Now Hear This
Los Angeles indie-rock pioneer Day Wave (the project of singer/instrumentalist Jackson Phillips) first emerged from the Bay Area in 2015 and quickly became known for his wavy lo-fi bedroom production. Tracks like "Drag" and "Something Here" put him on a global radar, boasting hundreds of millions of streams across DSPs and creating a lane for bedroom-pop that didn't previously exist. Now Jackson returns to the forefront of the indie space with Pastlife, an album that tackles themes of love, loss, and maneuvering life in your 30s. Singles "Where Do You Go" and "Before You Knew" kicked off the project and saw notable praise from PASTE, Lyrical Lemonade, Ones To Watch, Northern Transmissions and more, spins on SiriusXM's Alt Nation Advanced Placement, KCRW, SiriusXMU and features on coveted playlists like New Music Friday, Dopamine, and Today's Indie Rock to name a few. The title track off the forthcoming album, is a blustery indie-rock number that encapsulates the sweet nostalgia of missing someone. "I think of 'Pastlife' as the thesis statement for this record, because the overall theme is reminiscing on past chapters in my life. I have so many era's from my past that I miss, and so many friends left behind in those times. I wonder if they ever think of those times the way I do. " Jackson's knack for ear-catching melodies and simple, fresh production is cherished more than ever in a world saturated with overly-produced tracks. On Pastlife, Jackson takes it back to the basics of indie- a space he's been spearheading for the past 10 years and continues to rise to the top in, producing for a new generation of indie acts like Hana Vu, Saba, Hazel English, KennyHoopla and more.
Five years ago it seemed like Uncle Lucius had run its course. They had torn a swath out of the Texas roots music scene over a 13 year run, worn out 5 vans and recorded 4 albums, and grown a reputation at home and abroad as a thrilling, dynamic live act. Long-time fans were certain they'd be a massive global hit. The only question was when. Growing families demanded their fathers' attention, and years of touring started to feel like circles around a drain. The tide went out, and they folded up their sails.
The audience had other ideas. Interest in the band continued to grow during their absence from the touring circuit. Pro athletes used their songs for walk on music, and top-rated television shows (Yellowstone) featured their music during pivotal scenes.
"We should have broken up years ago," they joked.
They never intended to reunite. Some things are not up to us. intention is well & good, but some people are made to play together, meant to create together. And intuition was their intention, all along.
The tides had transferred, the forces realigned. Uncle Lucius was a dream, first materialized over dank nights at the Horseshoe Lounge, drinking cheap beer with Dixie while the jukebox moaned. It crystallized on endless highway drives and onstage fever dreams. It felt like part of the past, but where one van breaks down, another van comes rolling up.
After a five year hiatus, the band will be bringing their methods of soul, joy, and thunder to select stages across the country. All we've got is now.
On December 8th, the newly-reformed band will release their 5th album since 2015. Like It's The Last One Left carries on the Texas band’s deep rock and blues traditions while covering topics like mental health, love, and self-care.
Rosanne Cash left Nashville in the early 90's. The first album she recorded in New York with John Leventhal, The Wheel, celebrates 30 years with an exclusive 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition that features a 2023 Remastered version of the original album and an additional 11 tracks from the 1993 Live from Austin City Limits and Live from The Columbia House Records Radio Hour sessions, making their digital debut. Rosanne says of the album, "It’s satisfying and sweet to re-introduce The Wheel in this thirtieth anniversary year. I can’t look back at that time and separate the music from Love. What was true then has become more true and more alive every day since. We listen to this record now, and wish we had mixed the vocal a little louder on this track, or had a different guitar sound on that track, but honestly, it’s perfect for its time and place. I have a friend who doesn’t believe that artists evolve, but that there are only different stages and expressions. I’m not sure about that, but in either case, I’m so grateful for The Wheel. It turns out I can’t orchestrate the movement of the stars. They do that all on their own."
Each year, thousands of people flock to the city of Nashville with hopes of “making it”. Ironically, it wasn’t until Zach Russell made the decision to leave Music City, USA that he inked his first record deal with Thirty Tigers. Zach had stints as a manager at a shoe store and a karaoke host. He installed irrigation systems, and and also worked as a carpenter. He traveled the US and Europe as Tyler Childers merchandise manager for 3 years and got to witness firsthand what it takes to chase down greatness. Through it all, one thing that remained constant was his belief that he could chase it down as well.
Since leaving Nashville and returning back to the hills of East Tennessee, the past 18 months have been busy for Russell. He spent those months writing music, touring with The Alex Leach Band, and delivering a guest appearance on Adeem the Artist critically acclaimed album, White Trash Revelry. That wave of momentum has culminated to this moment, and the release of his highly anticipated full-length debut, Where the Flowers Meet the Dew.
Once again joining forces with up-and-coming producer Kyle Crownover (Adeem the Artist), this ten-song effort never takes its foot off the gas pedal. Dominant themes of wrestling with mortality, pondering reincarnation, and finding that ever elusive feeling of contentment that all weave gracefully through.
As the old saying goes, “Big hitters take big swings.”, and Russell’s choice as the first single is as bold a statement as can be made. Coming in at a shade over seven minutes long, “Born Again” begins as a rockabilly banger, then midway through, via a psychedelic segue it morphs into a funky, groove heavy jam. Russell sings of reincarnation and hints that perhaps every waking moment is, in fact, an opportunity to start anew.
The first half of the record is filled with traditional waltzes (“I Thought I Was the Trees”, “Take Me Back to Tennessee”), haunting electric folk (“What You Want Comes to You”), and 60’s R&B style (“Milk & Honey”) cuts. Its deep, mellow, and the lyrics are contemplative. It draws you in while not letting the listener get too comfortable.
Beginning with the aforementioned rip-roaring lead single, the back half of the record brings with it an altogether different vibe. Greasy, distorted guitar licks pepper the back half of Where the Flowers Meet the Dew. “Playing House” fully displays his creative dexterity, and would be right at home on a post-grunge rock radio station, circa 1998, sandwiched between Matchbox 20 and Third Eye Blind. There’s an underlying current filtering through the back half of the record that bristles with tongue in cheek humor, confidence, and all-out swagger. As a whole, Where the Flowers Meet the Dew is a remarkably ambitious effort that undoubtably demands and is worthy of repeated listens.
Hector Tellez Jr. is a soulful big-voiced singer and virtuoso rock guitar-player from Havana, Cuba. Growing up in a musical family in Cuba, he listened to scratchy bootlegged cassettes and CDs leading him on a passionate and self-curated music journey of blues and classic rock n’ roll. His cornerstone influences coalesced into Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Buckley, and Leonard Cohen.
Today Hector lives in Nashville, Tennessee and writes and records music in both English and Spanish. His upcoming debut album was produced by Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, Stone Temple Pilots) and features Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana.
Big Big Love is the first single from the eponymous album that is a mantra for embracing humanity with kindness. The single will be released in conjunction with the Michael Franti & Spearhead tour date celebrating a return to Red Rocks on June 2. Franti announced the US Big Big Love tour on January 31 which launched May 13 and runs through August 20.
Michael Franti is a globally recognized musician, humanitarian, activist, and award-winning filmmaker revered for his high-energy live shows, inspiring music, devotion to health and wellness, worldwide philanthropic efforts and the power of optimism. Throughout his multi-decade career, Franti has earned three Billboard No. 1's with triumphantly hopeful hits "Sound of Sunshine," "Say Hey (I Love You)," and "I Got You," as well as sic Top 30 Hot AC singles, 10 Top 25 AAA singles and three Billboard Top 5 Rock Albums.
Michael Franti & Spearhead continue to foster their community both on and off stage with a wish granting non-profit, Do It For The Love, founded by Franti and his wife, Sara. Do It For The Love brings those with life threatening illnesses, veterans, and children with severe challenges to concerts worldwide, fulfilling over 3,300 wishes and touching the lives of over 12,000 people to date. Franti also owns SOULSHINE Bali, a 32-room top-rated boutique retreat hotel located in Ubud, Bali.
Sometimes an artist makes a record, then decides not to release it. Neil Young and Prince are two artists who famously did that multiple times. Todd Snider is another artist who has done it, putting three albums on the shelf in a career now spanning three decades.
While Snider may not be as well known as Young or Prince, he is just as committed to his art, and his decisions to shelve those three records were artistic ones. But now Snider has decided to take one of those albums off the shelf. Sixteen years after it was recorded, Crank It, We’re Doomed will finally get its release via Aimless Records.
Snider was in the midst of one of the most creative periods of his career when he recorded Crank It, We’re Doomed in 2007. He was writing at a frenetic pace and experimenting with musical ideas he would develop more fully on later releases. He not only finished and recorded the 15 songs on Crank It that year, he also wrote and recorded the seven songs that appeared on Shit Sandwich, the digital-only EP released in 2010 by his alter ego Elmo Buzz & the Eastside Bulldogs. The tracks on Shit Sandwich made up the bulk of Snider’s 2016 full-length release,
“It was very much a blur,” he says, looking back on that year. “A blur not because of the party going on, but because of how many songs I was coming up with. It was probably the pinnacle of my time making up songs. Like they were really coming at me, and I didn’t know what to do with them all."
Crank It, We’re Doomed was supposed to be the follow-up to a pair of acclaimed records that had taken his career to another level — East Nashville Skyline and The Devil You Know. The album was mastered and ready to be manufactured when he decided to pull the plug on it.
When asked recently why he decided against releasing the album, Snider puts on his best movie trailer voice and says, “The year was 2007 — the sea was angry that year.”
Snider gets the laugh he’s going for, but the question remains because the why is not so easy to explain. His decision to shelve the record all those years ago was as much intuitive as it was the product of deductive reasoning.
“At the end, I was torn,” he says. “I felt like not only did I have all these story songs, sort of normal songs, there also were all these protest songs. And really that is where I lost the plot. I had too many scenes in the movie, and I had too many songs. It was all over the map. But I also remember feeling like it wasn't done either. Like it needed moresongs.”
Snider had intended Crank It, We’re Doomed to be a double album with the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street, The Beatles (White Album) and Bob Dylan’s Desire as its sonic touchstones/boundaries, and it unquestionably shares some musical similarities with all three of those releases. But with 15 tracks totaling 49 minutes in length, Crank It does fall a bit short of double-album length. Exile has 18 tracks totaling 67 minutes, while the White Album has a whopping 30 tracks that run more than an hour and a half.
Although Snider decided to not release Crank It, We’re Doomed, he did include five of the tracks he recorded for Crank It on his next two albums (Peace Queer and The Excitement Plan), with three of the songs getting new titles. In addition, he recorded new versions of six other songs from the record which were released on The Excitement Plan and Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables. Some fans, possibly many, will prefer the original versions of the songs on Crank It, which in some cases are dramatically different. The record also includes four other tracks no one outside the musicians and Snider’s inner circle have ever heard, and those recordings are pure gold.
Snider recorded Crank It, We’re Doomed at Eric McConnell’s East Nashville studio where he recorded East Nashville Skyline and The Devil You Know and was backed by the core of musicians he worked with on those albums: guitarist Will Kimbrough, drummer Paul Griffith, violinist Molly Thomas, and either McConnell or Peter Cooper on bass. He also brought in keyboardist Jimmy Wallace for the sessions.
At some point after Snider decided to put Crank It, We’re Doomed on the shelf, the stereo masters were lost. Over the years, both Snider and McCullough made efforts to locate the masters with no luck. The subject came up again recently when they met to discuss making another record together.
“We were sitting there just wracking our brains, ‘Where could it be,’ ” Snider recalls. “And finally Eric said, ‘I guess DeMain might have it.’ ”
McConnell was referring to mastering engineer Jim DeMain, and sure enough, DeMain had the masters. Snider’s mythic, lost album was found.
After hearing the record for the first time in more than a decade, Snider was no longer bothered by it being “all over the map.” So he shared it with a few friends and advisors, who recognized its historical importance and encouraged him to release it.
“I couldn’t see it conceptually back then,” Snider says. “But now I can see it was about a guy losing the plot.”
The Black Crowes
The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion: Remastered [2CD]
CD: $19.95 PREORDER
Original remastered album with the bonus CD The Best of the Box containing 9 rare and unreleased selections from the super deluxe box set.