There is nothing like the sound of siblings singing together. Whether it’s the Beach Boys or the Everly Brothers—or, more recently, First Aid Kit—absorbing the same breathing rhythms and speech patterns adds an element to vocal harmonies that can be pure magic. With the release of I’m Alone, No You’re Not, the mesmerizing, hypnotic sound of the trio known as Joseph—made up of sisters Allison, Meegan, and Natalie Closner—joins this elite company.
“It’s just second nature, like a fifth limb that’s already on you,” says first-born Natalie. “There’s an ability to anticipate what’s going to happen and blend with it. When Meegan and Allison sing, they know exactly what I’m going to do and when.”
But the Closners didn’t actually start singing together when they were growing up in Oregon, the children of artistic parents (their dad was a jazz singer and drummer, their mom a theater teacher). Natalie was the performer—“the older sister who stood on the edge of the fireplace and told everyone, ‘Watch me!,’“ she says. Twins Meegan and Allison stayed out of her lane, joining in for their mother’s musical theater productions but otherwise avoiding the spotlight.
When Natalie was in college, she began pursuing music more seriously. The summer before her senior year, she went to Nashville to check out the scene and work on her guitar playing and songwriting. She had recorded an EP and done a few rounds of touring when a friend sat her down one day.
“It was kind of dramatic,” she says, “He took me aside and said, ‘I don’t think you really believe in this.’ It stopped me in my tracks.” She thought deeply about the music she was making and had a curious epiphany; she decided to ask her sisters if they would consider singing with her.
Initially, they didn’t really get it. “We thought she was asking us to be background singers, so we didn’t take it that seriously,” says Allison. “It was more commitment than I was expecting—I even tried to leave at one point, but after a while, I was convinced.”
A transformation occurred when the Closners were in the process of recording their first album, Native Dreamer Kin. At the time, they were calling themselves Dearborn, but their producer felt that the name didn’t fit the strength of the music. They went to visit their grandfather Jo, in the eastern Oregon town of Joseph. Allison made a playlist for the trip and called it “Joseph,” which is what influenced the band’s name.
“Once she said it, it just hit us all—that’s what this is and who we are, these are the sounds of the land that we’ve lived on,” says Natalie.
With this new sense of themselves, Meegan and Allison began taking a more active role in the group’s songwriting. Meegan notes that while the process was a “totally new journey” for her, it felt similar to the candor and vulnerability of her long-time journaling—just “pulling out the gold and arranging that into neater lines.”
She and Natalie both point to the song “Honest” as a keystone for the development of I’m Alone, No You’re Not. “We were trying really hard to write a song, but nothing was coming,” recalls Natalie. “One night, Meegan was working on some lyrics and getting frustrated, so she wrote in the margin of the page, ‘I can’t say a true thing. It’s hard to be that honest.’ Immediately after that, her most honest sentence spilled out—‘There’s always two thoughts, one after the other: I’m alone. No, you’re not.’ And she thought, ‘Oh, there’s the song.’ “
Meanwhile, the group was cultivating a devoted fan base in the most traditional ways possible: touring the Western states playing living room shows, backyard parties, and secret house party gigs; reaching an audience directly through such platforms as Noisetrade; selling their self-released CD and building a loyal following step by step. By the time they were approached by ATO Records, Joseph had already built a strong community of fans on its own.
As they moved toward making their second record, the project took an additional turn when the Closners decided to work with some other songwriters in Los Angeles. “We were afraid of it at first because the songs were more pop than we were used to writing,” says Meegan, “but as we internalized them, they started becoming super-important to us.”
They point to “More Alive Than Dead,” co-written with Ethan Gruska, as an example of these contributions. “That song describes an experience with a partner where you have hard things in your combined past,” says Natalie. “You’re haunted by them until you realize that those things are dead, and as long as you dwell on them, you’re missing the real live person in front of you.”
She adds, though, that Gruska was critical in clarifying and sharpening the nuanced emotion of the lyric. “When Ethan sent us back the demo, I lost it, He was able to see the heart of the song and bring it out, cut to the core of what I was trying to say.”
Finally, the women of Joseph recorded the album with acclaimed producer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, Jenny Lewis, First Aid Kit) at his studio in Omaha. He was able to open up their expansive, evocative vocal sound with powerful and striking arrangements, adding depth while highlighting their haunting intensity.
“This was our first time doing a recording like this,” says Natalie, “and we learned so much about creativity. Mike is a genius, and he’s just a total maniac as a musician, so he took these bare bones songs and brought them to life with lush, gorgeous textures and sounds.”
The initial reaction to the music on I’m Alone, No You’re Not has been remarkable. Joseph was selected as a #SpotifySpotlight artist, and booked for festivals including Bonnaroo, Pickathon, and Sasquatch even prior to the release of the single “White Flag,” a song inspired by an article predicting a massive earthquake for the Pacific Northwest.
“Reading that created a heaviness that was making us jumpy, scared, and miserable,” says Natalie. “It became clear we had two options: be scared and cowering, backing away from the world into paralysis, or keep moving and live. Defy fear. Wear peace. Find better ways to love the people in our lives instead of huddling together like frightened sheep thinking about earthquakes.”
Most rewarding for the Closner sisters has been feeling the audience response to the new songs, as they tour supporting such artists as James Bay and Amos Lee. “This is really when you learn what’s special about a song, or if it’s special,” says Natalie. “It’s this crazy firecracker thing that happens—‘Am I feeling something? Is anyone? What is this song, what does it do, which parts make the most sense?’
“It really is about connection with people, and we’re so grateful we’ve gotten the chance to do that. This has been a totally wild journey, and we’re constantly blown away with possibility of what could be.”
When they're not touring with jazz virtuoso Raul Midón, or starring on London's West End in the hit show Close to You; Bacharach Reimagined, 25 year old twins Daniel (Bass) and David Bailen (Drums) are playing and singing in three part harmony with their 19 year old sister Julia (Guitar) in their band BAILEN. The three have been writing songs and performing since they can remember. As children, the siblings were all soloist in the Metropolitan Opera's children's chorus, singing along side the likes of Pavarotti, Rene Fleming and Placido Domingo. And before that, they were performing and touring with their parents, both professional NYC freelance musicians. Childhood friend Pierre Piscitelli (Keyboards) is the fourth member of BAILEN, and the only "non" Bailen, but the band says they are working on the paper work.
BAILEN has collaborated with artists such as Burt Bacharach, Bill Withers Alex Clare, Raul Midón, Jon Batiste and Stay Human, AJR, Kyle Riabko, Dianne Reeves, Liz Wright, Richard Bona, Marcus Miller, Bob Thiele Jr. and Joe Mardin. They have written music for Sons of Anarchy, Victoria's Secret, Paper Magazine, Marc Jacobs, Ansel Elgort and can be heard on Raul Midón's new album "Don't Hesitate" as well as Jon Batiste and Stay Human's "My NY." In 2014 they won the Elfenworks Foundation songwriting award: In Harmony With Hope. They have performed internationally and are regular guests at Madison Square Garden for the National Anthem. Grammy U and College Battle named them the best college band in the Northeast.
This past year the band has been cultivating a presence in London, where they have played dozens of shows, recorded with Grammy winning engineer Ricardo Damian (Uptown Funk), and have garnered a faithful following within the London folk scene as well as in NYC. The groups' three-part sibling harmonies have been compared to The Fleet Foxes and The Staves, and Entertainment Weekly described them as having "harmonies to rival Simon Garfunkel."
To Portlanders, Pond may always be the local trio of Charlie Campbell, Chris Brady and David Triebwasser, who recorded a couple of albums for Sub Pop in the '90s and were one of our town's true buzz bands back when most of the buzz was happening three hours up I-5. But it's 2014, not 1993, and a different band named Pond consists of a shaggy bunch of Australians who make psychedelic pop-rock that's as pure and pretty as fellow Perth exports Tame Impala, with whom Pond shares a few members.
There is a line from Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid that nearly a decade ago Laura Marling decided to have tattooed on her leg: "Varium et mutabile semper femina" it runs, translating roughly as "A woman is an ever fickle and changeable thing." Realizing that the line was a little long for the limb, at the very last moment she opted instead for an abbreviation: "Semper femina" she chose: "Always a woman." It makes a fitting and fascinating title for Marling's sixth album — an intimate, devoted exploration of femininity and female relationships, and among her finest work to date. Written largely on the tour that followed 2015's Short Movie and recorded in Los Angeles with production from Blake Mills, it is at once a distinctive and musically compelling collection of songs, run through with Marling's fierce intelligence; a keen, beautiful and unparalleled take on womanhood.
"I started out writing it as if a man was writing about a woman," Marling says. "And then I thought it's not a man, it's me — I don't need to pretend it's a man to justify the intimacy of the way I'm looking and feeling about women. It's me looking specifically at women and feeling great empathy towards them and by proxy towards myself."
The songs grew out of what Marling regards as "a masculine time" in her life. "A certain time when I'd sort of gone on this trip of abandoning any sexuality," she says. "Now in retrospect I was hopped up on the times, but I was living in LA, and LA does have an amazing knack for removing sexuality. I found it quite scary; I was scared of what I perceived to be the disappearance of my feminine side. But it gave me an ability to look at women in a different way and consider how I'd been looked at."
In retrospect there was a precursor to this strange period of her life — Short Movie had been concerned with the breaking down of the ego, "And then I guess piecing back together an ego you get to see it in all its parts," she says. "And tied in with this was the magical realism of living in LA." Having spent several years in Los Angeles, Marling now splits her time between the UK and California. "And LA makes me feel very different to England," she says. "Now my love affair with LA is at a point where I don't really leave my house and all my friends are English. It's a great place to be, but it's not an enticing fantastical adventure anymore, and I think the election has brought that home."
Marling's exploration of femininity is as broad as it is tender. On tracks such as Wild Once she was interested in the archetype of the wild woman and her unrestrained physicality. "In the more masculine phase of my life I got really into hiking and bouldering, scrambling up trees or whatever," she explains. "And I just hadn't exercised that part of myself for such a long time, and it was felt fantastic. It touched something that was really sweet and innocent. At a time when I couldn't really find that center, I was touching on it running through a forest by Big Sur with no shoes on."
Elsewhere she's looking at "What's been forbidden to me in female relationships in all forms, and at female empathy between each other, and friendships that have been really intense." On The Valley, for instance, a track she calls "a bit of an English nostalgia trip" she writes about "broken female friendships, and how that feels to be betrayed or betray a friend or a woman in any way."
The nature of female friendship has been a long-standing interest for Marling. "And again it's blurred as you open up the boundaries more," she says. "But the falling in love that you experience with friendship is so less defined than romantic or sexual love. I've been obsessed with that always I think," she says. "Because I have sisters maybe, and a mother. And I think because of that there's a high standard of trust and care that I place on myself and that I feel in my female friends as well — we have quite a high empathetic standard for each other. So I feel when that's broken it's so powerful. And I'm guilty of that in many respects because I'm so absent-minded. Until now I just hadn't really thought about that being a subject matter for a song, but when I tapped into the sadness of that, or the regret, or the feeling of being on the other side of that, I found that quite a fruitful well of stuff. So there's a lot of that on this record, that trying to make amends for those sort of broken channels."
She also became fascinated by the life of the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salome. "I came across her by accident through a love letter that [Rainer Maria] Rilke wrote," Marling says. "I was obsessed with Rilke, and he wrote about her being the only tangible thing that he'd ever encountered in his life — the famous quote is 'You alone are real to me'." Marling read about Andreas-Salome extensively — from her upbringing in Russia, through her intellectual and romantic relationships with figures such as Paul Ree, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, her unconsummated marriage to Friedrich Carl Andreas, and her passionate affair with Rilke which led to his Duino elegies.
Rather than her relationships with famous male figures it was Andreas-Salome's own psychoanalytic research that Marling found particularly interesting: "Just before Freud died she wrote him a letter saying 'I've been doing some research into the feminine psyche and I think you've got it completely wrong. Penis envy is an invention of man because women's sexuality by its nature is internal and self-perpetuating, so there's no lack of this or need of that. It's this internal, inherently creative thing without men.' And Freud wrote to her and said this is amazing and this is true, but he died two months later so it never got published. And that blew my mind. Imagine! It would've changed the entire psyche of the western world."
These thoughts were shaped further by Marling's ongoing podcast project Reversal of the Muse which saw her interviewing women from across the music industry — from famed singers such as Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris to female sound engineers, and guitar shop owners, discussing the nature and shape of female creativity. "I would say that feminine creativity, the feminine part of the brain is in both sexes, but is inherently different to the masculine," she says, for me, playing guitar has always been tied up with my identity, it's always been involved in myself, rather than enticing people in."
Having produced Short Movie herself, Marling decided to enlist Mills as producer for Semper Femina. "I really enjoyed producing but it's just not my calling," she says. "I'd love to do it for someone else, but for myself it was too difficult to play both roles. Making the podcasts I discovered I play off the vulnerability of being a solo human being, playing a very vulnerable song in front of a microphone with six people in a control room. It's a weird dynamic, but it has always worked for me. A lot of songwriters I know can't bear to be overheard when they're songwriting, but I quite like it — I write in venues or dressing rooms when there are eight people in the room. There's something thrilling and weirdly voyeuristic about it. But I like the idea that it will be heard, and if I'm producing it feels like it might only be heard by me."
Looking for a producer, and already a fan of his music, she was told that Mills had written a list of people he wanted to work with and that her name was on it. This is not to say recording was always straightforward, and working with a new, male producer brought familiar challenges for Marling. "I think Blake was very sweetly not sure what to do with an English girl," she says. "It took a week or two to shake off the very set image of what I was in his mind — a very romping through the countryside delicate character from Emma. And I've had that so many times. And in some ways I'm think you can keep that image of me, but in other ways I have to break it in order to get work done, because it's a really heavy block between you and what you want to get done. And also because I'd just come from producing a record myself I had to get rid of that idea of delicacy."
More than anything on Semper Femina Marling addresses the space between the perceptions and realities of being a woman, the space in which women are not frail but powerful, creative and abundant figures. "When I was a teenager in my head you were either this delicate tragedy or you were a muse," she says. "And they're both such horrifyingly subjugated roles. But our culture loves female tragedy. That's just been so ingrained over and over again, and there haven't been enough examples of a written alternative. My main focus is re-writing the idea of tragic woman."
If Marling sounds galvanized it's because this album marks a shift in her career. "The time and the political climate that we live in, we're coming to a point where there's no need for this sort of artistic expression that I've been a part of," she says. "Innocent creativity had a little flourish in the last ten years. But also I'm getting older and now I think 'What use is that?' It's not rooted, not pointed, not political. For me right now I feel like it's more important that I have a practical use."
Valley Queen front woman Natalie Carol leads a band reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac and My Morning jacket with lead vocals evocative of Florence Welch. Their sound brings to mind the soul of Motown and the power of southern rock. Over the past year, Valley Queen has been recording tracks for their debut, full-length LP and have played lauded shows at an array of venues, opening for Lucero and LP, as well as headlining Pappy and Harriet's in Joshua Tree, the Echo Park Rising Festival in Los Angeles and a 7 show run at the 2015 CMJ Music Marathon in NYC. The Huffington Post has declared them "the ultimate outlaws" (the music video for "Who Ever Said" premiered on TheHuffPost) and P. Claire Dodson from The Village Voice notes that Valley Queen has "stayed true to their roots while embracing the psychedelia of California rock — and making some damn good music along the way…anchored by Carol's enthralling vocals."
With their debut album tracked, Valley Queen is poised to unleash 10 uniquely original compositions written by Natalie and produced by Lewis Pesacov (Best Coast, Nikki Lane, Fidlar, Superhumanoids and Fool's Gold) at the beginning of 2016. The album showcases the band's diversity and a level of maturity rarely seen by songwriters at 25. Natalie brings the perspective of a fierce, confident, independent woman in the same vein as Jenny Lewis, Karen O, and Grace Potter. The rest of the band, consisting of Neil Wogensen, Shawn Morones and Gerry Doot, enrich the songs with energy, excitement and emotion.
In 19-some years, Califone haven't really changed. Which is to say they've had no need for reinvention. Unlike surfers of the stylistic zeitgeist, Tim Rutili's rusty, warm, tactile, vagabond folk continues to crack with the utmost distinction. Like a hobo's fire, the Chicago group's vast catalog warms and warbles, flickering in haunted harmony.
SPIRAL STAIRS RETURNS WITH DORIS AND THE DAGGERS
It’s been eight years since Scott Kannberg, aka Spiral Stairs, released any new music. He knows that. The years just have a habit of slipping away sometimes.
The Real Feel – the Pavement guitarist and Preston School Of Industry leader’s 3rd album – arrived in 2009, just as Pavement were announcing a hugely successful burst of reunion shows through 2010. “Then, after the Pavement shows, I moved with my wife to go live in a house in the country near Brisbane, in Australia,” the amiable Scott remembers, of those years of seeming inactivity. “Then we had a kid, and that sort of got in the way. I tried to do music, but all of a sudden it was two years later and I’m mowing my lawn and tending my garden.”
A little while after that, Scott and family got bored of life in Australia and moved to Los Angeles. “I had the perfect set-up there, so I started work. The way I write songs is, I put on my electric guitar and walk around the house and play it and look at myself in the mirror,” he laughs, “and just make up stuff. But because the kid was off at school for three hours a day, I only really had an hour or so to do that. So it took a little time. It was my intention to have done at least a couple more records by now, things just got in the way.”
You can’t hurry genius – not even the genial, unforced and unpretentious genius that has long been Scott’s forte. What’s for sure is his second album as Spiral Stairs, Doris And The Daggers, is worth the wait. It’s some of the best music Scott’s been involved with, and also some of the most personal and emotional music he’s ever written, reflecting the life changes that occurred over those seven years. During that stretch, Scott weathered the loss of friends, treasured the joys of fatherhood, lived life as an Australian and even ate haggis meat – experiences that inform these warm, sweetly melodic and soundly honest songs.
“The lyrics definitely have a more traditional ‘songwriter’ feel,” agrees Scott. “I’m getting older, and the music I’m listening to is often more story-based. I love Paul Kelly, the Australian singer-songwriter – he’s a great storyteller. I think I was trying to channel some of that, and people like Lloyd Cole, songwriters more from the Dylan school of honesty. It turned into a pretty emotional record, because my drummer died right before we were going to record it. That hangs over it, too.”
The original concept for the album was to go to Seattle’s Orbit Studios and “record the whole thing in a week, like the old days.” Then, a month before the trip, Scott awoke to heart-breaking news: Darius Minwalla, who had drummed with Preston School Of Industry and on The Real Feel, and was scheduled to play on the mooted Seattle sessions, died suddenly in his sleep.
Scott was deep-sixed by the news, and it would be another three months before he was ready to return to the studio. By that time, the album had changed – the songs had grown in the interim, become longer, more emotional. “That early idea of the album was more ‘garage-rock’ than what it became,” says Scott. Following Darius’ death, Scott went to spend time with his friend, singer-songwriter Kelley Stoltz, up in San Francisco, where they bounced ideas off each other. “His influence made me turn the record in an entirely different direction.”
Instead of a week-long blitz, Doris And The Daggers was recorded over a more civilised, considered batch of short sessions at Exactamundo studios in Eagle Rock, California. Long-time low-end foil Matt Harris returned on bass duties, while the drum-stool was adopted by Broken Social Scene’s Justin Peroff. The trio cut 30 songs in all, while a number of Scott’s close musical friends stepped in to make some key contributions. Peroff’s Broken Social Scene cohort Kevin Drew sang on Emoshuns, Kelley Stoltz lent guitar to the summery chime of AWM, and The National’s Matt Berninger lends vocals to the bittersweet, zephyr-light Exiled Tonight. “Matt’s a friend,” says Scott , “and I actually wrote that song for him to sing – while I was writing it I was thinking, how would Matt sing this? And when I told him about the song he said, ‘You have to sing this!’ And so we both sing on it.”
The songs range a wide sprawl of moods and subjects. The gleeful, charismatic Dundee Man essays a golfing trip to Scotland Scott made with old friend Paul Esposito (“It’s a travelogue,” says Scott, “but it’s also about a guy who’s, like, really proudly Scottish. It’s a great pub song.”). The moody, horn-shaded Trams (Stole My Heart), with its melancholic visions of blankly riding trams “from town to town”, is one of a clutch of songs Scott wrote during his sojourn in Australia (Pig City and Vultures Of Caboolture, the other two chapters of this Brisbane trilogy, will surface as B-Sides, and are well worth tracking down). The anxious, paranoid narrative of album opener Dance (Cry Wolf), meanwhile, is leavened by a stomping, danceable vibe, with Scott allying chords with a Wire-ish feel to a Roxy Music, David Bowie groove. “It’s positive, a kind of ‘Dance away the pain’ thing,” says Scott.
The Unconditional is an unabashed, lovable anthem to Scott’s young daughter, “a beautiful creature, who I helped to grow”, who’s “getting a little older, and now telling me what to do”. “I got kind of nervous writing those lyrics,” admits Scott, with a chuckle. “But everyone’s got to write a song about their kids, right? It’s me trying to be like Van Morrison writing about his kids.” Angel Eyes, meanwhile, is a salute to lost friends and comrades, poignant but upbeat, and affectionately commemorating fallen bandmate Minwalla – “Little D, such a good friend to me / those rosy cheeks that girls could not deny” – in its third verse. The closing title-track – an unforgettable blast of proggy-post punk, with its infectious chant of “Doris!”, and clattering drums from Shudder To Think drummer Adam Wade, inspired by a real-life Doris, the elderly landlady of a bar Scott frequented in Sydney – closes with a goofy vignette narrated by Minwalla, ending on a haunting note.
“I guess I’ve been writing songs for a while now,” reflects Scott on his second album. “I like hearing echoes of things I love in the music that I make. Writing music doesn’t come easy to me – it’s hard to write a song that’s good. But our memories slowly escape us as we get older, and in songs you kind of relive those moments, the things that matter.” And that’s part of the key to Doris And The Daggers’ charm, along with the lyrical wit and Scott’s unerring knack for tuneage as embraceably familiar as a beloved sweater: that these songs are full of life, stories engagingly told, and a sense of affection for everything that happens within them. You’ll keep returning to them again and again, and hope that Scott doesn’t wait so long to cut his next batch.
Blesst Chest
Blesst Chest is a trio playing instrumental, ‘70s-style prog rock. This band has enough heaviosity and groove to balance the asymmetrical bits.
The music is rich and inventive, with the bass and guitar frequently playing synchronized melodic lines.
Record Store Day was conceived in 2007 at a gathering of independent record store owners and employees as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1400 independently owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally. The first Record Store Day took place on April 19, 2008. Today there are Record Store Day participating stores on every continent except Antarctica.
This is a day for the people who make up the world of the record store—the staff, the customers, and the artists—to come together and celebrate the unique culture of a record store and the special role these independently owned stores play in their communities. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day. Festivities include performances, cook-outs, body painting, meet & greets with artists, parades, DJs spinning records, and on and on. In 2008 a small list of titles was released on Record Store Day and that list has grown to include artists and labels both large and small, in every genre and price point. In 2015, 60% of the Record Store Day Official Release List came from independent labels and distributors. The list continues to include a wide range of artists, covering the diverse taste of record stores and their customers.
While there’s only one Record Store Day a year, the organization works with both independent and and major labels throughout the year to create contests, special releases and promotions in order to spotlight the benefits of supporting these independent, locally owned stores with music purchases throughout the year. In 2010, Record Store Day coodinated its first Black Friday event, which gives record stores exclusive releases as part of the attempt to redirect the focus of the biggest shopping day of the year to the desirable, special things to be found at local stores.
Solange is a singer/ songwriter hailing from Houston, Texas, US who was born on June 24th, 1986. Since her debut, she has released two studio albums along with one EP and has worked with everyone from Lil' Wayne and Chromeo to The Lonely Island and Boards Of Canada.
It's safe to say that Matthew and Tina Knowles bore musical children. While the world knows exactly who Beyoncé is, her little sister Solange has been also been performing from around a similar age, and is just as deserving of anyone's attention. Solange began singing at around the same time she started talking, and was performing at state fairs by the time she was five years old. From the age of nine, Solange was more interested in writing her own songs than performing anyone else's, but then her older sister shot to fame as a member of the girl group Destiny's Child, and Solange began touring with them as a backup dancer. Over the next couple of years, Solange proved herself as a formidable singer and performer, and by the age of 16, her father had secured her a record deal thanks to his recording company, Music World Entertainment.
She began as an extended member of Destiny's Child, singing lead vocals on a track on the band's Christmas album “8 Days Of Christmas”. However, she soon began to prove herself away from her sister, writing a couple of the tracks on Kelly Rowland's solo album “Simply Deep” and in January 2003, releasing her debut solo album “Solo Star”. Being 14 years old, the album was regarded as coming a little bit too soon for Solange, but still showed more than enough promise to justify it. After the album's release, she took a break from music to focus on acting, and returned with 2008's far better received “Sol-Angel and The Hadley St. Dreams”. The album sold over 100'000 copies in four months, and Solange went on her first extensive world tour to promote it.
Ever since then, Solange has remained a fascinating and unpredictable artist, one day cutting singles entitled “F*ck The Industry”, the next appearing on the children's TV show “Yo Gabba Gabba!”. While she might never have the commercial success of her older sister, she'll still release material that can rival the best of her sibling for quality and for sheer unpredictability. For that, she comes highly recommended.
For those who like their music on the hard-as-fuck side, Stumpfest returns with a weekend tailored to the strong of heart. Hit it hard and hit it often.
Soul'd Out Festival Proudly Presents...
An evening of electronic + accoustic trailblazers...
RJD2 & Tortoise
w/ 1939 ensemble
April 20
Crystal Ballroom
8pm Doors / 21+
RJD2
RJD2's music is a collage of cut-and-paste hip-hop that combines disparate elements to make for soulful, moody portraits of the world. Born Ramble John Krohn in Eugene, Oregon, on May 27, 1976, he moved to Columbus, Ohio a few years later and was raised there. He first busted out onto the hip-hop scene in 1998 -- a time when producers were emerging from the shadows to seize the spotlight -- as the DJ/producer for the Columbus-based group Megahertz. MHz had two 12" singles released on Bobbito Garcia's Fondle 'Em Records and the group was mentioned in Vibe magazine's "History of Hip Hop."
In 2000, RJD2 produced Copywrite's debut single, "Holier Than Thou," on Rawkus Records. In the spring of 2001, he made his first formal appearance as a solo artist on the Def Jux Presents... compilation, proving he could hold his own alongside such luminaries as Company Flow, El-P, Cannibal Ox, and Aesop Rock. RJD2's debut album, Dead Ringer, followed on Def Jux in 2002. One of the best underground hip-hop releases of the year, it melded dirty samples and a classic approach to song structure for an end result that gave DJ Shadow, DJ Spooky, and Moby a run for their money. Aside from his top-billed recordings, he also provided productions for Cage's Hell's Winter and Aceyalone's Magnificent City (the latter also spawned an instrumentals album, Magnificent City Instrumentals).
RJD2 returned in 2004 with Since We Last Spoke, which blended hip-hop with elements of pop. He then moved to XL to fully indulge his passion for pop, releasing The Third Hand in early 2007. In early 2010, he dropped The Colossus. It was the first album to be released on his own label, RJ's Electrical Connections. Months later, he released Inversions of the Colossus, containing instrumental versions of The Colossus' vocal tracks and several additional cuts. The album More Is Than Isn't arrived in 2013 and featured appearances from Phonte Coleman, Aaron Livingston, and Blueprint. The R&B and soul flavors found on the LP returned on 2015's STS x RJD2, a collaborative effort recorded with rapper STS. Phonte Coleman, Blueprint, Son Little, and Jordan Brown all appeared on his 2016 solo effort, Dame Fortune.
Tortoise
Tortoise revolutionized American indie rock in the mid-'90s by playing down tried-and-true punk and rock & roll influences, emphasizing instead the incorporation of a variety of left-field music genres from the previous 20 years, including Krautrock, dub, avant-garde jazz, classical minimalism, ambient and space music, film music, and British electronica. At odds as well with the shambling framework of alternative rock's normal song structure, the group -- as large as a septet, with at times two vibes players -- relied on a crisp instrumental aesthetic, tied to cool jazz, which practically stood alone in American indie rock by actually focusing on instrumental prowess and group interaction.
Although the group's unique vision is to an extent the creation of drummer and master producer John McEntire, most of the other members are well-connected -- producers and/or participants -- in Chicago's fraternal indie rock community, which consists of numerous side projects and ongoing bands. After debuting in 1993 with several singles and an LP, Tortoise's underground prestige emerged above terra firma with their second album, Millions Now Living Will Never Die; the 21-minute opening track "Djed" was a sublime pastiche of Krautrock, dub, and cool jazz. Tortoise then linked themselves with the cream of European electronica (Luke Vibert, Oval, U.N.K.L.E., Spring Heel Jack) to remix the album on a series of 12" singles. Despite the band's growing reliance on studio engineering, Tortoise began re-emphasizing their instrumentalist bent in 1998 for their third album, TNT.
First formed in Chicago in 1990, Tortoise began when Doug McCombs (bass; formerly of Eleventh Dream Day) and John Herndon (drums, keyboards, vibes; formerly with the Poster Children) began experimenting with production techniques. The duo intended to record on their own as well as provide an instant rhythm section for needy bands -- inspired by the reggae duo Sly & Robbie. Next aboard was producer/drummer/vibes player John McEntire and guitarist Bundy K. Brown (both former members of Bastro) plus percussionist Dan Bitney (formerly with the SST hardcore band Tar Babies).
The five-piece recorded 7" singles for both David Wm. Sims' Torsion label and Thrill Jockey in 1993, then released their eponymous debut on Thrill Jockey one year later. Much of the album's sound -- restrained indie rock with sublime jazz influences and a debt to prog rock -- was pleasant but not quite revolutionary. Several tracks took a more slanted course, though, sounding like a reaction to England's ambient/techno scene filtered through the '70s experimentalism of Can and Faust. Tortoise became an underground classic and spawned the remix work Rhythms, Resolutions and Clusters featuring remixers Jim O'Rourke, Steve Albini, and Brad Wood; the album steadily segued from techno and found-sound environment recordings to feedback ambience and hip-hop, complete with samples of A Tribe Called Quest and Minnie Riperton. In 1995, the group released Gamera, a 12" single on Stereolab's Duophonic label.
Brown later left for solo production work and his band projects Slowpoke and Directions in Music; Tortoise added bassist David Pajo (formerly of Slint and also a member of the For Carnation) for second album Millions Now Living Will Never Die, released in early 1996. Much of the album was similar to the debut, but the British weeklies and American music magazines championed the strength of album-opener "Djed" -- which blended a rumbling bassline, scratchy lo-fi ambience, and dub techniques into over ten minutes of music before the sounds of reel-to-reel tape disintegration introduced another passage of calm yet angular indie rock figures. During the rest of 1995, Tortoise toured with Stereolab in England and headlined a U.S. tour with 5iveStyle and the Sea and Cake. John McEntire also remained busy with production, working on Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup and eponymous debut LPs from 5iveStyle, Trans Am, and Rome.
Instead of a remix album to accompany Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Tortoise optioned tracks out to several techno/experimental contemporaries during 1996. Mo' Wax heroes U.N.K.L.E. recorded a remix of "Djed" on the first of what became a four-volume series, with later interpretations coming from Oval, Jim O'Rourke and Bedouin Ascent, Spring Heel Jack, and Luke Vibert, among others.
By the time recording began in 1998 for Tortoise's third album, TNT, Pajo had gone to spend time on his Aerial-M project; a longtime group friend, guitarist Jeff Parker, replaced him. Parker's connection to the fertile Chicago free jazz community -- he's a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) -- served as a signpost to the group's new direction: growing instrumental prowess and an emphasis on straight-ahead, occasionally improvisational indie rock. Tortoise's fourth album, Standards, released in early 2001, maintained that direction, only leavened by many post-recording tweakings at the band's Soma Studios. Another three-year gap separated Standards from 2004's It's All Around You. The bandmembers then took a break, of sorts, concentrating on their raft of side projects -- Exploding Star Orchestra, Bumps, Fflashlights, Powerhouse Sound -- and producing only a collaborative Tortoise LP with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, The Brave and the Bold. (They also assembled a box set titled A Lazarus Taxon.)
The group's sixth proper LP, Beacons of Ancestorship, finally arrived in 2009. The following year, the Japanese release Why Waste Time? appeared, featuring the previously unreleased songs "Ruba'iyat" and "Passerine." The band also composed the score to Lovely Molly, a film by The Blair Witch Project director Eduardo Sánchez that debuted at 2011's Toronto International Film Festival. Tortoise's seventh full-length, The Catastrophist, built on music that they were commissioned to write in 2010 by the City of Chicago to commemorate the area's jazz and improvised music scenes. Featuring vocals from U.S. Maple/Dead Rider's Todd Rittman and Yo La Tengo's Georgia
Hubley, the album arrived in January 2016
In Mind, the fourth full-length record from Real Estate, is a portrait of a mature band at the height of its power. Long respected for their deft lyrical hand and gorgeous melodies, In Mind builds upon the band’s reputation for crafting perfect songs and carries Real Estate even deeper into the pantheon of great songwriters.
On the new record, the band fine-tunes the winsome songwriting and profound earnestness that made previous albums—2009’s Real Estate, 2011’s Days, and 2014’s Atlas—so beloved, and pushes their songs in a variety of compelling new directions. Written primarily by guitarist and vocalist Martin Courtney at his home in Beacon—a quiet town in upstate New York—In Mind offers a shifting of the gears, positing a band engaged in the push/pull of burgeoning adulthood. Reflecting a change in lineup, changes in geography, and a general desire to move forward without looking back, the record casts the band in a new light—one that replaces the wistful ennui of teenage suburbia with an equally complicated adult version. The record not only showcases some of the band’s most sublime arrangements to date, it also presents a leap forward in terms of production, with the band utilizing the studio as a tool to broaden the sonic landscape of their music to stunning effect.
In Mind offers passing nods to the sanguine qualities of earlier releases while also depicting a band in a state of real change. Since the recording of the band’s last album, Courtney had become a father of two and settled into a newfound domesticity living in Beacon, while bassist Alex Bleeker made the move out to sunny California, creating a complicated new set of logistics for the band to work around. Additionally, after the departure of founding member and lead guitarist Matt Mondanile in 2015, the band—Courtney, Bleeker, and drummer Jackson Pollis--faced the prospect of either closing ranks or embracing the changes that bringing in new people would ultimately bring. “It just seemed like a good moment to move in a slightly different direction,” says Courtney, “The idea of bringing in a stranger seemed too weird, but I wasn’t interested in recording as a four-piece and having some hired gun come out to play shows with us. In the end asking Julian Lynch—who we’d already been playing with and we’ve known since high school--to join the band made the most sense. He felt like a full-time member of the band already.” This was also true of keyboardist Matt Kallman, who previously played with the band on Atlas and on that record’s subsequent tour. Joining the band in a more official capacity before the recording of In Mind, Kallman contributed in both sound and scope, writing the keyboard parts and contributing to the album’s arrangements. With a new lineup secured and armed with an arsenal of songs that Courtney and Bleeker had spent the past six months writing, the band approached the business of fleshing out the songs in an almost workmanlike manner.
Come join XRAY's own Sex, Drugs and Basketball at the excellent Lost and Found bar for their first ever live broadcast in front of a audience! Join co-hosts Shannon Balcom and Arthur Bradford as they discuss the three titular topics and take live questions and texts from the audience. The show begins broadcasting at 8pm onXRAY.FM (107.1 fm and streaming at xray.fm) but come early to get a drink and practice heckling your hosts! What better way to start of your 4/20 evening?
• Preservation Hall Jazz Band- Crystal Ball Room 4/7: 8PM, 21+
• Giant Panda Gorilla Dub Squad w/ Kevin Kinsella- Mississippi Studios 4/7: 9PM, 21+
• Ice Cube- Roseland Theater 4/8: 8:30PM, 21+
• President Brown w/ Jahdan Blakkamoore- Mt. Tabor Theater 4/8: 10PM, 21+
• Donald Harrison- Jimmy Mak’s 4/9: 8PM, All Ages
• Ms. Lauryn Hill- Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 4/9: 8PM, All Ages
• Afro Cuban All Stars- Wonder Ballroom 4/10: 7PM, 21+
• Black Joe Lewis & The Honey Bears – Dante’s 4/10: 9PM, 21+
• Rafael Saadiq- Wonder Ballroom 4/11: 8PM, 21+
• Louis Hayes- Jimmy Mak’s 4/11: 8PM, 21+
• Francis & The Lights- Peter’s Room 4/12: 8PM, All Ages
• Dr. Lonnie Smith- Mississippi Studios 4/14: 9PM, 21+
• Rusko- Roseland theater 4/15: 8:30, All Ages
• Trent Mollar- Refuge 4/15: “Late Night,” 21+
• The Motet- Mt/ Tabor Theater 4/15 & 4/16: 9PM, 21+
• Mos Def w/ Hot 8 Brass Band- Roseland Theater 4/16: 9PM, All Ages
• Ellis Marsalis- Aladdin Theater 4/16: 7PM, All Ages
A percentage of Dig a Pony's proceeds ALL NIGHT will go to XRAY.FM's Spring Fund Drive.
4-6pm The Path is the Destination w/ DJ D'Jon Mustard
6-7pm Chor Bazaar w/ DJs Anjali & The Incredible Kid
7-8pm Circa Rad w/ DJ Tex
8-9pm The Denim Dinner Party w/ DJ Ramophone
9-10pm Songs From Under the Floorboard w/ DJ Dave Cantrell
Then a mix of XRAY DJs for the rest of the night!
An eclectic lineup featuring a range of mostly vinyl Lo-fi, Portland-centric, Global Bass, Post-Punk, Darkwave, Psych, Funk & Soul, Metal, Rock, Indie Cuts and International Jams.
Blazers game on the big screen, of course!!!!
Singer/songwriter Julia Jacklin was raised in Blue Mountains, Australia and currently lives in Sydney. Tonight she brings her dreamy blend of indie pop and alternative country across the Pacific for a headlining show at Mississippi Studios in support of her debut full-length, Don't Let the Kids Win.
Signed to Warner Brothers, , taking his stage name from his hustler father’s nickname, “Gucci Man,” his first single, “Icy,” peaked at #23 on the Billboard Hot Rap Tracks charts, and his first album, Trap House, peaked at #101 on the Billboard 200. His second album, Hard 2 Kill, was released in 2006, followed by Trap-A-Thon and Back to the Trap House in 2007, all of which sold well as independently released albums. Contents
While incarcerated, an Atlanta producer by the name of Big Kat was also in jail. Gucci Mane spit a freestyle in the cell and the rest was history. After his first single “Black Tee,” was frequently played in Atlanta on urban radio. Then Gucci Mane released his album Trap House in May 2005; the album hit number one on the Top Heat seekers chart.[3] His follow-up albums Hard 2 Kill, Trap-A-Thon and Back to the Trap House succeeded on the Top Heat seekers and Top Independent Albums charts.
Alvvays is a Canadian indie pop/rock band made up vocalist Molly Rankin, keyboardist Kerri MacLellan, guitarist Alec O’Hanley, and bassist Brian Murphy. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Pavement, The Smiths, The Magnetic Fields, Oasis, and even Celine Dion, Alvvays have concocted a unique, jangle pop sound. Their self-titled debut album was released in 2014 and peaked at number one on the U.S. college charts. They are currently working on their second studio album.
The Courtneys
The Courtneys drift back to the sound of the early '90s, drawing from strong influences including Teenage Fanclub, Pavement, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, and The Clean. Courtney Loove's dreamy guitar riffs add a timeless powerpop element to the punk backbone formed by Sydney Koke's driving basslines, while drummer/lead singer Jen Twynn Payne delivers heartfelt lyrics with a powerful vocal style. These components come together through a passionate collaborative songwriting process to deliver a special blend of fuzzy "artisanal grunge".
The first eponymous Courtneys album came out in 2013 on small independent label, Hockey Dad Records, based in the band's hometown of Vancouver, BC, Canada. They have since worked with a number of independent labels including Conquest of Noise in Australia and Waterslide Records in Japan, as well as Burger Records and Gnar tapes in the USA. They have released a number of singles and music videos, and toured throughout Canada and the USA, including spots supporting Tegan and Sara and Mac Demarco.
In 2015 The Courtneys made their way to Australia and New Zealand, where they were hosted by Flying Nun Records. Influenced by the legendary label from early on, the group are honored to now be able to call it their home.
Candace (formerly Is/Is) infuses their music with a sense of mystery and brooding atmosphere. Psychedelic and shoegaze influences emerge throughout the catalogue: the atmospheric tones of early Verve, a droning pulse reminiscent of Loop. Some songs bounce gleefully forward with a pop sensibility, while some keep a cool distance and move with a language distinctly their own.
Candace began as Is/Is in late summer of 2009 with Sarah Rose, Sarah Nienaber, and Mara Appel DesLauriers. The early days brought about "This Happening" EP (2010) and the "Vowel Movements/Blackest Beat" 7" (2011). Mara moved cross-country to Portland, OR, and in 2012 the band released their debut full-length LP "III," so named for the three drummers who played on the album. The two years following found the band cycling through drummers, with every lineup feeling more like an approximation of what the band was supposed to be, and never what it was. "Is/Is (Manimal Vinyl, 2014) would be the last to feature any drummer but Mara. During the coldest and darkest Minnesota winter that nobody wants to remember, Sarah and Sarah recorded the wistful, ethereal bedroom-pop tape "Shadow Days" (Moon Glyph, 2015). The following spring, they also moved to Portland OR.
The reunion was nothing short of propulsive. Writing and demoing became life. In the spring of 2015 the band spent a week at Jackpot! Recording Studio with longtime friend and co-producer, Neil Weir of The Old Blackberry Way. The following fall, three of those songs were self-released on a limited-edition cassette, "Return to Zero," coinciding with a West Coast tour and brief stint opening up for King Khan & The BBQ Show.
2016 brought about another transition, as necessary as any. On the surface, it's an update of a moniker. But beneath the surface, the band's maturation has been constant. Sarah, Sarah, and Mara are ready to debut Candace. "New Future" is due March '16 on Found Object Records.
The Microphones project was nourished by and located within the community of artists around K Records in Olympia in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Phil Elverum's musical ideas were clearly the product of the flood of independent music in the NW during those years.
After five albums the project was renamed Mount Eerie just as the Microphones were getting some unexpected attention from the widespread acclaim of "the Glow pt. 2" (2001). The Mount Eerie recordings got weirder and broader, and Elverum left K Records and began releasing everything himself, ultimately building a self-contained small town operation in Anacortes called P.W. Elverum & Sun. Radical self-sufficiency has been a theme and obsession; all all ages shows and never though a manager or booking agent, always self-recorded, hands on in all details.
Mount Eerie's albums have always aimed to push into new territory, both in sound and idea, but the thread of Elverum's voice has remained constant throughout, soft and human amid the wide range of textures and worlds. Often the lyrics have attempted to grapple with big questions, the briefness and the smallness of human life being a running theme. On occasion the music has been called "black metal" ("Wind's Poem," 2009), "dream landscape" ("Clear Moon," 2012), and "raw and direct" ("Lost Wisdom," 2008).
The new album, "A Crow Looked At Me", sounds closer to the latter; minimal instrumentation, no production, clear and heavy words right up front. The difference here is the subject matter. In 2015 Elverum's wife, the French Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with a bad cancer just after giving birth to their first child. She died a year later. Elverum wrote and recored the album throughout the fall of 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments; her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper.
The songs are about the brutal details of that experience, from the hospitalizations to the grieving, the specific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.
The writing draws inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Julie Doiron, Gary Snyder, Sun Kil Moon, and Joanne Kyger (whose poem "Night Palace" is on the album's cover). The sound was influenced by the spare production of the 1996 Will Oldham album "Arise Therefore".
Current and former collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Matana Roberts, Dana Reason, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Ellen Fullman, Mike Gamble, Mik Quantius, Embryo, Secret Chiefs 3, Marisa Anderson, Trey Gunn and Pat Mastelotto, Ô Paon, Tara Jane O'Neil, Natacha Atlas, Broken Water, Ed Pias, Byron Au Young, Christian Rizzo, Threnody Ensemble, Cynthia Hopkins, 33 Fainting Spells, Vanessa Renwick, Mark Mitchell and Lynn Shelton.
Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Frye Art Museum, Portland's Time Based Art Festival (TBA), WNYC, The New Foundation, Northwest Film Forum, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Crossing Border Festival, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, Joe's Pub, the Stone, Wayward Music Series, Oregon State University, Northwest Folklife, University of Chicago Film Studies Center, One Reel Film Festival and throughout the U.S. and Europe. She has received awards from Meet the Composer, Artist Trust, 4 Culture and Seattle Arts Commission, and has taught at the University of Washington, EMP, Idyllwild Arts Academy, the Vera Project and the Bush School.
Brooklyn-hailing singer/guitarist Jillian Medford and her psychedelic rock and alt-pop project hit the Mississippi Studios stage in support of their aptly-named 2016 full-length, Shapeshifter.
About the new album's first single, NPR declares, "Hold on tight: it's another relentlessly exuberant, propulsive jam from The New Pornographers. The latest in the band's deep catalog of clever and addictive power pop is "High Ticket Attractions,"
Of the new record, founder and frontman A.C. Newman notes that, “At the beginning of this record, there was some thinking that we wanted it to be like a Krautrock Fifth Dimension. Of course, our mutated idea of what Krautrock is probably doesn’t sound like Krautrock at all. But wewere thinking: Let’s try and rock in a different way.”
Since their debut in 2000, The New Pornographers have released six studio albums including their most recent, Brill Bruisers, hailed as an “exuberant, synthpop-infused set” by Rolling Stone, “infectious” by Harper’s Bazaar and “the grand and purposeful hookfest that you would hope these guys would come back with” by Stereogum. Pitchfork went on to note that “with the futurist sound of Brill Bruisers, the whole band embraces a more electric version of itself—bulked-up in chrome-plated armor, firing on all cylinders, and ready to steamroll anything in its path.” The band celebrated the release with a special NPR Music “First Listen Live” concert at the legendary Brill Building, and performed songs from the album on both “Conan” and the “Late Show with David Letterman.”
Waxhatchee's latest record, Ivy Tripp, drifts confidently from these previous albums and brings forth a more informed and powerful recognition of where Crutchfield has currently found herself. The lament and grieving for her youth seem to have been replaced with control and sheer self-honesty. "My life has changed a lot in the last two years, and it's been hard for me to process my feelings other than by writing songs," says Crutchfield. "I think a running theme [of Ivy Tripp] is steadying yourself on shaky ground and reminding yourself that you have control in situations that seem overwhelming, or just being cognizant in moments of deep confusion or sadness, and learning to really feel emotions and to grow from that."
Recorded and engineered by Kyle Gilbride of Wherever Audio at Crutchfield's home on New York's Long Island—with drums recorded in the gym of a local elementary school—Ivy Tripp presents a more developed and aged version of Waxahatchee. "The title Ivy Tripp is really just a term I made up for directionless-ness, specifically of the 20-something, 30-something, 40-something of today, lacking regard for the complaisant life path of our parents and grandparents. I have thought of it like this: Cerulean Salt is a solid and Ivy Tripp is a gas."
Crutchfield is accompanied by both Gilbride and Keith Spencer on Ivy Tripp, and the record was produced by all three of them. With the addition of more guitar work, piano, drum machines, and Crutchfield's vocals in full bloom, we are given a record that feels more emphatic and pronounced. Ivy Tripp opens with "Breathless," filled with only a distorted keyboard and layers of vocals, showcasing Waxahatchee's pension for quiet, personal reflection. The record then opens up into "Under a Rock," a quicker guitar-driven song that lays the foundation for the rest of the album, which as a whole resonates with strong, self-aware lyrics, energetic ballads, and powerfully hushed moments of solitude. Crutchfield's voice is certainly the guiding force behind Ivy Tripp—commanding and voluminous in the rock song "Poison," candied and pure in the frolicking "La Loose"—gripping you tightly and then softly releasing you into the wilds of emotion.
As far as her goals with Ivy Tripp, Crutchfield says, "I heard someone say that you have to be the change you want to see. I just want to be the kind of musician I want to see in the world. I want to present myself in a way that reflects that."