Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney are music lifers, married parents of two who have been the core of the band Big Harp essentially since they met two decades ago. As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Drootin committed to the DIY scene early, joining bands as a bassist before she could drive and bailing on high school with only a year left in order to tour. After Senseney met Drootin on the road in 2007, they accidentally moved to California together, got married, had their first kid, and then started Big Harp. They are lifers, and lifers make it work.
Big Harp’s fourth album, Runs to Blue, does not feel overdue. With songs of wanderlust and loss, love for your children and love for your lover, accepting one’s increasing age while also…
Tag Archive: Saddle Creek
Fans of Algernon Cadwallader during their original run claim lifelong bragging rights for having seen them play a late-2000s basement show with sweaty floors and a fisheye-toting Flickr photographer — and they probably have the blown-out YouTube video to prove it. Across the Northeast, the Philadelphia emo band paid its dues at every VFW hall, youth community center, and dilapidated DIY house that opened its doors. In the seven years before they called it quits, Algernon were a refreshingly haphazard and wildly fun live act. The longer the crowd bellowed like a football team to open “Serial Killer Status,” the higher scrawny teens flung themselves to “Katie’s Conscious”; the faster the drive home through pitch-black suburbs, the stronger the urge to burn…
Who are the people you don’t know personally but have gone to bed thinking about?
For Alexandra Levy, aka Ada Lea, they include painters, writers, and musicians. She thanks them in the liner notes of her third album, when i paint my masterpiece.
In addition to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lana Del Rey and Charli XCX, the Montreal-based singer-songwriter credits the artist Shuvinai Ashoona and the writer Olga Tokarczuk – an indication that the imagery and the lyrics play just as important a role as the music.
As for the last of the three, acknowledging the aforementioned musicians suggests that Levy follows the traditions of introspective folk pop but also has a tendency to experiment.