FEATURE: Four Sticks: Led Zeppelin IV at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Four Sticks

Led Zeppelin IV at Fifty-Five

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THIS might rank…

IN THIS PHOTO: Les Zeppelin in Milan in 1971

alongside the best albums of the 1970s. Many might claim this to be Led Zeppelin’s finest hour. Though there is stiff competition! Though I think its proper title is Four Symbols, it is commonly known as Led Zepperlin IV. In terms of the quality through this album, there are classics like Black Dog, Rock and Roll, Stairway to Heaven and When the Levee Breaks. Not a wasted moment, we have the sublime Misty Mountain Hop, thunderous Four Sticks, and the excellent Going to California and The Battle of Evermore. I think Robert Plant and Jimmy Page are at their peak regarding their songwriting and their performances, though it is John Bonham’s drumming that I feel steals the show! As it turns fifty-five on 8th November, I wanted to bring some features and reviews in. This is an album that I first listened to when I was a child. Lots of Led Zeppelin in my house! Four Sticks might be my favourite from the album, though I would also put Misty Mountain Hop up there. Everyone will have their own choices. I may have sourced some of these articles when I marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2021. Apologies if there is repetition! I am not sure how much fuss will be made of its fifty-fifth anniversary. Fans will note it. Maybe Led Zeppelin’s Instagram. Recorded out of Rolling Stones Mobile Studio at Headley Grange, Headley, Island, London, and Sunset Sound, Los Angeles. It was a chart-topper in the U.K. A behemoth of an album that I absolutely love. I will start off with a 2020 feature from Classic Rock that takes us inside the making of Led Zeppelin IV:

“The group began to settle in at Headley Grange, Page and Plant revelling in the atmosphere which was so different from the sterile surrounds of a normal studio. It was the idyll of the early 70s; gentleman rockers at large in the country, gear set up for extended jams, and some sedate – by Zeppelin’s Herculean standards, at any rate – recreation on hand.

Tour manager Richard Cole noted: “There weren’t any serious drugs around the band at that point, just dope and a bit of coke. Mostly we had an account at a shop in the village and we’d go down there and collect large quantities of cider. They were playing at being country squires. They found an old shotgun and used to shoot at squirrels in the woods. Not that they ever hit any. And there was this lovely old black Labrador dog wandering around which we used to feed.”

Each day, the band and Ian Stewart would gather downstairs and jam. Significantly, Stu had included his battered old upright piano in his luggage. He quickly assumed the same role he had with the Stones: a terrific, bluesy piano player with a particular feel for old-style rock’n’roll. But if Stu’s involvement was partly accidental, serendipity surrounded the making of the whole album.

In the middle of an early session, John Bonham began banging out the cymbal-led introduction to Little Richard’s Keep A-Knockin’. Stu playfully added a Jerry Lee Lewis roadhouse piano riff and Page and Jones picked up the ball and ran with it, knocking out a riff based on old Sun Records-era Scotty Moore guitar lines. Plant cut in with his own improvisation, and rather than trip into a rock’n’roll standard he began wailing nonsense lyrics built around a chorus of ‘It’s been a long time since I rock’n’rolled, mama!’

The lightbulbs went on. “We were doing something else at the time but Bonzo played the beginning of a Little Richard track. We had the tape running and I started doing that part of the riff,” Jimmy remembered. “It ground to a halt after 12 bars but we knew we had something. Robert came in with the lyrics and within 15 minutes the song was virtually complete.”

When they began playing the track in their live set during their European and US dates later that year, Plant introduced the tune under the title It’s Been A Long Time. After they had latterly settled on the more straightforward title, Rock And Roll would open Zeppelin’s live show from late 1972 through to 1975. But if Headley Grange was big on atmosphere, its aged walls also brought other, less expected advantages. The hallway was known as the Minstrel’s Gallery. The sound bounced around a natural bowl, and echoed back up the three flights of stairs.

“The other guys were out having a drink and John Bonham and I were at the house,” recalls Andy Johns. “He complained that he wasn’t getting the sound he wanted. I finally said to him, I’ve got an idea. We got his drums and put him in the hallway and then hung two mikes from the staircase and pointed them towards the kit.

“I remember sitting there thinking it sounded utterly amazing, so I ran out of the truck and said, ‘Bonzo, you gotta come in and hear this!’ He shouted: ‘Whoah, that’s it! That’s what I’ve been hearing!’”

Page was equally enthusiastic: “What you’re hearing on the record is the sound of the hall with the stereo mic on the stairs second flight up. There was a lot of different effects in there. Phased vocal and a backwards-echoed harmonica solo. I’d used backwards echo as far back as the Yardbirds’ days.”

Decades on, Bonham’s performance on When The Levee Breaks, an old Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy recording that Zeppelin rearranged quite radically into a narcotic, blues rock colossus, has become the most sampled drum sound of all time, first taken by the likes of the Beastie Boys and the house music DJs in the late 80s, it has been used on hundreds of rap and dance tunes. It has been speeded up, slowed down, distorted, stretched and condensed, and it remains one of the most startling percussive statements ever committed to tape.

Otherwise, Page remembers When The Levee Breaks being a difficult track to record: “We tried to record that in the studio before we got to Headley Grange and it sounded flat. But once we got the drum sound at Headley Grange it was like – boom! And that made the difference immediately.”

The sessions for the fourth Zeppelin album continued to develop organically. They were still drawing liberally from Page and Plant’s blues influences and were increasingly drawn towards the folk sounds that had either enthralled, enraged or confused those listening to Led Zeppelin III.

The reputations of Led Zeppelin’s four members have long been cast in rhetorical stone. Page as the virtuoso embodiment of the band’s creative spirit; Plant as the sexual, sinuous rock god; Jones as the scholarly muso; and John Bonham as the take-no-prisoners, hard-living, party animal. And yet as inspired and inventive as songwriters as Page, Plant and Jones were, and are, so Bonham was their equal as a musician, and as an important musical ‘voice’ in the band. His influence cannot be overstated, and nowhere more so than on the fourth album, where his contribution went way beyond his natural power and newly-discovered drum sound.

Bonham’s work on every track was superbly applied, and no more so than his dropping off the beat at 4 minutes 17 seconds into Misty Mountain Hop, the album’s nod to the medicinal properties of good, strong weed. Elsewhere on the album, Jones had an electric synth riff that the band were unable to nail until Bonham laid down a can of Double Diamond (much maligned and now forgotten workingman’s brew), picked up two drumsticks in each hand and, as Jimmy Page remembers, “just went for it. It was magic. We had tried different ways of approaching it. The idea was to get an abstract feeling. We tried it a few times and it didn’t come off until the day Bonzo did that.”

In a nod to John’s genius, the band decided to call the song Four Sticks. “It was a bastard to mix,” says Andy Johns.

More than any other Led Zeppelin album though, before or since, the fourth album, would become both glorified and then later vilified, before coming full-circle latterly to be glorified again for one track: Stairway To Heaven. Destined to become one of their two most famous songs (just ahead of Whole Lotta Love), we all know this one.

Still consistently voted one of, if not the, most popular and most widely known rock songs in history – kind of like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Bohemian Rhapsody all rolled into one – it has become the National Anthem of rock music.

Of course, it’s also said to contain beastly goings on if played backwards. And at least one of those involved in its creation, Robert Plant, has subsequently formed a relationship with the song that can only best be described as ambiguous. But when a song assumes such magnitude in people’s minds, the side effects can be strange, for those nearest to it just as much as those who are merely projecting their own thoughts and ideas into the song’s unashamedly metaphysical poetics.

Page had much of the chord sequence on a demo when they first tried it out. “I’d been fooling around with the acoustic guitar and came up with the different sections, which I married together. So I had the structure and then I ran it through Jonesy. I’d had the chord sequence pretty much worked out and Robert came up with about 60 per cent of the lyrics on the spot.”

Andy Johns: “We did the track at Island in London. Jimmy had the tune pretty much worked out. He played acoustic in the isolation booth. He was the thread that held it all together. We had Bonzo out in the main room and John Paul played a Honer electric piano.”

Plant’s lyrics were pieced together very quickly while the band was at Headley Grange. “Jimmy and I stayed up one night and we got the theme of it right there and then,” he recalled. “The lyrics were a cynical thing about a woman getting everything she wanted without giving anything back.”

It was Jones who came up with the memorable opening sequence: “We always had a lot of instruments lying around so I picked up a bass recorder and played along with Jimmy.”

Page took three separate attempts at the heavens-shaking guitar solo which became the orgasmic crescendo of the song; rather than deploy the usual Gibson Les Paul he returned to the battered old Telecaster that he had acquired from Jeff Beck and used on the first Zeppelin album.

"I winged that guitar solo, really. When it came to recording it, I warmed up and did three of them. They were all quite different from each other. I did have the first phrase worked out and then there was the link phrase. I did check them before the tape ran. The one we used was definitely the best.”

The result was one of the only guitar solos in history as likely to be whistled by milkman as air-guitared in the bedroom. And yet the song would become so ubiquitous that it overshadowed a brilliant body of work. As a result, Plant, for one, has an uneasy relationship with Stairway… now.

“There’s only so many times you can sing it and mean it. It just became so sanctimonious,” he said. An attitude that resulted in major row backstage with Page before their televised 1988 Atlantic Records 40th anniversary reunion at Madison Square, in New York Garden. Robert had decided, at the last moment, that he didn’t want to sing it. He finally relented, just before they went on, but the subsequent performance was accordingly dull and uninspired.

Richard Branson’s then newly-established Virgin Records set up special stalls to sell it, demand was so great. It was a similar story in the US, though Carole King’s Tapestry kept it off the No.1 spot. It didn’t matter. The airplay generated by Stairway To Heaven ensured the album remained in the Top 40 of the US album chart for the next six months. The record company had understandably wanted to release it as a single but the band steadfastly refused to allow it.

“We wanted them to hear it in the context of the whole album,” says Page, simply. They never looked back. Led Zeppelin IV, as it inevitably became known, is now confirmed as one of the biggest-selling hard rock album of all time, with sales to date of over 29 million”,

GRAMMY published a feature in 2021 around the fiftieth anniversary of Led Zeppelin IV. Their biggest-selling and world-conquering album still sounds like a revelation to this day. For anyone who knows Led Zeppelin and has not heard their fourth studio album, go and listen to it. Such a staggering  I don’t know how much I loved it when I was a child. In years since, I have absorbed and understood the brilliance of Led Zeppelin IV:

“It's the one with "Stairway."

That's all millions of fans have needed to know when picking up Led Zeppelin's best-selling fourth album, which was released 50 years ago this month. That's true in part because the record sleeve itself didn't give them much else to go on. The packaging was intentionally mysterious, without any words or insignias on the cover, only a peeling wall with a framed picture depicting a graying man hauling sticks on his back.

Colloquially known as Led Zeppelin IV, IV, or sometimes Runes in reference to the four runic symbols chosen by band members Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham to represent themselves, the officially untitled affair is a massive wallop of sound, the 1971 rock classic standing as a quintessential expression of the band's lyrical mysticism, folk leanings and bruising hard rock.

For the first three years of Led Zeppelin's existence, stretching from their formation in the summer of 1968 to the release of IV, the band was in constant motion, releasing three albums in a span of just 22 months. Led by former session and Yardbirds guitarist Page, fronted by a then-unknown Plant, and anchored by bassist Jones and drum-basher Bonham, the band built its fanbase by bringing its bombastic live show to concert halls across the U.K., Europe and North America.

Breaking in America was central to the band's strategy. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean seven times to tour the U.S. before releasing IV, building from opening for groups like Vanilla Fudge and Iron Butterfly in 1968 to headlining a two-night stand at the 20,000-capacity Madison Square Garden in New York City in under two years. Not long after that September 1971 run, the quartet returned to Headley Grange, where they had recorded part of III, armed with a batch of new songs that would change their lives.

By the time the band parked the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio outside the eighteenth-century retreat in rural southwestern England, its four members were locked in like a machine. The band hired engineer Andy Johns, who had just worked in the studio while tracking the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, and as a result, the record's production values leapfrogged their previous albums, which were mostly recorded in various towns while on tour. The live-in rehearsal and recording situation at Headley Grange yielded more than enough music for their upcoming album, leaving them with extra songs that appeared on 1975's Physical Graffiti. The eight songs that made the cut, though, were stone-cold classics.

"Black Dog" opens the album with an explosive pentatonic blues-based riff in the tradition of Page's classic "Heartbreaker" [a highlight from Led Zeppelin II] and a shrieking vocal performance from Plant. Bonham deepens the groove with propulsive drumming that alternates between 4/4 and 7/8 time, providing the backbone to the call-and-response interplay between vocals and guitar. "Rock and Roll" follows, a straight-laced, up-tempo boogie inspired by Little Richard.

Zeppelin returns to the Celtic folk it explored on III for the mandolin-based "The Battle of Evermore," which finds Plant exchanging vocal lines with Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention [famously covered by Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson on the Singles motion picture soundtrack in 1992, billed as The Lovemongers]. Later, contemplative, fingerpicked acoustic-folk ballad "Going to California" mellows the vibe after "Misty Mountain Hop" and "Four Sticks," an off-time experiment played by Bonham holding two drum sticks in each hand.

The album's most famous experiment came on the hypnotic "When the Levee Breaks," originally composed by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, with Johns capturing the sound of Bonham playing drums at Headley Grange with microphones hanging from a nearby stairwell. Johns slowed down the tape when he recorded the rest of the band, giving the drums an apocalyptic scale.

And then there's "Stairway to Heaven," the eight-minute epic that pulled all the band's strengths together into one song. Page wrote the song's delicate, acoustic opening section while staying with Plant at a remote cottage in Wales, then assembled the middle and climactic third section at Headley Grange, with Plant writing vocals on the spot.

"Stairway to Heaven" has become a cultural touchstone thanks to its enormous popularity on FM radio in the 1970s and '80s. The song's descending opening guitar figure became so well known that it made a cameo as "the forbidden riff" in 1992's Wayne's World, which winked at the song's enduring popularity. In 2014, that same riff was the subject of a lawsuit claiming the band lifted it from the song "Taurus" by the L.A.-based Spirit. A jury cleared Zeppelin, and the lawsuit finally ended in March 2020 when an appeals court upheld the verdict.

With legal questions in the rearview, the song's legacy is undeniable. "Stairway to Heaven" has notched more than half a billion streams on Spotify alone, and it ranked No. 61 on Rolling Stone's 2021 redux of its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Page's fiery leads in the third section topped Guitar World's list of the 50 Greatest Guitar Solos in 2009.

The seven other songs on IV have earned similar legacies through another path: sampling. Bonham's beats became foundational to hip-hop, and nearly every track on IV has been sampled—including dozens of instances for "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven." But the cavernous drum intro to "When the Levee Breaks" has been sampled more than 200 times, most notably in "Rhymin' & Stealin'" by Beastie Boys, "Kim" by Enimem, "Army of Me" by Björk, and "Don't Hurt Yourself" by Beyoncé featuring Jack White.

The popularity of Led Zeppelin's fourth album endures. At present, it is the fifth best-selling album of all time in the U.S. for moving 23 million copies. Worldwide, the album has sold 37 million copies and ranks the twelfth best-seller of all time. In 1999, the Recording Academy inducted it to the GRAMMY Hall of Fame.

The monumental success of Zeppelin's fourth album turned the band into a stadium act, and the momentum carried them through 1973's House of the Holy and 1975's double-album, Physical Graffiti. The band's pace slowed during the latter part of the decade, due to a car accident that left Plant in need of rehabilitation, as well as spiraling substance abuse with Page and Bonham that ultimately led to the drummer's death in 1980.

While their post-IV musical output only strengthened the band's legacy as one of rock's most potent forces, after five decades those eight songs still sound every bit as adventurous and groundbreaking”.

I am going to end with Classic Rock Magazine and their review from 2024. I think this is an album that you cannot find fault with. Almost perfect, I wonder what young generations make of it. Even though it is hugely influential, there are no bands around today quite like Led Zeppelin:

“Of all their records, Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, released in late 1971, remains their most admired work. From Jimmy Page’s unimpeachable riffs, through John Paul Jones musical invention and Robert Plant’s clarity of vocal to that titanic John Bonham drum sound, IV still emits a freshness that belies its age.

Black Dog’s machismo, Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Bonham-propelled brutality, Plant’s honeyed, evocative Sandy Denny-complemented vocal on The Battle Of Evermore, Stairway To Heaven’s mainstream-slaying production and dynamism and that’s just side one. After defining metal and folk-rock, IV’s encore was to unwittingly provide hip-hop with When The Levee Breaks, source of its ultimate breakbeat.

The epithet ‘tight but loose’ has always accurately described the band’s aesthetic. Squeaks, scrapes and microphone bleed were not errors to be corrected in Page’s production ethos, but rather characterful and inherent ingredients of the feel. That, and the world’s biggest fuck-off drum sound ever committed to tape.

Much has been written on the technicalities of this recording – basically two microphones hung above Bonham’s kit set up in a three-storey-high hall – and it’s not too much of a stretch to venture that Headley Grange, where IV was recorded, is the fifth member here. This ambience positively saturates the none-more-familiar finger-picked figure that introduces Stairway, the band’s finest recorded moment, near enough adding delay, such is the size of the reverb.

It’s been both loved and loathed in equal measures, but nowhere is Page’s supreme understanding of rock dynamics better illustrated than on Stairway, with a song that teases and caresses and then climaxes with nothing less than the world’s greatest ever guitar solo”.

Actually, there is a feature from Classic Rock from 2021. On its fiftieth anniversary, Led Zeppelin’s three surviving members - John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page -, looked back at this album. The full interview was published in MOJO. Classic Rock provided some exerts. It is interesting what they say about an album that sits alongside the biggest and best from all of music:

“The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin -  Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones - look back upon the making of their band’s monumental fourth album in a new interview to celebrate the album’s forthcoming 50th anniversary.

And while guitarist Page acknowledges that he was the band member driving the album sessions at Headley Grange in Hampshire in January 1971, he dismisses suggestions that he exerted a dictatorial role over proceedings: “I wasn’t walking around with jackboots and a whip,” he says with a laugh, as reported in the new issue of Mojo magazine, which has Zeppelin on the cover.

The making of Led Zeppelin IV actually began at Island Studios in London in December 1970, but Page suggested relocating the sessions to the former Victorian workhouse at the dawn of the new year, wanting the band to have a space where they could have privacy and time to write and create while living under one room.

“Headley Grange was cold, damp, dirty, smelly,” John Paul Jones tells Mojo’s Mark Blake. “I remember walking into my room and thinking, Oh really? I had to steal someone’s electric fire.”

“Why is John complaining?” Jimmy Page asks Mojo. “We were there to work. I don’t want to say anything to embarrass Mrs Smith, the lady in charge. Headley was a bit austere. But there was no, ‘Let’s get stoned or go to the pub and get pissed.’ That wasn’t our raison d’etre. It was ‘eat, sleep, work’, but at the same time, I wasn’t walking around with jackboots and a whip.”

“It’s like there was a magical current running through that place and that record. Like it was meant to be.”

In the interview, Page and Jones talk about the writing of the album’s centrepiece, Stairway To Heaven.

Jimmy said, ‘I’ve got this thing and it’s in different sections’,” Jones recalls. “I sat down at the electric piano, and we worked out where everything should go. The joy of it was it didn’t sound like anybody else.”

Jones reveals that one original working title for the song was Cow And Gate... as Robert Plant had recently bought a farm.

“John Paul and I worked on it before getting with John Bonham,” says Page. “A lot of the music precedes John coming in. It’s a slow reveal. But the whole time, Robert was listening and writing. Then he started singing and had most of the lyrics written… it was an inspired time for everybody”.

Turning fifty-five on 8th November, Led Zeppelin IV still sounds like nothing else. So fresh and revelatory. I have heard it a lot, but I get something new each time I listen. It is an album that everyone needs to own. An essential masterpiece that has few equals, I do hope that the surviving members share some thoughts on this seismic album…

AFTER fifty-five years.

FEATURE: Refuge of the Roads: Joni Mitchell’s Hejira at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

Refuge of the Roads

Joni Mitchell’s Hejira at Fifty

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I just twigged…

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell captured listening while backstage at the Civic Center in Providence, RI in February, 1976.  This image was taken during her North American Tour that year and was chosen for the front cover of her Woman of Heart and Mind DVD/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein

that the Deacon Blue song, Fergus Sings the Blues, must have taken its name from Joni Mitchell’s track, Furry Sings the Blue. That track appears on Hejira. Many consider this to be her greatest album. Mitchell turns eighty-three on 7th November. You can see Hejira as the beginning of a more experimental/Jazz-influenced period that would lead to 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and 1979’s Mingus. I especially love Hejira’s cover. I will come to some features and reviews of Hejira. As it turns fifty on 21st November, I wanted to mark that. Many people do not put it up there with her best work. Many look at 1971’s Blue or 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon as being her prime releases. I think that Hejira is one of her very best. Linking to the Joni Mitchell website and information about Hejira, we get a beautiful article from Laura Snapes that provides this background to the album. The changes that were happening in Mitchell’s life and career:

“The women of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns were always trapped in somebody else's frame. Joni Mitchell only used the first person once on her seventh album; instead, she sang of women as seen through men's eyes, assessed according to their suitability for motherhood, sex and deference. Similarly, Mitchell found herself made into an adjunct when she briefly joined the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, opening for male artists who were her equal. She approached the tour as a research trip, "an amazing experience, studying mysticism and ego malformation like you wouldn't believe", as she told journalist Timothy White. "Everybody took all of their vices to the Nth degree and came out of it born again, or into AA."

Where these acts were tilting towards the mainstream, by the mid-‘70s, Mitchell was keenly following Marvin Gaye in "moving away from the hit department, to the art department", keen to forge her own rhythms away from rock. In the wake of her split from drummer John Guerin, she was ready to give life the slip for a while.

After the end of the Hissing tour, Mitchell was sojourning at Neil Young's beach house. She she wanted to travel, but didn't know where, or who with. By chance, two friends invited her to drive cross-country. Her answer: '"I've been waiting for you; I'm gone,"' she recounted to Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe. They travelled together for a while before Mitchell went off alone. It was one of three road trips she took between 1975 and 1976, which led her from Los Angeles to Maine, then California via Florida and the Gulf Of Mexico. On the road, Mitchell stayed in lighthouses along the Gulf Coast and wore wigs to disguise herself in New Orleans. "Meanwhile, nobody knew where I was," she told White. "I'd do those disappearing acts. I'd pass through some seedy town with a pinball arcade, fall in with people who worked on the machines, people staying alive shoplifting, whatever. They don’t know who you are: 'Why you driving hat white Mercedes? Oh, you're driving it across country for somebodyelse.' You know, make up some name and hang out. Great experiences, almost like the prince and the pauper."

Mitchell had no license for her flashy car, so she drove behind truckers, who would signal when the police were approaching. She was living out of bounds, but hadn't, as the folk song goes “fallen by the wayside”. By the mid-‘70s, Walden and On The Road were archetypal male quests, but there were still few cultural precedents for women travelling alone. Eighteenth-century "girl stunt reporter" Nellie Bly circled the world in 72 days to prove that she could. Simone De Beauvoir’s America Day By Day (1947) was more journalistic, intended to convey the reality of America's culture and mores to the French. Released in 1976, the same year as Mitchell's travels, Tom Robbins' absurdist novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues followed the giant-thumbed Sissy Hankshaw as she encountered various countercultural avatars, But although just as geographically far-reaching, Mitchell's trip was defiantly insular- the kind of story that hadn't yet been written.

Living between her car and anonymous motels, Mitchell wrote songs on her acoustic guitar since pianos were seldom available. She thought of naming the collection of material "Travelling", but that implied a fixed destination. Instead, she chose a reference to the migration of the prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, which she later summed up as "leaving the dream, no blame".

"'Hejira' was an obscure word, but it said exactly what I wanted," she told Crowe. "Running away, honourably." She continued, referencing her split with Guerin. "It dealt with the leaving of a relationship, but without the sense of failure that accompanied the breakup of my previous relationships. I felt that it was not necessarily anybody's fault. It was a new attitude."

A new attitude required a new musical approach, furthering Mitchell's quicksilver mid-‘70s evolution. "For a long time, I've been playing in straight rhythms," she had told friend Malka Marom in 1973. "But now, in order to sophisticate my music to my own taste, I push it into odd places that feel a little unusual to me, so that I feel I'm stretching out." After 1974's richly melodic Court And Spark, the jazzy abstractions of Hissing were perceived as an ornery career-killer. On Hejira, Mitchell pared percussion back to the faintest patter, ditched choruses, and created nine fairly similar tone poems from her guitar (mostly electric on the recordings) and Jaco Pastorius' fretless bass. (Only lounge-jazz pastiche "Blue Motel Room" veers from the form.) Their rippling instruments evoke the uncanny surface of the pools in Hockney's California paintings, and the scant reliance on hooks encourages a sense of forward motion. (The New York Times' reviewer called it a -Los Angeles version of Kraftwerk's autobahn'.") This minimal backing lets Mitchell’s voice loose, as she sings in a meditative, instinctual fashion. "The poet took over the singer "' he said in 1998. "It's more like jazz melody, it's conversational improvisation."

This intimate, personal voice is key to Hejira, where Mitchell isolates herself from familiarity in order to confront her true nature. "In our possessive coupling/So much could not be expressed/So now I'm returning to myself /These things that you and I suppressed," she sings on the title track, as if taking her first deep breath in a long while. Hejira contains Mitchell's starkest and most sensitive examinations of the apparent incompatibility of love and work, belonging and freedom. Hejira lets Mitchell's duelling ideologies and impulses coexist at the same scale within each song, avoiding extremes of crisis or revelation, an idea reflected in the artwork. Mitchell used a Camera Lucida to edit together 14 different photos of varying perspectives - including an imposing Norman Seeff portrait - and then hired an air brusher to blend in the edges. "If I had done the cover as a collage, it would've looked much more primitive," she told Rock Photo. "This way it's so polished, as if it's exactly one photograph."

If art and love are in conflict, Mitchell's lucid relationship with that bind is unparalleled. "I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs," she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996 [ed: actually, 2006], "but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me." Marrying Hissing's observational approach to the personal nature of Mitchell's earlier records, Hejira contains some of her most expansive and idiosyncratic writing, each song filled with unanswered questions about the definition and contradictions of fulfilment. Sometimes, that satisfaction is immediate. To be a solo travelling woman requires a heightened sensitivity to the environment, and Mitchell vibrates at the frequency of her gorgeous, sensory landscapes. There are towering pinewood trees and vivid blue skies streaked with vapour trails that look like "the hexagram of the heavens", or the strings of her guitar. Snow "gathers like bolts of lace waltzing on a ballroom girl" in the spacious "Hejira", where Mitchell sighs with gratitude at her synchronicity with her surroundings. "There's comfort in melancholy/When there's no need to explain/It's just as natural as the weather/In this moody sky today. "Her world is so vivid, it almost feels surreal at time.

As she acclimatises to the road, she clocks on to the behaviour of the characters she encounters. The dewy "Coyote" details a tryst with a philandering rancher (who may be Sam Shepard in disguise)- Mitchell knows that he has "a woman at home and another down the hall", but she enjoys their brief affair, and revels in his palpable consternation about whether to run away the next morning. "Coyote's in the coffee shop/He's staring a hole in his scrambled eggs/He picks up my scent on his fingers/While he's watching the waitresses' legs," she sings, high on intimate power. "You're not a hit-and-run driver, no no," she reassures him, having played him at his own game. Sex is purely pleasure on Hejira, Mitchell writing without shame or qualification as she steps outside of society's expectations. "All I reallywant right now/Is to find another lover," she confesses at one point, and she succeeds. She may have reservations about the "foolish and childish" protagonist of "A Strange Boy", but rationality barely matters out here. "We got high on travel/And we got drunk on alcohol/And on love, the strongest poison and medicine of all," she rhapsodises, sounding barely tethered to the earth. "See how that feeling comes and goes/Like the pull of moon on tide/ Now I am surf rising/Now parched ribs of sand at his side."

Supposedly alone in the world and enjoying "the sweet loneliness of solitary travel", as she would describe it, Mitchell forces herself to reckon with the part her that still craves contact, and comfort. "I'm porous with travel fever/But you know I'm so glad to be on my own/Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger/ Can setup trembling in my bones," she sings on "Hejira". The alternating keys of "Amelia", a tribute to the lost pilot Amelia Earhart, underscore Hejira's most poignant and uneasy interrogation of a woman's ineffable need to wander, and the sacrifices that entails. "Maybe I've never really loved/I guess that is the truth/I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude/And looking down on everything/I crashed into his arms," she rues.

No matter how far she gets from home, she can't escape her mind. "Oh radiant happiness/It was all so light and easy/'Til I started analysing/And I brought on my old ways/A thunderhead of judgement was gathering in my gaze," Mitchell sings on the melty, hiccuping "Refuge Of The Roads". Hejira offers no resolution between love and independence, both of which lead to a measure of isolation that Mitchell elucidates beautifully. Being tethered to someone means always being seen in reflection: "White flags of winter chimneys/Waving truce against the moon/In the mirrors of a modern bank/From the window of a hotel room," she sings on "Hejira". But a similarly desolate image in "Refuge" suggests that being alone means barely being seen at all. In a service station, she sees "a photograph of the earth/Taken coming back from the moon/And you couldn't see a city/On that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest of a highway/ Or me here least of all."

In The Rolling Stone Book Of Women In Rock, Lisa Kennedy writes that Mitchell's work up until Court And Spark was influenced by the prairie, and that what came after drew from the city. It's true of Hissing, Mingus and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, but Hejira is a psychological bridge connecting the two territories and all that they represent. The closest she comes to defining that irreconcilable pull between a woman's duty and desire is on energetic highlight "Song For Sharon". (It's the only song here written on cocaine, which may explain the pace.) "And the power of reason/And the flowers of deep feeling/Seem to serve me/Only to deceive me," she ruminates. It's no wonder, as she sings on "Refuge ... ", that her journey "made most people nervous/They just didn't want to know/What I was seeing in the refuge of the roads."

To this day in popular culture, most women on the road are doomed figures, fated to die or disappear. In 2013, the cultural critic Vanessa Veselka wrote an essay for The American Reader titled "The Lack Of Female Road Narratives And Why It Matters". "We recognize that, in our world, a woman on the road is marked," she writes. "She has been cut from the social fabric, excised at such an elemental level that when she steps onto the road, she steps into an abyss. And whatever leads up to that choice inspires in us a primal fear. A man on the road is solitary. A woman on the road is alone."

Hejira remains one of the few counterexamples to this deficit - a restless rejection of what satisfaction and success is meant to look like for women as lovers and artists, and a fearless confrontation of the consequences that stem from rejecting the norm. It's perhaps the great feminist record: "Leaving the dream, no blame," indeed”.

It is clear was a change. Prior to coming to a couple of reviews, it is worth getting some words from Joni Mitchell. Hejira is an album that could not have come from anyone else. In 2006, for the Ottawa Citizen, Doug Fisher spoke with Joni Mitchell about a classic album that turned thirty. How she reflected on it then. I wonder if she will share any words on its fiftieth anniversary. It was such an important album in her career. One that she is clearly very proud of:

“Whenever Joni Mitchell had trouble sorting out her life, she took to the road. But in early 1976, with a turbulent love affair on the rocks and too many drugs in her body, she hit the highway almost with a vengeance.

"I was getting away from a romance, I was getting away from the craziness and I was searching for something to make sense of everything," she says. "The road became a metaphor for my life."

And it inspired the album many of her fans and music critics consider her masterpiece.

Released 30 years ago this week, the nine songs on Hejira form the remarkable personal journal of a nomadic, romantic dreamer whose aural notebook is filled with the stories of doomed love, late night roadhouse dance floors, wedding gown fantasies, lost chances and a deep yearning to escape and start over.

Mitchell is not convinced Hejira is the best of the 22 albums that made her among the most influential singer-songwriters, male or female, of the past 40 years. She won't attach that label to any of her albums.

'Hejira could only have come from me'

But she concedes Hejira is probably her one album that could not have been made by anyone else.

"I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me," she said an interview with the Citizen.

The stories they tell are so vivid, their observations so naked and the landscapes so haunting that Kris Kristofferson famously urged her in a letter to be "more self-protective ... to save something of yourself from public view."

But Mitchell says self-confession, no matter how risky and revealing, was essential to her writing during that era.

"My songs have always been more autobiographical than most people's," she says. "It pushes you toward honesty. I was just returning to normal from the extremities of a very abnormal mindset when I wrote most of the songs (on Hejira).

"When life gets interesting I get very alert, and life was very interesting. I think that took the writing to another level."

Mitchell talked about the album by phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade. More wary of public scrutiny these days, the Canadian singer agreed to a Citizen request to discuss Hejira because, she said, the album recalls an "interesting transitional" time in her life and her career.

Musically, Hejira certainly marked a departure from the two jazz-tinged but radio-friendly albums that preceded it. Gone were the hummable melodies, conventional formats and jaunty horn sections she used as Top 40 flirtations on 1974's Court and Spark and '75's The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

In their place, Mitchell offered seductively sparse rhythms, lush swirling guitars and the brilliant spark of Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass to create an unceasing musical motion that is as mesmerizing as the highways she travels in her songs.

The album is also a departure lyrically. Using the music's structural looseness to her advantage, Mitchell gives her words a simple directness and poetic polish seldom seen in her music before and rarely found again.

"To me, the whole Hejira album is really inspired," Mitchell says. "There is a rootlessness to it, for sure, but also discovery along the road."

Despite good reviews, Hejira did not sell as briskly as the more accessible albums Mitchell released during the first half of the 1970s. Although exact numbers are hard to get, there are indications sales of Hejira are stronger today than ever.

Voting on jonimitchell.com, an excellent fan-driven website, ranks Hejira as Mitchell's most popular album. A critics' poll done in the late 1990s placed the album in a first-place tie with the Blue, a moody collection of love songs she recorded in 1971.
Mitchell says Hejira's songs were written during or after three journeys she took in late 1975 and the first half of 1976.

The first was a concert tour cancelled amid turmoil after six weeks in February 1976 when Mitchell and her drummer boyfriend John Guerin ended their on-again, off-again relationship, this time seemingly for good.

Soon after, Mitchell signed on with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, a ragged, drug-soaked circus that also variously included Joan Baez, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely, Allan Ginsburg and members of the Band. She soon became a frequent cocaine user.

"I realized you couldn't stay on that thing straight -- you'd be the only one," she explains. "It was just insane." Looking back, she says, the drugs had both "great and disastrous" effects: "I had terrible insomnia but I wrote a lot of epic poems," including Song for Sharon, for many the masterpiece around which Hejira orbits.

In danger of losing her equilibrium, Mitchell fled for home in Los Angeles. She was only back a few days when two friends, one of them a former lover from Australia, showed up at her door proposing they drive across the country to New England.

Mitchell eventually dropped them in Maine before heading alone down the coast to Florida, around the Gulf of Mexico and across the southwest back to California.

"I was driving without a driver's licence," she remembers. "I had to stay behind truckers because they signal you when cops are ahead. I had to drive in daylight hours only to stay out of harm's way."

In the South, where hard rock and country music dominated the airwaves, Mitchell was a virtual unknown. "It was a relief. I was able, like The Prince and the Pauper, to escape my fame under a false name and fall in with people and enjoy ordinary civilian status."

The cross-country sojourn resulted in six of the songs on Hejira, which Mitchell says was originally called Travelling -- "that wouldn't have been very memorable," she jokes.

While looking through a dictionary, Mitchell came across the word "hejira," an Islamic term for exodus or breaking with the past. It became a song title -- and against the will of her record company, which wanted something less cryptic -- the name of the album.

"I'd been struggling with a title for the song," she says. "The idea of departure with honour captured the feeling I was after very well”.

Two reviews to come to before wrapping up. Culture Sonar showed love for an album that they felt was underappreciated. You could argue that. The last thing I will bring in is features where Joni Mitchell’s albums are ranked. Showing where Hejira comes:

“Everyone has albums they come back to again and again, albums they would take to their proverbial desert island. Such albums have made a deep connection to the heart, and to life experience, sometimes in ways we barely understand, or only slowly unpack as we grow older. For me there’s no contest. The album I never tire of, which speaks to me instantly and always, whose meaning has evolved and deepened for me over time: Joni Mitchell’s Hejira.

A bit of brush-clearing first:

I have many friends who simply can’t get past some aspects of Mitchell’s performances. There’s a prickliness in some of her work (and most definitely in her public statements), which I believe was well-earned through the struggle of navigating the classic rock boys club, but which can be confusing and off-putting at times. Her voice is a frequent focus of criticism, many finding it “pretentious” or “mannered.” I see the truth in these critiques, but at least on her best work (and I consider this album the best of her best), the rewards far outweigh the obstacles.

With that out of the way: if you haven’t heard Hejira, go right now and do that. It’s on YouTube in its entirety, though I strongly recommend buying it. Nothing I say can do it justice, but I can highlight some of what is so powerful about it in my view.

Mitchell’s rhythm guitar playing is unique and gorgeous. As elsewhere in her work, she relies on a wide range of bespoke tunings to achieve distinctive and rich voicings. On the opening track, “Coyote,” for example, she tunes to CGDFCE, a very odd setup which makes the hooky, haunting, chugging rhythm part quite easy to play.

Hejira is in some sense a concept album, documenting a long road trip across the country and back, after a tour which ended early in recrimination and romantic disappointment. There is a strong sense of place in every single song, and Mitchell evokes conversations and situations effortlessly and compellingly, giving other people in her life and travels a voice, telling fragments of their stories in ways which make them feel like people I have known myself. This kind of lyric writing is just plain hard to do well, and she makes it sound easy.

Mitchell has said that she found the “dead, distant” bass sound of 70s recordings very unsatisfying, and was told she should talk to Jaco Pastorius. If all this album accomplished was to give us the glory of the parts Jaco overdubbed on four of the songs, it would be a treasure. But it goes beyond the sheer beauty of those bass parts…Jaco seemed to understand Mitchell’s music intuitively, and everything he does makes the rest of her conception shine more brightly. The interplay between his bass and her guitar and voice feels like a playful but serious conversation between old friends.

And it wasn’t just Jaco who Mitchell gave scope to here. John Guerin on drums and Larry Carlton on electric guitar deliver some their best, most tasteful work, with just the right amount of assertiveness, skirting a line between folk-pop and jazz in a way I’ve never heard matched.

I can’t know what Hejira’s deeper meaning is to Mitchell, beyond the narrative elements she is playing with, but to me it evokes a deep longing, and serves as a somewhat sardonic but heartfelt elegy for failed dreams and broken promises, personal and social.

The atmosphere on this album sticks to me like glue, gets in everywhere, and every musical and production choice supports that effect. Mitchell and her producer Henry Lewy achieved great variety between tracks without once violating the sense of a continuous and encompassing world – it is a spectacular achievement.

And what is atmosphere on an album but the result of sound? So finally, that’s what makes Hejira what it is, more than any of the aspects I have discussed. It is a sound which envelops and caresses, teases and reveals, soothes and surprises, gently prodding the listener to offer attention to the story of “this hitcher…this prisoner, of the fine white lines, of the white lines on the free free way.”

Mitchell’s overall body of work has its issues, and her relationship with fame and the business of music has been…challenging. But no accounting of the history of modern songwriting and recording is complete without consideration of this kaleidoscopically beautiful album”.

In 2022, Pitchfork reviewed Hejira. It is, as they write, “an iridescent meditation on solitude, a masterpiece in her catalog and across all of music”. If anyone has not heard this Joni Mitchell masterpiece then you really need to. Whilst Ladies of the Canyon is my favourite album from her, I do really love Hejira and will always have respect for it:

“On “Hejira,” Mitchell interrogates her 32 years. She had made profound sacrifices for the sake of her art, which perhaps accounts for the music’s intensity: When you feel you’ve sacrificed everything for your work, you bring everything to it. She looked for answers in every corner of the country her car could reach. She poured in every reserve and inexhaustible query. What are the uses of solitude? How close to nerves and bone can you get? Is art worth the sacrifice? Could she ever fully be seen? Her music stretches into a dissolving horizon suggesting the questions are unanswerable. Its unresolved charge suggests that life will be a cycle of finding meaning in the questions. In the spartan space, Mitchell invites us to complete the picture.

Staring at headstones on “Hejira,” “those tributes to finality,” pondering death, she considered her life. “I looked at myself here,” she sings, “Chicken scratching for my immortality.” Even Joni Mitchell must sometimes feel meaningless, at the top of the mountain, wondering what everything is worth. She always said she embraced granular details in her autobiographical art songs because it made a better story, and people should “know who they’re worshiping.” Here she offers a metaphysical magnification of her most atomic truths.

We’re only particles of change
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I’m always bound and tied to someone

Two other of Hejira’s songs illustrate as much. “Song for Sharon” is Mitchell’s reckoning with her position as single and childfree in her 30s, subverting the status quo in subject and in form. She’d addressed this reality before, like on For the Roses’ “Woman of Heart and Mind.” But in this nine-minute letter to her long-lost friend back home, Sharon Bell—who took a conventional path, “a husband and a farm”—she went further, surveying the advice she’d received from other women about how to give her life meaning: “have children,” “find yourself a charity.” With unbothered resolve and an even-handed tone—not innate for Mitchell—she situates herself between these two pathways of womanhood, seeking the common ground between herself and Sharon, or maybe between herself and all women, like her mother and grandmother who suppressed their dreams. “Song for Sharon” blows up the myth of the pop renegade with no direction home. Staring the past in the eye, Mitchell admits (in a call back to Blue’s “All I Want”), “All I really want to do right now is find another lover,” the last word drifting like smoke.

The most significant of its 10 verses was inspired by the actress Phyllis Major, who died by suicide in March of 1976. “A woman I knew just drowned herself,” Mitchell sings about the wife of Jackson Browne, who she herself had also dated, and whom she despised. (Her 1994 song about domestic violence, “Not to Blame,” was written in the wake of accusations against Browne, too.) “It seems we all live so close to that line,” Mitchell sings, “And so far from satisfaction.” “Song for Sharon” becomes a multifaceted song of solidarity with a diversity of women seeking dignity and respect. Its length illustrates the endlessness of such a task.

Hejira built a new sound to match the feminist paradigm it presented for being a woman in the world, with autonomy, adventure, and pleasure all as virtues. In the mid-’70s, the trope of the solo male traveler seeking enlightenment in meandering solitude was well-defined by tales like Walden and On the Road, even Siddhartha. Women travelers were unknown. Mitchell’s position “made most people nervous,” she sings on the beautiful, gently loping album closer, “Refuge of the Roads,” which describes her meeting with Tibetan Buddhist spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa. But her role brought others to life. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had posited, in The Second Sex, that “the free woman is just being born,” and when she arrived so would her poetry. Hejira is evidence, a shapeshifting aesthetic to voice a still-emerging mode of being female.

“Here’s the thing,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

Time had another idea. For years, the prevailing Mitchell narrative positioned Blue as her creative peak, Court and Spark as her commercial apex, and everything else a fascinating slow fall. This is, of course, incorrect. Creatively, if not commercially, Mitchell’s entry to jazz—the second half of what biographer Michelle Mercer calls “her Blue period” from 1971 to 1976—was more akin to Dylan going electric and cresting on an upward stride. She had adapted a new language for her trio of albums leading to Hejira like Dylan’s triptych leading to Blonde on Blonde.

Hejira’s influence remains as boundless as the music. Along with inspiring the Rolling Stones, Hejira is among the Mitchell albums that a young Björk held in the highest esteem. In recent years, Danielle Haim, Weyes Blood, and St. Vincent have anointed it as their favorite. In 2019, pop experimentalist Jenny Hval wrote a song about the act of listening to “Amelia.” Hejira created a precedent for the pantheon of art about women alone in motion that now includes Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Patti Smith’s M Train.

The month of Hejira’s release, in November of 1976, Mitchell played “Coyote” as part of the Band’s Last Waltz. She herself didn’t tour for three years after, living “in exile from a mainstream audience,” as Rolling Stone put it when she resurfaced with her Charles Mingus collaboration in 1979. She either understood her staggering achievement or lost what little remained (had it existed) of her faith in the “star-maker machinery” of highly commercial music. She knew “no one’s going to show me everything,” as she sings on the title track, so she fulfilled her dreams herself. She wished for a river to skate away on. Hejira became one”.

Hejira doesn’t do too bad when we see ranking lists of Joni Mitchell’s albums. Earlier this year, Rough Trade ranked it first and said this: “You find yourself hanging on every word, wondering just how Joni will tie up every story in a deeply interesting arrangement. It is one of those albums that will change your life if you let it. I know it has changed mine”. In 2019, The Guardian placed it third: “This is definitely one for the road, evoking a hunger for movement, a sense of yearning and restlessness, that permeates every track. According to Mitchell, the album was written driving across the United States between Maine and Los Angeles. Amelia reflects upon the juxtaposition of concrete and skies after a break-up (an ode to the wild wings of Amelia Earhart – the urge to belong, the impulse to break free), whereas the album’s title track redirects us inwardly with the haunting, spine-tingling work of jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius”. On 21st November, the supreme and endlessly brilliant Hejira turns fifty. I wants to show love for a Joni Mitchell classic that is…

ARGUABLY her greatest album.

FEATURE: The ‘Yes’ Painting: 7th November, 1966: When John Lennon Met Yoko Ono

FEATURE:

 

 

The ‘Yes’ Painting

IN THIS PHOTO: Yoko Ono and John Lennon captured together at their apartment in The Dakota building in Manhattan, New York City on 8th December, 1980 (just five hours before Lennon was killed)/PHOTO CREDIT: Annie Leibovitz

7th November, 1966: When John Lennon Met Yoko Ono

_________

NEXT year is…

quite a big one for fans of The Beatles. You can debate when The Beatles was formed, though I think it was the moment when Paul McCartney met John Lennon at the Peter's Church Hall fete in Woolton on 6th July, 1957. Next summer, we mark seventy years of this seismic moment. You feel McCartney and Lennon would have met regardless, but it was this magical meeting and discovery at a fete that began this songwriting partnership. I can understand that John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono was not happy for everyone. He was married to Cynthia Lennon when he entered the Indica Gallery in London and his life changed forever. Before spotlighting sixty years since John Lennon and Yoko Ono met and would then fall in love, it is worth thinking about Ono. The world owes her a massive apology for the misogyny and hate she received. How people said she broke up The Beatles. She didn’t. She was this incredible force of good for John Lennon. An amazing artist in her own right, she is still recording and active at the age of ninety-three. I wonder if she ever thinks back to 7th November, 1966. This was at a time when The Beatles were massive. They had sort of wound down touring by the end of 1966. Revolver came out earlier in the year. You do feel for Cynthia Lennon and how hard it was. Though you can tell that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were just right for each other. She was so important to him. Opened his mind and made him a better person. Even now, we do not give Ono credit and love for what she did in terms of Lennon’s music. How amazing she is. In Sam Mendes’s four Beatles film that will come out in 2028, Anna Sawai will portray Yoko Ono. Harris Dickinson plays John Lennon. I hope that Ono is portrayed affectionately and her story is told. That she is not just a minor character or portrayed as someone who was meddling and disruptive.

I think that is the impression that many people have. However, one fateful day in November 1966, John Lennon walked into the Indica Gallery. Lennon met Ono ahead of her solo exhibition, Unfinished Paintings and Object. I think about Lennon encountered by the gallery co-owner John Dunbar. Lennon climbed a ladder, looked through the magnifying glass, and read the word ‘YES’. I am not sure if this was the moment that Lennon knew that Yoko Ono was someone he wanted to spend his life with. It was definitely an eye-opening experience. Lennon said of Yoko Ono: “I’d never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds big-headed, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn’t meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it”. This article takes us inside a fateful and incredible meeting that changed the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono:

“John Lennon met Yoko Ono at her 1966 art exhibit Unfinished Paintings and Objects, at London's Indica Gallery. She was an avant-garde artist, and he was the most famous pop star in the world. Lennon previewed the show the night before its opening, and Yoko later claimed she didn't know who he nor the Beatles were—which seems unlikely, although it is likely that she didn't care. One piece at the exhibit, Apple, was just a real apple on a plexiglass stand. Lennon picked the apple up and took a bite out of it. Ono later recalled: "He just grabbed it and bit it and looked at me like 'There!' I was so furious, I didn't know what to say. How dare this person mess around with my work?" Lennon said of the incident, "I thought it was fantastic—I got her work immediately...it was two hundred quid to watch the fresh apple decompose" (Lennon Remembers: The Full Rolling Stone Interviews from 1970).

Another piece, Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, was a ladder leading up to a picture frame on the ceiling, and a magnifying glass hanging on a metal chain. Within the frame, in tiny print, was the single word YES. Lennon described being impressed with the positive message: "I climbed up and got a look in this spyglass on the top of the ladder... you feel like a fool... and it just said, 'Yes.' Now, at the time, all the avant-garde was smash the piano with a hammer and break the sculpture and anti-, anti-, anti-. It was all boring negative crap" (Playboy Interview with David Sheff, September 1980).

There was also a blank white canvas on the wall with a bucket of nails and a hammer beside it, entitled Painting to Hammer a Nail. Lennon asked if he could hammer a nail in, but Yoko said no because the show wasn't opening until the next day. The gallery owner told her to let Lennon do it because he was a millionaire and might buy it. When Yoko finally agreed he could hammer a nail in for five shillings, John replied, "Well, I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." Lennon later reflected: "And that's when we really met. That's when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it and, as they say in all the interviews we do, the rest is history" (Playboy, 1980)”.

It was not like their love story necessarily began on 7th November, 1966. The second meeting was on 22nd November, 1966, at the Robert Fraser Gallery,  on 69 Duke Street, London. That was at an exhibition by American sculptor, Claes Oldenburg. Lennon arrived with Paul McCsartney. Lennon recalls how shy and nervous he was. So it took a while for that ice to be broken. The cultural differences and language barriers. They came from different worlds in a way. However, it is clear that Yoko Ono definitely stirred something in John Lennon. You can feel her brilliance affecting his work with The Beatles and his solo material. Though not everything was great – their earliest collaborative albums are pretty inaccessible and there were moments of vitriol in songs, especially one aimed at Paul McCartney (How Do You Sleep?), that don’t paint them in a good light -, but it was the start of something beautiful. They married and were together until Lennon’s death in 1980. Ono was with him when he was shot by Mark Chapman in New York. Howe horrifying it would have been to witness someone she had been with for fourteen years to be taken away. We do need to start acknowledging how important Yoko Ono was to John Lennon and many sides of his career. His activism. Bringing out a more experimental side. An intellectual and spiritual match, Ono helped him transition from the madness and messiness of Beatles break-up to becoming this solo artist and family man. Far from being someone who broke up The Beatles, she offered Lennon this stability and love at one of the worst moments in his life. Though Lennon was not competently transformed and rehabilitated – in terms of some of his choices, comments and musical decisions -, Ono’s presence and love was invaluable and transformative. I do think about that first meeting in 1966 and how it changed things. Maybe not as instant as Lennon approaching songwriting different and Yoko Ono being instrumental. Though she definitely affected many of his songs after 1966. There are events in the history of The Beatles that are hugely important and impactful. 1957 when John Lennon and Paul McCartney met. I do feel John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono for the first time as important as anything. In terms of their connection and how connected they were right away. It is so clear that Yoko Ono influenced John Lennon’s life…

FOR the better.

FEATURE: What Is Life: The Essential George Harrison

FEATURE:

 

 

What Is Life

IN THIS PHOTO: George Harrison in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Sunshine/Rex Shutterstock

The Essential George Harrison

_________

I am doing quite a few…

IN THIS PHOTO: George Harrison inventing the selfie in India in 1966

mixtapes for various artists. I am thinking about George Harrison. He died on 29th November, 2001. He had such a terrible last couple of years. At the end of 1999, he and his wife Olivia were attacked at their home in Friar Park. George Harrison suffered multiple stab wounds and was lucky to have survived. He died of cancer less than two years later. It was an unimaginably difficult and unfair end to the life of one of the greatest artists ever. The youngest member of The Beatles, he was part of the greatest group ever. Often seen as the quiet one, I think he was among the most interesting. So fashionable and cool, he could have a moan now and then. He was very spiritual but also had a sharper edge. Very funny and personable, Harrison often had to struggle to get his songs heard. John Lennon and Paul McCartney the dominant forces and songwriters. Although his earlier contributions to The Beatles were great, his two masterpieces arrived on the final album the band recorded together, Abbey Road (1969). Something and Here Comes the Sun are two of the most popular Beatles songs. The latter is the most-streamed on Spotify. After the band split, Harrison enjoyed a successful solo career. He was also part of Traveling Wilburys alongside Jeff Lynn, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty. I am putting together solo songs, some of his Beatles tracks and Wilbury cuts as we remember Harrison twenty-five years after his death. I know that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr will pay tribute to him on the day. They miss him very much. There is a new book, The Third Way, that collects all these never-seen-before photographs by George Harrison. Olivia Harrison provides the foreword and has been talking about the book and George Harrison. I may have used this before, but I will end with AllMusic and their biography of George Harrison:

“Something" provided a launching pad for Harrison's solo career, but he'd already been dabbling in solo projects since 1968. That year, the Beatles launched their Apple Corps collective of businesses, one of their enterprises being an experimental label called Zapple. George released Wonderwall Music that year, becoming the first Beatle to release a solo album, and this collection of Indian music was followed in 1969 by Electronic Sound, an album where Harrison experimented with synthesizers. A better indication of the sound George chose to follow once he officially went solo in 1970 came with his on-stage cameos during Delaney & Bonnie's 1969 British tour. Along with Bob Dylan and the Band, these American blues-rockers had an influence on All Things Must Pass, a sprawling triple album produced by Phil Spector that functioned as a spectacular introduction to George Harrison the solo artist. Bolstered by "My Sweet Lord," a single that hit number one throughout the world, and the Top Ten "What Is Life," All Things Must Pass topped the charts in the U.S. and U.K., elevating George above John, Paul, and Ringo's stardom. His rise was not without controversy -- Bright Tunes Publishing sued Harrison for copyright infringement in 1971, claiming "My Sweet Lord" plagiarized the Chiffons' 1963 "He's So Fine"; George lost the case but, in a byzantine turn of events, he wound up with the publishing to both songs after his then-manager Allen Klein purchased the rights to "He's So Fine" -- but there was no question Harrison came into his own.

George followed All Things Must Pass with something equally grand: a benefit concert for the refugees of war-torn Bangladesh. Upon the urging of his friend Ravi Shankar, Harrison arranged a star-studded benefit held at Madison Square Garden on August 1, 1971, enlisting his friends Starr, Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Billy Preston to play; it was the first all-star charity show, setting the template for those to follow. Although there were problems dispersing funds, the concert was a success, as was the album, which went gold in the U.S. and won the 1973 Grammy for Album of the Year. Also in 1973, Harrison released Living in the Material World, his second studio album and his second number one, assisted by the single "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)," a number one hit in the U.S. that topped out at eight in the U.K. He supported the record with an extensive series of North American concerts, the first tour launched by a Beatle. Upon its conclusion, he released his next album, Dark Horse (his tour shared the same title), a record greeted with mixed reviews and softening sales; it failed to chart in Britain, although it did peak at four in the U.S., where the title track went to number 15.

Harrison closed out his contract with EMI and Apple in 1975 with Extra Texture (Read All About It), an album that fared better in the U.K. and performed respectably in the U.S., due to the single "You." He quickly launched his own Dark Horse label in 1976, inaugurating the imprint that November with Thirty Three & 1/3. (Apple released The Best of George Harrison, containing solo and Beatles cuts, almost simultaneously.) Supported by the modest hits "This Song" and "Crackerbox Palace," the slightly slicker Thirty Three & 1/3 wound up a bigger hit than its two predecessors, thereby starting Harrison's Dark Horse years off on a slight rebound. This continued through 1979's eponymous album, a record highlighted by the soft rock hit "Blow Away," a single that peaked at number 16 in the U.S. but went no further than 51 in the U.K.

Harrison rebounded with 1981's Somewhere in England, thanks in no small part to the hit "All Those Years Ago," a song fashioned as a tribute to the murdered John Lennon and featuring contributions from Ringo Starr and Paul and Linda McCartney. Despite this hit -- which went to two in the U.S. and 13 in the U.K. -- the record failed to go gold in either America or Britain, and Gone Troppo, released just a year later, sank from view quickly. George slid into a relatively quiet phase, concentrating on raising his son Dhani -- he was born in 1978, the first and only son of George and Olivia Harrison, who also married in 1978. Harrison concentrated on his film company HandMade Films, a company started in 1978 with the intent of financing Monty Python's silver-screen debut Life of Brian but gained momentum in the early '80s thanks to the release of 1980's Bob Hoskins gangster drama The Long Good Friday and Terry Gilliam's 1981 fantasy Time Bandits; the company would also release the acclaimed Mona Lisa (1986) and Withnail and I (1987), before becoming mired in money problems surrounding the runaway production of the 1986 Sean Penn and Madonna vehicle Shanghai Surprise. George stayed involved in music largely through live guest appearances, popping up at charity concerts and tributes, but he also appeared on Dave Edmunds' oldies-inspired soundtrack for 1985's Porky's Revenge.

Eventually, Harrison began work on his ninth studio album, hiring Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra as co-producer. Lynne brought a lush, glossy sheen to 1987's Cloud Nine, a sound that was instrumental to the record's success. Preceded by a bouncy rendition of James Ray's forgotten chestnut "Got My Mind Set on You," a single that turned into a number one hit in the U.S. and reached two in the U.K., Cloud Nine was an undeniable comeback, reaching the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic and earning a platinum certification in the U.S., assisted in part by its second single, "When We Was Fab." In the wake of its success, Harrison and Lynne returned to the studio to record a B-side with the assistance of Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. This session turned into a full album with the superstars calling themselves the Traveling Wilburys. Accompanied by the single "Handle with Care," their record, The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1, appeared in October 1988 and it was selling well prior to the December death of Orbison. Its second single, "End of the Line," helped cement its success and it wound up being certified platinum three times in the U.S., reaching a peak of three; it wound up in the Top Ten in every major country around the world, save the U.K., where it topped out at number 16. The Traveling Wilburys released a second album, Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 3, in the fall of 1990. While it didn't sell as well as its predecessor, the record nevertheless went to number 11 in the U.S., where it also went platinum.

Following the 1992 release of Live in Japan and some live appearances that year, Harrison once again receded from the spotlight, reuniting with the surviving Beatles to assemble their 1994 archival Anthology project, an effort that also included working two existing Lennon demos into a finished project with the assistance of Lynne. After Anthology wrapped, Harrison produced Ravi Shankar's 1997 album Chants of India, but his output slowed further following a 1997 diagnosis of throat cancer. Over the next few years, Harrison dealt with several different health issues (he also suffered a serious knife attack by an intruder in 1999), and in 2001 his lung cancer spread to his brain. On November 29, 2001, Harrison passed away from lung cancer.

After his death, his son Dhani and Jeff Lynne completed Harrison's unreleased recordings and they were released as Brainwashed in 2002. George was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and, over the next decade, there were several archival projects, including a 2004 box set of his Dark Horse recordings and the 2009 compilation Let It Roll. In 2011, his life was the subject of a documentary film from Martin Scorsese called George Harrison: Living in the Material World; it was accompanied by a collection of rarities called Early Takes: Vol. 1. George's Apple recordings were remastered and released in 2014 as a box set called The Apple Years 1968-75. A hefty, handsome collection of LP reissues -- aptly titled "The 50th Anniversary Edition" -- of All Things Must Pass was commemorated by a series of deluxe reissues of the landmark album, each featuring a new mix supervised by Dhani Harrison and Paul Hicks. The Super Deluxe editions also contained a wealth of demos and outtakes”.

I will end here. Rather than feel sad that George Harrison is no longer with us, we need to celebrate the incredible music he left. As important as any artist who has ever lived. On 29th November, it will be twenty-five years since this amazing human left us. But his spirit and legacy lives on. Harrison will never be forgotten. Compiling a mixtape of his solo and band work has been…

A real delight.

FEATURE: Nothing Compares 2 U: Sinéad O'Connor at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

Nothing Compares 2 U

PHOTO CREDIT: Jane Bown/The Observer 

Sinéad O'Connor at Sixty

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ALTHOUGH it is a little way off…

I am thinking to 8th December and the sixtieth birthday of Sinéad O'Connor. We lost this icon 2023 at the age of fifty-six. Rather than this being mournful, I wanted to highlight her incredible catalogue. My mind is in 1966 at the moment. Talking about artists born in that year or events that occurred then. Though the brilliant Sinéad O'Connor is no longer with us, you can feel her influence today. Artists such as John Grant, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple have cited her music as an inspiration. Like I do with similar features, I am ending with a mixtape. The best from Sinéad O'Connor. There are a few biographies out there, but I wanted to bring in this one from Factory International. They provided one around The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor. It is a bold contemporary dance production directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner Sonya Tayeh. It acts as a theatrical wake and meditation celebrating the life, spirit, and legacy of Irish singer-songwriter and activist Sinéad O’Connor. It had its world premiere in Manchester in June. It had its New York run in September. It is moving to Los Angeles in January:

“Beginnings

Born in Dublin in 1966, Sinéad O’Connor’s early life was marked by instability and violence. Her parents separated when she was young, and she later described her mother as a physically and emotionally abusive figure who shaped both her fear and her defiance.

At odds with her mother, Sinéad was placed in Catholic reform institutions as a teenager. Constantly under strict supervision, the young Sinéad learned that authority was something to be survived, not trusted. These experiences would shape how she saw authority, religion and power.

In her childhood, music stood out as a place to seek solace, as noted in her memoir, Rememberings where she recalls an encounter where she was drawn to her grandmother’s piano, treating it like a person to be cared for. From an early age, music was something Sinéad felt deeply connected and called to – and it would become her way out of the reform institutions she loathed.

While at the An Grianan Training Centre – a former Magdalene Laundry – a nun recognised Sinéad’s talent for singing, encouraging the teenager and buying her a guitar. This led to her singing at a wedding reception where she met members of the Irish band Tua Nua. At just 15 the band thought her too young to join officially, though she co-wrote and recorded their first single for Island Records, Take My Hand.

It wouldn’t be the first band Sinéad joined – after cutting her teeth busking and gigging in Dublin, Sinéad formed the group Ton Ton Macoute with Colm Farrelly, meeting through an advertisement in Hot Press magazine.

Finding her own voice

In 1985, at just 18 Sinéad O’Connor signed to Ensign Records after Nigel Grainge, one of the labels co-founders, was impressed by her vocals while watching Ton Ton Macoute (he was less impressed by the band’s overall sound). She moved to London and began work on what would become her 1987 debut album – The Lion and the Cobra.

While recording her first record, Sinéad became pregnant. Accounts from the time describe pressure from her label to prioritise her career over having a child – to terminate the pregnancy, to reconsider motherhood. She refused.

This moment set the tone for what followed – Sinéad would not separate her life nor her morals from her work to fit industry expectations.

At the 1989 Grammys, she protested the Recording Academy’s refusal to televise the Best Rap Performance category by painting Public Enemy’s logo in her hair – and also wore her baby son Jake’s onesie attached to her jeans during her performance of Mandinka, representing her identity as both a mother and a musician.

Nothing Compares

By the early 1990s, Sinéad had become internationally renowned. Her 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got sold millions worldwide. With her definitive version of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, Sinéad’s voice and image became instantly recognisable – her shaved head, direct gaze and a single tear rolling down her face spurred on by the lyrics reminding her of the passing of her mother five years earlier.

But with that level of fame came scrutiny. Sinéad was celebrated as a monumental talent, while also being questioned for how she looked, spoke and behaved.

She defied industry expectations again by boycotting the 1991 Grammys despite having one of the most successful singles that year – fed up with how the industry prioritised commercial success over artistic integrity.

Fight the real enemy

In 1992, during a live performance on Saturday Night Live, Sinéad made a gesture that would come to define her public life.

After singing an acappella version of Bob Marley’s War, she held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II and tore it into pieces, saying “fight the real enemy.”

The act was a protest against child abuse within the Catholic Church – something she connected to her own experiences and to broader, institutional violence.

The response was immediate and hostile. She was banned from performing on NBC and even called a ‘she-devil’ in headlines. Hundreds of her CDs, tapes and records were destroyed by a 30-tonne steamroller outside her record label's US headquarters at the Rockefeller Center in New York. Yes, really. And all of this happened when she was just 25 years old.

At the time, the systemic abuse within the Catholic church was not yet widely acknowledged. Years later, her actions have been re-evaluated for what they were – an early and public challenge to institutional abuse, far ahead of its time.

The media circus

Sinéad O’Connor’s relationship with the media was often difficult. She was frequently described as controversial, rather than being taken seriously on her own terms.

Her appearance, beliefs and outspokenness were often used to define her, overshadowing her music and message. She famously shaved her head in a rejection of femininity after being told to present a more conventional image – but the media weaponised this as something to evidence her being unstable.

The SNL incident was the pinnacle of this treatment – but not the only time she was grossly misunderstood. Post-SNL, Sinéad was condemned, mocked and, in many spaces, erased. Her commercial success never recovered – but that didn’t matter for someone who wanted to live on their own terms.

Always searching

Sinéad continued to make music throughout her life, exploring different styles and collaborations while also speaking openly about her personal struggles – maintaining a commitment to truth-telling about abuse, religion, mental health and survival.

In 2011, she performed with us at Manchester International Festival – calling it “one of my favourite nights of all time”.

In 2018, she converted to Islam, taking the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat. For Sinéad, it was part of an ongoing spiritual journey and search for peace rather than a sudden change.

In 2023, she passed away at the age of 56, leaving behind her three children and an incomparable catalogue of songs.

The Surge

Throughout her career, Sinéad’s voice captured listeners with its emotion and restraint – but it also challenged authority and refused to fit expectations. Now her voice and life will be celebrated through a new dance work directed by the Tony Award-winning choreographer and director Sonya Tayeh.

The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O'Connor is a meditation on voice, protest and the courage to live a life that defies the norm. Set to her songs and narration from her memoir, Rememberings, The Surge is inspired by Sinéad’s uncompromising spirit.

Revisiting her work a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, her words are as vital as ever. Sinéad O’Connor was ahead of her time, and the world is still playing catch up”.

It is true that Sinéad O’Connor was a trailblazer. Such a distinct artist. I look around the world today and wonder what O’Connor would make of it. You know she would be writing about what is happening in the world. Genocide in Gaza and the corruption of leaders around the world. Her voice lives on in artists that she has inspired. On 8th December, we mark Sinéad O’Connor’s sixtieth birthday. A chance to reflect on everything she gave us. How her brilliance lives on. She is so sorely missed. The world is a lot poorer without this music giant…

IN it.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sasha Alex Sloan

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Sasha Alex Sloan

_________

I have been following…

PHOTO CREDIT: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times

Sasha Alex Sloan for a while now. Her new album, The Crowd Goes Mild, was released last month. I did want to spotlight this incredible American artist. I hope that she has some plans to come to the U.K. and play next year, as we would love to see he here. I cannot find any reviews for The Crowd Goes Mild. There are some interesting recent interviews with Sloan. In addition to being an acclaimed artist, she is also a respected and prolific songwriter. She has penned some songs for major artists. Collaborated with Charli xx among many others. I am starting with Music Row and their look inside Sasha Alex Sloan’s songwriting universe:

“The early years were anything but easy. Sloan worked at a coffee shop, clocking in for 5 a.m. shifts before heading to songwriting sessions. She spent roughly four years doing that without seeing much tangible progress, but she now looks back on the experience as an education in collaboration.

“I was this 19-year-old who had written alone forever, and then I was thrown into rooms with people who were used to co-writing. The first couple of years there, I just spent learning how to be a good co-writer.”

Nashville eventually became the place where Sloan felt most connected to the kind of songwriting she wanted to do. She bought a house in the city in 2019 after making several trips to write, then moved to Music City permanently in 2020. The shift gave her a deeper connection to guitar-and-piano-driven writing and the storytelling that first drew her to music.

Her Nashville work includes five cuts on Zach John King’s I’m What You Get album, as well as collaborations with Wetmore, Max McNown, Willow Avalon, William Beckmann, Carter Faith, Kaitlin Butts, George Birge, Sam Hunt, Alana Springsteen and Kelsea Ballerini. Among those songs, Wetmore’s “Yours” and King’s “Way To Go” reflect the songwriting process Sloan values most: starting with an idea and building the story together.

“What I love about Nashville is it’s so much about the song and the production comes later. It’s about getting from point A to point B and telling an amazing story.”

At the same time, Sloan’s pop work has placed her in rooms with some of the biggest names in contemporary music. She co-wrote Olivia Rodrigo’s “what’s wrong with me,” featuring Robert Smith, a collaboration that became particularly meaningful after Sloan had stepped away from songwriting for a period and was struggling with her confidence.

After hearing that Smith would appear on the song, Sloan tried to put the information out of her mind until it was real. Watching Rodrigo and Smith perform the song together at a festival ultimately became a turning point.

A similar sense of disbelief followed when Sloan learned that a song she had written with Isabel LaRosa and Thomas LaRosa would be released by KAROL G and Bruno Mars. Hearing Mars’ voice on the song was especially significant for Sloan, who has long admired him as a songwriter and performer.

“Hearing his voice on something I was a part of was just full body chills.”

Those experiences have reinforced what Sloan already believes about songwriting. It’s less about fitting into a genre and more about making music that connects. Her experience as an artist has also shaped that philosophy. After initially releasing her own music as a way to help other artists understand her writing, Sloan eventually embarked on her own major-label career and toured, giving her firsthand insight into what artists need from the songs they record”.

Not to mangle these interviews too much or bring in the same information twice. I am keen on Songwriter Universe and their conversation with Sasha Alex Sloan. I really like The Crowd Goes Mild. I get a new favourite each time I pass through it, though perhaps the opener, Glitter, is top for me. I would urge people to check out the album:

“Along with her career as a pro songwriter, Sloan has also established herself as a distinctive singer/songwriter who has previously released three solo albums. And she’s about to release her latest album, And The Crowd Goes Mild, on October 23.

With the 10 songs on her new album, Sloan shows why she’s a unique songwriter and gifted lyricist, who is also an expressive vocalist. The songs on And The Crowd Goes Mild range from uptempo, modern pop-rock cuts, to heartfelt ballads.

Interestingly, Sloan’s creative lyric ideas shine through on her new album. The album’s title song, “And The Crowd Goes Mild,” shows her quirky sense of humor and her subtle understatement. Another imaginative lyric is “Delusional Optimism,” which displays a lyric freshness and clever wordplay. On the more serious side is “Still Be Me,” a sensitive ballad about a couple that she’s friends with, who are going through a difficult time.

Sloan will soon be taking her music on the road, embarking on a new concert tour. Starting in late November, she will be headlining shows in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston. For her shows, she will be playing a combination of her older popular songs, and songs from her new album.

Sloan grew up in Boston, MA, and she attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music. When she was 19, she moved to Los Angeles and began to have success as a songwriter. She secured cuts with Kaskade, Idina Menzel, Kygo and Maggie Lindemann, and she reached hit status when she co-wrote the Top 10 single “Never Be The Same” with Camila Cabello.

In 2018, Sloan began to establish herself as an artist. She released two EPs (Sad Girl and Loser), and in 2019 she released her third EP, Self-Portrait. Then in 2020, Sloan released her debut album, Only Child (on RCA Records). She subsequently released her albums I Blame the World (in 2022) and Me Again (in 2024).

We are pleased to do this new Q&A interview with Sasha Alex Sloan. She tells how she co-wrote the hits “Never Be The Same” and “What’s Wrong With Me,” and she also discusses her artist career and her new album.

DK: Sasha, do you see yourself mainly as an artist who also writes songs for other people, or are you a songwriter first who is also an artist?

Sloan: That’s such a great question. I think throughout the past decade, those roles have interchanged in terms of what comes first.  I would say right now, I’m songwriter first, an artist second. But for a long time, it was artist first, songwriter second. I originally started as a songwriter, so I’m kind of back to where I started.

DK: You’re about to release your new album, And the Crowd Goes Mild. Can you talk about the making of your new album?

Sloan: I think with this new album, I was in such a weird place mentally. I thought I was done with my artist stuff, and I hired new management. And I sat them down and was like, “Hey look, it’s been a long time since I just focused on writing songs. And I can’t really commit to being an artist and a songwriter. They’re both full-time jobs.” I had been trying to straddle the line of the two, and I was like, “You know what? I feel like I’m done with Sasha Alex Sloan (the artist).” And they were like, “Cool.” So I started writing for other people. Then I wrote this song called “Glitter” and I was like, “Uh-oh, I have the itch again.” This song is hitting me in a way that makes me feel like I should put some more music out (as an artist).” So I slowly but surely started making another album.

DK: On your new album, I like your song “Still Be Me,” which has a heartfelt and creative lyric theme. What inspired you to write this song?

Sloan: Thank you. It’s actually about a couple I know. It’s about watching a couple, trying to make it work. When I wrote that song, I was thinking what it would feel like to be in that position. I’m married, and hopefully I’m never in that position. But I also inserted myself hypothetically, and it made me really sad.. It’s actually about a couple of people in my life where I think when you’re in something, it might be harder to see than it is when you’re outside of it. So yeah, I’m glad you like that song.

DK: On your new album, besides the songs we’ve talked about, what are your favorite songs on your album?

Sloan: I think one of my favorites is “What It Isn’t.” That song hits me in a way that I hope doesn’t sound too narcissistic since it’s my own music. But as I always say in my marriage, I may not have learned what to do, but I know what not to do. And to me, that song is special in terms of, “Hey, I don’t know what the hell we’re doing, but I know that we’re not doing this, and that’s a good thing.” So that’s one of my faves, at least today. We’ll see if it changes”.

I will end with Music Business Worldwide and their detailed and engrossing interview. A lot of these facts and biography about Sasha Alex Sloan I was unaware of, so it has been interesting learning more about her. I know that she has some U.S. tour dates but I am not sure whether there are plans for more next year. It appears that Sloan had a very musical childhood. In the sense that she was exposed to a lot of great artists from an early age:

“Twice Sasha Alex Sloan has tried to formally study music; twice she has got bored, given up, and done something else. Yet both times, these experiences (once indirectly, once directly) have pushed her along the path to becoming a successful songwriter.

The first time, she was only 10. She remembers: “My dad is from Siberia, and he hired me a very Russian piano teacher, because he wanted me to learn classical music. So, I started taking piano lessons. But then I was like, wait, this is boring; I just want to make my own music.”

Thankfully, Mom stepped in and bought Sloan a guitar, a Beatles chord book, a Queen chord book, and a Phantom Of The Opera chord book. “That was my holy trinity. She also bought me a Carpenters CD and a Kate Bush CD, both of which I became obsessed with. And without realizing, I started learning about song structure. And from there I started writing my own songs.

Success was far from instant, and even when it came, says Sloan, it came gradually. A couple of early cuts, one with DJ and remixer Kaskade, and This Town on Kygo’s debut EP, might not have pointed to her future output as a songwriter, but were enough to convince her she might at least have a future.

“Up until then I thought everyone wrote their own songs, so I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant.”

At the same time, she embarked on a career as an artist in her own right, and has released three albums, most recently Me Again in 2024.

Writing is her first love and main priority, though, and it’s through writing for and with other artists that Sloan has become a bona fide hitmaker.

Her first big breakthrough came with Camila Cabello’s 2018 hit Never Be the Same (Top 10 in the UK and US). Since then she’s written with Charli XCX, John Legend, and, most notably, Olivia Rodrigo – on the Robert Smith-featuring What’s Wrong With Me. Most recently, she co-wrote Karol G’s Bruno Mars duet Still.

Sloan now has a schedule filled with sessions. Boredom won’t be an option for quite a while.

At the same time as being a songwriter, you’re forging a parallel career as a recording artist. Was it always part of the plan to do the two things in tandem?

I’m very introverted, and what I thought being an artist was turned out to be very different than the reality.

The truth is, what first sparked me to put music out was my songwriting career. Because I started having cuts, but I thought, well, if I were an artist and I was looking at this writer’s cuts, I’m not sure I would want to work with them – because sometimes as a writer, your favorite songs don’t come out.

So why don’t I just put some music out myself? I thought about it as more of a calling card than as wanting to be an artist.

But then it kind of scaled, and I had a lot of anxiety. I was really bad at touring and all that came with it.

I enjoyed parts of it though, and I do think it really helped me as a songwriter in a room with an artist.

What do you remember about working with Camila Cabello?

I love Camila. She’s the sweetest, best person on earth – and an incredible songwriter.

When we wrote Never Be the Same [2017] we were pretty much the same age; we were both babies, but we had written so many songs, and we were just having fun. Like, I didn’t really understand what was happening, even when that song came out; I didn’t realize the impact it was having.

You also worked with a pre-Brat Charli. What was that like?

That was also just such a fun time, because Charli and I also worked with Camila, and we would all just hang.

Unfortunately, whenever I went into a room, I always used to put this insane pressure on myself to deliver. But you can’t do it every time.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m older, and not everything’s as intense as it is when you’re in your 20s, but I have a new outlook now: it’s supposed to be fun; it’s not supposed to be scary.

Charli’s just the best. She is what you see. She loves to party, she’s funny, she’s smart. She’s that girl. I learned a lot from her too, just seeing her navigate the industry.

What single thing would you change in the industry if you could?

This is something that can’t be changed, because it’s just life, but as a songwriter there’s just this huge lack of control.

I always say, I would have done well at a corporation, because I love to be on time, I love to do my job, and when I go home I like to feel I’ve really contributed and that my boss is happy with me.

And in this industry, where I struggle is you have no control. That’s true of all songwriters, no matter if you’re just starting or if you’ve been at it for a while. You don’t know what’s gonna happen. You can wake up every day and do the best possible job and have nothing.

If it were up to me, I would love to wake up every day and know that if I go do a great job, this is gonna happen. As it is – trust the process and hope for the best”.

I shall end there. The superb Sasha Alex Sloan is someone I would like to see live one day. Such an accomplished songwriter, her work as a solo artist is brilliant. I am not sure what next year holds in store, but I imagine that she is going to be pretty busy. If you have not heard The Crowd Goes Mild, then do give it a listen, as it is an excellent album. The latest chapter from…

THIS amazing talent.

_________

Follow Sasha Alex Sloan

Official:

https://www.sadgirlsloan.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sadgirlsloan

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@sadgrlsloan

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/sadgirlsloan

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ2nKwA5u9zhtF9LfCjXJ9g

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4xnihxcoXWK3UqryOSnbw5?si=HoF7jQ9XQieu_1DrKMJvVg

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Remembering the Great Eva Cassidy

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Remembering the Great Eva Cassidy

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AT the moment…

I am writing some features which might seem a bit morbid. Remembering great artists who are no longer with us. Rather than it being grim, it is a chance to celebrate their legacy and work. On 2nd November, it will be thirty years since we lost Eva Cassidy. She was only thirty-three when she died. Here is an artist who I don’t think gets as much recognition as she deserves. To be fair, a lot of the attention around her arrived after her death. Born in Maryland, there was this local recognition and fanbase, though perhaps not the wider U.S. Posthumous songs and albums helped to push her music further. I think she is one of the greatest singers ever. Even though she mainly interpreted other people’s works, she did it like nobody else. I am going to end this feature with a mixtape that pulls together some of her best recordings. There is an album, JAZZED, which is coming out on 13th November. I am not a fan of the cover, which is an A.I. image, but what can you do?! You can pre-order it here. Rough Trade provide some more details:

“Jazzed gathers the jazz side of Eva Cassidy into one beautifully focused set, highlighting just how effortless she was with the American Songbook. Across ten songs written over six decades, her voice reshapes familiar standards with real character, nuance and warmth.

Four new arrangements from composer Christopher Willis bring extra sparkle, especially on It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), Blue Skies, Cheek To Cheek and At Last. There’s a clear nod to the classic vocal jazz sound of the fifties and sixties, drawing on Nelson Riddle and Billy May.

Elsewhere, You’ve Changed and Ain’t No Sunshine lean into the deeper, more reflective side of the record, with the London Symphony Orchestra beautifully capturing the emotional richness associated with Gordon Jenkins. A timeless celebration of great songwriting, arranging and interpretation”.

Eva Cassidy could deliver these tender and spine-tingling vocals on songs such as Autumn Leaves and Over the Rainbow, but also deliver these gutsy and powerful vocals on tracks like Blues in the Night (which is featured on JAZZED). It is a case of what could have been. If Cassidy had received great international acclaim in her lifetime and released more albums. What she might have done. Prior to getting to an extraordinary mixtape where we get to hear Eva Cassidy’s multiple gifts and versatility in full flight, here is some biography about a sorely missed artist:

“Eva Marie Cassidy (February 2, 1963 in Washington, DC – November 2, 1996 in Bowie, Maryland) was an American vocalist described by the British newspaper The Guardian as “one of the greatest voices of her generation.” She had a diverse repertoire of jazz, blues, folk, gospel and pop. Cassidy remained virtually unknown outside of her native Washington, DC, when she died of melanoma (which had spread to her bones) in 1996. Her posthumously released recordings have since sold in excess of 12 million copies, and in early 2001 the compilation album Songbird reached #1 on the UK album charts.

Eva Cassidy was the third of four children born to Hugh and Barbara Cassidy. From an early age, she displayed artistic and musical talent. When she was nine years old, her father taught her to play the guitar, and she began to play and sing at family gatherings.

While a student at Bowie High School, she did sing with a local band, called Stonehenge, and received considerable praise.

At the age of eighteen, Cassidy began her professional career, singing and playing guitar in a Washington, D.C., area band, called Easy Street. This band performed in a variety of styles, at weddings, corporate parties, and pubs.

During the summer of 1983, Cassidy sang and played guitar, six days per week, at Wild World, in Maryland. Her brother Dan was also a member of this working band.

Throughout the 1980s, Cassidy worked with a number of other bands, including the soul and Motown-oriented band The Honeybees, and the techno-pop band Characters Without Names, later called Method Actor.

During this period, Cassidy also worked as a propagator at a plant nursery and as a furniture painter in Annapolis, Maryland. In 1986, she met (bassist and recording engineer) Chris Biondo, who encouraged her and helped her find work as a backup singer for various acts. In 1990, Biondo and Cassidy hired the so-called “Eva Cassidy Band”, composed of Chris Biondo, Lenny Williams, Keith Grimes and Raice McLeod, and she began to perform frequently in the Washington area.

In 1992, Biondo played a tape of Cassidy’s voice for Chuck Brown. Best known as the “Godfather of Go-go”, Brown is also a jazz and blues vocalist. This led to the first commercial recording of Cassidy, the duet album with Chuck Brown, The Other Side; which featured performances of classic songs such as “Fever”, Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” and Cassidy’s signature tune “Over the Rainbow”. The album was released and distributed by Liaison Records, the label that also released Brown’s Go-go albums. The duet CD attracted the attention of various record companies, but the offers all required Cassidy to pigeonhole herself within a single style (e.g., pop or jazz), something she adamantly refused to do.

In 1993 Eva Cassidy was first honored by the Washington area music community when she was awarded two Wammie awards for “Female Vocalist Roots /Traditional R&B” and “Vocalist Jazz/Traditional.” The next year she was chosen to perform for the awards ceremony.

In January 1996, Cassidy recorded the album Live at Blues Alley, about which The Washington Post later commented that “she could sing anything and make it sound like the only music that mattered”. Cassidy was unhappy with her singing on the album, because she had a bad cold on the night of the recording; she began recording a studio album which was eventually released as Eva by Heart posthumously in 1997.

During a promotional event for the Live at Blues Alley CD in July 1996, Cassidy noticed an ache in her hips, which she attributed to stiffness from painting murals. The pain persisted, and, a few weeks later, Cassidy was diagnosed with melanoma. By the time of her diagnosis, the cancer had spread throughout her body. Cassidy’s health rapidly deteriorated, and her final performance was in September 1996. At the performance, she had used a walker to reach the stage, sang “What a Wonderful World” in front of an audience of friends, and was subsequently admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Eva Cassidy died on November 2, 1996, at the age of 33. She was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Washington Area Music Association.

A new edition of the biography Behind the Rainbow, the story of Eva Cassidy was published by Omnibus Press London in 2023”.

I did want to remember Eva Cassidy, as 2nd November will be thirty years after she died. Through posthumous releases, her music has reached more and more people, though we cannot overlook the incredible work she made when she was alive. Even if she was more of a local sensation and maybe wasn’t someone who toured widely, she has won praise from Paul McCartney, Adele, and Leona Lewis. Katie Melua counts Cassidy as a huge inspiration. This eternally wonderful voice that will ring out through time and touch people’s lives, do go and check out JAZZED and dive into her music. You will quickly discover why she is seen as one of the all-time great voices. Though you can compare Eva Cassidy to a few legends (such as Etta James), I believe that there is…

NOBODY quite like her.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Lorde at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Wera Nowak for DAZED

Lorde at Thirty

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NOT that I need an excuse…

PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Jackson for Vogue Australia

to celebrate Lorde. However, as she turns thirty on 7th November, I am assembling a mixtape with some of her best tracks and deeper cuts. Born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor in Auckland, New Zealand, she is one of the greatest modern artists. It is hard to believe that her second studio album, Melodrama, turns ten next year. It is one of my favourites from the 2010s. Before getting to a mixtape of Lorde tracks, AllMusic provide detailed biography:

“Emerging as a fully formed enigma from her native New Zealand, Lorde blends deeply artful, literate songwriting with electronic and psych-pop hooks. Since bursting into the public consciousness with 2013's "Royals" and her international smash debut Pure Heroine, the singer/songwriter has garnered cross-generational acclaim, earning respect from established artists like Bruce Springsteen and Jack White (both of whom covered "Royals"), while simultaneously becoming an icon for a generation who feel older than their years; a stylistic vibe that paved the way for the arty, confessional indie pop of artist like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Troye Sivan. Her sophomore album, 2017's Melodrama, topped the charts in multiple countries while receiving a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year and winning New Zealand's Album of the Year award. After another lengthy absence, Lorde returned in 2021 with her third effort, the laid-back and environmentally concerned Solar Power. She has remained a cultural icon, whether paying respect to New Zealand's indigenous Māori people with her Te Ao Mārama EP or collaborating with fellow pop maverick Charli XCX on their 2024 Brat remix of "Girl, So Confusing." In 2025, she returned with Virgin, whose lead single "What Was That" found her balancing raw emotions and dance club catharsis.

Born Ella Yelich-O'Connor on November 7, 1996, in Takapuna, New Zealand, Lorde delved into art at an early age. By the time she was entering adolescence, she started performing as a duo with her friend Louis McDonald, winning a talent contest at Belmont Intermediate School in May 2009. Soon, the pair were featured on the Radio New Zealand's Afternoons show hosted by Jim Mora and, on the strength of this performance and a tape McDonald's father sent to Universal, the record label signed a development deal for Lorde. Throughout 2010, she continued to attend school and perform with McDonald, but 2011 is when things started to turn a little more serious. Universal teamed the singer with vocal coach Frances Dickinson and started to write originals, often with the assistance of other songwriters, but nothing clicked until her A&R head Scott MacLachlan introduced her to Joel Little. The former lead singer of Goodnight Nurse, Little proved a good collaborator for the fledgling singer/songwriter and the pair recorded the Love Club EP, which appeared on SoundCloud in November 2012.

Love Club swiftly earned an audience, so Universal released it commercially in March 2013; it peaked at two on the New Zealand and Australia charts. The reason for its immediate success was "Royals," which was spun off as a single in the summer of 2013 and soon swept across the globe, where it topped the charts in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Italy, and reached the Top Ten in most other Western countries. Her full-length debut, Pure Heroine, followed in September 2013 and it also became an international smash, earning triple-platinum certification in the U.S., quintuple-platinum certification in New Zealand, and gold in the U.K. Further singles followed -- "Tennis Court" and "Team," the latter of which turned into a Top Ten hit in the U.S. -- and Lorde worked Pure Heroine into 2014, touring and headlining many festivals around the world while taking home Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance for "Royals." "Yellow Flicker Beat," a song from the soundtrack of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Pt. 1, followed in September 2014.

Lorde next turned her attention to writing and recording for her second album, which took nearly two years to materialize. Once she began collaborating with Jack Antonoff of Fun. and Bleachers in 2016, the record took shape. "Green Light," the first single from her sophomore set, appeared in March 2017, with the full-length Melodrama following in June. A critical hit, the effort received a nomination for Album of the Year at the 2018 Grammy Awards and took home an award of the same name in her native New Zealand. To promote Melodrama, Lorde toured worldwide with Run the Jewels, Tove Styrke, and Mitski. In conjunction with the tour, Run the Jewels released a remix of her song "Supercut." Retreating from the spotlight, she spent the following years preparing her next album and also released Going South, a photography book documenting her visit to Antarctica.

In June 2021, Lorde returned with "Solar Power," her first single in four years. It was the title track from Solar Power, an album she co-produced with Jack Antonoff that appeared in August of that year. Imbued with themes of environmentalism and a desire to escape from a celebrity-driven culture, the album found the singer exploring a low-key psych-folk sound. It topped the charts in both New Zealand and Australia and reached number five on the Billboard 200. A companion mini-album, Te Ao Mārama, appeared that September with Lorde singing five of her songs translated into te reo Māori, the language of the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand. Proceeds for the album went to the New Zealand charity organizations Forest & Bird and Te Hua Kawariki.

In March 2024, Lorde contributed a cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" to Everyone's Getting Involved, a tribute to the Talking Heads and their classic 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense in which they famously covered Green's song. However, also that year, she joined Charli XCX for a remix of the Brat song "Girl, So Confusing," a collaboration that marked a songwriting deal with Universal Music Publishing and teased a forthcoming album.

In April 2025, Lorde released "What Was That," an organically textured dance track whose raw, emotive catharsis heralded her fourth studio album. More singles followed including the slow-burn ballad "Man of the Year" and hypnotic "Hammer," all leading up to the June release of Virgin. Co-produced alongside Jim-E Stack, the album found the singer embracing a club-inspired vibe that evoked her Melodrama era and exploring themes of gender identity, heartbreak and self-actualization”.

A happy thirtieth birthday to Lorde ahead of her thirtieth anniversary on 7th November. Such an incredible songwriter, I always look forward to a new album from her, Virgin was one of the best of 2025. Whatever she does next, it sure to be…

SO extraordinary.

FEATURE: Like Dylan in the Movies: Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Like Dylan in the Movies

Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister at Thirty

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THIS is one of the best albums…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Crolla

from the 1990s, though I wonder whether it will get many anniversary features written about it. Belle and Sebastian’s If You're Feeling Sinister was released on 17th November, 1996. Ahead of its thirtieth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time with the album. The second studio album from the Scottish band, even though it did badly in terms of its chart position, If You’re Feeling Sinister is hugely influential. One of the most important albums from the 1990s. Some of the articles I want to bring in are paywalled, so I am using what I can to illustrate the importance and brilliance of If You’re Feeling Sinister. All the tracks were written by the band’s lead, Stuart Murdoch. It is an album that had no singles released from it and made little commercial impact. It is one whose truly brilliance and influence outweighs sales and chart positions. In 2016, Stereogum wrote about If You’re Feeling Sinister on its twentieth anniversary:

“Today, it would seem like a transparent marketing stunt. Belle And Sebastian were a group of bookish Scottish kids, playing stunningly pretty songs that happened to be radically out of step with everything happening in music at the time. They didn't play live. They didn't do interviews. They didn't let anyone take their pictures. Nobody really knew anything about them; people assumed that Isobel Campbell was Belle and that Stuart Murdoch was Sebastian. If anything like that happened now, it would come off as a strategy, and maybe an effective one. The Weeknd started off doing a variation on this act, and he ended up becoming one of the biggest pop stars in the world. If anything like that happened right now, your bullshit detectors would be going off like car alarms after an earthquake. But the world was different in 1996, and Belle And Sebastian's reticence didn't come off like an act -- mostly because it wasn't an act.

At this point, you probably already know the backstory. Stuart Murdoch spends his early-to-mid-20s suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, taking in the world as an outsider because he never has the physical stamina to go out and experience it himself. He fills notebook after notebook with lyrics and song ideas. Eventually, he gets better, and as sort of a class project, he gets together with a bunch of other students and records Tigermilk. It's a stunning record, and only 1,000 copies are pressed. But that's enough to attract the interest of the brand-new London indie Jeepster, a label that had been formed just a year earlier. And so, a few months after Tigermilk, Murdoch and his thrown-together group return to the studio and emerge, a few days later, with a close-to-perfect album.

Of course, if you actually heard If You're Feeling Sinister within the first few years of its release, there is basically no chance that you knew any of that origin story. Belle And Sebastian self-consciously kept themselves hidden, building up a Smiths-esque mythos through things like the shadowy, classically composed photos that they used for album art, or like the floridly cryptic short stories that appeared in their liner notes. Their actual human selves remained a complete mystery. And while I suppose you could've learned about the band through the rock press, or even through Napster once that became a thing, it was much more likely that you found out about them directly, through word-of-mouth.

I'm pretty sure I'd read about Belle And Sebastian in SPIN before I actually heard Sinister, but all that did was convince me that this new band was irredeemably lame and that rock critics were irredeemably lame for liking them. (Rock critics, I'd learn after I became one, are irredeemably lame, but not because we like Belle And Sebastian.) The idea of a band who made carefully orchestrated folk-pop, who sounded like a '90s-wallflower version of Simon And Garfunkel, was about the least enticing thing I could've imagined in high school. At that time, just about every form of music that was popular -- whether in the UK or in America, whether mainstream or underground -- was defined, at least in part, by its aggression. Belle And Sebastian, by contrast, were defined by their utter and complete lack of aggression. That's a huge part of what made them special, but you actually had to hear them to understand that they were special -- and when the internet was in its infancy, when most of us were still on dial-up, hearing them wasn't so easy.

Murdoch was writing about stammering pauses and distant conversational murmurs and emotionally confusing makeout sessions and fleeting infatuations in ways that drew up a picture of a whole world -- one that sounded enormously appealing, especially when you had no real frame of reference for it. He found glamor in coyness in ways that only Morrissey had really ever discovered. "Think of it this way: You could either be successful or be us," he sang, and he made a lack of success sound like the best possible way to live. For some of us, this felt important -- a state to which we could aspire.

It might've been too influential. Before Sinister, a typical American underground rock band would've been someone like Unsane or the Jesus Lizard or Boss Hog -- bands who had come from punk and hardcore, who made gnarled and ugly and physically imposing forms of riff-driven noise. Even the quieter forces on the underground, people like Elliott Smith, were still expected to make something heavy. Belle And Sebastian weren't heavy. They were gloriously light. It took a long time for their influence to spread; it needed years to fully sink into the bloodstream of the indie rock world. But within, say, five years, people like Death Cab For Cutie had taken the band's timidity, Americanized it, and turned it into something that resonated with American college kids. A few years after that, the biggest stars in indie rock were sensitive and proudly bookish souls like Sufjan Stevens and the Decemberists -- a development that I don't think would've happened if not for Belle And Sebastian's influence”.

There are a couple of reviews that I want to bring in. Pitchfork. I can’t find any interview archive from 1996 where Belle and Sebastian discussed the album, so I am relying on retrospective feature and reviews. In any case, I think that we get a good impression of the album. Why it is so revered and influential. The sheer quality of the songwriting;

“Stuart Murdoch is a character in his own songs, largely a comedic one, and he tends to exist at a remove. A lapsed-but-simmering Presbyterian zealot, he’s always calling balls and strikes on everyone’s perversions but his own. He’s a strange anthropologist of the underground, a little overstimulated, thrilling to the milieu without quite jumping in—a beguiled wariness regarding the weird edges of town he shares with his Canadian contemporary Dan Bejar. He asks peculiar questions. “Have you and her been taking pictures of your obsessions?” he gently interrogates a young woman in a detective’s cadence on the spectacular album opener “The Stars of Track and Field.” He’d like to know, because he has definitely been taking pictures of his. The rollicking, seasick “Seeing Other People” is a piano-driven paean to bewildering bi-curious sexual confusion, resolving around a killer punchline: “You’re going to have to go with girls/You’d be better off/At least they know where to put it.”

In “Me and the Major,” a scintillating blues harp soundtracks a pointless circular disagreement with an officious Boomer as to whether the Queen’s army is where one goes to learn to be a man. Where does one go to learn to be a man? Or to learn anything, for that matter? The sins of the father are cheerfully sloughed off on the son. “All the others took drugs,” Murdoch sings of the preceding generations, turned censorious in their dotage. “They’re taking it out on us.” They still are to this day.

The album’s title track and centerpiece is a five-minute-twenty-second series of perfect, steel-guitar abetted snapshots of doomed characters adrift in spiritual crisis, seeking nourishment from religious institutions that traffic largely in corrupt predation and outdated ritual. All around there is the pre-Brexit feeling of Potemkin institutions of church and state, lost somewhere in the deafening reverberations of history, insufficient to meet the physical and psychic needs of a younger generation:

At times, critics have interpreted Murdoch’s songs as compositionally simple—a spare edifice around which to hang his stories and aphorisms, with backing crew providing their baroque but down-home orchestral support. I suspect this has something to do with their nominal relationship to the “twee” movement, a specific kind of aggressive guilelessness that ran through Scotland’s Postcard Records and Olympia, Washington’s K label. Those kinds of records—Talulah Gosh and Beat Happening—tended to the lo-fi and amateurish as a point of pride. No doubt, some of that filtered through to Murdoch, but it did not emerge in simplicity of arrangement. Indeed, the thorniest of Murdoch’s tunes here—the galvanizing keep-yourself-safe “Like Dylan in the Movies” or the passive-aggressive devotional “Mayfly”—are as delightfully and compositionally difficult as your average Todd Rundgren song.

In his late 20s at the time, Murdoch was commencing a staggering hot streak that would last roughly a decade. A couple Belle and Sebastian LPs during this stretch would suffer from the decision to delegate several songs to sundry bandmates, particularly 2000’s uneven Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, which shines on Murdoch’s material and is considerably diminished by lesser contributions by Stevie Jackson, Isobel Campbell, and Sarah Martin. Who knows the reasons for this choice—band dynamics are a psychedelic kaleidoscope of competing imperatives—but whatever the case, by 2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress, Murdoch had been largely restored to creative primacy, on both that record and The Life Pursuit. Such a decade-long streak is historically unusual. Sly Stone from 1967 to 1976. Joni Mitchell from 1968 to 1977. Dylan, a couple of different times. Anyway, If You’re Feeling Sinister launched the band into a rarified air from which it would not soon descend. Thirty years later, the group has evolved into the very sort of communal institution and devoted cult that Murdoch dared dream into reality.

After all of the bone-deep hooks, ribald jokes, and meticulous world-building, If You’re Feeling Sinister ends on the sort of galvanizing grace note that used to come so easily to Morrissey, before his hardwired paranoia finally overtook his vaulting compassion. With its lilting, sing-song progression and vaguely goofy brass interlude, “Judy and the Dream of Horses” is a sweet-natured mash note to a bookish teenage rebel, the sort who is equally interested in S&M and Bible studies, who maybe wants to know how and why and when and where to follow. Don’t follow, Murdoch seems to tell her: Lead”.

I will end with Treble Zine and their review of If You’re Feeling Sinister. I don’t think I heard it when it came out in 1996. It is an album that I discovered in years since. The band’s next album, The Boy with the Arab Strap, was released in 1998. They embarked on this incredible streak. No other band could match them. If you have not heard If You’re Feeling Sinister, then do make sure that you listen to it:

“It is amusing to think of the title of Belle and Sebastian‘s sophomore full-length as a postscript attached to messages inviting friends, family and arbitrarily selected strangers to listen to the album. Not that it would be unfounded. While the music is simple, acoustic guitar driven indie-pop, and Stuart Murdoch’s voice is soft and lyrical, his lyrics are barbed with a singularly (and charmingly) venomous wit. The infusion of this wit into arrangements that range from delicate and fey to exuberant and raucous, is what made Belle and Sebastian great from the beginning. It always annoys me when someone writes them off (in conversation or in writing) with a dismissive wave of the hand and a haughty assertion that they are “too precious.” I’ve heard it plenty of times, too many times to still let it get under my skin. The only revenge I have exacted is this: whenever I play The Life Pursuit at the bar where I work, someone asks, nearly without fail, who it is, and when I say “Belle and Sebastian” a confused look often takes hold of the asker’s features, a look that says, “Oh, shit…I thought I safely wrote them off years ago.”

Of course, there are myriad fans of the band, many that push head on into obsession. They are that kind of band—they polarize listeners. And then, in 2006, after a string of hit and miss material, they delivered one of the most irresistible pop albums—complete with a couple of spot-on singles—in recent memory. And that seemed to surprise people, both positively and negatively, but the truth is the seeds were there from the beginning. The uncanny sense for emotionally resonant melody (though more subtly expressed), the deft ear for instrumentation and arrangement, the capacity for expressing joy adequately and without sinister motive. Murdoch’s skill at stringing details together into a satisfying form of storytelling emerged nearly whole and, as for their penchant for the morose, for “old sad bastard music” as it was once expressed…there is no antidote without the poison.

For me the heart of If You’re Feeling Sinister has always been the title track and “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” a pair of hilarious heartbreakers, hummable and mischievous, comfortably situated beside each other at the beginning of the album’s second half. The latter is in first person and slips between Murdoch’s own experiences and those of a fictional boy from a story he read. When he sings the title line again and again toward the end of the track it is surprisingly celebratory, a fracturing, or maybe even an exorcism, of despair. The consolation of literature is there, the consolation of melancholy and a motive for making music (“Nobody writes them like they used to so it may as well be me“).

“If You’re Feeling Sinister,” in contrast, describes a few characters, vividly alive through brief description, each at a personal crossroads. It weaves a jaunty rhythm and a somber tone into something playfully moving, full of particulars that tempt one to read into them. Like the album as a whole, it is both a delightful pop song and a miniature world that draws one further and further in. Doing two things at once was already a trademark of Belle and Sebastian by this point. And the fact that If You’re Feeling Sinister continues to exude its magic so many years later is a testament to their skill at doing so, at crafting music with dimension and depth in a languidly enticing form indebted, in equal measure, to the past and their own distinct sense for creating songs that only seem to grow richer with the passing years”.

I am sure there will be some thirtieth anniversary features. I wanted to bring in one in but it is paywalled, so I have had to dip into a couple of reviews and an older feature. I do hope that it has highlighted and adequately explored the genius of Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister. It is commendable that London-based label Jeepster Records, who the band signed to, were okay with there being no promotional interviews and singles. Most labels would not have wanted that. That leap of faith paid off when we think about If You’re Feeling Sinister today. It remains this….

TRULY stunning work.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Clara Mann

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

Clara Mann

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I spotlighted…

Clara Mann back in 2022, as I wanted to revisit her work now. Her new album, Wishbone, arrived on 23rd October. I am going to end with a review for the album. I will bring in a couple of 2025 interviews with her before a recent chat, just so that we can get a bit of background. Last year was when she released her debut album, Rift. It was released through state51 Conspiracy. They handle physical and digital distribution for Kate Bush’s independent label, Fish People. That is a big reason to admire Clara Mann. I wonder if she is a Kate Bush fan. I wanted to start out with this interview from The Line of Best Fit, not only because we get some background in terms of life and growing up. I think that Clara Mann’s pure and unfiltered charm comes through. Although it is an interview for her previous album, it is important to bring in here I feel:

“Having grown up in a small rural community in the south of France and a village in southwest England, nearby Cheddar Gorge, getting her first car at 17 (also a Nissan Micra, also named after a French feminist writer) was a watershed moment, pulling back the curtain on a world of open roads and tender adventure. As the daughter of two writers, Mann had travelled the world over through the books and stories she’d devoured as a kid, and having a car only fortified the independence she felt in her bones.

“I’ve always sought out freedom, sometimes to a fault,” she tells me over coffee, not far from the studio where she recorded the majority of Rift with 4AD Studio producer Fabian Prynn. “As I’ve grown up a bit, I’ve realised that freedom and independence doesn’t necessarily mean anything when you’re always on your own,” she says, explaining that she's still learning how to balance her self-direction with her desire for closeness. “I wanted to let go of the need to do everything alone all the time, but I’ve definitely struggled with that.”

Written over the course and end of a long-term relationship, there’s a lot of struggle in Rift, a lot of letting go. But don’t dare call it a breakup record. It’s a mending record, like songwriting kintsugi or an earthquake in reverse. “I think when you go through something really profound and something very fundamental in your life is changing, it does feel like being pulled apart, like something geological,” says Mann. “There’s this gap that you’re left with, and you have to figure out what to do with that emptiness. That’s why I think Rift is a hopeful record, because I imagine these songs almost like water flooding into the cracks of this dried up earth.”

What Rift also represents is Mann signing herself over fully to music and giving it the space to become the fabric of her life. Not a side quest or a scenic drive-by, but fundamental to the framework of her story. It wasn’t always a given. Though she was classically trained on piano as a child, when she pictured her future it looked a lot like the lives of her parents in academia. Then, just as she was preparing to move to London to start a degree in French and History of Art, she suddenly blanked. “I found myself asking why I was really taking that path,” she says. “Was it just because I’d grown up always thinking that’s what I wanted, because it felt set out for me, in a sense? What if I didn’t want to do that anymore?”

Part of that questioning arose from starting to immerse herself in Bristol’s DIY music scene, often bussing there from Cheddar with a friend to see whichever bands happened to be playing. Drawn to the guitar because she liked the way it hugs the body as you play, as opposed to the formal distance of a piano, she began to write her own songs and uploading simple home recordings to Bandcamp.

It was around that same time that the relationship chronicled on Rift began, with another musician whom she wound up recording her debut EP Consolations with, while isolating during Covid. A support tour with Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen followed, and he later came on board to produce a track from her next EP, Stay Open, released in late 2022. “Committing to making an album felt like quite a big deal,” she says. “I had no idea how I was going to write ten songs, record them really nicely, and make them sound exactly how I want.”

As it turns out, once she had the right collaborators in place, getting the songs to sound exactly how she wanted was surprisingly easy. “All I knew was that I wanted there to be a strangeness to them, because I feel quite alienated a lot of the time,” she says. “Actually, I think that being a maker requires some degree of alienation from your surroundings otherwise how do you observe, if not from slightly on the outside of things? I wanted to get that in the recordings so I told Fab, and Tom Kellett [who recorded “Rift” and “It Only Hurts” in his living room], that I wanted the songs to feel like tiny ghosts whispering in your ear. But they’re also shouting and it’s really intense. Like you’re scared, but also you’re happy that I’m there”.

Just one more interview from last year and I will bring things up to date concerning Wishbone. The beauty and honesty within Rift resulted in some seriously impressive reviews. This is an album that was worthy of Mercury Prize nomination. Artists like Clara Mann should be nominated more. That is what the prize is set up for. In any case, don’t bet against Wishbone being in with a shout next year. I am not sure if it was released within the eligibility window, but it is deserving of award recognition. Rolling Stone UK spoke with Mann to discuss her debut last year:

“Rift is an important and representative word for the themes of the album, as well as its title – can you explain why?

The word rift struck me because it refers to an argument or falling out, but also when tectonic plates move, and the gaps that are left. I had this image of that cracking, that fragmentation, and realised that it was part of the album. It was about trying to love something in my life when it had been blown apart, or I’d blown it apart. It’s about trying to reassemble that and be like, ‘I love this in its new shape, and I accept it’. It’s like when you break a bowl and you’re like, ‘It’s never going to be the same, but that’s OK and I love it as it is now’.

The rift itself became a metaphor for this valley, which was a very dark, mostly sad, very empty place in my life where I felt like I just had nothing to hold onto. I felt completely alone, even though maybe I wasn’t – I don’t know, I can’t remember. But that feeling I remember, the feeling of, ‘There’s nothing I recognise. There’s nothing to hold onto. There’s not even anger or sadness, because those are familiar things that I could maybe hold onto. I just feel nothing.’

What is the album’s title track reflecting on through this process of struggle?

It’s about finding out that there is something in me that makes me get up and keep going every time. It’s like an insane spark of faith that we have. I think I have a lot of faith. Not necessarily religious, but I have a lot of faith, and it makes you keep moving. It’s like driving through a dark valley. I can’t see lights ahead, but I just have to keep going. I don’t have a choice. I know that if I stop, I’ll never get out, so I just have to keep going.

I don’t think there’s any song [on the album] that’s like, ‘Yes, I’m fixed’. It’s more about accepting the journey. I stopped hating the parts of myself that are dark and sad, and realised that I just have to live with this. I accept it. It’s about acceptance.

How has your time playing and listening to traditional folk music contributed to your songwriting and overall appreciation of music?

It’s really evocative music. I love the stories and this sense that you’ll hear words and lyrics put against different melodies, and you’ll think, ‘How did that happen?’ It’s because they travelled across the ocean in a boat with people 200 years ago, and then they were put against new tunes that existed on the Appalachian Mountains, and then they came all the way back, and now they’re playing in the pub in London. To me, that’s the most beautiful, mind-blowing thing.

Can it also provide a link to a more positive corner of English history, when fewer and fewer young people here – especially in the creative industries – feel proud of their heritage?

In England, we have really lost touch with the importance of those songs, because we’ve never had to fight for anything, not in hundreds of years. We’ve never had something that we felt we were going to lose. If you go over to Ireland, obviously there’s a much more palpable sense of what’s at risk culturally, but it’s not thought of as radical music here [in England]. In fact, it has much more conservative ideas around it. But actually, the music is the music, songs matter, preserving those songs and passing them down matters. It’s a beautiful community to build”.

I am surprised there are not more interviews with Clara Mann around her exceptional new album. However, Music to Blame featured her. She has some dates ahead, so do go and see her if you can. After they are complete, I guess she will want to take some time out and relax. Now, we can appreciate and absorb this fantastic album from the stunning Clara Mann. I have been following her since 2022, but I have not seen her live. I will try and correct that if she plays London next year:

“Connection comes up repeatedly. Mann has spent much of her career performing alone, and songwriting remains a similarly solitary process. Everything starts with just her and either a piano or guitar. “Everything is written by just me on my own with piano or guitar. When I know that song is strong enough that I can play it on my own and it stands up, I bring it to the studio.” There is a sense, though, that Mann is becoming more comfortable with letting people into the process — or at least what happens after a song has been written. Her sophomore album, ‘Wishbone’, is more expansive than 2021’s ‘Rift’, bringing in additional musicians. She sees this partly as a musical decision, but also as revealing something about herself. “I guess that the fact I wanted more musicians to play on this was a mark of being okay with surrendering some control and also more confidence.”

That surrender has continued on stage, ahead of a tour to support her new album. “Yeah, it's the first time I play with a band. I had played with other musicians, but never with a full band. And it is so much fun. I’m having the best time.” That doesn’t mean she’s finished with playing solo, far from it. “I definitely love playing solo still, always will. It's so different to touring with friends.”

Playing with other people has altered the experience in ways she wasn’t necessarily expecting: “Playing with friends and touring with friends is somehow a much more normal experience. You feel much less detached from your real life.”  More interestingly, it also changed her relationship with the songs themselves. During rehearsals, viola player Laura began playing one of Mann’s older songs and “at the end of the song I just stopped and I was like, ‘Whoa, I’m feeling really overwhelmed actually’.” It wasn't simply the sound of the viola but “remembering how I was and who I was when I wrote that song and how it felt — her playing really brought that up in me.” Mann wonders whether playing alone had made it easier to keep some of those emotions at a distance. “Maybe I can hide those things more easily when it's all on my terms; it's just me playing.”

Some of ‘Rift’ was written when Mann was just nineteen. If that record was more questioning, ‘Wishbone’ feels more certain. The growing confidence is particularly apparent in two songs: ‘Oblivion’ and ‘Wishbone’. “For me, they are the weightier songs on the album and the more adult songs as well, in terms of writing confidence, production, and lyrics. ‘Wishbone’ in particular is a song of release and exaltation for me, and it's very uninhibited.”

There are signs that Mann may be ready to surprise herself more often. She feels that ‘Rift’ and ‘Wishbone’ belong to the same sonic world and one she is ready to move beyond: “I  definitely feel ready to challenge myself writing-wise. How different that will look to everyone else versus how different it will be to me. I don't know. But I feel really excited about writing.”

For now, Mann is looking forward to releasing ‘Wishbone’ to the world and touring with her band. The puppet theatre may or may not work out, Clara Mann, though, seems ready to see where everything else takes her”.

I am finishing up with CLASH and their impressions of Wishbone. If anyone has not heard Clara Mann’s music, I would advise you to listen to Rift and then Wishbone. Even though they share a sonic space, there is development and growth between the albums. Such a prolific artist, I would not bet against an E.P. or album coming in the next year or two. One of our most gifted songwriters in full flow and bloom:

“There is something about Clara Mann that is hard to ignore. Maybe it’s her voice. The way she plays guitar. The beautiful songs she writes or the fact that she’s released two glorious albums in less than a year. They feel like they could have been recorded anytime in the last 50 years. Built on solid songwriting and not fads. New album ‘Wishbone’ picks up where 2025’s ‘Rift’ left off, but things feel more intimate and personal.

‘Go Getter’ is one of the standout tracks on the album. The piano is haunting, the guitar is glorious and the vocals are the chef’s kiss. When Mann sings “You called as soon as you heard that I was down. And I said, “Baby, didn’t you know I’m a real go-getter?”. And everything that I lose comes back around” You believe her, but you aren’t sure who she is talking to. Is it a lover? A friend or herself in a mirror? The recipient doesn’t really matter, as its such a powerful message. ‘Wishbone’ isn’t just an album of messages, but of key changes, as well as self-mantras. On the title track, there is a key change that you can feel coming, but when it hits, it HITS! After there is a lackadaisical run of notes that really make you smile before Mann’s graceful vocals deliver the knockout blow. Clever stuff.

Clara Mann is in the possession of a classic voice. She’s up there with Sandy Denny, Laura Nyro and the rest. On ‘Song For Joy’ she croons effortlessly. Barley above a whisper. Then she takes it up a notch, and a delirious lilting edge enters the performance and it’s something else totally. Then, a few phrases later, back to the original croon. Under this is picked guitars, gentle piano and way in the background a slow drum being brushed, instead of hit. It takes you back, and away, to a place where the key thing was songwriting and performance. Everything on ‘Song For Joy’ and ‘Wishbone’ is for the sake of the song, not Mann. It’s refreshing to hear.

At its heart ‘Wishbone’ is a collection of songs about love, loss, redemption and hope. It’s the hope that is the important part. ‘Wishbone’ feels like an album that is saying, “Things can get better, if you want them to”. After listening to ‘Wishbone’ you feel uplifted and positive. That’s not something you can say about a lot of albums released in 2026. Like the idea of positive thinking, ‘Wishbone’ is an album to take a chance on. Who knows. It might change your life…

8/10”.

There are few artists who have the talent and ability of Clara Mann. She is someone I am going to continue to follow, as I feel she is going to making music for a very long time to come. Make sure she is on your radar. Wishbone is a fantastic album that people need to hear. The minute you start listening to Wishbone, it is guaranteed to make…

SUCH a huge impression.

____________

Follow Clara Mann

Official:

https://www.claramann.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/claramannn/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@claramannsongs/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/claramannsongs/

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJxQfm6Bzw2GfuI_p4ipaw

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0BcrhuzQqziiZJXLSdiJu0?si=3XTJI6_xTEiDNUgPx87nMg

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Snoh Aalegra

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Max Montgomery

 Snoh Aalegra

_________

THIS is one of my favourite…

modern artists, though it has been a while since I have written about Snoh Aalegra. I have loved her music ever since her debut album, 2016’s Don’t Explain. Her latest, 2021’s TEMPORARY HIGHS IN THE VIOLET SKIES, I think was the last time I wrote about her. Her fourth studio album, Legendary Love, is out on 13th November. I would urge everyone to pre-save it. I wonder if she has plans to play London next year, as I have never seen her live but keep meaning to. I feel a performance at the Kentish Town Forum would be an ideal slot, though she likely has tour plans mapped for next year already. I am going to share part of a recent interview, as some people do not know about this astonishing artist with one of the most evocative voices in music. It is a stunning thing! Born to Iranian parents and raised in Stockholm and Enköping, Snoh Aalegra signed her first record contact aged fourteen. Now thirty-nine, she has spent time living in London, though that was a while ago. I believe she is located now in Los Angeles. In 2023, Aalegra was nominated at the 65th Annual GRAMMY Awards in the category Best Traditional R&B Performance for her cover of Do 4 Love. I cannot wait to hear Legendary Love and what the critics says. Her latest album won acclaim and got a four-star review from NME, and AllMusic. CLASH gave it a 7/10. I think Legendary Love might be her finest work. I just have that feeling. Someone who I am so keen to see live, as I can imagine her shows are breathtaking. Four albums in, you sort of feel like Snoh Aalegra’s finest work may about to be released. I do think that all her albums are brilliant, though what we have heard from Legendary Love is simply extraordinary. This hugely accomplished artist reaching new heights.

In terms of why her most recent work is perhaps the most extraordinary and powerful to date, I do think that this article from The Line of Best Fit, where they quote from Aalegra, gives us some insight and revelation: “Legendary Love was written and recorded over a period of two and a half years, following Aalegra’s growth within a relationship that is described as a “dated karmic connection that never fully materialised. I don't think the greatest love stories are measured by how long they last. They're measured by who they ask you to become," she explains. "Every song holds a piece of who I was, who I became, and who I will continue to be because I allowed myself to love this deeply. This love brought me back to the era of music I fell in love with growing up. It carried the same longing, romance, and nostalgia that first made me dream of becoming an artist”. I did want to drop part of an extensive and in-depth interview with The New York Times. It is a fantastic chat that gives us more depth and background regarding Legendary Love. This is an album that everyone needs to own. The New York Times note how “Snoh Aalegra returns with an intimate LP made her way. Inspired by ’80s sounds, it draws on her connections to Babyface, Stevie Wonder and Prince”. Having followed her for a decade or so, I can feel and see how her music has evolved and bloomed. I do think her recent work is her most impactful and memorable:

“The Iranian-Swedish singer-songwriter, an if-you-know-you-know music industry favorite for her dreamy neo-soul take on romance and its disconnects, has not released an album in more than five years. Since she got her start as a teenager in Stockholm, she’s amassed A-list collaborators including Pharrell Williams, Tyler, the Creator and the producer No I.D.; bewitched Prince; and had a breakout R&B chart-topper with “I Want You Around” — back in 2019. Her fans despaired: Where was Snoh? A 2023 single was called, tantalizingly, “Wait a Little Longer.”

Now Aalegra has returned, on her own terms, still carrying secrets. She approaches each project as a new artist — “I always start over,” she told me, during a dinner in which she was both strikingly blunt and lastingly enigmatic. “I wasn’t away on purpose,” she said, explaining (or not) her absence. But, she added, “It took time for me to find myself.”

Her fourth LP, “Legendary Love,” out Nov. 13, is her most intimate yet — it’s a heartbreak album that charts a brief, seismic relationship with an unnamed (but famous?) paramour. The vibe and production is vintage R&B, down to the real ’80s synths and drum machines. Enduring music legends like Raphael Saadiq and Nile Rodgers appear on several tracks; Stevie Wonder himself gave his blessing for a rare sample of “I Believe (When I Fall in Love With You It Will Be Forever).” The record’s nostalgic and windswept first teaser, “Run Free,” released last week, was greeted with intense adulation (“The Queen is back!”) by her audience. “It’s time sister,” Kehlani wrote in the comments of an Instagram post. Normani: “YESSSSSS.”

Even without significant commercial success, Aalegra has long built buzz in creative circles. “She is one of those artists that I think a number of producers and writers always have major respect for, because, you know, she’s a real one,” said Babyface, the hit-making, Grammy-winning songwriter and producer, who worked on her new album.

When she reached out about collaborating, “It was an immediate yes,” he said. They’d only met in passing, but he’d been a fan for years, after he saw her play at a small club in Toronto. He was taken with her “incredible voice,” he recalled, “and how honest it felt.”

When we met in late September, Aalegra, 39, looked every bit the carefree Angeleno, in a V-neck and white jeans. But she is no party girl, preferring mostly to spend her time in the studio. She holed up for more than two years, starting in 2023, to write “Legendary Love.”

The knockout cover image for “Legendary Love” has her in low-cut sequins, wearing two watches — representing, she said, “two lifetimes” — and gazing in a mirror with a far-off look. “There’s a bit of sadness in my eyes, even if I’m very posed up,” she offered.

Aalegra’s natural emotional state is moody. (In our recent video chat, she wore a baseball hat that read “Yes” on one side, and “No” on the other — that’s her, confounding even via her accessories.) Her “sad girl, emo girl, layered melancholy,” as she called it, is inspired in part by the Farsi poetry her mother still writes to her, and by her transcontinental experiences. “I dream in English, I think and count in Swedish, and I feel everything in Farsi,” she said, describing a long-held sense of cultural displacement.

She was born in Uppsala, Sweden, the daughter of Iranian immigrants who arrived there as part of a wave of refugees fleeing the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. By the time she was around 2, her parents had divorced, and she spent her early years in a smaller town, Enkoping.

As a kindergartner, she was the only non-blue-eyed, non-blond kid in class, she said, and though her area eventually diversified, “me and all the immigrants, we would still face a lot of racism,” she said. That bullying still shadows her. Like a paper that’s been crumpled, “It doesn’t matter how much you flatten it out, it will never be straight again. And I will carry those insecurities with me and those scars with me.”

She found solace in music. As a child, hearing “I Have Nothing” by Whitney Houston, “I got goose bumps,” she recalled. “I said, whatever this is, I want to learn how to do this.” By age 7, she had announced her intentions to be a singer; her family moved to Stockholm so she could work with a local producer and attend a music high school. She signed a publishing deal with a major label, Sony, at 13”.

I absolutely adore Snoh Aalegra’s music. I do hope that she comes to the U.K. next year for some dates. She has a big fanbase here, and lots of people would turn out to see her. I feel Legendary Love is going to get a lot of great reaction. Some five-star reviews. If you have not discovered this beguilingly brilliant artist, then do go and follow her. I think next year will be one of Aalegra’s happiest and most successful. Some big tour dates. Maybe a Coachella spot. I would not be shocked if she was on the bill for Glastonbury here. I can see incredible personal happiness and awards too. A GRAMMY coming her way. Whilst perhaps better known in the U.S. and Europe, there is admiration for her in the U.K. I hope that there are some interviews here with sources like The Guardian, NME and CLASH. I love how personal and important each song on Legendary Love is to Snoh Aalegra. How it draws her to music she grew up with. I wonder Aalegra dreamed of a child she would achieve so much in music. It would have been an ambition, but she is one of the most revered and respected modern-day artists. One of my absolute favourites. I am thinking about her coming here next year and performing. What her live set would be like. I am looking back at a 2022 review, when Aalegra played in Brixton: “One thing that is undeniable about the show is that Snoh fans really came out and came through for her, never stopping word for word song for song from start to finish”. Her music means so much to her fans. Even if Legendary Love is personal and there is that unique meaning, the songs will resonate with listeners. Her words taken to heart by her fans. Hearing the lyrics sung back to her must be a major reason why she will want to tour this album. She is an absolute queen that everyone needs to follow and listen to. There are some incredible artists out there that continue to do great work. Not many that can match the dizzying heights of…

THE spectacular Snoh Aalegra.

____________

Follow Snoh Aalegra

PHOTO CREDIT: Max Montgomery

Official:

https://www.snohaalegra.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/snohaalegra

Twitter:

https://x.com/snohaalegra

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChVibCOlzk9GwJZfbYJOY8A

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1A9o3Ljt67pFZ89YtPPL5X?si=i5YcF6UtRwW_vGXzDDYrtw

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow at Fifteen: A Wonderful Album That Warrants Wider Exposure and Investigation

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow at Fifteen

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

A Wonderful Album That Warrants Wider Exposure and Investigation

_________

I will end with…

a couple of reviews for Kate Bush’s 50 Words for Snow. Released on 21st November, 2011, it turns fifteen soon. This final anniversary features looks at what could have been. The Mercury Prize was held last month, and among the nominees was Paul McCartney for The Boys of Dungeon Lane. I wondered whether Kate Bush ever had interest in the awards. I could have seen 2005’s Aerial getting a nod. 50 Words for Snow would have been shortlisted. Perhaps not wanting to go to a ceremony and unconcerned with awards, you wonder what could have been if 50 Words for Snow were shortlisted. It could have beaten off 2012’s winner, Alt-J’s An Awesome Wave. I have said before how a short film could be made of the seven tracks. Whilst the only connection is cold asnd snow – except for the final track, Among Angels -, I do feel like a narrative could work where we get this mix of the beautiful and dark. A story that could have been scored by these amazing songs.  This was Kate Bush at perhaps her most ‘un-Pop’. In terms of there being longer tracks that were more like Jazz pieces. It was interesting when she spoke with Jamie Cullum for a promotional interview. His interpretations of the tracks as this successful artist. Kate Bush talking about Jazz. You can see it as part of an archive here. It was a wonderful chat that was so different to anything else. I am dropping it in below, so that you can hear the whole thing. Such an interesting that. 50 Words for Snow sharing D.N.A. with some classic Jazz composers. The Dave Brubeck Quartet song, Take Five, was mentioned at one point. Bush said how she does not listen to other people’s music when writing her own, though I feel like she would have referenced Jazz albums when composing 50 Words for Snow. Billie Holiday was also mentioned. I also wonder if she was in mind when writing this album.

aerialish · Jamie Cullum  talks about jazz music with kate Bush

Also though there is some animation around the songs on 50 Words for Snow, it would have been wonderful seeing something like a short film. Bush did make a 1993 short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. That was based around her album, The Red Shoes. In 2013, Beyoncé released a self-titled visual album. Two years earlier, Bush could have released a visual album. Arguably, she was the first woman to release a visual album. That 1993 achievement. I feel that this story where we get visuals of the songs could give the album more exposure. People rate it quite low when rating her albums. I feel like it is this wonderful and immerse work. I love the Jamie Cullum interview, as she talks about Steely Dan. Her love for 1977’s Aja and 1980’s Gaucho. Getting to chat about music in a  different way. Other promotional interviews for 50 Words for Snow did not talk about Steely Dan. I think it gives new dynamics and layers to 50 Words for Snow. In terms of possible influences and what Bush was channelling. I could see her listening to Aja and that inspiring tracks on 50 Words for Snow. For Radio Monte Carlo, Bush did say that she wanted snow to be the central theme as it is magical. She said how it is “a really fascinating thing”. Its life being brief and beguiling. Most artists would reference snow in a song. Bush took that further and made an album with that imaginative side of snow in her mind. I think the fact that a lot of the audio interviews from 2011 are not available takes something from 50 Words for Snow. This charming clip, where Bush was speaking with Lauren Laverne. I do think that it should have got more praise and love. Many of the reviews were glowing, yet 50 Words for Snow is never seen as one of her best albums. That is a shame. Even though Tom Jones sort of mangles reading from an autocue, he did present Bush with a 2012 Sky Arts Pop award for 50 Words for Snow. It was great that she did get that nod, so maybe a Mercury nomination would not have been so bad? She was happy to be seen in public at least. I feel lie 50 Words for Snow is this ultimate vinyl album. You put it on and have to listen to everything. Not skipping tracks. The fact it is not easily separated and digestible was intentional. Bush worried digital music was threatening the album, so she recorded one that is very much demanding of people’s time and commitment, rather than having a lot of shorter songs people could listen to whilst ignoring the rest.

Go and listen to all of the archive interviews from 2011 and what Bush said about 50 Words for Snow. I’ll end with a couple of very positive reviews. Starting with Jude Rogers and what she write for the BBC. The fact that the record is strange and magical is quintessential Kate Bush. Always different and never resting, you do wonder what her next album will sounds like. I can imagine it having similarities with 50 Words for Snow:

“Six years after Aerial’s bursts of summer sound, Kate Bush’s winter album arrives, each track exploring the long Christmas months. They reflect a season which brings out the profound and absurd in equal measure – the feelings of longing and loneliness that emerge as the dark nights bed in, the party-hat silliness that pops up when the same nights stretch out. 50 Words for Snow initially aims for the former value, with Bush’s son Bertie taking the opening vocal on Snowflake. "I was born in a cloud," he sings eerily, like the ghost of Little Lord Fauntleroy; he is constantly falling, all "ice and dust and light". His mother keeps appearing – he sees her "long white neck" – promising to find him, but we don’t find out if she does. On paper, it’s a lovely concept. On record, it treads an exceedingly fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous.

But this is classic Kate. On 1993’s The Red Shoes, Prince had to play second fiddle to Lenny Henry on Why Should I Love You?; on Aerial, Rolf Harris performed on two songs. But Bush has always been almost wilfully uncool, and this time around is no different. Take Stephen Fry taking the lead on the title-track, whispering fifty synonyms for the white stuff, from the lovely "blown from polar fur" to the frankly daft "phlegm de neige". It sounds embarrassingly cold, perhaps because of his ubiquity – if only Vincent Price was still alive, or Ian McKellen was available. Another guest, Elton John, fares much better on Snowed in at Wheeler Street, partly because his voice takes on a gentler quality than usual, partly because the song maps the movements of lost love very beautifully, and partly because John was Bush’s first hero; you can hear this depth of feeling as their voices mesh together.

The album only really reaches the heights Bush has set for herself when she appears centre stage. Her voice is noticeably older now, full of earth, heft and husk, and works stunningly well with little more than her piano’s sustain pedal – especially in Misty, her already widely-commented-upon love song for a snowman. Giving Raymond Briggs’ famous concept an X-rated twist – he is "melting in my hand", the next morning "the sheets are soaking" – its 13 minutes are spellbinding. The album’s finale, Among Angels, is even better, a torch-song for a friend in need, with a stunning central lyric: "I can see angels standing around you / They shimmer like mirrors in summer / But you don’t know it." Throughout, the piano sets a magical mood, all dark, loud and heavy.

Just after the song’s start, you also hear Bush stop for a second, take her fingers off the keys, and whisper the word "fine". In Lake Tahoe, the song also breaks suddenly at 8.44, leaving Bush to exhale one sharp, startling breath. 50 Words for Snow may threaten to lose its way in the blizzard sometimes, but it is moments like these – jolting us from her world for a moment, reminding us of how all-embracing her talent can be – that show just how much she can move us with her fire and ice”.

The radio interviews in 2011 are fascinating. Europe stations and U.S. too. Each one revealing different things. I do love this one with Larry Flick for Sirius XM. Such a complex album, it did reach five in the U.K. In 2011, I think more traditional Pop was more favoured and successful. Yet plenty of people bought this album that was more Jazz. Chamber Pop perhaps. A masterpiece that I feel would gain more praise if people checked out the interviews and spent time with it. I also wonder, if Bush were to perform live again, whether she would stage 50 Words for Snow. Among Angels was part of the encore for her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn, though turning it into a suite or performing the album in full would be magnificent. I will end with Treble Zine and their thoughts. Some highlight songs where she collaborated with others – including Elton John on Snowed in at Wheeler Street – as the weaker moments. Though this review says they add vigour and new energy. The space and beauty of 50 Words for Snow means it rewards repeated listens before you can appreciate it. Many not wanting to spend time fully digging into the gorgeous 50 Words for Snow:

“Kate Bush released only one album during the ’00s, the epic double feature Aerial, but in spite of her absence, her influence has continued to loom large over pop music in recent years. Florence and the Machine has maintained a heavy dose of Hounds of Love in her pop anthems, perhaps the most visible charting artist to do so since Kate herself, though there are definitely others. Bush’s artful grandeur has seeped into the works of Bat For Lashes, My Brightest Diamond and, to a lesser degree, St. Vincent. She’s gotten big ups from Big Boi, and is apparently part of some unifying theory of hip-hop, according to a ganja-fueled stage routine by Das Racist. As heartening as it is to see Bush’s legacy loom large in newer acts, however, sometimes you just can’t beat the real thing.

Bush’s tenth album and her second this year following the collection of re-recorded material, The Director’s Cut, 50 Words For Snow is a snapshot of an artist who, even after a much sparser output in recent years, continues to operate from an advanced playbook. The album is identifiably Kate’s, in terms of aesthetic details, sheer idiosyncrasy, and her inimitable vocals. But it’s also far less immediate, a kind of loose concept album of lengthy ballads that unfold slowly and venture into subtly haunting spaces via artful, atmospheric arrangements. And as with all of Bush’s best material, it’s charmingly weird.

As implied by its title and admittedly goofy cover art depicting a woman kissing a snowman (carved in snow no less), 50 Words For Snow is a winter album. It’s not a Christmas album, though Bush already had the holiday record covered back in 1980 (“December Will Be Magic Again“). Rather, this is an album of songs designed for listening in the coldest winter months, when the snow piles high outside and sunlight is just a fleeting visitor only to disappear for days at a time. And as such, it’s absolutely gorgeous. The arrangements on the album’s seven songs, which range from six to 13 minutes in length, are spacious and delicate, frequently evoking the breathtaking post-rock of late-period Talk Talk, albeit given Bush’s own eccentric stamp of authenticity. There is a majesty to these songs that can be easily appreciated upon first listen, but their minor, delicate details encourage repeat listens. It’s an immersive experience, by design I would imagine, akin to that of slowly being blanketed with tiny frozen flakes.

When exploring these wintry themes lyrically, Bush begins to reveal more of the unconventional nature of her songwriting. In the incredible opening track, “Snowflake,” Bush is snow personified, with phrases like “I am ice and dust/ I am sky” and “Be ready to catch me” projecting an almost literal image of falling from the sky. That, however, is just the beginning. Bush trades verses with Sir Elton John on the heartbreaking “Snowed In On Wheeler Street,” narrating an epic and continually tragic romance that references World War II and 9/11. Then there’s the outstandingly peculiar “Misty,” which finds her building a snowman only to, apparently, have sex with him, and it ends just as well as you’d expect: “So cold next to me/ I can feel him melting in my hand/ melting, melting, in my hand” It’s strange, but oddly affecting, in a way that only Bush herself could deliver so convincingly.

Though the vast majority of 50 Words For Snow consists of beautifully sparse art-pop ballads, those few moments in which Bush and her collaborators raise the tempo provide some welcome invigoration. First single “Wild Man,” with its Fleetwood Mac-style melody and bizarre choral vocal featuring Andy Fairweather Low, follows second-hand Yeti sightings through a powerful pop epic. The psychedelic, trip-hop styled title track, meanwhile, finds Bush coaching and counting along with actor Stephen Fry, who runs down a very literal list of 50 synonyms that range from the poetic (“elderfalls”) to the absurd (“blown from polar fur,” “whippoccino”).

On 50 Words For Snow, Kate Bush juggles a heady mix of graceful abstraction and curious humor, much like she always has. But no matter how exaggerated the latter, it’s actually that sense of grace and beauty that ultimately defines 50 Words For Snow. It’s an album that asks of ample time and attention from the listener, but pays repeated dividends on that investment. As the mercury continues to drop and the sky grows ever more grey, this album will provide excellent company”.

As this wonderful album turns fifteen on 21st November, it makes me wonder about getting it heard. Is this something Gen Z and Alpha can listen to? There are few popular contemporary artists who have recorded anything like 50 Words for Snow. More and more are turning to physical formats and want to listen to albums in full. I think this is a perfect album to give to a younger listener. So immersive and full of wonderful imagery, Bush’s curiosity for beautiful snow and how it comes and goes. I love all of that! This sumptuous thing. Bush said to Jamie Cullum how Director’s Cut – an album released in May 2011 where she revisited songs from The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) – was technically tedious and longer to complete than expected. An opposite experience with 50 Words for Snow. She took this momentum from Director’s Cut into the new one. Among Angels was written during a break in Director’s Cut. Bush estimates 2008 or 2009. Lake Tahoe was the first song she wrote for 50 Words for Snow. She then honed in on snow rather than winter. We do not really get snow in the South a lot. It is evocative. Maybe we will get some this winter. A big reason that the wonderous 50 Words for Snow is…

AN essential listen.

FEATURE: It’s Just My Job Five Days a Week: Kate Bush’s Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

It’s Just My Job Five Days a Week

Kate Bush’s Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) at Thirty-Five

_________

WHILST Kate Bush…

has not appeared on an Elton John album, he has appeared on one of hers. On 21st November, it will be fifteen years since 50 Words for Snow was released. This is her most recent album. John appeared on Snowed in At Wheeler Street. I am writing anniversary features around that album. Elton John has always been a big hero for Kate Bush. Respect both ways. Elton John said how her duet with Peter Gabriel, Don’t Give Up, was a huge moment for him. In terms of saving his life. That song turned forty in October. All these anniversaries! Bush grew up listening to Elton John and the fact that this major artist was successful and was a piano player. That appealed to her and might have been a reason why her earliest work was piano-led. If Kate Bush never appeared on an Elton John studio album, she did contribute to a tribute album in 1991. Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin saw artists such as Sinéad O'Connor, George Michael, and The Beach Boys cover a classic. As Kate Bush’s take on Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) was released as a single on 25th November, 1991, I wanted to mark thirty-five years. The original appeared on Elton John’s 1972 album, Honky Château. I always thought that Kate Bush directed the video for the single, though Kate Bush Encyclopedia cite Julian Doyle as director. It was always going to be a risk covering a song like this and doing it in a different way. Bush felt attached to Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time), but she took it away from the original. I have mentioned some of these reviews before but, when it came out, there was mixed reaction.

If St. Etienne, reviewing for NME, shat all over it and Melody Maker were cold, there was more positive reception from Billboard. This is what Boston Phoenix said about an inventive and interesting cover: “Kate Bush certainly renders the most imaginative contributions, blending a reggae beat, touches of harp, and uillean pipes… her inimitable siren’s voice arching up like a missile every time she approaches the title”. Perhaps people felt Bush was too quirky here. That it stripped some of the emotion and heaviness from the original. She has huge affection for the song and Elton John, so she did not simply want to repeat what he sung. Also, switching genders too. It gives the song this new twist and dynamic: “She packed my bags last night pre-flight/Zero hour nine a.m./And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then/I miss the earth so much I miss my wife”. Intentional or not, Bush maybe nodding to L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ people. She is an idol in the community. Elton John as a homosexual referring to his wife packing his bags. Maybe not putting himself in the song, you sort of feel like artists for decades had to hide their sexuality. Bush switched things and we do, at least, get this female astronaut ascend to the heavens. Kate Bush’s version got to number twelve. Quite an impressive feat, considering that not everyone loved what she did with the song. I did want to bring some interview archive in. The second interview mentions how Bush directed the video, which I always felt. This was not her randomly choosing an Elton John song. It is one she admired when it came out in 1972. One she bought as a single:

“I was really knocked out to be asked to be involved with this project, because I was such a big fan of Elton’s when I was little. I really loved his stuff. It’s like he’s my biggest hero, really. And when I was just starting to write songs, he was the only songwriter I knew of that played the piano and sang and wrote songs. So he was very much my idol, and one of my favourite songs of his was ‘Rocket Man’. Now, if I had known then that I would have been asked to be involved in this project, I would have just died… They basically said, ‘Would we like to be involved?’ I could choose which track I wanted… ‘Rocket Man’ was my favourite. And I hoped it hadn’t gone, actually – I hoped no one else was going to do it… I actually haven’t heard the original for a very long time. ‘A long, long time’ (laughs). It was just that I wanted to do it differently. I do think that if you cover records, you should try and make them different. It’s like remaking movies: you’ve got to try and give it something that makes it worth re-releasing. And the reggae treatment just seemed to happen, really. I just tried to put the chords together on the piano, and it just seemed to want to take off in the choruses. So we gave it the reggae treatment. It’s even more extraordinary (that the song was a hit) because we actually recorded the track over two years ago. Probably just after my last telly appearance. We were quite astounded when they wanted to release it as a single just recently.

BBC Radio 1 interview, 14 December 1991

I remember buying this when it came out as a single by Elton John. I couldn’t stop playing it – I loved it so much. Most artists in the mid seventies played guitar but Elton played piano and I dreamed of being able to play like him. Years later in 1989, Elton and Bernie Taupin were putting together an album called Two Rooms, which was a collection of cover versions of their songs, each featuring a different singer. To my delight they asked me to be involved and I chose Rocket Man. They gave me complete creative control and although it was a bit daunting to be let loose on one of my favourite tracks ever, it was really exciting. I wanted to make it different from the original and thought it could be fun to turn it into a reggae version. It meant a great deal to me that they chose it to be the first single release from the album.
That meant I also had the chance to direct the video which I loved doing – making it a performance video, shot on black and white film, featuring all the musicians and… the Moon!
Alan Murphy played guitars on the track. He was a truly special musician and a very dear friend. Tragically, he died just before we made the video so he wasn’t able to be there with us but you’ll see his guitar was placed on an empty chair to show he was there in spirit.

KateBush.com, February 2019”.

I do love how the song has this Reggae vibe to it. Bush also bringing Irish sounds into the mix. I guess that makes sense. She recorded the song in 1989, which was when The Sensual World was released. That album’s title track also featured Irish instruments and I think that she was keen to give this new light to a song that many people might have forgotten about. Concertina played by Alistair Anderson. Uilleann pipes from Davy Spillane. Beyond the album and a live appearance, you do not hear people talk about the song that much. When ranking her twenty-nine singles in 2018, The Guardian placed Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time)  last: “Few of Kate Bush’s professed influences – David Bowie, Roy Harper, Pink Floyd – are really audible in the music she makes, but she paid homage to her childhood hero Elton John on this cover, a rare misstep that misses the original’s unease in favour of an oddly twee reggae-ish lilt”. I think it is unfair. Whist not perhaps as impactful as the original, I do feel it is a brilliant rendition. The Observer put it inside the top fifty covers of all time in 2009. The song was included on last year’s Best of the Other Sides. Kate Bush recorded a few covers in her career. I do think that Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) is a brilliant song. One of Elton John’s best. Kate Bush choosing this song when she was part of the star-studded tribute album in 1991. A single that did pretty well but has never received huge critical appreciation, I did want to show some love ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary on 25th November. A typically unique and interesting take on this established song, what Kate Bush did with this gem is…

FITTINGLY impressive and impassioned.

FEATURE: The Rumours Are True: Why An Overdue Fleetwood Mac Documentary Can Cement and Also Reframe Their Legacy

FEATURE:

 

 

The Rumours Are True

IN THIS PHOTO: Fleetwood Mac (L-R: Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks/FRONT: John McVie)

Why An Overdue Fleetwood Mac Documentary Can Cement and Also Reframe Their Legacy

_________

MAYBE people…

have this idea of Fleetwood Mac being a band who were warring a lot. Their 1977 album, Rumours, seems to be marred by in-fighting, break-ups and excess. Even though the album is arguably their greatest work, there were tensions within the band. In relatively recent years, Fleetwood Mac have stopped touring. They will not record another album together it seems. Christine McVie died in 2022. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were not on speaking terms for the longest time. I think a lot of people only know the Rumours period of Fleetwood Mac’s career. They do not go further back. Also, today, that album is so dominant in terms of the conversation around them. Though the music is incredible, I guess we also look inside the recording and how tense it would have been. It does somewhat misshape or define a legacy of the band that is not the whole picture. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Rumours next year, there is a documentary coming. One that has been in the works for a while. Rolling Stone provided more details:

“Nearly two years after being announced, Frank Marshall’s Fleetwood Mac documentary has an official title and release date. Fleetwood Mac: The Chain arrives on Jan. 29, 2027, via Apple TV.

The film is the first fully-authorized documentary by the band, and the release is timed to the 50th anniversary of Rumours, which hit shelves on Feb. 4, 1977. Fittingly, it’s named after “The Chain,” a.k.a. the only song in the Fleetwood Mac discography that credits each member: Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and the late Christine McVie, who died in 2022.

Fleetwood Mac: The Chain traces the band’s history, from when Buckingham and Nicks joined the band on New Year’s Eve in December 1974 to the present. It boasts previously unseen footage and new interviews with the core members, digging deep into their catalog, their immediate rise to superstardom and rock & roll excess, and their highly publicized relationships and ultimate love for each other.

“I am fascinated by how this incredible story of enormous musical achievement came about,” Marshall said in 2024. “Fleetwood Mac somehow managed to merge their often chaotic and almost operatic personal lives into their own tale in real time, which then became legend. This will be a film about the music and the people who created it.”

Marshall has five Oscar nominations to his name, and is a recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. His recent music documentaries include 2020’s The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, 2024’s The Beach Boys, the upcoming Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes, and more. The Chain is produced by the Kennedy/Marshall Company with White Horse Pictures’ Nigel Sinclair, Nicholas Ferrall, Jeanne Elfant Festa, and Kennedy/Marshall’s Aly Parker.

The documentary’s title and official release date arrives a year after Buckingham and Nicks reissued their 1973 debut Buckingham Nicks, which had been out of print for decades. It was then revealed that the two are back on speaking terms, after Buckingham was fired from the band in 2018 (in 2024, Nicks told Rolling Stone the two had briefly interacted at McVie’s memorial a year prior). Buckingham has been quietly teasing big plans for next year, which might be the documentary in itself, or some form of a reunion.

“Stevie and I are talking all the time now,” Buckingham said last August. “Next year should be a pretty interesting year, because I think quite a few things will reveal themselves”.

I am not sure whether Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks will reunite and record together or Fleetwood Mac. I do feel it is unlikely the band will record again, having lost Christine McVie. I think they closed the lid on tour. Buckingham was fired from the band, but would he be welcomed back into the fold given the recent reconnection with Nicks? I do feel like a one-off concert to mark fifty years of Rumours would be a way of marking that occasion without having to commit to a new phase and lease. There are always rumours Fleetwood Mac will headline Glastonbury, but I think that hope has been dashed enough that it will not come to life.

Whilst Fleetwood Mac: The Chain is not going to shy away from the personal turmoil and fraught moments within the band, we will get this wider picture. So many younger listeners are connecting with the band. They may pick up Rumours or another album and not really know too much about it. Documentaries, if balanced and handled right, are a great way of knowing an artist and their career. In a transparent way. Too many documentaries gloss over things, or they can be a little too self-serving. What we will see if Fleetwood Mac’s legacy be cemented. In terms of their genius. They also loved one another. There were fallouts and bad times, yet there was this connection – this chain – that bound them together. So many define them with uglier days and this sense there was division. That only is true of a small portion of their career. In terms of the future, who knows what can happen. I do feel it is a long shot that the surviving members will play together and record. Though it is going to be fascinating to what form the documentary takes. Whether there are new interviews with Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. I do feel like it will help bring their music to new fans. Whilst acknowledging Rumours and that 1977 landmark period, also shining a light on earlier albums that gets overlooked perhaps. Also, seeing the different sides and dynamics to this decades-enduring band. Fleetwood Mac are also one of these bands that you feel should be brought to the big screen, though you wonder if they will ever approve a biopic. In any case, this 2027 documentary is going to go a long way to highlighting their incredible legacy and brilliance. The ups and downs. The fact that the documentary focuses on the music and the people who made it. Getting that direct and first-hand account and insight. Even if there are flickers of reconciliation but ultimately we may have seen the last of Fleetwood Mac as a recording and touring act, their influence and success cannot be denied. That is a chain that…

CAN never be broken.

FEATURE: Headline Acts: Some Contemporary Queens Who Should Be Top of the Bill at Next Year’s Biggest U.K. Festivals

FEATURE:

 

 

Headline Acts

IN THIS PHOTO: JADE

Some Contemporary Queens Who Should Be Top of the Bill at Next Year’s Biggest U.K. Festivals

_________

A week ago…

IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Dean

we saw several of this country’s biggest artists vie for the Mercury Prize. Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving and Jade’s THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! went up against the winner: RAYE’s THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. All very strong albums, though RAYE’s second studio album was a deserved winner. This year’s Mercury Prize really was about established artist, whereas previous years has seen more emerging or smaller acts compete for the prize. A drawback this year, I do however think that the best album won. What it did show is that we have several festival headliners. Not that Jade, RAYE and Olivia Dean have never headlined a festival. I just feel that, at a time when most major festivals struggle to affect gender balance when it comes to the headline acts, we have a few incredible women that springs to mind that could and should headline. What would be amazing is if Glastonbury Festival, for the first time ever – which we should not be saying over fifty years since it started – should have three female artists as Pyramid Stage headliners. I don’t think it will happen. I am pretty sure a band like Fontaines D.C. will be one of the headliners. They deserve to be. However, RAYE would be an incredible headliner. Doing the Saturday night, her and Fontaines D.C. as headliners would definitely be popular. Glastonbury would have locked in their headliners a long time ago, though I think the Mercury win cements RAYE’s cements her reputation as this headline-worthy artist. Seeing THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE brought to life at Glastonbury would be incredible. RAYE performed the album in full at a show at the Royal Albert Hall on Friday (23rd). I think that the next step would be a Glastonbury headline slot.

Whilst not guaranteed, I would be very surprised if RAYE was overlooked. Maybe she has dates next year that would clash. However, there are these women in music that should be headliners. Olivia Dean would also be an incredible headliner for Glastonbury. She will definitely be on the bill, though I am not sure she will be a headliner. That is a shame. That said, I would not bet another festival booking her as a headliner, given the momentum and success of The Art of Loving. With every accolade, Dean is showing what a special artist she is. I am not sure how big her U.S. exposure is. I could see her headlining Coachella next year. Whilst Glastonbury is not going to go all-female next year I fear, having RAYE and Olivia Dean sharing the Pyramid Stage would delight so many people. I do think that JADE is going to be a headline act last year. Last year, JADE completed the all-female line-up at Mighty Hoopla. A huge Pop festival, this was the first time there had been an all-female line-up. The statistics are shocking. Isle of Wight have announced their headliners and it is male-heavy. I feel Reading & Leeds next year will balance things but we will not see all the headline slots go to women. Glastonbury will not do it. Our biggest festivals really not reflecting the way women are defining and dominating modern music. In this NME interview, JADE did reveal that she would love to headline next year’s Reading & Leeds:

“It’s been a packed year for Jade, and the last time we saw her was when she threw one hell of a party at Reading festival, pulling one of the biggest crowds of the weekend.

“It was amazing,” the singer recalled. “I’d never played Reading before, it was my first time and I think as a pop artist you’re always a little apprehensive of how the crowd is going to react – especially at Reading. But they were amazing, they were well up for it. It was one of my favourite festivals that I’ve done this year and one ticked off the bucketlist.”

Could she follow in the footsteps of Charli XCX and Raye and become one of R+L’s pop headliners for a new generation?

“I mean I’d love to, I’d absolutely love to,” she replied. “That’s definitely a dream of mine to headline more festivals, and there are no better ones that Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury.”

Asked about the chances of her appearing at Worthy Farm in 2027, she replied: “Fingers crossed, we’ll see. It was so special there last year, and it was probably one of the best shows of my life. It was so, so special. I’d love to re-live it and do it again”.

JADE has performed at huge festivals, though having her headline Reading & Leeds would be a dream for her. She also deserves a Glastonbury headline slot. I do think that they need to book at least two female artists to headline, as they have been male-focused since their inception. JADE and RAYE are two artists who are very much ready to headline. JADE should headline Reading & Leeds and maybe Glastonbury. RAYE seems destined for Glastonbury. Olivia Dean is headlining a festival in South Africa next year, though she warrants a massive headline slot in the U.K. Nia Archives was also nominated for the Mercury for Emotional Junglist, and she is worthy of headline kudos. This magnificent artist, I do not know whether next year will see improvement regarding gender imbalance. Lily Allen and Tinashe are headline names. As is Phoebe Bridgers. If festivals like Primavera Sound can affect gender balance with their headline artists, major festivals here struggle. Many think Harry Styles will headline Glastonbury, so that might mean male dominance. I don’t know. Watching the Mercury Prize and some incredible British queens, we saw spotlighted headline artists in our midst. That being rewarded and realised next year would be…

RICHLY deserve.

FEATURE: Spotlight: HoneyLuv

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

HoneyLuv

_________

I wanted to spend some time…

PHOTO CREDIT: Yas Avdji

spotlighting the remarkable HoneyLuv. Prior to coming to a recent interview with Metal Magazine, there are a couple from earlier in the year that I want to get to. This interview from Cold is one I am keen to start with. Hailing from Cleveland, Ohio, she is now based in Berlin. Someone who has this soulful House blend, where she can mix “sensual energies with upbeat, jovial sound”. Sexy grooves and soulfulness. No wonder her work and sets are so memorable and popular:

“Before she became a DJ/producer, HoneyLuv, née Taylor Character, experimented with different career paths. As a kid, she imagined herself as a basketball player. Then, she joined the US Navy in 2016 on a four-year contract at a naval base in Oxnard, California. This was a strategic move in hopes of financing her college tuition. At the time, she was studying criminology at the University of La Verne in Cali. But while working on drones in the Navy, it quickly became apparent that she didn’t want to become another cog in the machine.

Music, and more specifically DJing, became a necessary creative outlet. The musical worlds she built in her own time became more than an escape. Today she occupies space on some of the world’s biggest stages, with a career trajectory that confirms you need not stick to one niche to excel. Instead, it seems the key to success is honing the skill it takes to pivot and reshaping your goals as you move through the world.

Before she became a DJ/producer, HoneyLuv, née Taylor Character, experimented with different career paths. As a kid, she imagined herself as a basketball player. Then, she joined the US Navy in 2016 on a four-year contract at a naval base in Oxnard, California. This was a strategic move in hopes of financing her college tuition. At the time, she was studying criminology at the University of La Verne in Cali. But while working on drones in the Navy, it quickly became apparent that she didn’t want to become another cog in the machine.

Music, and more specifically DJing, became a necessary creative outlet. The musical worlds she built in her own time became more than an escape. Today she occupies space on some of the world’s biggest stages, with a career trajectory that confirms you need not stick to one niche to excel. Instead, it seems the key to success is honing the skill it takes to pivot and reshaping your goals as you move through the world.

PHOTO CREDIT: Yas Avdji

Community is another central feature of HoneyLuv’s practice. This comes to life with projects like her Label, 4 Tha Luv. Established in 2024, 4 Tha Luv is a celebration of house music and its deep history, rooted in Black and LGBTQ+ sounds. The purpose of the project is to highlight the hard work of those who built the house music we know today while paving a way forward for new talent to enter the industry. HoneyLuv is now laser-focused on the releases of her upcoming singles. “I have my first song that I’m releasing for my label, called ‘Good Measure’. I’m really excited to get that out this summer.”

Not only does she pour into her own musical practice, but she’s also influenced by her surroundings and her environment. “Seeing other people express themselves differently is really inspiring. I don’t want to limit what I express in my music. To see them do the same with their clothes and art, it’s really inspirational.” In HoneyLuv’s eyes, it’s crucial to seek innovation, while holding true to your authentic voice. “We’re constantly evolving, so it’s important to evolve yourself as an artist, but also stay true to the core of it.”

Beyond music, HoneyLuv is a self-described “foodie,” obsessed with trying new flavours and eager to boast about the many chefs in her life. “I have a lot of chef friends that I would love to collaborate with,” she says. She spends much of her time visiting restaurants. When she used to live in London, there were quite a few places she would frequent, that came to know her by name.

Brat in Shoreditch – a Basque-Welsh fusion restaurant housed in a former pub – is one London favourite. And if you’re visiting Berlin, she recommends Ari’s, a Peruvian-inspired luncheonette with “the best pancakes I’ve ever had in my life”. Or November Brasserie, “this really delicious Japanese fusion spot.” Berlin, she estimates, is a “small New York”, a smorgasbord of cultures and people she can ceaselessly explore.

When asked about some of her biggest creative inspirations, Willy Chavarria – the Chicano designer who has won acclaim for his outfits inspired by his queer, Latin and working-class upbringing – came to mind. “I love what he’s doing. It’s just very street. It’s hip hop.” Part of HoneyLuv’s excitement toward this designer and his work comes from the way he seamlessly world-builds. Blending sartorial excellence into experiential runway shows, every detail is considered, down to the “music culture” he highlights.

Reading is another hobby – important for grounding herself against the music industry’s nonstop relent. Recently, she picked up a copy of The Alchemist, Paul Coelho’s seminal fable of a young shepherd boy who ventures to the Pyramids in pursuit of ancient treasure. “This industry can be a lot on mental health because there’s a lot of ups and downs”, she says”.

Before getting to the final interview, HoneyLuv was interviewed by Magnetic Mag and was asked about her Miami Music Week run, and how she is less confined to genres. Whereas House was her main genre and focus, HoneyLuv responds to the energy and flow in the room. It is an interesting evolution for this incredible D.J. and artist:

“Do you still think in genres when you build a set or has that structure started to dissolve for you?

That structure has definitely dissolved for me. I’m still rooted in house music, but I don’t think in strict genres anymore, it’s more about all the different sides of what house can be. I move through sounds based on feeling, not labels. It’s all about energy and how it connects in the room.

Have you noticed more DJs blending styles and moods in ways that didn’t feel possible ten years ago?

Yeah, I’ve definitely noticed that, especially with local DJs.

A lot of the DJs I’ve seen around Berlin are blending styles and moods in really fluid ways, and it’s been really inspiring to witness. At the same time, I think some touring DJs still stick pretty closely to one sound. Seeing that contrast has pushed me to be more open in my own sets, still rooted in house, but not limiting myself. It’s made me want to play more freely and follow what feels right.

How do you make sure your sets still feel cohesive when you’re moving across sounds and eras?

For me, cohesion comes from intention and how everything flows together.

I’m always incorporating new sounds and discovering new artists, so my sets are constantly evolving and never stuck in one era. But I’m intentional about how I blend those newer records with what’s come before, so it all feels connected. It’s about creating a path that moves forward while still fitting the moment.

What’s a genre you never thought you’d play but now it feels at home in your rotation?

I’d say Baile funk is one I never thought I’d play, along with touches of dubstep and garage.

They’re not genres I usually listen to, but being exposed to new sounds has shifted my perspective. If it feels good, has a groove, and I connect with it, I’m open to it. At that point, it’s not about genre anymore, it’s about the feeling”.

Metal Magazine spoke with HoneyLuv as she played at Amsterdam Dance Event 2026. Also, “she’s also looking beyond the dancefloor with the launch of her own label, 4 THA LUV, a project dedicated to creating opportunities for underrepresented voices and building a community where everyone can find their place”. They chatted to HoneyLuv her about her latest single, Good Measure (I Like It):

“Before becoming a DJ, you dreamed of playing basketball professionally and even served in the US Navy. Your journey has been anything but conventional. Looking back, did you ever imagine your life would take such a different direction?

Honestly, not at all! But if you’d told me years ago this is where I’d be, I definitely would’ve believed you because I’ve always believed anything is possible. I just never knew what the journey would look like getting here!

You started making music in your barracks after long shifts in the military. Do you remember the moment you realised this could become your future?

Honestly, I think when I first started DJing in my barracks, I was like, yeah, I wanna make this into a real thing. And from that moment I just became obsessed with the idea of making it happen.

“Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m literally living the life I once dreamed of.”

Congratulations on the Grammy consideration campaign for Don't Stop with Muni Long. Last week, you shared a beautiful message about being a girl from Cleveland with big dreams. What did that younger version of you imagine for her future?

It was always traveling the world and eating good food for sure! Those were always two things I dreamed of doing, so the fact that I get to do both while doing something I love is pretty amazing.

Your sound draws from the roots of house music while incorporating R&B and soul influences. How would you describe the direction your music is taking right now?

I feel like my sound is always evolving, especially now that I’m living in Berlin and discovering so many new sounds that I’m really drawn to. I’ve started incorporating those influences into my sets as well. A HoneyLuv set from a year ago sounds completely different from what it does today. You’ll always hear those house, R&B, and soulful influences, but we’re definitely getting a lot darker with it now, and I’m loving that direction.

You're also joining conversations at ADE about supporting women in the music industry. From your own experience, where do you think the scene still needs to improve?

I think we still have a long way to go when it comes to equal opportunities and representation, especially for women, and Black women in particular in dance music. There’s so much incredible talent out there, but not everyone is given the same opportunities to be seen or heard. I want to see more women headlining, in leadership positions, and behind the scenes making decisions. And not just because they’re women, but because they genuinely deserve to be there”.

The tremendous HoneyLuv is someone who I discovered recently and want to share with other people. She has fans and followers in the U.K., though perhaps she is better know in other parts of the world. I do wonder if there is going to be an E.P. or album next year. Stunning singles this year such as Don’t Stop and High in Ibiza are tremendous. Go and follow this amazing queen. The magnetic and majestic HoneyLuv is…

A true wonder.

__________

Follow HoneyLuv

PHOTO CREDIT: Yas Avdji

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/honeyluv

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@theehoneyluv

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV28C0vHZTOuhmMiBKdaqWA

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1sl3gVNz3Nxd4poA8f76sl?si=NYIlJh2QQHK5kJA5hnUsxg

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Jazzy

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

Jazzy

_________

I have featured…

Jazzy before, but I am revisiting now, as she recently released her debut album, Peace & Patience. I will end with a review of it. Even though I wrote about her a few months ago, as her debut album is out, I wanted to come back to Jazzy. I am starting with BBC and their recent feature about this sensational Irish artist. She is someone who I have been following for a while. She is currently touring the U.K., so if you can get to see her then do so:

“Releasing your first album is a big step for any artist, but for Jazzy it's one that's followed some huge strides.

The Irish singer and DJ has been streamed more than a billion times and worked with industry heavyweights including Calvin Harris.

If that's not enough, on Saturday she has her biggest gig yet when she'll be playing tracks like No Bad Vibes and Someday in front of a home crowd in Dublin.

For Jazzy, writing an album has always been in the back of her mind and now, finally, it's time to hit send.

She's previously released dozens of singles, building up a monthly listenership over 10 million strong, but Peace and Patience is her first full-length work.

"It's been quite a few years of creating some smaller projects," she tells BBC Newsbeat.

"That's given me enough experience now to feel like it was the right moment."

'I wasn't thinking about going viral'

The 30-year-old, real name Yasmine Byrne, has been putting out music for more than five years and collabed with the likes of Sonny Fodera, Rossi. and KILIMANJARO on some of her biggest tracks.

Dance music has boomed in recent years, with Spotify previously telling Newsbeat that since 2020 the amount under-25s listen to the genre has grown by more than 73% globally.

It also dominated festival line-ups over the summer - including Radio 1's Big Weekend which dedicated all its stages to dance music on the opening night.

But artists in the genre have often moved away from albums, opting instead to release EPs and singles.

Jazzy has noticed the change, saying it feels "a lot different now, with people kind of siding with virality rather than quality of music".

I want to come to Music Week - https://www.musicweek.com/talent/read/jazzy-on-her-debut-lp-the-solutions-needed-for-ireland-s-nightclubs-and-the-laziness-of-ai/095309 - and their interview. As they write, “Here, joined by Polydor Label Group president Ben Mortimer, Chaos Records, Attention Management and collaborator Mark Ralph, Jazzy talks EDM culture, the merits of experimentation, the perils of AI and her enduring love of “a little rave cave”.

“The album’s been in the works for a while so I’m so curious to see what everyone else thinks,” she says with a big smile, also revealing that some of the material was written two years ago.

It checks out that Jazzy is keen to be at Ralph’s studio today. She’s ready to make fresh music, though today’s session is purely for “vibing”, with no specific project in mind. That adds up, too, because as Jazzy reminds us frequently, she lets her life and her music “happen organically”.

Such authenticity lines up with the moment Jazzy finds herself in now. She’s a dance star in her own right, kicking back against the featured artist tag she is sometimes narrowly labelled with.

Making music, she says, is a collaboration most of the time anyway. And when she does link up with other DJs and producers, she debunks any preconceived ideas that she’s purely a vocalist.

“I’m my own artist and I don’t want to be known as a ‘feature artist,’” she says. “So when I go into the studio, I make sure that it’s going to be a collaboration and not just, ‘Oh, you want me to come in and do a vocal for you?’ I very much want to be involved in what the song sounds like and how it’s built.”

Having autonomy and remaining true to herself and her roots is at Jazzy’s core. A Crumlin native, to this day she still lives in Dublin county, where she recently purchased her first home.

A racing green holdall placed at Jazzy’s feet on her new album’s cover provides a fitting metaphor for a life lived mostly on the road in recent years.

“I bring that iconic bag with me as I travel the world, and it represents all that stuff,” she explains. “The album is a big ‘thank you’ to the people who’ve built me, made me the way I am, kept my feet on the ground. I’m glad I’m not getting too big for my boots!”

She needn’t be so humble. Ben Mortimer, president of Polydor Label Group (PLG), praises Jazzy as “a brilliant example” leading the charge for Chaos.

“I’m incredibly proud of what Chaos has built in such a short space of time,” he tells Music Week.

Chaos launched in 2023 and achieved a chart breakthrough with its debut release, Giving Me, which was also Jazzy’s maiden single.

“Within its first few years, the team has established a label with real weight in dance and electronic music, rooted in great A&R instincts and a real understanding of the culture around artists,” Mortimer adds. “Jazzy is a brilliant example of that. The label has become an important part of PLG, and combines a great team with exciting, creative new artists.”

That appreciation of where Jazzy is from is part of Chaos’ approach in honouring her heavy involvement in Dublin’s club and hip-hop scene (she formerly fronted the rap collective Powerful Creative Minds: PCM).

It’s a strategy spun out of Jazzy’s ethos – which has been “Dublin to the world” from the start – shares Chaos GM and director of dance marketing, Silas Howison-Waughray.

Putting Dublin on the map has taken “a lot of graft and continues to do so,” he adds, but she is “well on her way to making it a reality”.

Howison-Waughray puts that down to the fact that Jazzy is a “unique” artist.

“Being an Irish singer-songwriter and touring DJ, with all original vocals on her own records and a strong creative vision, puts her in a totally different space to a lot of acts in dance music,” he explains. “She’s able to put herself both visually and sonically at the forefront of every aspect of the campaign, which removes the limits of success in our minds.”

Jack Duckworth, A&R director at Polydor and head of A&R at Chaos, signed Jazzy after a lunch in Dublin four years ago. He knew from the off that it was imperative to recognise her background as a singer, songwriter, DJ and raver.

“It’s always been about making sure she’s had one foot in the underground and the other in the crossover world,” explains Duckworth. “We wanted people to know Jazzy was coming from the culture. When we signed her to Chaos, she was well rooted in the D12 [postcode] Dublin house scene, which was popping off. She’d just come off the back of Make Me Feel Good. We knew we needed to be fluid and nimble.”

And, as is the case in electronic music, fans expect a steady stream of releases.

“We set out a regular flow,” explains Duckworth. “Some tracks would cater to Jazzy’s club audience and others to her crossover one.”

Those crossover tunes include No Bad Vibes, her 2024 collaboration with Zambian-British DJ Kilimanjaro, which takes its cues from the slow, protracted beats of amapiano as well as Afro house. It marked a shift from Jazzy’s punchier dance hits like Giving Me or Somedays. No Bad Vibes, Howison-Waughray adds, became one of Universal Music Group’s biggest-performing sounds on Snapchat.

Securing the “right” collaborations, including High On Me, a No.18 single released last year with Rossi, has been key to “really super-charging the project”, Duckworth adds.

“To quote Paddy McLean,” he says, nodding to the Chaos co-GM, “we wanted ‘to be everywhere, anywhere, all at once’.”

Howison-Waughray echoes those sentiments.

“The primary goal for both the label and Jazzy from the outset was long-term artist development,” he says. “This album is the biggest moment in her journey and we have high expectations in the UK, Ireland and globally, but it’s another milestone in a long career that will stand the test of time and continue to evolve.”

Belying their company’s name, Attention Management’s Jo Eales says that she and founder Iain Watt prefer to work “quietly” behind the scenes, but are “happy to be loud about our pride in Jazzy”.

“She’s one of one: a phenomenal DJ, a brilliant writer and most importantly, genuinely a fantastic human being,” Eales says.

Eales remarks that Jazzy’s success so far is down to her “genuine credibility” in the dance music space.

“In an age where anyone can be a DJ, being a curator is the true epitome of what it is to be a DJ,” she says. “Jazzy eats, sleeps and breathes dance music. We joke that she wakes up and goes straight to 140BPM, which is unbelievable for a person with such a chilled demeanour. Maybe it’s that dichotomy that keeps the wheels on when everything is as hectic as it is for her.”

The album is home to plenty of the kind of house bops you’d expect, topped with her husky, soulful tones, but there is some experimentation, too. On Genuine, she sings over a crisp, 2-step beat co-produced with UK garage legend MJ Cole.

“I’ve explored quite a few sub-genres of house in my music before, but I wanted there to be more variety,” says Jazzy. “MJ Cole is obviously iconic over here, and it was great to have him. We sent Genuine to him and he just really put that 2-step magic into it. It was something I hadn’t really tried before.”

Deeply melodic, bouncy basslines occupy much of the album’s latter tracks including Get Me Started and the Chris Lorenzo collaboration, Invisible. Elsewhere, amapiano, funky, ’90s rave and hip-house can be heard on tracks ranging from Fantasy to Funky Flow and Elevate (feat. Reggie).

If that’s a dizzying array of dance, that’s business as usual for Jazzy. Dance music is, as Eales reminds us, what consumes her. She has an “amazing talent”, says Eales, not only as a songwriter and a DJ, but also as a curator.

“I really do love it so much,” says Jazzy, chuckling. “From the minute I started listening to it, I felt like that, and I still feel like that now. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

I am going to finish with a review of Peace & Patience from HotPress. I am surprised that it has not received more reviews, as it is one of the most important debut albums of recent years. People getting to see Jazzy on the road at the moment. There is no denying her brilliance. Someone who is going to be releasing music for years to come:

“Has a recent debut album from an Irish artist ever been more highly anticipated than Jazzy’s Peace & Patience? Perhaps CMAT, Hozier or Fontaines D.C. But that is the Mount Rushmore type of territory we are talking about.

After scoring a massive hit in 2022 with ‘Make Me Feel Good’ (No. 1 in Ireland and No. 4 in Britain) with Belters Only, Jazzy’s debut single ‘Giving Me’ subsequently clocked up a quarter-of-a-billion Spotify streams. Her first solo collection, Constellations, followed in October 2023. Its six tracks established her sonic framework: house, touches of trance, and the dancefloor as a place to shake off your troubles.

Subsequent mammoth collaborations included ‘Somedays’ with Sonny Fodera and D.O.D.; ‘No Bad Vibes’ with Kilimanjaro; ‘High On Me’ with Rossi.; and ‘Satisfy’ with Calvin Harris – records that place Jazzy within the global dance scene. Hence the heavy hitting posse that collaborate on Peace & Patience, including Mark Ralph, Tre Jean-Marie, Theo Hutchcraft and Chris Lorenzo.

The latter features on ‘Invisible’, a heavy bass groover with a superb Jazzy vocal, which clubbers across the world will soon be losing themselves in.

But this is also an origin record. ‘Intro’, for example, features the voices of Crumlin natives declaring Jazzy as one of their own. Indeed, ‘My People’ is a tribute to the Dublin and the community that shaped her – magnificently threading her signature sound of polished nocturnal pop and personal reflection.

When the Choice Music Prize field is announced in January, expect Jazzy to be a bookies favourite.

9/10”.

I will wrap up here. The brilliant Jazzy is someone who I have a lot of respect for. Peace & Patience stands alongside the best albums of this year. If you have not followed her yet then make sure that you do so now, as she is a major talent. The sensational Jazzy is one of the greatest artists…

IN the world.

__________

Follow Jazzy

Official:

https://www.jazzy.ie/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jazzy

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@jazzy

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCagcrKRy2laLZ6u3MD9z4Zw

Spotify:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCagcrKRy2laLZ6u3MD9z4Zw

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Jeff Buckley at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Jeff Buckley shot in New York in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Merri Cyr

Jeff Buckley at Sixty

_________

THERE is a reason why…

I am thinking about Jeff Buckley. Born on 17th November, 1966, we mark what would have been his sixtieth birthday soon. We sadly lost Buckley in 1997 at the age of thirty. It was one of the greatest losses in music history. Even if he only released one studio album, 1994’s Grace, he left behind a lot of material. Incredible live performances and interviews. He has inspired so many artists and is recognised as one of the finest artists ever. Grace was not really a success in his native U.S. in 1994. It was far more embraced in Europe. The U.K. too. Since his death, it is seen as a classic and one fo the best debuts ever. It is sad he perhaps did not get the ackolwdgement he deserved in his lifetime. Though, he became weary of constant touring and pressures near the end of his life. He was in the process of constructing songs for his second studio album in 1997 when he died. Rather than wonder what could have been, we need to celebrate his legacy and brilliance. To mark his sixtieth birthday, I have compiled a mixtape of songs from throughout his career. Included are songs from the posthumous album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. Prior to getting to that, AllMusic’s biography of this legendary artist gives us a glimpse into his career and impact. Though he was only thirty when he died, the impact his music has made in the years since is massive:

“A mercurial singer and guitarist whose mystique was matched by his incredible an talent, Jeff Buckley wed the nuanced improvisations of jazz with the soulful expression and raw attack of blues and rock. As the son of cult songwriter Tim Buckley, he faced more expectations and preconceived notions than most singer/songwriters, so perhaps it wasn't surprising that his music was related to his father's by only the thinnest of margins. Buckley's voice was grand and sweeping, which fit with the mock-operatic grandeur of his Van Morrison-meets-Led Zeppelin music. His audacious debut, Grace, made him one of the most popular alternative artists of the '90s, accentuated by his early and tragic death in 1997, and his cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" virtually redefined the song for a modern audience. Although Buckley didn't amassed a large body of work during this lifetime, a succession of posthumous releases, most of them live, have been pulled from the vault, while various books have emphasized his lasting legacy. The documentary film, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley, premiered in 2025, nearly three decades after his death.

Buckley began playing while in high school. Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles to study music; while he was there, he performed with several jazz and funk bands, as well as playing with Shinehead, a leader in the dancehall reggae movement. A few years later, he moved to New York, forming Gods & Monsters with the experimental guitarist Gary Lucas. The band became a hip name, yet its lifespan was short. Buckley began a solo career playing clubs and coffee houses, building up a considerable following. Soon, he signed a record deal with Columbia Records, releasing the Live at Sin-e EP in November of 1993. It received good reviews, yet they didn't compare to the raves Buckley's full-length debut, 1994's Grace, received. Unlike the EP, the album was recorded with a full band, which gave the record textures that surprised some of his longtime New York followers. Nevertheless, it made several year-end "Best of 1994" lists and earned him a belated alternative hit, "Last Goodbye," in the spring of 1995.

A long hiatus followed as Buckley worked on material for his follow-up effort, provisionally titled My Sweetheart the Drunk. Originally slated to be produced by Tom Verlaine, who later dropped out of the project, Buckley finally began work on the record in Memphis during the late spring of 1997. On the night of May 29, he and a friend traveled to the local Mud Island Harbor, where Buckley spontaneously decided to go swimming in the Mississippi River and waded into the water fully clothed. A few minutes later, he disappeared under the waves; authorities were quickly contacted, but to no avail -- on June 4, his body was finally found floating near the city's famed Beale Street area. Buckley was 30 years old.

A collection of unreleased recordings, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, appeared in 1998, and two live albums arrived during 2000-2001, Mystery White Boy and Live a l'Olympia. Over the next decade and a half, other posthumous records appeared -- the compilation So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley in 2007, the live album Grace Around the World in 2009 -- but the biggest excavation from the vaults was 2016's You and I, which presented cover versions the singer/songwriter had recorded early in his career. Among a trio of archival live sets released in 2019 was the full concert of Live at Wetlands, New York 8/16/94, some of which had previously been issued as B-sides. In 2025, director Amy Berg premiered an authorized documentary film, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley, examining Buckley's life and career”.

On 17th November, we remember Jeff Buckley on his sixtieth birthday. Artists such as Thom Yorke, Matt Bellamy, Lana Del Rey, Adele, Chris Martin, Chris Cornell, and Anna Calvi have been inspired by this much missed artist. Grace remains this masterpiece that captured the sound of a young artist who should have had a long career with many more albums. Bittersweet to remember him on his sixtieth birthday. However, few artists have the same legacy as Jeff Buckley. That will continue to grow for decades more. One of these artist that was unique and truly special. The likes of which…

WE will never see again.

FEATURE: Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black at Twenty: Her Influences, and the Artists She Inspired

FEATURE:

 

 

Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black at Twenty

PHOTO CREDIT: Mischa Richter

Her Influences, and the Artists She Inspired

_________

FOR anyone who is a…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sarah J. Edwards

fan of Amy Winehouse and her album, Back to Black, to listen back to BBC Radio 6 Music’s programmes from yesterday. They celebrated the album and Winehouse. Interviews with those who knew and worked with her. Songs from Back to Black. Because the album turns twenty on 27th October, I am sharing a playlist at the end that contains songs from the 20th Anniversary Edition of Back to Black, in addition to songs from artists that are inspired by Amy Winehouse. Tracks from artists that influenced Winehouse. A blend that celebrates this once-in-a-generation talent. In a way, it is almost sad that the anniversary will pass, as we do not get to talk about Amy Winehouse and Back to Black. However, it is an album that will influence and resound forever. Artists today you can hear are directly impacted by this 2006 masterpiece. Twenty years after its release, the amazing and unforgettable Back to Black has…

FEW equals.

FEATURE: No Better Station: BBC Radio 6 Music, the Mercury Prize and Beyond

FEATURE:

 

 

No Better Station

BBC Radio 6 Music, the Mercury Prize and Beyond

_________

LAST night…

RAYE won the Mercury Prize for her album, THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. I wrote a feature where I said the Mercury Prize will be won by either RAYE or Olivia Dean. Dean’s album, The Art of Loving, was a huge commercial success. I said Dean would win, but I am glad that RAYE won. It was an incredible award ceremony. Held at the Utilita Arena Newcastle, I was following along on BBC Radio 6 Music. Hosted by Deb Grant and Nathan Shepherd, they were broadcasting live from Newcastle. More than write about the Mercury Prize and RAYE’s deserved win, I have particular pride in BBC Radio 6 Music. Their coverage was exceptional. Lauren Laverne was hosting. Matt Everitt was interviewing artists nominated and was the first to speak with RAYE when she came off the stage following her win. Their passion for the ceremony and the way they covered it was brilliant. I am already looking forward to next year’s ceremony, as again they will be there and covering things. Even though the winner has been crowned, I would still advise people to check out the episodes Matt Everitt presented, where he looked at the dozen nominated albums. Many of the artists speaking about their albums. You got a real insight into each artist and the record. Everitt also predicted RAYE would win too! It is brilliant that a station can do something like this. It is not only the Mercury Prize that makes me proud of BBC Radio 6 Music. There is so much going on. As I write this, Lauren Laverne is presenting and her show is dedicated to Amy Winehouse. Her album, Back to Black, turns twenty. “Marking 20 years since the release of the late musician's iconic album ‘Back to Black’, 6 Music celebrates Amy Winehouse and her important contribution to music. We'll be playing music from Amy herself, her musical heroes, and those she continues to inspire. In the final hour of the show we'll be playing music from Amy's personal jukebox, and Lauren Laverne will be in conversation with Darcus Beese OBE who signed Amy”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by BBC Radio 6 Music (@bbc6music)

It is a brilliant time to follow the station. I know other radio stations have special episodes and go deep, but BBC Radio 6 Music do it all the time. It is a pity that I do not have more time to listen to the station. Working full-time, I try and catch it as much as I can. Looking ahead, there is a lot to look forward to. The station turns twenty-five in March, so I know there will be celebration around that. One of the biggest regrets is not being able to work for the stations and get involved that way, as it would be a dream. Though listening and getting all these audio treats is great. When they spotlight an album or do an artist feature. Marking twenty years of Back to Black. There is something about BBC Radio 6 Music that you do not get with other stations. This unique edge. I think that BBC Radio 6 Music is the best station in the world. Their endless passion for music. The fact that they do so much. Not a lot of people write about them. Very rare that you get any features about the station. Their listening figures are high, though you kind of wish there was more written about the station, as some people are missing out. I was listening along last night at the coverage of the Mercury Prize. It is hard to put my finger on it. Some stations merely nod to it. BBC Radio 6 Music go deeper. You can follow BBC Radio 6 Music on Instagram. Go and listen back to their Mercury Prize coverage, and also check out their celebration of Any Winehouse and Back to Black. Rather than just do a social media post, I did want to write a bit more. No real huge point or conversation. Just me fondly looking back last night and the exceptional Mercury Prize coverage. It is not an isolated thing. The station is always putting these incredible programmes on. In fact, rather than Lauren Laverne solely discussing Amy Winehouse, the station is dedicating the day’s schedule to her. I would compel everyone to listen back to all the shows. I started with RAYE and her Mercury Prize win. This ambitious and long concept album, RAYE said how much she valued albums. I think that is why BBC Radio 6 Music cover the event. They love the album and what it means. In an age of streaming and people handpicking tracks, we need to truly connect with the album and its value. The Mercury Prize is that recognition of the album. The best from the U.K. and Ireland. One of the criticisms this year was that the shortlist was made up of major artists and very little in the way of emerging talent. A deviation from its purpose and roots. Though I think this year is an anomaly in that sense and next year will see a shift towards newer and independent artists. In any case, I did want to shout out BBC Radio 6 Music and their coverage. And what the station do every day. That is to produce this world-class and incredibly interesting and passion broadcasting. If you are not aware of them and are not yet tuned in, I would encourage you to…

START listening now.