It’s fair to describe Peggy Seeger as folk music royalty by now. Just a glance at her family tree reveals a plethora of star-studded names.
She’s the half-sister of folk legend (and Bob Dylan mentor) Pete Seeger, while musician Mike Seeger is another sibling. She is also, of course, the widow of Scottish singer Ewan MacColl, which makes her the stepmother to the late Kirsty MacColl and grandmother to Bombay Bicycle Club‘s Jamie MacColl.
Seeger though has been a prolific artist in her own right over the last 70 years or so. She’s been a prolific feminist, with the seminal I’m Gonna Be An Engineer amongst her credits, and was a visitor to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp during the 1980s.
Category: folk
Based in Spain with two Irishmen (frontman Garrett Wall and bassist Dave Mooney), an Englishman (trumpeter Howard Brown) and an American (Robbie K. Jones on cajon and banjo) and named for workers on the New York subway system, the quartet came together in 2006 since which time they’ve released eight albums of generally lively and upbeat songs built around the core instrumentation of acoustic guitar, electric bass, trumpet and cajon with smatterings of banjo, uke and mandolin. So Tracks Laid, Tracks Covered is a sort of taking stock retrospective and looking ahead, a double set that pulls together back catalogue material from their first six albums and numbers only previously released on EPs alongside new songs and a collection of covers…
Having known each other for two decades, and after recording a live album in 2018, Gordie Tentrees and Jaxon Haldane combine in a Nashville studio under the auspices of producer Nash (brother of Kacey) Chambers.
The pre-released pair ‘Time’ and ‘Arcata’ are both Tentrees songs: the former is a bluegrass number on county road time, where quad-biking, fishing and skinny dipping goes on because “nothing happens till we make it happen”; the latter is a musician’s picaresque journey in which his “lost, forlorn…blue” narrator drives through the redwoods to get home to his beloved and her “morning breath” down in that California town.
The quirky ‘Tinkering’, which appropriately took Tentrees two years to finish, begins with our…
…”More Songs About Love” adds eight new stripped-down tracks to the collection, including delicate acoustic versions of Anniversary’s standout tracks; a captivating French translation of crowd favourite “Rattlesnake”; and Lapell’s unique take on a handful of beloved classics, including her impassioned version of “Feels Like We Always Go Backwards” by Tame Impala.
Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s 6th album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile.
Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love. However, anyone seeking…
Kassi Valazza opens ‘Roll On’, a meditative country -tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”.
Her voice is a high, sharp lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez or Carolyn Hester or other folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s, with a gentle vibrato and a gift for windswept phrasing. She sings like the breeze is scattering her syllables like leaves. “Roll On” is a break-up song – with a lover perhaps, but more likely with a city – but she instills the song not with resentment or sadness, but a precarious excitement for a new beginning.
From Newman Street is an album full of…
In 2023, at age 73, film director Sally Potter released Pink Bikini, her singer/songwriter debut album. Its songs revolved around her growing up a young female activist and rebel in London during the 1960s. Potter is well known for composing and recording her own film scores — Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Roads Not Taken among them — and her musical pedigree dates to the 1970s with Lindsay Cooper’s various groups including the Feminist Improvising Group.
Anatomy, from Bella Union, is a song cycle that charts “the passionate love, destructive human behaviours, spiritual longings, physical dependencies and rampant exploitation that make up our turbulent love affair with the planet we inhabit.” She enlisted Marta Salogni as…
Even today, Japan remains a thriving capital of recorded music – and, in particular, physical media. In the 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon for top-tier American artists, from Andy Williams to The Supremes, to record live albums exclusively for the Japanese market. Among those artists was Yusuf, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, whose 1974’s Saturnight: Live from Tokyo was the singer-songwriter’s first concert LP. Now, following its reissue last November as part of Record Store Day’s Black Friday event, Saturnight is coming to wide-release vinyl, CD, and digital/streaming on May 2 from UMe and Cat-o-Log Records.
Recorded at Nakano’s Sun Plaza Hall on June 22, 1974, the album chronicled Stevens’ Bamboozle World Tour.