A dozen of the most exciting emerging artists in Americana & Roots music. Cover: Sierra Ferrell
Ditty TV
Ditty TV debuts Martin Ruby’s new video for “Kodachrome Shangri-La”
Martin Ruby (aka Marco North), is getting ready to release his debut debut album, Heaven Get Behind Me, this Friday, Nov. 20, on WhistlePig Records. Written on a 100-year-old parlor guitar, and recorded in a Soviet-era living room on a collection of vintage instruments, including an 1887 August Pollman banjola and a 1929 Selmer tenor saxophone made in Paris. Eleven tracks wrestle with life’s messiest questions: examining regret, memory, religion, love, mental health.
Ned Hill’s video for “Movin’ On” is now L I V E @ Ditty TV. Go check out the wild new animation by Marco North of Martin Ruby…
Ned Hill, who just released his sophomore solo record, By the Light of the Radio (WhistlePig Records), was raised on the sounds of FM radio, American Bandstand, and drugstore jukeboxes in the small town of Horse Cave, Ky.
Hill has long since shifted his focus to the sights and sounds of Nashville, where he’s planted his feet for more than 20 years, performing regularly at East Nashville’s The Five Spot, and touring the South, Midwest and New England.
Ditty TV has the featured reel of debut videos next week, including Ned Hill’s “Movin’ On,” directed by Marco North of Martin Ruby.
DittyTV Debut Videos of the Week | Oct. 12 – October 18
Ditty TV debuts David Quinn’s NEW video for “Born to Lose,” whose “bluesy swagger makes the lyrics sound even more haunted.”
Indiana-based David Quinn is gearing up to release his sophomore LP, Letting Go (out Oct. 23). Most of the songs on his second solo album came to him during a ramble around the Midwestern countryside. The barnstorming “Thunderbird Wine” and woe-is-me “I Hope I Don’t” integrate a wide range of influences—from Texas outlaws to Bakersfield badasses, from Southern rock heroes to Nashville cats. Wherever he rambles, however, Quinn remains rooted in Midwestern soil, “It always comes back to John Prine,” he says. “I got started in the Midwest, so he’s somebody I love.”
Ditty TV premieres new video for Stuffy Shmitt’s cutting “It’s OK,” calling it “Alice in Wonderland meets Paris, Texas”
An old New York City rock & roller who’s performed and recorded with everyone from The Band’s Levon Helm to Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano and David Johansen of the New York Dolls, from 2000 to 2012 Stuffy Shmitt released a half-dozen mostly under-the-radar solo records. Then about eight years ago he was completely consumed by bipolar disorder. Finally, he got himself properly medicated, moved to Nashville, and was able to sort out everything he’d created during his bouts of depression and mania. The resulting album, Stuff Happens was produced by Brett Ryan Stewart and Chris Tench and features Aaron Lee Tasjan and Brian Wright, as well as drummer Dave Colella and bassist Parker Hawkins.
Bleak but defiantly upbeat, the lead single, “It’s OK,” is a brutally honest song about Shmitt’s relationship with a beautiful soul who can’t seem to get her shit together. There’s a mesmerizing resignation in Shmitt’s voice as he sings, “It’s OK, forget it, It’s OK, don’t sweat it,” over and over again, as if he wants so badly to believe it’s true, but knows deep down that it’s all pretty far from OK.
The video for the song can only be described as Alice in Wonderland meets Paris, Texas. Catch the world premiere exclusively today at Ditty TV.