singer/songwriter – Page 7

Free and legal MP3: Dawn Landes (sweet, gentle, sad)

Sweet and gentle and ineffably sad, “Love Song” creates bittersweet mystery from a string of simple words, set to a sing-along rhythm.

“Love Song” – Dawn Landes

Sweet and gentle and ineffably sad, “Love Song” creates bittersweet mystery from a string of simple words, set to a sing-along rhythm. The melody is plain and sturdy, with an elegant balance of upward and downward motion, while the song is structured around verses that end, Dylanishly, with a repeating lyrical conceit that serves as a truncated chorus. The recurring line—“I want to write you a love song/With my life”—is itself achingly elusive, both a profound intention and an implicit confession (of what, is not clear). Landes sings with a tenderness that seems equal parts reflection and regret; when she sings, strikingly, of “the technicolor of a loving soul dimmed to black and white” I find it impossible to know whether she is talking about her own or her ex-lover’s or (most likely) both.

I would be remiss if I did not, now, point out that Landes was married to fellow singer/songwriter Josh Ritter for a portentously short 18 months earlier this decade, and that Ritter was the first of the two to release the so-called “divorce album” (2013’s The Beast in its Tracks). Landes’s upcoming Bluebird, arriving next month on Western Vinyl, is hers. Disliking both gossip and speculation, I leave it at that.

Landes was born in Kentucky, moved to New York City to attend NYU in 1999, dropped out after two years, and, as a self-professed studio geek, finagled her way into recording studio jobs while also working on her own music. Based in Brooklyn, she owns a studio there with two partners which has been up and running since 2008. Bluebird was co-produced by Landes and Thomas Bartlett (Doveman); among the album’s performers are Bartlett, Rob Moose, and Norah Jones. Landes was previously featured on Fingertips in February ’08 for the beguiling “Bodyguard.” Bluebird is her fifth full-length album; she also has released two EPs, including 2012’s charming but largely disregarded Mal Habillée, a French-language tribute to the yé-yé music of the early ’60s.

Free and legal MP3: Matt Longo

Crisp, warm, vibrant, lovely

“I’m Just About Done” – Matt Longo

Shimmering with warmth, “I’m Just About Done” offers an object lesson in the power of crisp, skillful production to bring a song to life. It’s a fine song to begin with, and Matt Longo is a gifted singer, but a number of little decisions are made along the way that add to the potency of both the singer and the song.

First smart decision: to begin the song without an actual introduction but in a way that still feels like an introduction, which is affected by starting the verse slowly and starkly, with minimal accompaniment. We can right away sink into the tender qualities of Longo’s voice, and be introduced to a melody that gains power as the song’s true tempo kicks in (0:08) and, even better, when the drum joins the piano and guitar (0:29). Note that even now the full rhythm section hasn’t come on board; this is a moment that waits for the beginning of the second verse (0:45), and to me, that kind of discipline pays off, giving the song a kind of wordless “story arc” that is less available to songs in which the band roars in full steam from the get-go.

Lovely things continue to happen. Horns slide in shortly after the rhythm section enters and move to the forefront of the accompaniment by 0:51. I love the grace of the horn lines here, how they embrace and enfold the melody rather than offering a more traditional kind of “horn chart” burst. And these in turn lead to the song’s last major building block, which is the female vocal harmony that enters the second time we hear the chorus (1:16), sung beautifully by Brigit Kelly Young and mixed with tantalizing discretion—as vibrantly as she sings, you can also rather easily not hear her as well, if you don’t focus on her, and for me there is more power in robust singing mixed down than there would be if her voice had been given more volume. Note that in seeking to point out some of the winning nuances of “I’m Just About Done,” let me not forget that it is still Longo’s skill as a singer and songwriter that carries the day. There are moments when the combined sweetness of the melody and the voice give me the chills.

“I’m Just About Done” can be found on Longo’s EP You Bet Your Life, which was released last month and is available in full as a free download via Bandcamp. He has one full-length release to date, which came out in December 2011, and was previously featured on Fingertips in January 2011.

Free and legal MP3: Carrie Ashley Hill (brisk & melodic)

“Lay Your Lazy Head” – Carrie Ashley Hill

Graceful and brisk, with chime-y guitars and spirited vocals, “Lay Your Lazy Head” is grounded in a simple, beautifully effective melody—so effective, in fact, that its basic motif is employed in both the verse and the chorus. Which is to say that the verses and the chorus sound largely although not exactly the same. This is not as easy to do as it might seem. It involves first of all offering a good amount of subtle variation in and around the basic repeating tune—not only, here, is it presented somewhat differently in the chorus, each iteration in the verse scans slightly differently based on lyrical and vocal discrepancies. This gives the ear something to reach for even as it has absorbed the basic reality of the repetition. The other thing required here, of course, is a strong enough melody to support the concept. To my ears, Hill has it in spades.

The specific power of “Lay Your Lazy Head”‘s basic melody comes from the unexpectedly large harmonic difference a mere half-interval makes to our ears. A clear place to focus on this is in the second visitation of the verse melody, and on the difference there between the notes that Hill lands on for the word “stray” (0:30) and then the word “own” (0:33)—they are just a half-step apart, and yet the underlying shift is from the I chord to the V chord. Which is a bunch of music theory yammering to say that this smallest available step, the half interval, can take you to a whole new harmonic neighborhood. And while I’m sure this has nothing to do with Hill’s intention, I even like how the simple half-step difference kind of reinforces the titular idea of laying down one’s “lazy head,” as there may seem nothing lazier than falling merely a half step down in a melody. Okay, a stretch, but that’s how my mind works.

“Lay Your Lazy Head” is from Hill’s debut EP, entitled Me At All, which you can listen to on her web site. The EP was released in August and was recorded with Jeff Berrall and Sam Hopkins of the band Caveman (themselves featured here back in August 2011). The Dallas-born, Brooklyn-based Hill is on tour this fall with Jane Herships, who has recorded as Spider, and is herself a Fingertips favorite with two previous features, in 2006 and 2009. Both Hill and Herships are both, also, members of the Brooklyn-based band Desert Stars.

Free and legal MP3: Lydia Loveless

Hard-edged, alt-country-flavored

“Boy Crazy” – Lydia Loveless

Twenty-two-year-old rabble-rouser Lydia Loveless returns with another mercurial slice of hard-edged, smartly sung alt-country-flavored rock’n’roll. A talent to be reckoned with, Loveless knows how to put a song together from top to bottom, showing an accomplished grasp of structure and texture that renders her impressive vocal skills all the more striking. And while I don’t know how directly involved she is in production decisions, the fact that she in any case knows enough to end up in this setting speaks well for her vision. I am particularly taken with the combination we get here of limber bass work and droning guitar lines, which lies at the center of the song’s vigorous blend of bash and agility. I like loud stuff best when performed by folks who still seem to be paying attention to what’s going on around them.

Loveless was previously featured here in April 2012, and you should definitely check out that review if you want to learn a bit about her somewhat unusual past. The bottom line is whatever she’s been through and whatever combination of nature and nurture gave her her musical know-how, she’s a live wire who sings from somewhere deep inside; sparks fly from her smallest, instinctive shifts. Listen, for instance, to the end of the first time through the chorus, where one moment she tosses off a guttural “Uhh!” (1:58) only to swing seamlessly into a measure of lovely “oo-oo”-ing. I’m not sure you can teach that or even plan for it. And then, at the same place, the second time we hear the chorus, check out how she at once belts and breathes out the words “hit a home run” (3:15), somehow wrapping desire and frustration into one evanescent package.

“Boy Crazy” is the title track to a five-song EP released earlier this month on Bloodshot Records. The EP is currently streaming at American Songwriter. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Kim Taylor (crisp, heartfelt acoustic stomp)

Kim Taylor has a convincing timelessness about her; she seems the kind of singer/songwriter who can disappear for years and later return as if in mid-sentence.

“Like a Woman Can” – Kim Taylor

Equal parts stomp and grace, “Like a Woman Can” spiders its way into your body with its minimal urgings and dusky vibe. I think it’s that hollowed-out stamping sound, kicking in around 0:32, that really hooks me and makes me engage in a bit of office dancing. To show you how centrally the song is organized around that elusive effect, which sounds kind of like clapping hands crossed with marching feet, see how the sound moves from background to foreground at 1:36, and how this is when everything begins to make perfect sense.

Kim Taylor has a convincing timelessness about her; she seems the kind of singer/songwriter who can disappear for years and later return as if in mid-sentence. In “Like a Woman Can,” she has come back to us with something of particular importance to say; in interviews, she has called it nothing less than a “protest song,” penned by someone not merely tired of the persistence of garden-variety misogyny but aware of how much we have to gain by getting past it already. It’s 2013, people.

Taylor was first featured here back in December 2005 and then again in August 2010. “Like a Woman Can” is a song from her fourth studio album, Love’s a Dog, which she recorded with drummer Devon Ashley and producer/multi-instrumentalist, and long-time musical associate, Jimi Zhivago. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. The album, funded via Kickstarter, was self-released earlier this month. You can listen to it, and buy it if you’d like, from Kim’s web site.

Free and legal MP3: Cameron McGill (Newman-esque piano ballad, w/ soulful flair)

Refreshingly Randy Newman-esque, “American Health Insurance” starts wry, turns earnest, and engages the ear with chord changes last heard in the early ’70s.

“American Health Insurance” – Cameron McGill

Refreshingly Randy Newman-esque, “American Health Insurance” starts wry, turns earnest, and engages the ear with chord changes last heard in the early ’70s. McGill is exactly the kind of durable, skillful singer/songwriter who might’ve made a solid name for himself back in those halcyon days. Instead, in the 2010s, he joins the legions who release good music to an indifferent world, not actually as propped up by the endless supply of free digital music as proponents keep telling us is going to happen, any day now, just wait and see. And okay, so I’m especially disgruntled because I just today saw someone still passing along Cory Doctorow’s idiotic “My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity” meme with a straight face, as if being merely one of a zillion artists throwing free content onto the web isn’t being dreadfully obscure in a whole new way.

Anyway. McGill does a nice job here, coming across as simultaneously weary and engaged, while the song smartly transforms from an ambling piano ballad into something more soulful, complete with spiffy horn charts. The title alone prompts a bit of a surprised smile, but despite the opening line, McGill himself has noted that the song is not actually about health insurance, but about how it feels to be an American in this insecure moment in history. And while that may not actually feel too good, I can’t help but be buoyed by McGill’s subtly spirited performance. He’s got one of those rounded voices that can get a little blurry if too reverbed, but we get a good balance in the mix, which stays generally crisp (horn charts will do that for you), and gives him a chance to stretch a bit—I like both his falsetto reaches and then, in particular, that stirring tone he achieves on the lyrics “when the house was on fire” at 1:42. I think we sometimes forget that half of a singer/songwriter’s job is singing, and maybe sometimes some of them forget that too. Not Mr. McGill.

“American Health Insurance” is from the album Gallows Etiquette, released a couple of weeks ago, its title taken from a Charles Simic poem. This is McGill’s sixth album, and his first after a trio of releases with him fronting a band called What Army. He was featured in that time frame here on Fingertips back in October 2009, for the wonderful song “Madeline, Every Girl.” Note that the Chicago-based McGill is also a member of the band Margot & the Nuclear So-and-So’s. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Johnathan Rice (concise midtempo charmer)

Johnathan Rice is the rare 21st-century singer/songwriter who is making a career of it without gathering much in the way of blog buzz and hipster worship.

“My Heart Belongs to You” – Johnathan Rice

There’s something unabashedly old-fashioned about “My Heart Belongs to You,” from its sentimental title to its easy-going, midtempo melodicism. There’s something old-fashioned about Johnathan Rice as well, being the rare 21st-century singer/songwriter who is making a career of it without gathering much in the way of blog buzz and hipster worship, relying instead on more, shall we say, professional tastemakers such as actual music publications and real-life music supervisors (his earliest marketplace breakthrough came via song placements on The OC and Grey’s Anatomy). Instead of worrying about his social media presence he has spent time doing things like playing Roy Orbison in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. (I will note however that Rice is indeed a dry and entertaining Twitterer, so it’s not like he’s living in 1974.)

In any case, this song is terrific. Check out how quickly it hooks us via solid songwriting chops—the verse adjoins four initial measures of pleasing, run-on melody lines with four follow-up measures of breath-catching, in which the melody is related, but different, and if anything, even catchier. It’s an easy step from there into a two-part, four-measure chorus, which resolves all melodies and leads us, with some gratifying “oo-oos,” back to the beginning. The conciseness of Rice’s craft is a joy to behold; he does not muddy a good thing with a tacked-on bridge, creating drama in the last third of the song instead via the rarely-used tool of a false ending.

Rice was born in Virginia but raised partially in Scotland, his parents’ native country. He moved from Virginia to New York City at the age of 18 on September 9, 2001; his first album, Trouble is Real, was released in 2005. A tour highlight for him that year was opening for R.E.M. in London’s Hyde Park in front of 80,000 people. In 2006, he joined Jenny Lewis’s touring band, and the two of them have had a close working (and personal) relationship ever since, including a lot of songwriting together. In 2010, the two formed the duo Jenny and Johnny, and released an album of the same name. “My Heart Belongs to You” is from Rice’s third solo album, Good Graces, which is coming in September on SQE Music. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Shelby Earl

Seattle singer/songwriter takes a star turn

“Swift Arrows” – Shelby Earl

With its slow, triplet-induced swing, “Swift Arrows” nods in the direction of the ’50s while staking out idiosyncratic 21st-century territory all its own. I don’t think I overstate my case to say that Shelby Earl has one of the best voices I’ve heard in my 10 years on call here at Fingertips—soft and hard and sweet and strong all at the same time, it’s a voice that does nothing obvious to call undue attention to itself, which makes her able, delicious yet elusive tone all the more effective, to my ears.

And she’s not just a voice; she’s an impressive songwriter too. I hear the song’s greatness pivoting on the moment when the titular phrase enters. The fuller phrase Earl sings is “one poison-tipped swift arrow,” but listen both to how the song is written and to how she negotiates the phrasing: the words “one poison-tipped” swoop dramatically, in relative alignment with the beat, while “swift arrow” veers irregularly, almost a melodic afterthought. And yet these last words grab the ear in a most affecting way, which I think has to do with how, as a singer, Earl manages on “arrow” to accentuate the first syllable (as one would merely speaking it) while extending the second both out and upward. This strikes me as tricky, and while I’m not sure she gave this any particular thought, it is the moment I return to over and over again. Beyond the singing and the songwriting, I’m likewise enjoying Damien Jurado’s production, with its curious union of the minimal and the baroque. There are strings, woodwinds, and deep dramatic bells and drums in the mix, and sometimes the sound rises to challenge—perhaps even to bait—Earl’s voice, but more often than not we’re just hearing those basic piano triplets in the background. The song even reduces to silence at one point (2:01). The end result is something both familiar and a little odd. Works for me, to say the least.

“Swift Arrows” is the title track to Shelby Earl’s second album, and I can confidently report that she is the real thing, a bona fide star, at least here in the Fingertips firmament. She was previously featured in October 2011 for the song “Evergreen,” and also stopped by for an notably thoughtful Q&A the next month.

The MP3 is no longer available but you can listen to the track here, via SoundCloud:

Free and legal MP3: Brandon Thomas De La Cruz

Powerful simplicity

“White Roses” – Brandon Thomas De La Cruz

“White Roses” is as simple as a song is likely to be in 2013—a plainly strummed acoustic instrument, a delicate tenor voice, three verses and three choruses, over and done in three minutes, sixteen seconds. The lyrics too are plainspoken in the extreme; De La Cruz has a previously explicated talent for compositional austerity, otherwise known as having a way with one-syllable words. (For instance: in the last version of the chorus, 20 of 22 words have one syllable; the other two are “roses” and “listen.”)

Now then, simplicity doesn’t guarantee quality any more than complexity does. But the high-wire act of coming to us with just a nylon-stringed guitar and a voice and a satchel full of plain words is itself impressive; that De La Cruz manages to add genuine beauty into the equation renders the end product all but breathtaking. To begin with, the melody is gorgeous, and deceptively deep. The entire verse and chorus is one unbroken melody line, with an elegant transition that leaves the verse unresolved and sets up the chorus’s beautiful inevitability, complete with a lovely bit of major/minor drama—how the uplifting “I still saw it was you” part (0:44) veers into the minor-key “coming through” (0:48) addendum, before cycling resolutely back to a gentle major key.

And perhaps the most beautiful thing of all here are the female harmony vocals. Four singers are credited, and they slide into place so gracefully, only in the chorus, and sing with such sweet subdued finesse, and are so apt in tone and intent, that you might almost miss them even as they are fully audible and perhaps the song’s greatest asset.

“White Roses” is from the album Common Miracles, which De La Cruz released at the end of May. You can hear the whole thing on Bandcamp, and buy it there on a name-your-price basis. You can download “White Roses” via the link above, as usual, or do it via SoundCloud, where you can leave a comment directly for De La Cruz, if you so desire. The Southern California-based singer/songwriter was featured previously on Fingertips in January 2011.

Free and legal MP3: John Murry (moody, churning, redemptive)

“Southern Sky” wraps you into its spacious yet slightly menacing world with an enticing mix of buzz and chime.

“Southern Sky” – John Murry

Existing in a murky net of sound, “Southern Sky” wraps you into its spacious yet slightly menacing world with an enticing mix of buzz and chime. The song launches with a purposeful, two-chord alternation, which gives the piece both propulsion and tension. We wait for release, it doesn’t come. The verse hews to the two chords, and Murry’s blanketty voice, rich and weary, sings a melody marked by rests and delays.

At 1:10 a new chord arrives, and something like redemption: the churning, moody verse gives way to a darkly gorgeous chorus. Murry is joined by a female backup singer, that elusive marimba-like sound comes slightly more forward into our awareness, and while the melody once more occupies the back end of the measure, it now feels suffused with grace and power. Without doing any one remarkable thing, this chorus is nevertheless remarkable, and it gives “Southern Sky” the sturdy feel of something timeless and necessary.

With addiction and loss in his back story, Murry is not play-acting here; the song’s partially-contained anguish is probably all too real. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Murry has landed as a musician in the Bay Area. His debut album, The Graceless Age, was released last year in the UK, and then in the US in April via the Oakland-based Evangeline Recording Co. You can listen to the whole album, and buy it if you like, via Bandcamp. Thanks to WXPN for the head’s up. You can download the song via the link above or via SoundCloud, where you can comment directly to Murry if you are so moved.