Maisy Owen, a Nashville native, has been surrounded by music and the art of songcraft just about all her life. First came the viola at age nine, then guitar where she embraced fingerpicking, soaking in influences from Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Mazzy Star and David Olney. Maisy’s unique sound, musical truth and stirring vocals inhabit Dark On a Sunny Day, her debut album, produced by Robin Eaton (known for his work with Jill Sobule and co-writer of “I Kissed a Girl”)
…Lead single, ‘My Youth Is All for You’, is a perfect opening track. Delicate finger-picked folk guitar and Owen’s lilting, crooning, whispering vocal immediately invite you into her world. “I cannot bear the weight of your affection / I cannot walk with all these shadows behind me”.
Tag Archive: Tompkins Square
It’s always interesting to see where the next Imaginational Anthem compilation will take us, and this fourteenth addition (in time for Tompkins Square’s twentieth anniversary) has hopped us over to one of the traditional music hubs of the world to show us some of the instrumental guitar talent operating in Ireland.
Cian Nugent has his hand on the curating tiller and has chosen nine other tracks to sandwich his own little number, the lovely ‘I am Asleep and do not Wake Me’, a traditional Irish tune that he learned from a harp arrangement. As you would expect from Cian, the playing here on solo acoustic is finely nuanced and unshowy, with a couple of softly audible knocks on the body giving the sound an intimate feel.
“Waiting: More Recordings 1968-1976 can be thought of as a before-and-after follow-up to the Tompkins Square release, Partly On Time: Recordings 1968-1970. For that record we stuck with the mono recordings my high school friend Carter Redd and I made at WDCR radio in Hanover NH in those years.
When Tompkins Square brought up the idea of doing a follow up collection we turned to some even earlier material, five songs Carter and I previously made that were kindred in spirit but more primitively recorded. There had been one more WDCR era song which there wasn’t room for before, and there were two other recordings I made a few years later including one I did with another friend, Bob Stein. All of these were…
The CD contains ten covers of 78-era songs by artists such as Luther Dickinson, Eden & John’s East River String Band w/ R.Crumb, William Tyler, Muireann Bradley, Gwenifer Raymond, Michael Hurley and more. Eight of the ten songs were recorded specifically for the project.
We’ve had vinyl, CD, and cassettes all making a “comeback.” So are 78s the next format we’ll all be hankering after. It feels unlikely simply on the grounds of breakability alone. But 78s refuse to go quietly. In the 1960s the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band built a career on recycling the stranger corners of 1920s and 30s Jazz and Dance Band tunes. In 2015 some of these were compiled in a CD ‘Songs the Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us.’ A quick visit to Bandcamp finds that there have…