“’Someone Else’ kinda plays on the comical part about letting someone keep coming back a million times, even though you know they’ll just leave again, because there’s just someone else that they all can’t let go, someone else in the back of their mind that they just can’t shake, that they would drop you at any minute for, whether it’s an ex or someone they’ve always wanted…more than you.” – Shawn Williams
Americana Highways brings you this premiere of Sarah White covering Michael Nesmith’s song “Different Drum,” due to be available on February 17 via White Star Sound. The song was produced, recorded and mixed by Stewart Myers (Liz Phair, Rachel Yamagata, Shawn Colvin) and mastered by Lurssen Mastering.
This is a very important and personal song to me. I wrote it years ago, but never recorded a proper version until now. I lived in Roanoke, VA for most of my twenties. It’s where I first started playing in serious bands, where I started touring, where I lived when I met so many people who still mean so much to me. This song is a love letter to that town and those times and just being young and dumb and full of hope. And then, I suppose, also the melancholy and the lessons you learn when those dreams don’t work out. – William Russell Wallace
If Tom Waits decided to sing some bluegrass-type songs dipped in a jar of blues spices he’d be as good as Bill Filipiak. 55-year-old Bill comes from the same cloth as Otis Taylor—as he unravels a gritty, upbeat, convincing array of bruised ballads of glittering fragments. Bits of glass in the sidewalk. There’s experience in his musical notes.
Medicine I Need (drops Oct 1 – independent) is Bill’s 3rd LP of welded-together dusty blues, undercurrents of burlesque, foot-stomping boots on the wooden porch & wailing harmonicas scaring off the crows. The penetration of his vintage-ness is ripe. He could sing folk, blues, minstrel & spirituals and still come out the real thing. “Fearing the Dawn” is country-blues brawn & grit.
Read more & check out Bill Filipiak’s recent single “Fearing the Dawn” at Americana Highways.
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.
“[Walter Parks’] style is in the realm of late blues great John Campbell, Keb’Mo, Taj Mahal, & Jon Dee Graham. Yet what makes Walter special — he knows the songs need the region’s dirt & mud in the melody, the swamp diction, southern-fried intonation, humid phrasing, & whiskey tonality.”