Back in February, we told you about Bruce Hornsby’s interactive live chat with his fans through the keyboardist’s Facebook page. Hornsby will answer questions from his fans once again this
Later this week Phish is releasing a remaster of the 7/31/99 Fuji Rock Fest show to benefit Japanese disaster relief, and to set you in the right frame of mind,
As promised, Phish has announced more summer tour dates this afternoon starting with a pair of shows at The Gorge in George, WA on August 5 and 6 and ending
The Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival returns to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for the fourth year on August 12 – 14 boasting a lineup that features headliners Arcade
On their first full-length release – titled Mirrors – Washington D.C. up-and-comers U.S. Royalty piece a musical mosaic over the course of ten songs. Most early reviews of the album point to the Americana element, but the band manages to include sections of skinny tie ’80s themes, cutting hook-based rock and hushed ballads.
The songs don’t necessarily don’t flow per se, but rather serve as almost point-counterpoint, giving the record a appeal in getting to know both the songs as well as the song sequence. In the tender Voice Memo, one of the most introspective tracks, which closes out the album, singer John Thornley sings in earnest, “Where I hope to find some rest for my troubled soul.” For the rest of us, this song is a good place to find it.
Hidden Track: The reception to the album, Mirrors, has been terrific thus far, and rightfully so. I saw that you mentioned making a real shift in the songwriting approach for this project as opposed to the previous E.P. Could you describe what you did differently this time around?
John Thornley: Paul and I would demo and work out most of the songs beforehand. We would lay down and layer a lot of the parts then bring it to the rest of the band. Then we would fiddle with arrangements or add new ideas. It seemed to go faster than all sitting in a room together and writing from scratch.
HT: Also, how would you characterize the collaborative process with Gus Oberg? It’s not every day that a young band gets to team up with a Grammy winning engineer.
JT: We had known Gus for about a year before he worked on this project. As we were pulling together songs for this album, we really wanted him involved with the project because we felt he would be able to get the sound we had not been able to get on our recordings up to this point. He had seen us live, so he knew our live sound, but in the studio he was instrumental in helping us record something that could sound big and sweeping while at the same time layered and cohesive.
READ ON for more of Ryan’s chat with John Thornley of U.S. Royalty…
On May 3, the Beastie Boys will drop their highly anticipated new album Hot Sauce Committee Part 2. In conjunction with the release, the legendary hip-hop act have looked to
Alison Krauss & Union Station will release their first studio album in nearly seven years, Paper Airplane, tomorrow. On Wednesday, the group will visit The Ed Sullivan Theater for a performance
Charley Orlando is no stranger to the road – in fact he makes any other so-called troubadour seem a homebody. He performed for ten years with his former musical partner Steve Drizos as Dexter Grove on an enduring ten year musical journey that began in 1994 and saw them play 1,700 shows in 45 states including Canada and Mexico.
Lisa Loeb is an accomplished singer-songwriter with a discography that stands up next to her contemporaries. Hopefully the next time she comes into town to play, she won’t try to wear too many hats (or different glasses, for that matter), and she’ll be Lisa Loeb, the musician we came to love over the past fifteen years.
The first thing that jumps out at you is the stunning cover art of Generation Debt; taken from a George Jartos painting as the Bellingham, WA group featured a hometown artist on their album. The second thing that is noticeable is the running time of the tunes, these songs stick around for a while as there are no quick ditty’s on Acorn Project’s newest offering.
