I recently learned of Mary Chapin Carpenter's illness; she's had to cancel her tours. She talks about it all on NPR's "This I Believe" at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11182405
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Long interview with Mary Gauthier
in which we learn a lot about her life, and how important a good producer is, and what it's like to co-write with the late Harlan Howard, using the napkins he made notes on while drinking White Russians
http://www.puremusic.com/maryg2.html
http://www.puremusic.com/maryg2.html
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Joni Mitchell's back with a new album
Joni Mitchell: The legendary singer-songwriter is back
By Pierre Perrone, Published 10 August 2007, The Independent
Joni Mitchell says that she's not ready for retirement after all
Ten years ago, it looked like Joni Mitchell's life had gone full circle. This most archetypal of singer-songwriters was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame along with her old friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. But, more importantly, she was reunited with the daughter she'd given away for adoption after becoming pregnant in the mid-Sixties, and her musical and personal journey – which had taken her from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Laurel Canyon, California via Greenwich Village, New York – seemed complete.
"In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy and loss," she told the documentary-maker Susan Lacy. "When my daughter returned to me, the gift kind of went with it. The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back."
In 1998, Mitchell released Taming The Tiger, her last album of new material, and toured the US and Canada that year, and again in 2000. After that, as she explained during a two-part Radio 2 documentary broadcast earlier this year, she spent most of her time painting, watching old movies and listening to talk radio. "I came to hate music," she admitted to her friend the British songwriter Amanda Ghost.
Indeed, in 2002, as she issued Travelogue, a double CD on which she revisited her repertoire with orchestral backing, Mitchell announced she'd had enough of "the corrupt cesspool, the pornographic pigs" of the music industry and would be a recording artist no more. "Nothing sounded genuine or original. Truth and beauty were passé. I got the picture. I quit the business," she said. And, despite working with Rhino, the reissue arm of Warners, on a couple of thematic compilations of her oeuvre, she was as good as her word.
Until last year, that is, when Jean Grand-Maître, the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet, contacted Mitchell for permission to use her compositions in a ballet. Rather than simply let him choose songs to fit what would have been a "somewhat autobiographical" piece called Dancing Joni, she helped the project evolve into The Fiddle and the Drum, which premiered in Calgary, Canada, in February. She contributed some of her politically charged paintings to the set design and also delivered a couple of new songs she'd been working on, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "If" – her favourite poem – and "If I Had A Heart".
These compositions are now two of the pivotal tracks on Shine, Mitchell's new album to be released via Hear Music, the Starbucks-owned label, in the US and Canada, and the Concord Music Group/ Universal in the UK and the rest of Europe at the end of September.
The rest of the article is at
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/features/article2849630.ece
By Pierre Perrone, Published 10 August 2007, The Independent
Joni Mitchell says that she's not ready for retirement after all
Ten years ago, it looked like Joni Mitchell's life had gone full circle. This most archetypal of singer-songwriters was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame along with her old friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. But, more importantly, she was reunited with the daughter she'd given away for adoption after becoming pregnant in the mid-Sixties, and her musical and personal journey – which had taken her from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Laurel Canyon, California via Greenwich Village, New York – seemed complete.
"In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy and loss," she told the documentary-maker Susan Lacy. "When my daughter returned to me, the gift kind of went with it. The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back."
In 1998, Mitchell released Taming The Tiger, her last album of new material, and toured the US and Canada that year, and again in 2000. After that, as she explained during a two-part Radio 2 documentary broadcast earlier this year, she spent most of her time painting, watching old movies and listening to talk radio. "I came to hate music," she admitted to her friend the British songwriter Amanda Ghost.
Indeed, in 2002, as she issued Travelogue, a double CD on which she revisited her repertoire with orchestral backing, Mitchell announced she'd had enough of "the corrupt cesspool, the pornographic pigs" of the music industry and would be a recording artist no more. "Nothing sounded genuine or original. Truth and beauty were passé. I got the picture. I quit the business," she said. And, despite working with Rhino, the reissue arm of Warners, on a couple of thematic compilations of her oeuvre, she was as good as her word.
Until last year, that is, when Jean Grand-Maître, the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet, contacted Mitchell for permission to use her compositions in a ballet. Rather than simply let him choose songs to fit what would have been a "somewhat autobiographical" piece called Dancing Joni, she helped the project evolve into The Fiddle and the Drum, which premiered in Calgary, Canada, in February. She contributed some of her politically charged paintings to the set design and also delivered a couple of new songs she'd been working on, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "If" – her favourite poem – and "If I Had A Heart".
These compositions are now two of the pivotal tracks on Shine, Mitchell's new album to be released via Hear Music, the Starbucks-owned label, in the US and Canada, and the Concord Music Group/ Universal in the UK and the rest of Europe at the end of September.
The rest of the article is at
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/features/article2849630.ece
Arlo Guthrie Interview in Modern Guitars Magazine
Arlo Guthrie Interview
by Rick Landers, August 27, 2007
Arlo Guthrie. Photo by John Hancock Photos.Mention the name Arlo to most Boomers and immediately the song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” comes to mind. That song alone would be a pretty darn good legacy. But Arlo Guthrie’s given us a lot more treasures over the years like “The Motorcycle Song,” “City of New Orleans,” “Deportee” and the counterculture tune "Coming into Los Angeles" he sang at Woodstock.
Most fans recall a young guy with wiley attitudinal humor and an ability to tell a tale with front porch charm. Today we all know when he fashions a story about the government, television evangelists or the price of gas there’s more than a smattering of critical analysis going on under that long silver mane. The end game for Guthrie seems to be targeted at making statements about life’s foibles and contradictions while he gathers up laughter from his fans.
As the son of the legendary songwriter and chronicler of American life, Woody Guthrie, Arlo’s talents and inspiration spring from a very deep well. He’s carried his father’s legacy along a straight and narrow path keeping ripe the elder Guthrie's spirited integrity while satirizing or poking fun at unbridled authority.
Landing on the music charts in 1967 with his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant, Guthrie quickly became a young icon of a turbulent decade. Nearly every year since Arlo's laid down tracks on a long list of memorable albums such as Washington County, Hobo’s Lullaby and his highly acclaimed Amigo.
Forty years later and Arlo's own Rising Sun record label has just released his twenty-fifth album titled In Times Like These.
The rest of the article at
http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/003640.html
by Rick Landers, August 27, 2007
Arlo Guthrie. Photo by John Hancock Photos.Mention the name Arlo to most Boomers and immediately the song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” comes to mind. That song alone would be a pretty darn good legacy. But Arlo Guthrie’s given us a lot more treasures over the years like “The Motorcycle Song,” “City of New Orleans,” “Deportee” and the counterculture tune "Coming into Los Angeles" he sang at Woodstock.
Most fans recall a young guy with wiley attitudinal humor and an ability to tell a tale with front porch charm. Today we all know when he fashions a story about the government, television evangelists or the price of gas there’s more than a smattering of critical analysis going on under that long silver mane. The end game for Guthrie seems to be targeted at making statements about life’s foibles and contradictions while he gathers up laughter from his fans.
As the son of the legendary songwriter and chronicler of American life, Woody Guthrie, Arlo’s talents and inspiration spring from a very deep well. He’s carried his father’s legacy along a straight and narrow path keeping ripe the elder Guthrie's spirited integrity while satirizing or poking fun at unbridled authority.
Landing on the music charts in 1967 with his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant, Guthrie quickly became a young icon of a turbulent decade. Nearly every year since Arlo's laid down tracks on a long list of memorable albums such as Washington County, Hobo’s Lullaby and his highly acclaimed Amigo.
Forty years later and Arlo's own Rising Sun record label has just released his twenty-fifth album titled In Times Like These.
The rest of the article at
http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/003640.html
Recently Discovered Live Recording by Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie's music, alive and well
By Geoffrey Himes
International Herald Tribune, Monday, September 3, 2007
NEW YORK: Upon entering the Woody Guthrie Archives here, you're confronted by bronze busts of Guthrie, the mid-century folk legend; his son Arlo; his old bandmate Pete Seeger; his good friend Leadbelly; and his disciple Bob Dylan.
Nearby on the wall is the original manuscript for Guthrie's most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land," under its original title, "God Blessed America for Me," a riposte to Irving Berlin's more jingoistic song with a similar title. Also on the wall is a hand-scrawled note that says: "Dear Whoever, Woody lives and I'm glad. Love, John Lennon, '75."
Lennon's letter is just one example of the surprises that show up at the West 57th Street, Manhattan, archives. In 2001, for example, Guthrie's daughter Nora received a small box that contained two black-and-yellow spools of silver wire with a note that said, "I found this in my closet and thought you might like to have it." When she reopened the boxes in January, the strands resembled the wire you might use for hanging pictures. But the spools were recordings, an exciting discovery.
"What these are," Nora Guthrie, 57, said, "are the only decent live recordings we've found of Woody in front of an audience. When we could finally hear them, we flipped out, because it's Woody telling jokes, laughing with the crowd and singing songs for them." This week those recordings will be released on CD as "The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949" (Woody Guthrie Publications).
The rest of the article is at
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/03/arts/woody.php
By Geoffrey Himes
International Herald Tribune, Monday, September 3, 2007
NEW YORK: Upon entering the Woody Guthrie Archives here, you're confronted by bronze busts of Guthrie, the mid-century folk legend; his son Arlo; his old bandmate Pete Seeger; his good friend Leadbelly; and his disciple Bob Dylan.
Nearby on the wall is the original manuscript for Guthrie's most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land," under its original title, "God Blessed America for Me," a riposte to Irving Berlin's more jingoistic song with a similar title. Also on the wall is a hand-scrawled note that says: "Dear Whoever, Woody lives and I'm glad. Love, John Lennon, '75."
Lennon's letter is just one example of the surprises that show up at the West 57th Street, Manhattan, archives. In 2001, for example, Guthrie's daughter Nora received a small box that contained two black-and-yellow spools of silver wire with a note that said, "I found this in my closet and thought you might like to have it." When she reopened the boxes in January, the strands resembled the wire you might use for hanging pictures. But the spools were recordings, an exciting discovery.
"What these are," Nora Guthrie, 57, said, "are the only decent live recordings we've found of Woody in front of an audience. When we could finally hear them, we flipped out, because it's Woody telling jokes, laughing with the crowd and singing songs for them." This week those recordings will be released on CD as "The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949" (Woody Guthrie Publications).
The rest of the article is at
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/03/arts/woody.php
Monday, September 3, 2007
9/2/07 -- No Playlist, waaaaaaaah
No Sunday Night Folk Festival on Sunday September 2, 2007, because (1) the first two hours were preempted by a soccer game and (2) the host was in the hospital getting NO sleep after an emergency appendectomy.
Next Sunday Night Folk Festival will air on Sunday September 9. Honest! (I hope.)
Susan
Next Sunday Night Folk Festival will air on Sunday September 9. Honest! (I hope.)
Susan
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