vinyl.
Her first album in almost a decade, ‘LIAR (Love Isn’t A Right)’ is an album of haunting beauty and exquisite musicianship underplaying her unique voice that tells a masterful story of emotional, political and personal truths.
When it was released in 1988, the multi-million selling ‘Ancient Heart’ was the story…
Horses (50th Anniversary Edition), available through Legacy Recordings, will pair the classic LP with a further nine alternate versions and outtakes from the album sessions, including two selections from Smith’s demo tape for RCA Records. (Arista, unaffiliated with RCA at the time, ended up signing her for about a quarter-century.) A demo version of standout “Redondo Beach” was released on a 2002 compilation, but the others here – including the preview track “Snowball” and a cover of The Marvelettes’ “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” – are heard here for the first time. The deluxe Horses, available on CD, vinyl and digitally, prefaces the publication of Smith’s new memoir, Bread of Angels, in November. (Smith’s deliberate recording pace – one album in the ’80s…
When you think of really top class female singer-songwriters named Williams, the name that does not so often get mentioned is Dar; and yet, she has a very tasty backlog of very good albums, 13 in total dating back to 1990, with a varied mixture of styles, songs with a wide variety of topic (many of them more than just very good) and all sung by one of the sweetest voices around. In addition she has written well-received books, largely drawn from her experiences as a touring artist over many years. In truth she not had the greatest commercial success, but if success is measured by the affection in which she is held by her significant fan base, and the popularity of her live shows, she is certainly successful. She is also highly regarded by some of her peers (and mentors like…
Joan Shelley follows her acclaimed 2022 album The Spur with Real Warmth, her seventh full-length release. Recorded in Toronto with producer Ben Whiteley and features contributions from the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman, Doug Paisley, Nathan Salsburg, Matt Kelley, Ken Whiteley, drummer Philippe Melanson, and saxophonist Karen Ng.
…“Every emotion in one small hour,” sings Joan Shelley, observing her young daughter Talya on ‘Field Guide to Wild Life’. “A raging ocean, a meteor shower.” The folk-adjacent auteur’s ninth studio LP is alive, Natalie Merchant-style, to the marvels of creation, but also the vulnerability that comes with suddenly having a physical stake in the future of humanity.
Craft Recordings commemorates the 60th anniversary of Joan Baez’s bestselling sixth studio album, Farewell, Angelina, with its first wide vinyl reissue in nearly four decades. A pivotal release in Baez’s catalog, the album blends traditional folk standards with contemporary covers, marking a notable stylistic evolution-including the singer-songwriter’s first use of electric guitar.
Set for release on October 3rd, Farewell, Angelina returns with all-analog mastering by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and is pressed on 180-gram vinyl (via Fidelity Record Pressing). An old-school style tip-on jacket, meanwhile, replicates the LP’s original cover. Singer, songwriter and activist Joan Baez (b.1941) is one of modern music’s most influential and enduring voices…
Thanks a lot!