William Russell Wallace’s essence is a timeless concoction that is a rare balance of vocal execution and harmonically driven rock and roll in its most raw form. With a throwback Americana style that sounds as if The Jayhawks jammed with Patti Smith, Wallace hoots, toots, and struts with a contagious abandon. Fans of new soul revival artists like Low Cut Connie and Ron Gallo will find something to adhere to on Wallace’s new album Confidence Man.
This set lights up like kindling drenched in gasoline. The instruments are bright, the music well-produced, the voice is a pit bull with a groove that is rock music as it should be in 2021. Stuffy Shmitt (vocals/acoustic guitars, National Steel guitar) has lots of musical pulp on his varied short masterpieces.
His core band is producer Chris Tench (electric & acoustic guitars /xylophone/piano/tubular bells/xylophone/glockenspiel), Parker Hawkins (electric+upright+fretless basses/vocals) & Dave Colella (drums/percussion).
On the 11-cut, 49-minute CD (already available), Stuff Happens (Realistic Records) was recorded in Nashville, TN. The songs have personality, wit, expressiveness & are ballsy.
One of my most played albums of the year, STUFF HAPPENS, from the idiosyncratic Stuffy Shmitt featured in our review section back in February of this year. It made an immediate impact, to say the least, with its stockpile of raging rockers alongside smooth ballads, which found the author digging into the memory vaults and recalling incidents and characters from his explosive past.
Settled and reinvigorated in East Nashville, following a near self-destructive existence in New York, Stuffy hooked up with producer Brett Ryan Stewart and multi-instrumentalist Chris Tench to record the album at Stewart’s studio in Franklin, Tennessee. What also followed were some striking videos to promote a number of the songs, filmed by the talented husband and wife duo Ahana Kaye and Iraki Gabriel.
Resplendent in his jeans, boots, black sport coat, his head shaved on the sides with a tufty palm tree of hair on top, wide-eyed and expressive, Stuffy Shmitt has consorted with known felons and worn-out trollops on the mean side of the street. A Milwaukee native with poetic alcoholic disasters for parents, Shmitt grew up seeing the world not so much as a place for good souls but as a backwater county fair full of damaged human exhibits smelling like hay and cow shit. He’s a heck of a good time, in other words.
His latest musical offering, Stuff Happens, is a rocking, bluesy, angry, funny, howling, cooing, heartbreaking party where all the crazy chickens come to roost. It takes a special artist to write a song called “Sleeping on the Wet Spot” and it not be a novelty song — or go from the gorgeous ode to his parents, “Mommy & Daddy” (featuring strings from Austin Hoke and Derek Pell) to the ‘turn it up to eleven’ Velvet Underground-ish madness that is “Scratchin’ at the Cat.” “Mommy & Daddy” birthed an equally poignant video, produced by Irakli Gabriel and Anana Kaye.
Every great artist needs a good story to tell. For Bill Filipiak, a producer for the Grand Ole Opry, has worked with a list that would giddy up the most casual music listener. With a gritty voice and a knack for roadhouse rhythm blues, Filipiak has used his tenacious chops and ears that have heard everyone from Willie to Emmylou as a cornerstone for his own bodacious Americana sound. on his new LP Medicine, I Need.
“When you have the opportunity to talk songwriting with these people and watch them perform—I’m talking about folks like Larkin Poe, Sarah Jarosz, Molly Tuttle, Bryan Sutton and Allison Russell; artists like Lera Lynn and Maggie Rose, who insist on finding their own path while staying true to who they are; or maybe you spend a couple days with a legend like Keb Mo, George Thorogood or Ray Wylie Hubbard—after that,” Filipiak says, “it’s hard not to pick up your instrument, try to emulate what they’ve done, then come up with your own idea and follow through on it.”
Glide is premiering the chugging rocker “When The Blues Come Calling,” which prowls with a John Hiatt meets Steve Earle rumble atop a toasty harmonica lick that is undeniably old school and full of edge.
Read more and check out the song at Glide Magazine.
It’s nuts the Calumet River south of Chicago doesn’t get more musical nods. Sure it’s no Mississippi or Hudson but surely this body of water sneaking below one of our country’s greatest musical cities would get a big chorus in some Creedence type chugger. Enter Kiely Connell and her righteously soulful charismatic vocal who has something to say about this area on her debut album Calumet Queen. READ MORE…