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 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...'. 

End Of The Road 2011

OK. I'm back home, have caught up on some of my accumulated sleep deficit, and so it is time to write something.  Just how good was EOTR 2011?
Well, for once, words fail me. Actions speak louder and so I have just bought my ticket for End Of The Road 2012. See you there? This year it was bigger than before, that is certainly true.  I and most of the people that I spoke to that had also attended in previous years concurred that it was actually even better than before.

In the gardens, just before the start of play on Friday.

A few minutes later...  Secret Sisters on the Garden Stage. What's not to like?

   

Until this year the Garden Stage was the main one, but the new format required a larger one too and that is the Wood Stage.

Much more to come over the next couple of weeks as I'm intending to link this in with more comments about and pictures from the other festivals that I have been to this summer. I also want to overhaul and refresh the contents of the side bar but it all takes time.