Before you leave

Josh Farrow is an Illinois-born kid who played punk rock music as a teenager, eventually headed to Nashville in his early 20s to chase after his future wife — pulling triple-duty as lead singer, songwriter and ringleader.  He is inspired by the New Orleans funk of Allen Touissant and the Chicago blues of his hometown — chasing down success on his own terms, bringing with him a sound that’s smoky, soulful, and signature.

“Before You Leave,” was a finalist in the John Lennon Songwriting Competition.  

This old house feels empty
There’s nothing I can hear
But the sad and silent echo
Of better years

I feel something breathe
In this dead and hollow room
It’s just this heavy old heart
That’s hanging on you

So before you leave
Darling, won’t you le me down easy?
Before you go
Won’t you help me ease my achin’ bones?
So before you leave
Darling, please, won’t you take what’s left of me

Living like it’s dark out
And the breeze is running cold
It’s moving through me like a haunting ghost
A photograph by the beside, it’s all that’s left I own
It’s a picture of a woman and all I’ve known.
So before you leave
Darling, won’t you let me down easy?
Before you go
Won’t you help me ease my achin’ bones?
So before you leave
Darling, please, I’m begging
won’t you take what’s left of me

~ Josh Farrow, from “Before you Leave (Atwood Magazine, Oct 26, 2016)

It’s been a long day! (Hit it Moji! Hit it!)

No one’s going to cry for me if you don’t…
If you’ve got a minute,
if you’ve got a space in your heart
Keep my memory
Don’t let me fall behind, no, no, don’t let me fall behind…


Notes:

 

St. Paul & The Broken Bones

St. Paul & The Broken Bones is a six-piece soul band based out of Birmingham, Alabama, which formed in 2012.

“Paul, according to all the reviews and stuff that are written of the band, he looks like your high school history teacher, or he looks like Drew Carey,” Phillips explains. “Bottom line is that we’re a bunch of kind of nerdy-looking white guys, and when this sort of earth-shaking soul roar comes out of his mouth for the first time, you can always hear the air being sucked out of the room.” Janeway wasn’t raised to be a soul singer. He grew up in rural Alabama in a strict religious household. “I could only listen to, like, gospel Christian music,” Janeway says.” And he got most of his musical chops from church. He even trained to be a preacher. “I learned more from preaching than I did singing in church,” Janeway explains, “because you learn a little bit more about how to interact with the crowd — feeling momentum, just feeling that intensity — and it’s not a whole lot different than what we do now.”

(NPR Music: From Preacher To Grass Cutter To Earth-Shaking Soul Singer)

Liked this? Don’t miss I’ve Been Loving You and All I Ever Wonder.

Find the group’s 2016 album Sea of Noise on iTunes

Walking Cross-Town. With Spirits.

feather-light-weightless

The subway rumbles underground, the earth trembles under my feet. Out of the corner of my eye, a flourish and a rustle. I turn.

Blue waste paper twirls in a whirlwind. It spins upward in the current before landing gently on the concrete in front of the hulking sky scraper.

Odd.

It’s 6 am. A still, windless morning in Midtown. A single piece of wastepaper lifts the Blues, lightness fills the cavity.

I turn my head back to see it stir.

Zeke?

Is that you?

 


Notes:

 

Rag’n’Bone Man


Rag’n’Bone Man (born Rory Graham) sings “Human“. He’s a British singer-songwriter from Uckfield, near Brighton.  At 15, he started he career by testing his rap skills at open-mic hip hop nights.  At 19, encouraged by his father, he sang at a blues jam in a local pub and doors started opening for acoustic gigs. His career has since taken off.  You can find his pages on Facebook, his web site and on iTunes.

 

Satisfy Me


Michael Cameron Anderson, 27, known professionally as Anderson East, is a rhythm and blues/pop musician from Athens, Alabama, later based in Nashville, Tennessee.  His grandfather was a Baptist preacher, his father sang in the church choir, and his mother played the piano in church when he was young.

Wheels take me, anyplace today


Kaleo is an Icelandic indie pop / rock / folk band established in 2012 and their first major public appearance Iceland. Firmly a phenomenon in their home country of Iceland, the four-piece band Kaleo is set to descend upon foreign shores in 2015, bringing their gorgeous blend of folk, blues, country, and rock to a wider mainstream audience in America. Best friends since attending elementary school in the small town outside of Reykjavik, the band began playing together at the age of 17. They named the band Kaleo, which means “the sound” in Hawaiian.  Kaleo has since moved to Austin, TX. (Source: officialkaleo.com)


[…]You and me together riding into the sun 
Live without care, with the wind in my hair 
Driving through the desert, yeah I’ll go anywhere 
Take me where the wheels take me, far away 
Wheels take me, I can’t stay 
Wheels take, any place today 
Imagine myself in an automobile 
a hundred miles an hour if you know how I feel. 
Alone with my mind, leave my worries behind 
I might even reach the border, it’s just a matter of time 
I said take me where the wheels take me, far away. 
Wheels take me, can’t stay. 
Wheels take me, any place today. 
Ohh I’m going to San Diego, here I come. 
San Fransisco, it won’t be long. 
Sacramento, yeah in the sun. I just might go 
I said I’m going to San Diego and San Jose 
San Francisco and hang by the bay 
Sacramento, yeah all the way I just might go 
all the way to Mexico oho 
I just might go all the way down to Mexico.

Suzannah Espie


From Suzannahespie.com:

Suzannah Espie is a Melbourne, Australia based singer songwriter who has been casting spells over audiences ever since she first took to the stage with her alt-country pop band, GIT, in 1997. A woman of compelling beauty — statuesque, with piercing blue eyes framed by golden curls — she has a voice to match, an intoxicating mix of country, soul, blues and pop. A gentle, sweet trill that can move grown men to tears one moment, or an Aretha-esque hellcat belt that can raise the roof the next; however she sings it though, it’s still unmistakeably Suzannah Espie. It is as a solo artist Espie has truly come into her own…

It’s hard to believe now that, despite her prodigious talent, Espie was beset by self-doubt and shyness early on in her career, which she moved to Melbourne from Fremantle at aged 18 to pursue in earnest. She tells of forcing herself to get up at Fitzroy’s Rainbow Hotel to sing once a week. “Then I’d go and have a cry in the toilets afterwards because I thought it was so horrible.”

Collard recalls the first time he went over to Suzannah’s house to play some music together. “Absolutely nothing happened,” he says with a laugh. “She was too nervous to sing a note.”

While Espie’s confidence and profile have grown over the years, she remains as earthy and honest as the music she writes and performs.  “I still don’t think I’m a good songwriter. Occasionally I’ll pull a good one out of my arse,” she says in typically straight-talking Suzannah fashion.

Find her album on iTunes: Sea of Lights


 

 

Do You Feel


José James, 36, is a singer songwriter from Minneapolis, and is best known for performing and blending modern jazz and hip-hop. James joined the Blue Note roster in 2013 when he released his breakout album No Beginning No End to wide acclaim. With its irrepressible lead single “Trouble,” the album release found José making national TV appearances on ConanLate Show With David Letterman, andTonight Show With Jay Leno.

The New York Times praised his “cool and confident” album, adding that it “sounds like the result of the black-pop continuum, jazz and soul and hip-hop and R&B, slow-cooked for more than 50 years.” NPR Music raved that “James makes utterly contemporary music,” noting that he “skirts categories with ease, fitting in with current R&B innovators like Frank Ocean or Miguel, yet maintaining a strong awareness of a lineage that stretches from Ray Charles to Marvin Gaye to Lou Rawls to Maxwell.”

Find this tune on his 2013 Album titled: No Beginning No End

José James official site and his full bio can be found at: josejamesmusic.com


George Ezra


George Ezra (born George Ezra Barnett), 21, is a British singer songwriter. His debut studio album Wanted on Voyage will be released on 30 June 2014.  Ezra was longlisted for the BBC Sound of…2014, where he eventually finished in fifth place. 

Ezra is the he son of an art teacher and a deputy head. Music trickled down to him via an elder sister, a regular at local venue the Marquee (“She was going out with the promoter”). He made his stage debut at the Marquee as a 13-year-old in a covers band, “singing the female part of Teenage Dirtbag, wearing eyeliner and my sister’s skinny jeans”. When he left school at 16 he took a job in a local sweet factory – “two jellybeans for the box, one for me, all the way.”  Ezra dropped out of college and embarked on a year of support slots, criss-crossing the country by train. Within a year he had a record deal with Columbia. (Source: The Guardian: George Ezra)

Find this song on iTunes on his EP titled Did You Hear The Rain.

His website can be found here: The Official George Ezra website


Johnnyswim


Johnnyswim is a folk, soul, blues, pop music duo consisting of singer-songwriters Amanda Sudano and Abner Ramirez. The duo formed in 2005 in Nashville, Tennessee.  Sudano spent summers touring the world as a backing singer for her mother Donna Summer. Ramirez and Sudano first met after Sunday service at a church in Nashville, Tennessee. Four years later Sudano attended a songwriting workshop held by Ramirez and became interested in writing songs with him. Sudano and Ramirez were married in 2009.

Find their new album released on April 29, 2014 on iTunes: Diamonds


How Far Is Heaven?


Try, just try not to be foot-tapping along with the Los Lonely Boys…From album titled Heaven.


Alberta Gold


Matt Andersen is a Canadian blues guitarist and singer-songwriter, from Perth-Andover, New Brunswick. In addition to headlining major festivals, clubs and theatres throughout North America and the UK, he has shared the stage and toured with Randy Bachman, Bo Diddley, Little Feat, April Wine, America and Loverboy. On January 25, 2010, Andersen won the top prize for a duo/individual in the Memphis, Tennessee, International Blues Challenge, beating artists from 11 other countries and five continents – the first Canadian to prevail over the event’s 26 year history.

If you liked this tune, don’t miss a slower blues tune: “Drift Away” and Anderson’s rendition of Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.

His new album “Weightless” will be released on February 4th, 2014. Find it here on iTunes.


 

Ruins


Liam Bailey, 30, born in Nottingham, England, is an English musician who is noted for his soul, reggae, blues vocals. He has been compared to Otis Redding, Dennis Brown, Jimmy Hendrix & BB King.

Tom Peter Odell, 23, was born in ChichesterWest Sussex, England to an airline pilot father and a primary school teacher mother. He studied piano classically to Grade 7. He began writing his own songs at the age of thirteen but told no one, because he felt it was “uncool.”

Liam Bailey’s Website here.
Tom Odell’s Website here.


Better than


Related Post: Lake Street Dive


Mandolin Orange


Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz are the singers, songwriters, and musicians behind Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s Mandolin Orange, a bluegrass/country/rock band.

If you like this tune, be sure to check out: Until the Last Night.


Charles Bradley


Charles Bradley, 65, was born in Gainesville, Florida.  He was raised by his grandmother until the age of eight when, while meeting his mother for the first time, she told him that she wanted him to come live with her in Brooklyn, NY.  In 1962, his sister took him to the Apollo Theater to see James Brown perform. Bradley was so inspired by the performance that he began to practice mimicking Brown’s style of singing and stage mannerisms at home.  When he was a young teen, Bradley ran away from home and lived on the streets and in subway cars for two years. Later, he enlisted in Job Corps which eventually led him to Maine to work as a chef. One time while working, someone told him he looked like James Brown. Yet when asked if he could sing, he was too afraid to admit it. Eventually he did, however, overcome this fear and performed five or six times with a band. But after his band mates were drafted into the Vietnam War, the act never re-formed.  Bradley worked in Maine as a cook for ten years until deciding to head west, hitchhiking across the country. He lived in upstate New York, Seattle, Canada and Alaska before settling in California.  There, Bradley worked odd jobs and played small shows for 20 years before he was discovered by Daptone’s Gabe Roth…and then, as they say, the rest was history.


References:

T.G.I.F.: Feelin’ the Blues


Jamynne Bowles’ English bulldog is deaf but is groovin’ squarely on beat to the melody.  His pal, on the other hands, just ain’t feelin’ it.

I’d Rather Go Blind…

Michael Grimm, a Mississippi Southern Soul singer/songwriter, was the winner of America’s Got Talent in 2010.  Grimm sings a blues and soul classic, “I’d Rather Go Blind,” which was a song first recorded by Etta James in 1968.  LOVE his rendition…



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