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bluegrass country folk Independent music Thirty Tigers

Jason Eady presents his self-titled album released on the 21st of April.

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On his last two albums, Jason Eady earned major acclaim for his ahead-of-the-curve take on classic country, a bold departure from his earlier excursions into blues-infused Americana. Now with his sixth album, the Mississippi-bred singer/guitarist merges his distinct sensibilities into a stripped-down, roots-oriented sound that starkly showcases the gritty elegance of his songwriting.

The follow-up to 2014’s critically praised Daylight/Dark—an album that “belongs on a shelf next to Dwight Yoakam’s Buenos Noches from a Lonely Room, Joe Ely’s Letter to Laredo, and yes, even Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages,” according to AllMusic—Eady’s latest finds the Fort Worth, Texas-based artist again teaming up with producer Kevin Welch. Now longtime collaborators (with their past efforts including 2012’s AM Country Heaven, a top 40 debut on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart), Eady and Welch worked closely in crafting the album’s acoustic-driven yet lushly textured aesthetic. “At the beginning I told everyone I wanted to make a record where, if the power went out, we could still sit down and play all the songs the exact same way,” says Eady, who points out that steel guitar is the only electric instrument featured on the album.

Despite its subtle approach, the album radiates a warm vitality that’s got much to do with Eady’s gift for nuanced yet unaffected slice-of-life storytelling. “I’ve always been drawn to writing that’s got a simplicity to it, where you’re digging deep into real day-to-day life,” he notes. Here, that means touching on such matters as turning 40 (on the reflective, soul-stirring “40 Years”), his daughter’s growing up and going off to college (on the sweetly heartbreaking “Not Too Loud”), and the everyday struggle to “embrace the messy parts of life instead of trying to get the point where you’ve somehow fixed all your problems” (on “Rain,” a joyfully determined anthem featuring SteelDrivers fiddler Tammy Rogers). Throughout the album, Eady’s soulfully rugged voice blends in beautiful harmonies with his wife, singer/songwriter Courtney Patton. And on “No Genie in This Bottle,” the legendary Vince Gill lends his singular vocals to what Eady refers to as a “good old country drinking song.”

In each track, Eady reveals a sharp sense of songcraft he’s honed since childhood. “Even back in my early days of getting into music, I always cared more about the writers than the singers,” says Eady, who grew up in Jackson. “I’d look up who’d written a certain song, and then go seek out more songs from that writer.” At age 14—the same year he started writing his own material—Eady began performing in local bars and showing his natural grasp of everything from soul and R&B to blues and country. After some time in the Air Force, he moved to Fort Worth and started playing open mic nights, where he quickly built up a devoted following. By 2005, Eady had made his debut with the independently released From Underneath The Old.

For Eady—who names Merle Haggard, Guy Clark, and Willie Nelson among his main inspirations—instilling each song with so much graceful honesty proved to be his greatest achievement and thrill in creating the new album.  “When you first get started making music, your ideas are grandiose and more about the big picture. But the longer I’ve done this, the more I’ve realized that the real joy comes from the process rather than the end goal,” he says. “Now it’s about getting better and finding more of myself with every album. So instead of writing what I think people want to hear, I’m writing what I want to write and trusting that—as long as it’s coming from an honest place—it’ll hopefully mean something to the people listening too.”

9b90f2a0-f829-465e-8640-0892ec6c583dTracklisting

1. Barabbas
2. Drive
3. Black Jesus
4. No Genie in this Bottle
5. Why I Left Atlanta
6. Rain
7. Where I’ve Been
8. Waiting to Shine
9. Not to Loud
10. 40 Years

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APRIL

04 The Loft at Seven Bridge Street – Galway, IRE
05 Griffin’s Bar – Clifden, IRE
07 Kenny’s Bar – Lahinch, IRE

Festival in Pontivy, France from May 12-14
Shows in Switzerland May 17-21
Then shows in northern Italy May 25-28.

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For more information about the Thirty Tigers roster, including Jason Eady please contact Sara Silver
sara@thirtytigers.com +44 (0)20 8265 0772
http://www.silverprojects.com/news/

Categories
Thirty Tigers

Lucinda Williams ‘Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone’ chart-bound!

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Thirty Tigers is extremely proud to announce the release of Lucinda Williams’ brand new double album
“Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone”

this week!
see the rave reviews… 

 

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Lucinda Williams

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“…her new double-album may be the best work of her career”  THE INDEPENDENT – ALBUM OF THE WEEK, 5 STARS  

SUNDAY EXPRESS – ALBUM OF THE WEEK, 5 STARS

MAIL ON SUNDAY (EVENT MAGAZINE) – 4 STARS

DAILY MIRROR – 4 STARS

“This is prime Lucinda Williams”  THE SUN, 4.5 OUT OF 5

“…the Louisiana-born singer-songwriter on top form..”  F.T. 4 STARS

“ A 20-track album that scarcely dips in quality across more than 100 minutes of blues, country, folk, pop and soul”  SUNDAY TIMES (CULTURE) 

“..her resilience demands respect”    INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

“an intimate, end-to-end, night-drive companion”  Q MAGAZINE – 4 STARS

MOJO – 4 Stars 

UNCUT  – 8/ 10

As a rule, you can divide music into three categories — the kind that aims for the head, the kind that aims for the heart and the kind that aims for the hips. Forging two of those connections at once is pretty impressive, but connecting on all three? That’s a rare accomplishment indeed, one that Lucinda Williams manages on her 11th studio album, Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone.

Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone, the first release on Lucinda Williams’ own Highway 20 Records label, is easily the most ambitious creation in a body of work that’s long on ambition. Over the course of two discs, Williams leaves no emotional crevice left unexplored, drinking deeply from a well of inspiration that culminates with an offering that overflows with delta-infused country soul.

Williams wrings every drop of affirmation from uplifting tracks like the empowering “Walk On” (a loping paean to life’s most sustaining aspects, the fleeting and the permanent) and every whit of dark beauty from songs such as “This Old Heartache” (a stark reminder that churning psychic waters can lurk beneath a placid surface).

“I felt like I was really on a roll when we started working on the album,” says Williams, who produced the album with Greg Leisz and her husband Tom Overby. “I usually have enough songs to fill an album, and maybe a couple more, but when I started writing for this, the inspiration just kept coming, and the people I was working with kept telling me the songs were worth keeping. It’s not like I was reinventing the wheel — there are only so many things you can write about, love, sex, death, redemption, and they’re all here — but I felt like I was really in a groove here.”

There’s no disputing the immediacy of the set’s offerings, both the most hard-edged (like “West Memphis,” which extrapolates a hardscrabble landscape from the story of the wrongly-convicted West Memphis Three) and the softly caressing (the bittersweet “When I Look at the World”). As ever, she uses words to ensnare her audience, sometimes with an arm around the shoulder, sometimes with hands grabbing the lapels, and sonics to hold that crowd’s rapt attention.

But here, Williams pushes herself as a vocalist as well, making the most of both her instrument’s honeyed warmth and its sandpaper-to-the-soul toughness. She un-tethers herself more fully than she has in ages, or possibly ever. “I felt really comfortable and happy when I was singing, and sort of on my toes a little, since I was working with a lot of new musicians, not just my regular band,” she says. “Putting different people together in different combinations, there was a lot of room to maneuver – a lot of room to make little changes that really made things click.”

That list of “new musicians” is peppered with names that will be familiar to most rock and roll aficionados. This includes longtime Elvis Costello collaborators Pete Thomas and Davey Faragher, guitarist Bill Frisell, iconic Faces keyboardist Ian McLagen, guitarist Stuart Mathis from the Wallflowers, vocals from Jakob Dylan and the distinctive guitar tones of Tony Joe White. Her longtime rhythm section of David Sutton and Butch Norton provides a rock solid foundation on a passel of the tunes, and Leisz — who she credits as “the glue that holds the whole thing together” — adds ornamentation in all the right places.

While there’s no shortage of eureka moments on Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, Lucinda digs deepest on “Compassion,” which is based on a poem that was published in 1997 by her father Miller Williams — who read at President Clinton’s second inauguration. She says the homage was a long time in coming.

“It was challenging, to say the least,” she says. “For years, I’ve wanted to take one of his poems and turn it into a song. You really have to take the poem apart and put it back together, you can’t just sing it as is. Tom had said he felt it might work with ‘Compassion,’ so I finally started working on it and came up with something. I told my father about it and he loved the idea, which made me really proud.”

“He had always maintained that there’s a clear differentiation between songs and poems. When I’ve shown him something I thought might become poem, he always just says ‘Honey, I think it wants to be a song.’”

Lucinda Williams has been maneuvering down a path all her own for more than three decades now, emerging from Lake Charles, Louisiana (a town with a rich tradition in all of America’s indigenous music, from country to the blues) having been imbued with a “culturally rich, economically poor” worldview. Several years of playing the hardscrabble clubs of her adopted state of Texas gave her a solid enough footing to record a self-titled album that would become a touchstone for the embryonic Americana movement – helping launch a thousand musical ships along the way.

While not a huge commercial success at the time – it went out of print and stayed there for years –Lucinda Williams (aka, the Rough Trade album) retained a cult reputation, and finally got the reception it deserved upon its reissue earlier this year. Jim Farber of New York’s Daily News hailed the reissue by saying “Listening again proves it to be that rarest of beasts: a perfect work. There’s not a chord, lyric, beat or inflection that doesn’t pull at the heart or make it soar.” In calling it “a masterpiece,” Blurt magazine dubbed it “a discovery worth making and music that will live in your heart and mind long after the disk stops spinning.”

For much of the next decade, she moved around the country, stopping in Austin, Los Angeles, Nashville, and turning out work that won immense respect within the industry (winning a Grammy for Mary Chapin Carpenter’s version of “Passionate Kisses”) and a gradually growing cult audience. While her recorded output was sparse for a time, the work that emerged was invariably hailed for its indelible impressionism — like 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which notched her first Grammy as a performer.

The past decade brought further development, both musically and personally, evidenced on albums like West (2007)which All Music Guide called “flawless…destined to become a classic” and Blessed(2011), which the Los Angeles Times dubbed “a dynamic, human, album, one that’s easy to fall in love with.” Those albums retained much of Williams’ trademark melancholy and southern Gothic starkness, but also exuded more rays of light and hope — hues that were no doubt imparted by a more soothing personal life, as well as a more settled creative space.

Those vibes come to the fore once again on Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone. While she stays very much rooted in the here and now, Williams also conjures up the spirit of classic ‘70s country soul — the province of Dan Penn, Bobbie Gentry and Tony Joe White. The resulting warmth of tone gives the album a late-night front-porch vibe — one that could be accompanied by either a tall glass of lemonade or something a little stronger, all the better to let the sounds envelop the listener like a blanket of dewy air.

“I didn’t set out to do a whole album of country-soul, but once I started working, a stylistic thread kind of emerged,” she says. “It’s a sound I can relate to, one that’s really immediate and really timeless at the same time — kind of sad in an indefinable way. It’s like something my dad said to me many years ago, something I wrote down and included in my song “Temporary Nature (Of Any Precious Thing)” because it was so profound to me — ‘the saddest joys are the richest ones.’ I think that fits this album really well.”

Lucinda W - Covert Art

Tracklisting

CD N°1
1. Compassion
2. Protection
3. Burning Bridges
4. East Side of Town
5. West Memphis
6. Cold Day in Hell
7. Foolishness
8. Wrong Number
9. Stand Right by Each Other
10. It’s Gonna Rain
 
CD N°2
1. Something Wicked This Way Comes
2. Big Mess
3. When I Look at the World
4. Walk On
5. Temporary Nature (Of Any Precious Thing)
6. Everything but the Truth
7. This Old Heartache
8. Stowaway in Your Heart
9. One More Day
10. Magnolia

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Listen to the new single ‘Burning Bridges’ bellow:

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Lucinda Williams’s website

Lucinda Williams’s facebook

Lucinda Williams’s twitter

Lucinda Williams’s youtube

Categories
Thirty Tigers

Top Americana duo Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis release ‘Our Year’ ‘A modern take on classic country music.’

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If Austin’s happily egalitarian music scene suddenly switched to a monarchy, Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis might have to learn to perform while balancing heft crowns. The two already reign as one of Americana music’s coolest couples, and their latest release, Our Year, elevates them closer to the lofty territory once occupied by beloved royals, Johnny ‘n’ June and George ‘n’ Tammy.

Working again in Nashville with producer Brad Jones (Cheater’s Game), they delivered their musical thoughts in 10 outstanding tracks, from formidable originals to well-honed covers including a knockout version of the Tom T. Hall-penned “Harper Valley PTA.” Jeannie C. Riley’s 1968 hit sounds like a classic all over again in the hands of this pair — and the chicken-pickin’, mandolin-plucking, shaker-grooving players who back them on this tart tale. 

The desire to capture that live dynamic — their “swampier, grittier side” — drove the creation of Our Year, Willis says. Robison calls their style “a modern take on classic country music, without being retro.”

Watch the stunning performance of Bruce and Kelly’s song ‘Harper’s Valley PTA’ here:

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Tracklisting:

1.Departing Louisiana
2. Motor City Man
3. Carousel
4. Lonely For You
5. A Hanging On
6. Shake Yourself Loose
7. Harper Valley PTA
8. Anywhere But Here
9. I’ll Go To My Grave Loving You
10. This Will Be Our Year

For more information about the Thirty Tigers roster, including Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis, please contact Sara Silver
sara@thirtytigers.com +44 (0)20 8265 0772
http://www.silverprojects.com/news/

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Thirty Tigers

Thirty Tigers collaborates with Shooter Jennings and family on Black Country Rock

Releases from: Shooter Jennings, Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter.

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When Shooter Jennings left Universal South, he first created Black Country Rock, to brand the projects he was involved in and own the music he created. But now, nearly 6 years later, the label has expanded into Nashville and Los Angeles, both of which are working in sync together to create some of the wildest projects to come down the pike in a long time.

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Shooter Jennings – The Other Live CD + LP
In Store: 31/03/2014
Genre: Country

Recorded over the summer and fall of 2013, “The Other Live” is Shooter Jennings’ sophomore live album. This time he and his band find themselves honed, lock and loaded and in top form. An incredible performance from top to bottom, “The Other Live” really showcases Jennings’ entire career with songs spanning across his 6 expansive albums, as well as his growth with new songs and songs from his critically acclaimed 2010 concept album “Black Ribbons”.

Tracklisting

1. A Hard Lesson to Learn
2. Isis
3. The Low Road
4. Mama, It’s Just My Medicine
5. Old Friend
6. Outlaw You
7. Solid Country Gold / The Outsider
8. The White Trash Song
9. Something in the Way
10. All of This Could Have Been Yours
11. The Gunslinger

WaylonJennings

Waylon Jennings – Right For The Time (Remembered) CD + LP
In Store: 31/03/2014
Genre: Country

This is a remastering of Waylon’s 1996 Justice Records release “Right for the Time”. In a unique pairing, Justice records and BCR Nashville have teamed up to re-release this memorable album of the late great Waylon Jennings. Transferred from the original 1/2″ reel-to-reel tapes, remastered directly for vinyl by Pete Lyman, this pure analog version of the record really pursues the methods and morals that producer Randall Jamail was after when he first recorded it.

Tracklisting

1. WBPT
2. Cactus Texas
3. The Most Sensible Thing
4. The Boxer
5. Hittin’ The Bottle Again
6. Wastin’ Time
7. Kissing You Goodbye
8. Carnival Song
9. Out of Jail
10. Lines
11. Deep In The West
12. Right for the Time
13. Living Legends, Pt. 2

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Shooter Jennings, Twiggy Ramirez & Jamey Johnson – You Are My Sunshine LP
In Store: 31/03/2014
Genre: Country

Something dreadful happened with Jamey Johnson, Twiggy Ramirez & Shooter Jennings created this piece of music.  It can only be described as a sonic journey, the first of which takes one of the most well-known songs and reinvents it to possibly it’s true meaning using much ritual when it comes to the creation and conjuration of the music.  Side B is a mystical sound collage that takes the listener on a dark ride into the subconscious using many methods of sub sonic sound synthesis.

Tracklisting

Side A – You Are My Sunshine
Side B – There Is No Sunshine

JessiCoulter

Jessi Colter – Live From Cains CD + LP
In Store: 31/03/2014
Genre: Country

Recorded September 19th, 2013 at “The Event” at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this live album shows that soul never fades. From the first note the first lady of Outlaw Country strikes on her grand piano to the last bombastic chord of her electric band, Jessi Colter shines, overflowing with charm and charisma, and not to mention a few very personal moments. This is the first and only live record Ms. Colter has recorded and such a rare treat wouldn’t be complete with it’s own twists and turns. Jessi is joined by her son, Shooter, on a few of the tunes, such a humble performance really makes you feel lucky to be able to be there… or simulate being there by listening along.

Tracklisting

1. Intro
2. Mystery Train
3. Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus
4. Interlude 1
5. Without You
6. Interlude 2
7. What’s Happened To Blue Eyes (with David Chernicky)
8. You Can Pick ‘Em Baby
9. Interlude 3
10. You Were My Mountain
11. I’m Not Lisa
12. Interlude 4
13. Out of the Rain (with Shooter Jennings)
14. Please Carry Me Home (with Shooter Jennings)
15. Interlude 5
16. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
17. Interlude 6
18. Storms Never Last

For more information, please contact Sara Silver
sara@thirtytigers.com +44 (0)20 8265 0772
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Categories
Rounder Records

Son Volt to release New Album March 2013 entitled Honky Tonk

Honky Tonk 

SON VOLT’S NEW ALBUM “HONKY TONK” TO BE RELEASED ON ROUNDER RECORDS : ELEVEN NEW SONGS ABOUT “HEARTACHE, HEARTBREAK, AND THE ROAD”

On March 18th 2013, Son Volt will release Honky Tonk, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2009’s critically lauded American Central Dust.

The album features eleven new Son Volt songs that are inspired by the classic honky tonk sound of Bakersfield. Bandleader Jay Farrar observes, “Honky tonk music is about heartache, heartbreak, the road.” He reflects that as he wrote and recorded the songs so deeply steeped in tradition,  “I wanted these songs to sound more contemporary and modern. There was no strict adherence to methodology of the past. You never want to be a nostalgia act.”

Honky Tonk sees Son Volt moving forward on the path of a more acoustic-based sound.  Many of its compositions mine a thematic lyrical vein inspired by a traditional country music aesthetic, which Farrar first explored on American Central Dust. Farrar recalls, “I was always averse to using certain words in songs, including ‘love’ and ‘heart.’ But I started using them on American Central Dust, and now I guess the floodgates have opened.”

Indeed, many of Honky Tonk’s songs dwell on affairs of the heart, including the album’s opener, “Hearts and Minds,” a speedy Cajun waltz which assays the delicate balance between love’s steadfastness and its caprice, the plaintive “Brick Walls,” and “Barricades,” which affirms the necessity of pushing forward in the face of overwhelming despair and defeat.

Farrar recalls how his decision to learn a new instrument inspired an intense exploration of honky tonk music: “In the time between Son Volt records, I started learning pedal steel guitar. I play with a local band in St. Louis now and then called Colonel Ford. So I was immersed in honky tonk music, the Bakersfield sound, in particular. And it was almost second nature when I started writing the songs for this record.”

Honky Tonk and Farrar’s forthcoming book, Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs (Counterpoint Press, 2013) both continue his ongoing exploration of America’s landscape through the redemptive power of its music. Yet for all its hearkening back to a classic sound, Farrar and company make Honky Tonk feel vital, fresh, and new.

 

Honky Tonk Tracklist:

1.    Hearts and Minds

2.    Brick Walls

3.    Wild Side

4.    Down the Highway

5.    Bakersfield

6.    Livin’ On

7.    Tears of Change

8.    Angel of the Blues

9.    Seawall

10.  Barricades

11.  Shine On

 

Son Volt On Tour in the USA:

April 10 – Mercy Lounge – Nashville, TN                   April 11 – The Orange Peel – Asheville, NC

April 12 – Terminal West – Atlanta, GA                    April 13 – Cat’s Cradle – Carrboro, NC

April 14 – Bijou Theatre – Knoxville, TN                   April 16 – WorkPlay Theatre – Birmingham, AL

April 17 – The Parish – New Orleans, LA                  April 18 – Continental Club – Houston, TX

April 19 – Old Settler’s Music Festival – Austin, TX     April 20 – Sons of Herman Hall – Dallas, TX

 

Son Volt Honky Tonk [116619145-2] Available March 18, 2013

http://www.sonvolt.net                                          https://www.facebook.com/SonVolt

Categories
Rounder Records

The Steeldrivers announce a new album

OCTOBER 17, 2012

GRAMMY® NOMINATED BLUEGRASS-MEETS-SOUL BAND
THE STEELDRIVERS RELEASING NEW HAMMER DOWN

“They’re a blues, country, bluegrass, swagger band and they are brilliant.” ~ Adele

“Whether it was older songs such as ‘Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey’ or newer songs such as ‘Guitars, Whiskey, Guns and Knives,’ the new lineup earned the respect of the most skeptical in the crowd. The SteelDrivers are still in the running to become a crucial factor in the history of bluegrass.” ~Geoffrey Himes, Baltimore City Paper

The SteelDrivers are back! The three time Grammy® nominated bluegrass-meets-soul band has threaded the roots of bluegrass music with the distinctive threads of their own design, bringing together country and soul to create their own unapologetic hybrid of new music with the old feeling. Hammer Down, their third release on Rounder Records, is set for release February 4, 2013.

The SteelDrivers’ brand of bluegrass – intense, dark, poetic, and inescapably human – is a refreshing reminder of the timeless power of string band music, and is captured perfectly on the new Hammer Down. The band has gone through a few changes since they first hit the national scene in 2008 with their self-titled debut, but their songs and sound remain fresh and powerful.

The SteelDrivers are banjo player Richard Bailey, bass/vocalist Mike Fleming, guitar/vocalist Gary Nichols, fiddler/vocalist Tammy Rogers and mandolinist Brent Truitt. Produced by Luke Wooton, Hammer Down is a collection of 10 new tunes from original members Chris Stapleton and Mike Henderson, as well as Rogers and Nichols. The set also includes the songs “I’ll Be There” and “Cry No Mississippi” that Nichols co-wrote with John Paul White – one-half of the band The Civil Wars.

The English pop star Adele was so smitten with the band that she began performing their song, “If It Hadn’t Been For Love,” in her live performances. Throughout 2013, The SteelDrivers will be touring nationwide in the USA at clubs and festivals.

www.steeldrivers.net
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-SteelDrivers/6900218737