New Music 2017 - Part 15 - The Secret Sisters - You Don't Own Me Anymore

It was only last weekend that I was discussing the impact that new music can have on me, particularly when blind-sided by something unknown and therefore quite unexpected. It has happened quite a few times now, most often at festivals, and it is a thrill that doesn't seem to diminish with each incidence thereof.
This is about one such act that I mentioned here and one that I am happy to report has resurfaced after a very challenging time that involved being dropped by their record label and various other soul-destroying events. This is one of the very few pictures I took then and long before all that happened to them:

The Secret Sisters - Garden stage, End Of The Road Festival, 5 September 2011.

I mention this because The Secret Sisters are back! Laura and Lydia Rogers had been writing songs in a desultory fashion and with no real expectations until towards the end of 2015 when Brandi Carlile coaxed them to play support for her in her native Pacific Northwest.
Then she told them that she was producing their third LP (that wasn't even written) in collaboration with her own co-producers the Hanseroth Twins.

This re-focussed the songwriting; the experiences of the previous few years becoming material for whole new set of songs and this is the result.

The Secret Sisters - You Don't Own Me Anymore (New West Records, 16 June 2017).

The Secret Sisters - You Don't Own Me Anymore

• Tennessee River Runs Low
• Mississippi
• Carry Me
• King Cotton
• Kathy's Song
• To All the Girls Who Cry
• Little Again
• You Don't Own Me Anymore
• The Damage
• Til It's Over
• Flee as a Bird

That is the playlist and this is the opening song. I can't wait to see them live once again.

New Music 2016 - Part 22 - Cale Tyson - Careless Soul

While this is about a forthcoming LP, Careless Soul is the first full-length by American artist Cale Tyson, it is also a very appropriate vehicle for the continuation of a number of themes concerning the music industry that I have espoused over a period of a few years.

Cale Tyson - Careless Soul (Clubhouse Records, 8 April 2016).

Cale Tyson, born and bought up in Texas, now calls Nashville his adopted home.  Both these facts, perhaps unsurprisingly, have had a considerable bearing on his music but in ways that are either not immediately apparent to the mainstream Nashville music industry of the major labels or not to its liking for artistic (and by implication audience) control...
There is a great deal of tradition involved here - this is country soul - but very little pastiche. It was recorded in Muscle Shoals, AL, at Fame Studios and with top-drawer acoustic musicians. This is part of a wider revival and indeed re-invention of traditional country subject material. Careless Soul comprises twelve songs:

• Staying Kind
• Somebody Save Me
• Careless Soul
• Easy
• Traveling Man
• Pain in My Heart
• Railroad Blues
• Dark Dark
• High Lonesome Hill
• Gonna Love a Woman
• Pain Reprise
• Ain't It Strange

A fact perhaps more surprising is that it will be released in the UK before its North American release. In the last decade the change in attitude in the UK towards this kind of music - let's group it under the broad church of folk, roots and Americana just for the purposes of the here and now - has been nothing short of seismic. The traffic in artists has been bi-directional. A look at festival line-ups either side of the Atlantic, for 2016 or in the previous few years, will soon show that to be true.

Why has this happened?
Well I certainly don't know that, but it appears not to be a result simply of a single generation. Both artists producing such music and the audiences attracted by them have been becoming younger without, unusual historically-speaking, alienating older listeners; it pains me to feel I ought to count myself amongst the older listeners. The most encouraging thing is the egalitarian nature of the younger ones and the everyone-has-something-to-bring attitude to all this.

Cale Tyson came to the wider attention of UK audiences in 2015 when Clubhouse records released Introducing Cale Tyson, which is a complete synthesis of his previous two EPs/mini-albums High On Lonesome (2013) and Cheater's Wine (2014) that had only had official US releases.
As a taster, because I like it and it displays some of the old-time flavour, I have chosen this original song:


'Old Time Blues', the song later appeared on the High On Lonesome EP, live in Nashville, 26 March 2013.

Should you be wondering who the backing vocalist is, on the left as viewed here, it is Erin Rae and she releases her début album Soon Enough together with her band, as Erin Rae and The Meanwhiles and again through Clubhouse Records in the UK on 3 June 2016. I mentioned it here a couple of months ago. The pedal steel player in the above video, Brett Resnick, is also one of 'The Meanwhiles'.
I think it important that music is starting to rediscover that there is real value to be found in simple links like this. Music as a space to be shared by all those involved, from musicians to audience, rather than dog-eat-dog, short-sighted exploitation. That is another reason why learning to trust artists, independent labels, festivals and one's own instinct is coming to the fore again as a community aspiration after far too many years under the patriarchal hegemony of the major label system.

Added April 7, 2016:


Cale Tyson and the making of Careless Soul.
Another example of the change that all this represents are the possibilities provided by crowd funding. My next post is likely to be about an album made possible that way.

Old dog. New tricks. And a total bargain...

My liking for music in physical format needs no further mention. That is still true - I have not changed my spots all of a sudden.
When, however, Spotify offered me 'Premium' for three months at the princely sum of £0.99 and that payment is for all three months, not per month. It would have been churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth.
It will not alter the amount of physical music I actually purchase but, my goodness, it is facilitating the task of listening to new music and, especially if I'm uncertain about it, also making it a whole lot easier. It might even lead to me purchasing more physical music. It is not that it is impossible to do this with Spotify 'free' but the lack of advertisements actually does make a difference. The blurb said that the sound quality is also noticeably better. I was slightly dubious about that, but then again 99p is not a sum even I was afraid to wager on the possibility. Pending more demanding tests this coming weekend I'm inclined to the idea that this might actually be true.
What has impressed me, and again I could have done this with 'free' but this was the impetus to explore, was the coverage. The removal from Spotify of the music of Taylor Swift became something of a cause célèbre in late 2014 but it is just one small canon of work in the great scheme of things. It was an otherwise unremarkable and quite acceptable commercial response to perceived market forces. It, the music and the publishing phenomenon, is easily found elsewhere quite legally and not least in physical formats, including vinyl. Deleting pressings to promote the sale of newer ones is as old as the mass market for music.
What impresses me more is the sheer scope of the music to be found here - both old and new and across all genres - and with that comes the opportunity to discover, listen and then promote the music of artists less well known should one feel so inclined.
It is something human to look for the newest things and music is no exception - the internet is perfect for this. Finding older, often obscure, things has also been revolutionised but the foil is not so easy to overcome; the contemporary details are either unavailable or require lateral thinking and often more than a little guile to uncover. That, however, is also part of the thrill of the chase - and another use of foil.

I have an idea:
It is not scientific but nevertheless empirical observations can be of great value. It is to test Spotify by searching for a variety of recordings, both recent and old, that I know or believe are hard to source on a physical format and that I either already have or have tried to find in the past. It has already yielded, as a more or less random 'hit' -  an album of folk music from NE England that I was only faintly aware of hitherto and was released in 1975. The result... I have now bought it on original vinyl.
This new resource will quite possibly shape much of my thinking over the next couple of months. I'm also imagining those artists that I expect/desire to see at the festivals that I shall or even just may attend this coming summer.
Items never released in a digital format are, unsurprisingly, extremely unlikely to feature. This is not to be found therefore - Cate Le Bon 'Edrych yn Llygaid Ceffyl Benthyg' (2008). It was released only on 10" vinyl  but the title is to a reasonable degree the Welsh equivalent of the English phrase 'to look a gift horse in the mouth', more literally it is 'to look into the eyes of a borrowed horse'. I rather like that - there's something about it that makes the horse, rather than the lessor, the more important part of the deal.
I know that it is not the weekend yet...
What the hell, I'm doing some testing now and not least because I'm thinking about those artists that I might be seeing at this summer's festivals. There are some big announcements coming soon.

This artist would be high on my wish list. To say she is underrated is only the half of it.

   
The Spotify search box is not, or so it seems to me, nearly as good at guessing your mind as some but it's worth a few tries to find what you are searching for. It is also less comprehensive in its results, so you need to be as precise as you are able to be for that reason alone. You can also do this reversibly to good effect - if you know only a song title and artist you can fairly easily get back to the album or other resource from which it came.
It is a collision of new and old technology and quite possibly not to the detriment of either. If you want an old physical recording then not only can you find a source of it on-line but, quite possibly, you can even listen to at least some of it the same way before you commit to purchase.
The sale of an LP that the purchaser regrets buying does neither party any good in the longer term: a fact that, in the quest for 'first-week sales' and 'chart penetration', the major labels forgot somewhere down the line.

New Music 2014 - Part 21 - The Secret Sisters - Put Your Needle Down

After a spell in which the 'New Music' series has predominantly been about UK based artists the pattern, like the weather does, seems to have wandered west to feature North American ones once again. As usual this is often dominated by ones that I have seen live, are going to see live or simply wish to see live. This one falls in to the first of those categories.

'Put Your Needle Down' is The Secret Sisters recently released second LP. 
    

They opened the Garden Stage at End of The Road Festival 2011 around noon and, true to festival form I got off to a very poor start with photography. I only took two and this is the better of them!

These days I am aware of this problem and, while I still don't really know why it happens, I am consciously able to compensate for it to some degree. One thing is evident here: that had I had wished to be up against the barrier, towards the left of this picture and a spot that would have been ideal, then there was absolutely nothing to stop me.
WTF was I thinking?
  
One answer, given that I only had the faintest idea about what to expect, is just how astonishingly good it was. The self-titled début LP had then only recently been released and I had not heard it. Unlike some such sibling-named acts Laura and Lydia Rogers really are sisters and, since these things matter more than they seem to in some forms of music, their home town is Muscle Shoals, Ala.
The title of this LP may be rhetorical; I don't know and I have no knowledge as yet of this LP released on vinyl. That is no matter but I can tell you is that it was considerably cheaper (delivery to the UK included) to buy it brand new and sealed (it arrived thus) on CD from the USA than to download it on amazon.co.uk.
That says something.  It took a few days longer; I'm quite down with that. I'll buy LPs direct from the artist if I can.
It certainly won't please everyone (and that I regard as a good thing) but for me the overarching thing about 'Put Your Needle Down' is that it is perfectly poised between being reverential of tradition and a contradictory need to seem to out-grow the same. Some of the new songs could have been written in the late 1950s or early 1960s except to say that they weren't.
There is a cover of a much more recent song in PJ Harvey's 'The Pocket Knife' and then, from the early 1980s, something more than a cover - Bob Dylan never completed 'Dirty Lie' and so, about twenty years down the line he offered Secret Sisters the demo recordings and a plea to pull it together, which they duly did.

There is a whole lot of good stuff coming out at the moment, and even the 'major labels' have stepped up to the plate, at least to some extent. It is hopeful, but tempting, to say that 'Times They Are A Changin...'.