New Music 2017 - Part 32 - Eilen Jewell - Down Hearted Blues

I intended to write about this a few weeks back and did nothing.  This is the latest release from a prolific songwriter, touring artist and, as in this case, an interpreter of the songs of others and she did this on the album 'Butcher Holler: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn' (2010).

This is all about the last mentioned trait but here it is blues and for the most part it is not blues 'standards' that is the focus of attention here.

Down Hearted Blues - Eilen Jewell (Signature Sounds, 22 September 2017).

Eilen Jewell - Down Hearted Blues:

• It's Your Voodoo Working
• Another Night to Cry
• You'll Be Mine
• Down Hearted Blues
• I'm a Little Mixed Up
• You Gonna Miss Me
• Walking with Frankie
• Nothing in Rambling
• Don't Leave Poor Me
• Crazy Mixed Up World
• You Know My Love
• The Poor Girls Story

I thought about mentioning the sources of the songs here but decided that it is probably more fun if you explore them for yourself, should you wish to do so. Another point to note is that Eilen and her regular band have not been slavish to the original and have added whatever interpretation that was felt to be appropriate.

All this as well as her own music with the band, her gospel-influenced recordings with The Sacred Shakers, a young family and a vast touring schedule.

New Music 2015 - Part 40 - mid-west or north-west?

The first of this pair I mentioned here back in February. The strangest thing is that although released in the North American market on May 26 it is already available in the UK. WTF?

It is fair to say that this brings no Damascene conversion from her previous records. That would, I proffer, be rather like expecting Dylan to go disco. The rather more shocking thing is that I have yet to see Eilen Jewell play live. I have only listened to it a couple times so far but there's nothing not to like. I'm quite certain that, as I listen to it more often and more carefully, I'll find much more in it and not least because that has been the case with all the earlier releases. Why albums such as her solo début Boundary County (2006), which includes one of the finest modern protest songs in my opinion, remains so little known beggars belief.
OK. Perhaps I should get off my high-horse and chill out. This is pretty much how I would plan on doing that and this is another band that I have never seen live. Having relocated long ago from the mid-west to the ocean-side of Seattle Seapony releases a third LP. I guess it is as much a case of whether wide sky or wide sea does it for you.

'A Vision' is released on 31 July 2015.  Music for warm summer days and sea breezes.

Not only that: Seapony is now a four-piece and, with real percussion from Aaron Voros in place of their former vintage drum-machine, it marks a major step-change. Jen Weidl, Danny Brewer and Ian Rowland continue in their previous rôles but there is a new versatility.
Previous albums 'Go With Me' and 'Falling' were released by Hardly Art.
'A Vision' is self-released and more information. including ordering and formats are vinyl, CD and d/l, may be found here. This is the track list.

1. Saw The Light
2. Bad Dream
3. Couldn’t Be
4. Everyday All Alone
5. Hollow Moon
6. Let Go
7. A Place We Can Go
8. Go Nowhere
9. In Heaven
10. New Circle
11. A Vision

I have never seen Seapony live either. Lots more things to do!

New Music 2015 - Part 16 - Eilen Jewell - Sundown Over Ghosttown

I don't keep statistics of my posts to quite the level of either Wisden or the NFL (select region as appropriate) but I suspect that this is my most lengthy succession of posts on new music.
My view of this is that if there is music that captures my attention there is no reason to ignore it. I will miss plenty for sure but I can't help that.
This is a double-bill, more than that really, by the same artist - Eilen Jewell. At the end of 2014 I posted about live albums. I deliberately held this one back because I had a suspicion that a new studio album was in the offing and I felt that they belonged in a post together. The live album is self released. Here it is.

Eilen Jewell and band was recorded live at The Narrows, Fall River, MA, in February 2014.

The new studio album will be released by Signature Sounds as always and, in North America at least, on 26 May 2015. It is 'Sundown Over Ghost Town.' No idea of the artwork yet but trust me, when I have I'll be on the case and ordering the LP on vinyl (and I strongly suspect that this will be possible).
I still haven't seen her live and I was lamenting that as long ago as 2011. This needs fixing, particularly given the class of the live album mentioned above. I recommend a listen to the four LPs that the songs are taken from.
'Live at The Narrows' comprises twenty-nine tracks over a pair of CDs and was recorded over two successive nights at the venue. It is epic in any reasonable sense of the word.

2011 in Music - Albums - Part 2

I was planning to do the '2011 in EPs and mini-albums' section before this but that has (once again) proved more complicated.  This, which is not a second-string selection of albums, hasn't been much better and actually more difficult that the first because I have, in order to limit to a dozen, been forced to be even more ruthless.
Here it is, again in alphabetical order by act/artist and (for now) without further comment:

• Alessi's Ark - Time Travel
• Black Keys - El Camino
• Demdike Stare - Tryptych
• Eilen Jewell - Queen of the Minor Key
• Gill Sandell - Tarry Awhile
• Jackie Oates - Saturnine
• Joy Formidable - The Big Roar
• Kitty, Daisy and Lewis - Smoking In Heaven
• Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know
• Low Anthem - Smart Flesh
• Naked and Famous - Passive Me, Aggressive You
• Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls

I might attempt the aforementioned '2011 in EPs and mini-albums' this evening. I have also introduced a new rule for these lists - although I don't think that even retrospectively I have actually violated it - and that is the the same act/artist combination cannot appear in more than one list in a given year with the exception being the 'Live List', if I ever get around to posting one.

New Music 2011 - Part 13 - Queen of the Minor Key

Some artists and acts take many years between album releases but Eilen Jewell is not one of them. This is the new album, due for release worldwide on June 28, 2011.

In addition to an intensive and extensive touring schedule this is her fifth full length release in as many years.  The first three albums were a mixture of self-written material and judicious covers some rather surprising and, unless you already knew otherwise, telling them apart would sometimes have been difficult:

• Boundary Country (2006)
• Letters from Sinners and Strangers (2008)
• Sea of Tears (2009)

In 2010 she released 'Butcher Holler', a tribute to Loretta Lynn, and now comes 'Queen of the Minor Key' which, as far as I am aware, consists entirely of new songs that she has written for it.  

She and her band come with a fearsome reputation for live performance too. Another that, while I have failed to do so yet, I would absolutely love to hear live in 2011.

Sea of Tears - new music I want in 2009 - part 5½

It was perhaps obvious that my last post was left unfinished and so it was...

That was a problem, entirely of my own making, and I apologize for it. April is a good time, so here are some new albums, scattered across genres, that I now want. I don't care if they are popular now: some are, some will be so in the future, and others simply will not.
That is the long term view and I'm disinclined to take it.
If I want an album, and although it is true that I have many that are decades old, when I want a new one the buying choice is wider but so, quite alarmingly, is my taste in music! If that were a surprise then this a very surprising selection, one based on Americana again, but I just can't help it.
You can tell me what you think (either e-mail or comment) but I still think that you should simply listen to whatever it is that you want to so feel free to tell me about whatever music you have found.

The selected ones are already on order, many from the US, something that was not really possible twenty years ago, but this one actually takes its reference points from Americana and also the British 'pop-rock' of the sixties and Jewell does it well - back then you simply couldn't have done it this way. The covered songs are excellent again but the originals are even better.
They have an air of total authenticity and are often narrative, songs that are tales of being fu**ed over, but they do it without appearing self-consciously traditional or, on the other hand, overtly bitter or modern. It certainly isn't nu folk, anti folk or whatever, and I like most of that too, even though this album is much more electric-oriented than LfS&S. The result is engaging, more 1960s than obviously influenced by anything that came later, and really quite special.

Amongst the others are...

Love, Save The Empty - Erin McCarley

There are just so many good things around - this is merely another interim post.

When all else fails...

I apologise for attempting to provide a positive note concerning the current economic situation. Banks may fail, and some more probably will, but even if all four remaining 'major recording labels' were also to do so (which I suspect will not happen), while it would have a major effect on the music industry in the short term, it would not be the end of the world.

The world will still need music, just as surely it will still need banking services, but if the current modus operandi is no longer appropriate then that needs to be addressed too. I can think of one thing that has survived, maybe even thrived, in previous times of trouble and that is music.
It matters not whether you want to enjoy it for escapism or wallow in its realism for, either way, there is plenty already available to draw upon and there is no sign of a supply shortage - far from it indeed.
The established music industry has been feeling the pinch for a few years now, and long before the current economic crisis, but I have no reason to believe that is in any way likely to change as the making of music is, as far as can be reliably surmised, a human trait that transcends almost everything else and possibly even language. The recorded music industry however, as we knew it until recently, was barely fifty years old and as such thus one of the youngest dinosaurs.
I never thought I'd write this but I wonder if, as although it belatedly realised the game was up a couple of years ago, in this situation it is actually slightly ahead of the others here!
The grim reality of the rust-belt matters again and so does - whilst maybe updated - the music of uncertainty and dislocation that goes with it.
This image is reminiscent of the track 'Dusty Boxcar Wall', which was written by Eric Anderson for his 1965 album 'Today Is The Highway' and if anyone is going to cover such downbeat Americana in 2008 why shouldn't it be a short, half-forgotten, tale of despondency reinterpreted by a female artist born in Boise, Idaho in 1979?

I for one can't see any problem with that.

This image, and the cover version of the song, come from the 2008 album 'Letters from Sinners and Strangers' by now Boston-based singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell. The rest of the album is a mixture of covers and self penned tracks that, unless you know better, are often indistinguishable - it is a wonderful album.She also plays harmonica, a long neglected instrument, to great effect on several tracks and no major label got a look-in here - it was released by Signature Sounds Recordings and all credit to them for doing that.