by Anna Karney
After my previous album, Creatures In The Garden, I didn’t think I had another one in me. But suddenly this chorus just popped out, lyrics, chords, and melody all at once, “We will all come out together for love, love, love.” And I really needed to hear these hopeful words, because of the daily barrage of sad news. It was enough to start me off on my next album journey.
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When I wrote I REMEMBER YOU, I had been watching a friend go through a really rough time. They had been going through the kind of difficulties that challenge your identity and your ability to show up for life in a healthy way. They had pretty much shut down and tried to hide it from the world, but they were not themselves, and anyone who really knew them could see how much they were struggling.
In moments like that, you have two choices: show up and love the person where they are, and remind them who they are and that they are loved, regardless of whether they can give anything back to you, or check out and leave. I choose to show up.
Continue readingby Poli Nika
I look into his eyes and remain silent. I know my silence wounds him, but I can’t utter a single word. My throat tightens, my head spins with the darkest thoughts I’d never dare say out loud. “What would he think of me then?” These are the monsters inside me, and I’ll never let them destroy what we have. I’ll never let them out, because then…
by Ben Richel
During my childhood in Savoie, France, most of my free time was devoted to one activity: imagination. I imagine grandiose destinies but also standard and common stories: From fishermen in the Philippines to Western rockstars, from 19th-century wars to post-collapse scenarios, from my Star Wars spin-offs to projecting myself on stage later… I could imagine revolutionary flying machines, and the same day imagine the realistic routine of the today’s French middle class (I am myself in the middle, like Malcolm!)
For me, everything is interesting.
My life has been built by imagining and connecting lives. It was obvious that one day I would invent characters, partly because expressing my whole personality cannot be done by simply embodying a predefined, cliché role given by society.
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Years back, I attended my late cousin’s funeral in the core of the inner city where she lived. One could call the area run-down, poor, and even scary. It was the kind of place where taking to the street at night was risky, let alone by day. Many of the shops were closed down, and the upkeep on the surrounding buildings was minimal, to say the least.
My cousin had been renting a three-room apartment over a dingy hotel where she lived a hand-to-mouth existence due to childhood traumas. Every time I went to this city, I made a point of stopping in on her for a visit because, despite her struggle, she hadn’t lost her sense of humor and hadn’t forgotten the ways of knowing taught to us by our grandmother. She was fun and had a great sense of humor. She didn’t let too much bother her, and I enjoyed spending time with her. It was relaxing because there was no pressure to be anything else than two cousins spending time together. We would often jump into my car, as she didn’t own a vehicle, and drive out to the country for fresh air and a change of scenery.
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Hi, my name’s Jamie Hutchings; I’m a singer, songwriter, guitarist, percussionist, and sometime improviser and producer. I’m based in Sydney, Australia.
Music was a given in my family household as my dad was a woodwind session cat. He’s 83 now, but he still gigs here and there, but as kids, it was his bread and butter. So all of us inherited his musicality in some form, but still (particularly with my brother and I), we found ourselves gravitating more and more towards rawness and originality over professionalism and technique. I was looking through my mum and dad’s record collection the other night, and it’s almost exclusively Frank Sinatra records. Sinatra is amazing, but the overexposure to music in a show-biz format perhaps contributed to us going in a different direction!
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Lissa and I began performing and recording together in Los Angeles in 1980. Our first band was called ‘Live Nude Girl’ formed during the post-punk era. Angular, with arcane drum-machines, synths, guitars, and theatrical graphic visuals. I am an American-born Australian, who grew up in Sydney, went to design school in Melbourne, then after starting my career in visual communication design, relocated to the USA to freelance in design and get serious about song writing. To find collaborators, starting bands, and doing solo singer-songwriter spots around LA, while designing in the daytime.
by Richard Thomas a.k.a. Mint Biscuit
I spent three or four years as a student in school and University, playing in rock bands and organizing music events. These years were the best of my life, filled with music, love, learning, friendship, and joy. It was also a tumultuous time, with stress, illness, and injury plaguing my life. In the band “Mint,” we played loads of gigs around my University town of Durham and recorded an album, “Leaving It Late,” which marked the culmination of our collective collaboration with a flourish.
After going “off the rails” slightly for this short period, I had to force discipline back into my life. I quit the rock and roll lifestyle completely and returned to being the hard-working, sports-playing, family-oriented guy I was before. I played rugby four times a week. I completed my degree eventually and got married to my girl.
Continue readingby Jessica DeSimone of Warren Teagarden and the Good Grief
Since I can remember, I’ve been performing. My earliest memories are dancing around my childhood home, singing along to my mom’s records, or doing what I can only describe as a cobra pose inside the giant planter boxes at our local shopping mall, pretending I was Ariel from The Little Mermaid. I used to feel like I could fly when I sang, like I had tiny wings sprouting from my back.
As I got older, my grandma taught me how to play piano, back when my hands were so tiny I couldn’t hit an octave. In school, I added choir, theater, and dance team to my repertoire, and I was sure I would be a big theater star one day. But of course, pragmatism won, and I went to college for something far less fun and ended up in a career even less fun, leaving a part of myself behind.
For years, my creative self was suffocated. I was dying to tap back into the freedom that came with being on stage, that rare out-of-body experience when you get to leave yourself behind and become something else entirely.
Continue readingby Ben Richel
In France, when I ask: “What kind of music do you listen to?” most people answer “J’écoute de Tout” (I’m listening to everything).
When people ask me what kind of music I do, I say “Le Tout”!
It’s my own musical genre, my philosophy. It’s an approach of reinforcing ties instead of retiring ourselves in a caricatural box behind some society walls.
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