Str8OutDaDen: Our top ten songs from the week of 12/03 – 12/09. Our Da Den 10 series has hit Vol.11!!! This week we have new joints from B. Russ, Naji, Tamara Bubble and more. READ MORE…
Despite being among the most welcoming genres around, folk is intriguingly hard to get a precise bead on. That isn’t stopping L.A. singer songwriter Chase McBride from trying. Determined to hit that sweet spot, McBride is returning with his second full LP of 2018 alone. Following up February’s Green Shade, he’s grown inexorably closer to that elusive sweet spot with Pink Lemonade. READ MORE…
The daughter of musical parents — her father Larry Brown played in The Association, Smothers Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, when he met her mother, singer Anne-Marie Brown — Dominique Pruitt loves a good old-timey song, and she’s put her predilection for music of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s into “High In The Valley,” her first new single in five years. “I had written down that song title a few years ago,” she says of the song. “It was such a part of me at one point to feel like I was trapped in this hopelessness of being so close to what you want in a way but so far away.” Perhaps that has something to do with her musical trajectory getting interrupted.
In 2009, Pruitt recorded three demos of her father’s old songs, which in 2011 got her attention from Merovee Records. Her Dave Darling-produced EP, “To Win Your Love” was released in 2013 and though she completed a full-length, she decided to shelve it and the label ultimately folded. From there she did some wandering and creative soul searching, mining her love for Wanda Jackson, the movies “Cry Baby” and “Gypsy,” with burlesque, vintage show girls and Americana, which completes her vision that encompasses both the auditory and visual experience. “That’s something important. I want to put on a show with a spectacle,” she says.
“High In The Valley” was written in collaboration with Jasmine Ash, Joseph Holiday and Kenny Fleetwood. With a little growl in her voice, it opens on the evocative line, “Closest that I’ve ever been to God is a Bible on a nightstand at an old roadside motel” and follows with musings on being broke, “getting high,” being close but yet so far from the glitz of Hollywood stardom, and feeling sad and lost, but the combination of all these elements stirred together makes for a rather glamorous cocktail….READ MORE
Americana Highways brings you this song premiere of Charles Wesley Godwin’s “Strawberry Queen,” from his album Seneca due out February 15th. The album was produced by Al Torrence, and features Eric Heywood (Son Volt, Ray LaMontagne) on pedal steel and Ben Townsend (Hillbilly Gypsies) on fiddle and banjo.
Growing up in Appalachia, Godwin has some observations to share on West Virginia life, and producer Al Torrence helped highlight that on the album. From the old timey rhythms, to the clarity of the acoustic guitar and stringed instruments, this one will take you back to a old style country barndance love story. “I never would’ve guessed it in a hundred years or more… I’d meet a lowland angel like I’d never seen before.”…READ MORE
Because the guitar-bass-drums-violin as well as the vocals aren’t so much subtle as mild, these seven love songs never work up the right pitch of emotional intelligence. But you still believe in your heart that John Elderkin and Joanna Sattin are a couple, because only a couple would notice these things? In the jocose “My Pre-Existing Conditions” Elderkin admits to two left feet, getting stuck in the past, needing to talk before bed, and there’s more. In the pained “Where Does It Hurt” Sattin is so sick with ennui she asks only that he still be there in the morning. And he will be, because elsewhere they stay in bed, miss each other when they don’t, and overnight a Christmas turkey on Amazon Prime so it’ll be there for the Fourth of July. B PLUS…READ MORE
With The Weary Traveler, The Deep Hollow get about doing a whole lot of living. This comes even in the light of lamenting the act of getting older, let alone all of the emotions that tend to come out over the course of any journey on the road. In other words, they’re Americana, defined, firmly rooted in storytelling roots that are often autobiographical. Taking a page from the likes of other open-road folksters like Patty Griffin and Jason Isbell, the band’s three-part vocals complete a soulful roots sound is sure to relate a warm shoulder to lean on for many listeners….READ MORE