Laura Cantrell

This is for all non-EC or peripheral-EC topics. We all know how much we love talking about 'The Man' but sometimes we have other interests.
johnfoyle
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Laura Cantrell

Post by johnfoyle »

From Matador news-

Laura Cantrell:

Laura Cantrell's absolutely gorgeous debut album for Matador (and third
album proper) is entitled 'Humming By The Flowered Vine' and is
scheduled for June 21 release worldwide. Featuring a mixture of original
songs, the traditional "Poor Ellen Smith" (a classic murdered-woman ballad),
and interpretations of songs by Lucinda Williams, Emily Spray, Dave
Schramm, and others. With star guest musicians to boot. We'll have more
information on this release shortly; in the meantime, feast your eyes on
the cover art, based on a painting by Fred Tomaselli:

Image
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

See also
http://www.lauracantrell.com/
Last edited by johnfoyle on Thu Dec 08, 2011 2:15 pm, edited 3 times in total.
johnfoyle
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Post by johnfoyle »

Checking out Fred Tomaselli , the artist who's work is featured on the cover of Laura's album, I was interested to see there is an exhibit of his work on here in Dublin.

http://www.modernart.ie/en/page_72398.htm

I went to see it today and very interesting it was , including images like this -

Image
Untitled, 2000, Photocollage, acrylic, leaves, pills, insects, resin on wood panel, 84 x 120 inches

I didn't spot the detail used on Laura' cover ; hopefully all will be told when the album is released.

Here's a write up from todays papers -

The Sunday Times , March 27 '05

American artist Fred Tomaselli’s use of drugs makes for psychedelic art, says CRISTIN LEACH

Fred Tomaselli: a trip down memory lane





Fred Tomaselli turned to drugs in 1989. He had tried other things but they didn’t work. Everything around him in New York seemed to be decaying. The visionary quest, as he described it, of the 1970s counterculture was falling into ruins, with the legendary nightclub Studio 54 symbolising its decadence and failure. His personal life was crumbling around him as friends began to die of Aids. Tomaselli turned to pills.

First he reached for aspirin and bottles of Sudafed. He fixed them to wooden supports and sealed them in resin. Then he moved on to the harder stuff, entombing narcotics in resin.

Marijuana leaves from his garden also got the treatment; their organic quality appealed to him as a means of softening the geometric shapes of the pills. Gradually, Tomaselli found a way of moving on from the conventional art forms that had frustrated him, and in the process created something both druggy and entirely new.

At the age of 48, he has spent most of his adult life exploring the areas he first opened up in 1979. Once an installation artist, he now makes paint-collage hybrids that incorporate not only pills (prescription, over-the-counter and illegal) but also leaves and images cut from magazines and catalogues.

Monsters of Paradise, his show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is a useful introduction to his psychedelic art and contains one authentic masterpiece, Doppelganger Effect, a two and a half metre square diptych made last year, which indicates that the Californian-born artist is at the height of his power.

That piece comprises countless overlapping strings of pills and leaves, cutout paper birds, flowers, mushrooms, human body parts and lots of painted dots. Together they add up to an explosion of love bead-style chains on a black background.

It combines undeniable visual energy with an exhilarating physical presence. It is a swinging, beaded entrance to an irresistible visual vortex.

The viewer wants to jump into it, but instead must remain content with gazing at its myriad elements. It’s an ultimate expression of the style that has made Tomaselli’s name a mind-altering, drug-fuelled experience without the dangers of ingestion.

Doppelganger Effect is one of 18 works included in the show, which marks the first appearance of Tomaselli’s work in Ireland. It appears to have made it past customs unhindered — unlike his 1994 experience, when a Paris show opened with empty walls, the paintings detained by officialdom — but then the drugs in Tomaselli’s collages are so irretrievably encased in layers of resin that sniffer dogs would have failed to identify the substances.

Despite his unorthodox materials and the psychedelic visual nature of his work, Tomaselli does not present himself as a particularly subversive figure. He stopped taking LSD in 1980, preferring these days to stoke himself up with caffeine and cigarettes. There are a couple of half pills in his Study for Gravity in Four Directions, which includes the antidepressant Prozac, but perhaps they came to him that way.

He gets his drugs by bulk ordering non-prescription remedies; the antidepressants, heart and diabetes medicines in his work include out-of-date stock and leftovers from friends; the rest, he says, come through anonymous donations.

His work owes a debt to both western Pop and Op Art movements and to eastern visual traditions including Tibetan Buddhist mandalas and Indian devotional art. The many-armed dervish in a work called Metal Destroyer looks like a Hindu god, but the artist has also indicated its intended homage to Keith Moon from the Who.

Far from celebrating drug culture, Tomaselli argues his creations make sobering comment on the reality of many of his friends’ lives. Like specimens preserved in formaldehyde, his multicoloured pills offer a record of a human race that has become hooked, for better or worse, on chemical solutions to physical and mental problems.

His hyper-real landscapes may be visual manifestations of a drug-fuelled experience, but by encasing the constituent narcotics in layers of resin, Tomaselli also renders them inaccessible, at once destroying as he displays them.

As a career move the drug use smacks of gimmickry, but what makes Tomaselli more than a one-trick pony is not only the undeniable beauty and technical skill in his work but also a marked continual progression. He made his first drug-based work in 1989; these days the pills aren’t so important.

Tomaselli has recently shifted his focus from drugs to body parts, introducing the human figure into his celestial landscapes. Almost half the works in the show are figurative, with bodies formed from paper clippings that range from porn magazine genitalia to intestines and brains cut from anatomical guides.

A multitude of smaller body parts — along with snakes, insects, birds, flowers and more — make up each human form. The naked body is a traditional subject of beauty in art, but Tomaselli’s bodies are more than naked. They are skinless, flayed, giving them a nightmarish quality despite their cosmic surroundings.

The figures bring into sharper focus the utopia/dystopia element that has been central to his pill works. These new collages balance a human yearning for transcendence with a real-life tendency towards chaos and painful extremes. The male figure in Expecting To Fly falls to Earth as many hands reach up to catch him and the pit becomes a 21st-century arena for Icarus’s ancient tale of human aspiration and failure. As if the almost overwhelming detail was not enough, Tomaselli throws curve balls, such as the tiny figure of Hitler among the toys in Toytopia, a portrait of his infant son.

He also plays jokes that it takes a second to get. The birds in Passerines Finches and Passerines White Eyes have had their feathers replaced with cutouts from clothing catalogues: zippers take the place of beaks, fleece meets waterproof where wing should meet underbelly. It turns out that the birds are wearing the anoraks by which their human watchers are generally identified.

He plays heavily on the relationship between drug taking and the centuries-old concept of art as a window on to another reality. And yet, although he tempts his viewers with visions of paradise, he barely conceals the monsters that lurk there.

Encasing it all is the thick resin seal that adds to the jewel-like quality of each piece, making the surface of the works translucent yet impenetrable. This seal also gives them a uniquely plastic, manufactured feel that is at odds with their handmade, labour-intensive origins. It’s an interesting dichotomy for a boy who grew up in Santa Monica, with Hollywood and Disneyland nearby constantly blurring the line between reality and fantasy. Tomaselli claims to have searched for the hidden plumbing the first time he saw a real waterfall.

There are those for whom all this will add up to nothing more than decorative excess. To others the works may offer the kind of portal on to the otherworldliness they seem to promise. This artist invites viewers to get lost in his world, and indeed we might.

In America, those who got up in arms about Tomaselli’s use of drugs worried that addicts might attempt to chip the pills out of the works. Their argument for some kind of health warning doesn’t really hold, but if there is to be one, it should be not to look for too long. Just in case.



Fred Tomaselli: Monsters of Paradise is at Imma, Dublin, until June 19
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King Hoarse
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Post by King Hoarse »

Thanks for sharing, very nice.
What this world needs is more silly men.
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Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.matadorrecords.com/laura_can ... songbysong

'Humming By The Flowered Vine'
song-by-song by Laura Cantrell

14th Street (Emily Spray)
To a lot of New Yorkers, 14th Street is the unofficial divide between uptown and downtown. I personally love 14th street – the Salvation Army, Union Square, the L train running just below. I think this song also perfectly sums up the moment when you see someone you’re obsessed with on the street and decide whether it’s worth it to say hello or stay safely in the background. I’ve known Emily, a Portland, Oregon native, for many years and really appreciate the New York moment she captured in this song.

What You Said (Jenifer Jackson)
Jenifer is another great New York-based writer that I’ve been fortunate to get to know, and this song is from her wonderful 2001 album Birds. It has a breezy joy that to me is perfect for summer, and Kenny Kosek contributes some lovely fiddle work along with Rob Burger on accordion.

And Still (Dave Schramm)
Dave played guitar with me when I toured with Elvis Costello in 2002, and his band The Schramms backed me on some dates the following year. I’ve always admired Dave’s writing (his “Conqueror’s Song” was on my last album), and this was one of a couple of songs-in-progress that he shared with me last summer. When it came time to record, JD suggested we try the song with Dave and Calexico, and later Amy Helm and Fiona McBain of Ollabelle added some harmony. The song has a lot of depth and can be very personal or applied universally.

Khaki & Corduroy (Laura Cantrell)
This one draws from a specific time and place for me personally: New York in the mid-eighties when I first moved here to attend college. It’s really not about anything more than remembering people that you knew in school, little details that stay in your mind about old friends that you don’t see anymore. It’s also about the relationships from that time of your life that are so powerful; and, even though they usually don’t last, their memories are still very strong and will sometimes take you by surprise.

Letters (Lucinda Williams)
A friend played me a rough demo of this unreleased Lucinda song from her late seventies New York period and it really struck a chord with me. Some of us remember what it felt like in the pre-email era to come home from a crummy job to find a beautiful letter in the mailbox. It was as if every detail said something — the paper and the envelope, the postmark, the handwriting. The lyrics reminded me of all those things and stuck in my head for days. Then I knew I had to give it a go.

California Rose (Laura Cantrell)
Rose Maddox of the Maddox Brothers and Rose was one of the great female artists of the honky-tonk era. Her family left Alabama in the Great Depression under the guidance of their mother Lula, convinced they’d find their fortune in California. When this proved as elusive in California as it had been in the South, the family turned its love for music into a livelihood, and was soon dubbed “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band.” Rose’s eventual struggle to leave the family band behind to find success as a solo artist came at a huge cost. She is one of country music’s female pioneers not recognized by the Country Music Hall of Fame, so I thought she was due a tribute in song.

Wishful Thinking (Wynn Stewart)I have a great fondness for the country music that came out of California in the late fifties and early sixties. This shuffle was written and recorded by the Bakersfield honky-tonk legend Wynn Stewart, and was also covered by one of my favorite “girl singers,” Skeeter Davis, who died last year. I wanted to include this as my own private tip of the hat to both her and Wynn Stewart.

Poor Ellen Smith (Traditional, arranged by Laura Cantrell)
My mother’s family is from Chattanooga, Tennessee and was doing some genealogical research last year when we discovered that the famous “song catcher” Ethel Park Richardson was my great, great grandfather’s sister. Ethel collected songs in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee and published the book “American Mountain Songs” in 1927. She later moved to New York and produced the radio drama “Heart-Throbs Of The Hills” for the NBC network throughout the 1930s. This song from her book is a truly American murder ballad based on real events in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As part of the ongoing “folk process,” the melody is slightly changed and I left out one out of ten verses in the book.

Bees (Laura Cantrell/Jay Sherman-Godfrey)
This song pays tribute to an old friend who had ill health at the end of this life and was growing to accept that he wouldn’t be around forever. He had lived a full life and had great stories to tell, but he was also sadly aware that the people that he ran around with for years were all gone. My friend Jay, who produced and contributed songs to my last two albums, helped me finish the song.

Old Downtown (Laura Cantrell)
I wrote this meditation after a real walk in my old downtown of Nashville, Tennessee. I was in one of those moments when you try to match the past up with the present to see if it makes sense. I was taking in a lot of local landmarks around the state Capitol building, like the tomb of William Polk, the statue of WWI hero Alvin C. York, and the Life & Casualty tower. I was struck by the idea that all the things that happen in a place can shape it and the people who live there. No matter what town you’re walking in, the monuments show the triumphs and the scars.
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Post by johnfoyle »

Here's the latest on Laura -


"14th Street" can be heard on the Laura Cantrell music page:

http://www.matadorrecords.com/laura_cantrell/music.html

Hmmm.....I'm liking it , once I adjust to a such a 'produced' sound. I guess I'm just so used to hearing Laura doing more 'organic' ( ie. cheap 'n cheerful) recordings.


http://matadorbb.bway.net/showthread.ph ... eadid=3190

New shows added
Jun 21 – New York, NY – Virgin Megastore Union Square (Instore)
Jun 22 – Boston, MA – Museum of Fine Arts (Calder Courtyard)
Jun 23 – Burlington, VT – Higher Ground
Jun 24 – Northampton, MA – Iron Horse
Jun 25 – Hoboken, NJ – Maxwell’s*
Jun 27 – Philadelphia, PA – Tin Angel*
Jun 28 – Arlington, VA – Iota
Jun 30 – Raleigh, NC – The Pour House*
July 1 – Atlanta, GA – Red Light Café
July 4 – New York, NY – Battery Park

*denotes newly confirmed shows


She's also playing London , England on June 1st.....and I've just ordered my ticket and booked my flight.

see
http://meanfiddler.lggmedia.com/info.as ... owall=true


LAURA CANTRELL


Date: Wednesday 1st June 2005
Venue: The Jazz Cafe
Address: 5 Parkway, London, NW1 7PG
Time: 19.00
Price: Face value: £15.00, booking fee: £3.50.
Phone: 020 7534 6955

Ticket bookings -
http://www.seetickets.com/meanfiddler/p ... ode=144513


Image
Photographer: Ted Barron © 2005
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Post by johnfoyle »

London here I come - I'll tell all ASAP.
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Post by johnfoyle »

Laura , London , June 1st
-------------------------------

Laura's show in a packed Jazz Cafe , Camden , London was an evening of great music and emotion. Doing mostly songs from the new album she was as captivating as ever.

There's loads more I want to tell about the evening. However right now , 10.50AM, I'm in a 'net cafe on Oxford Street and there are a hundred shops I have to check out before my evening flight back to Dublin.
I have loads of notes so I'll tell all this weekend.

Watch this space!
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Post by johnfoyle »

I posted a review on a Cantrell forum -

see
http://216.220.96.163/showthread.php?s= ... #post30604

Image

Image
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Post by ReadyToHearTheWorst »

Laua Cantrell is supporting Lucinda Williams in Gateshead next month - Yippee Aye Ay! 8)
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Post by johnfoyle »

Here's a photo scanned from the print edition of the Guardian review of the London gig.

Image
Mark Winpenny/Live
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Post by johnfoyle »

Laura has sent this to people who signed up to her site -

Hey there folks,

I don't use this mailing list too often, so I hope you will remember
signing up for it!! Best wishes for an enjoyable summer. I am kicking off
the season with the worldwide release of my new album, Humming By The
Flowered Vine, on Matador Records this week. It was very exciting
working with producer JD Foster and the many great musicians who joined us in
the studio, and the cover art is from an amazing piece by Fred
Tomaselli. I'm very proud of the result and hope you will enjoy it too.

I'm getting ready to hit the road this week, with an acoustic band
featuring Mark Spencer and Jimmy Ryan (both of the Blood Oranges), along
with Jeremy Chatzky on double bass. It all starts in New York this
Tuesday evening at the Virgin MegaStore in Union Square. We are then heading
up and down the East Coast, and returning to NYC for a free 4th of July
concert on the Battery Park Lawn with Stephen Malkmus and Yo La Tengo.
We will make our first visit to the West Coast in early July, and then
off to Amsterdam and the U.K. (where I will be joined by Dave Schramm
on guitar and Steve Goulding on drums), for a series of dates opening
for Lucinda Williams.

Please visit my new website for updated news and tour dates, and thanks
so much for your support.

Laura Cantrell
Summer 2005
Jackson Heights, NY

http://www.lauracantrell.com
http://www.radiothriftshop.com
http://www.matadorrecords.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steve Goulding should be great ; Elvis Costello fans will know that his extensive studio career includes playing on the original recording of Watching The Detectives.

see also -

http://www.mekons.de/steve.htm

Read about the Blood Oranges here -

http://music.channel.aol.com/artist/mai ... istid=3706
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Post by Meadowmeal »

I didn't find any link to this Elvis-cover on the forum, so I thought I might as well put it here:

Laura Cantrell - Indoor Fireworks
"A WONDERFUL WOODEN REASON"
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Post by johnfoyle »

Looking at the two different editions of Laura'a new album ( I know , I really should get out more!) I've noticed differences in the the detail around Laura's name on the front. Most interesting , I'm sure you'll agree.


U.S. sleeve detail-

Image

U.K. sleeve detail -

Image
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Post by BlueChair »

Stay tuned for El Vez's interview with Laura Cantrell, which will be posted in our July issue of Being There on Friday.
This morning you've got time for a hot, home-cooked breakfast! Delicious and piping hot in only 3 microwave minutes.
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Post by bambooneedle »

That would have been a nice experience, she's obviously a very attractive woman.
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Post by BlueChair »

This morning you've got time for a hot, home-cooked breakfast! Delicious and piping hot in only 3 microwave minutes.
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Post by Boy With A Problem »

Nice Interview -

Excellent well researched questions El Vez - did she seem suitably impressed?
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Post by El Vez »

Well, it was all done over email while she was on the road touring so there was very little in the way of small talk opportunities. She was fabulous enough to basically write her answers and send them to me while getting ready for soundchecks so that's really a testament to what a classy person she is. The major drawback is the cut and dry nature of an email interview which cut off any opportunity to digress in interesting ways. Cantrell knows as much about country music as any living person so I would have liked to have just had a conversation about Ray Price or Tompall Glaser with her. She was very vocal about liking Fulks' Georgia Hard (she called it his best work) which kinda strengthened the connection I felt with those two interviews.

I'm impressed with Matador's marketing because I just saw a commercial for Flowered Vine on VH1 which is a hell of a lot more than Diesel Only could do for her. Hopefully she'll pick up a larger audience with this move because she has everything it takes to be a legit star.
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Post by johnfoyle »

Hey, El Vez , if you had been in London you could have ended up like this Irish journalist!


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
( scanned from print edition)

The Hot Press ( Dublin) , July 13 '05


Sweetheart Of The Radio

The songs of Laura Cantrell are steeped in the timeless values of American country rock. But Cantrell. a former Wall Street banker, is a thoroughly modern artist

WORDS Peter Murphy


It’s 2.15am in your reporter’s room at the Holiday Inn, Camden Lock. Laura Cantrell is sipping water and I’m having a beer from the mini bar. Faced with the choice of an early start or doing the interview at this unlikely hour and location, Cantrell, pretty, chatty and just the right side of prim, has elected to take her life in her hands and brave my temporary lair. I’ve assured her husband and road manager Jeremy that if he hears screaming and pounding on the door, it’ll probably be me.

Earlier in the evening, Cantrell and her three-piece ensemble (mandolin, guitar, stand-up bass) had played, with feeling, a set at Camden’s Café Jazz that veered fram the virtuoso to the informal, alternating the old (‘The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter’) with the new and the borrowed (Emily Spray’s ‘14th Street’) and a whole lot of blues. Drawing on her new album Humming By The Flowered Vine, Cantrell displayed an impressive directness and purity of tone, whether re-upholstering Appalachian murder ballads or evoking more contemporary country-rock songwriters such as Amy Rigby or Lucinda Williams. Elvis Costello, who took her on tour a couple of years ago, wasn’t far off the mark when he described her sound as a cross between Kitty Wells ond Rubber Soul.


Cantrell herself is Tennessee born and bred, but this is no impoverished gingham-and-dungarees sob story. Her parents were Grand Old Opry devotees but also lawyers. When Cantrell moved from Nashville to New York to attend college, she supported herself not by waiting tables but with on 11 year stint on Wall Street, occupying a senior position in the Bank Of America Equities Research Department. After she eventually quit to pursue music full time, Oprah’s magazine, 0, ran a profile on her.


Middle class indie bands might pay good money to shut people up about such a background but Cantrell has no such hangups. Just as the majority of traditionalist country acts
wouldn’t be caught dead in ripped jeans on a Saturday night, they also tend to appreciate the value of a good job in the city.

“I had a weird epiphany recently, ‘cos people carp so much about country music changing and why can’t it be like it was,” Cantrell says. “There’s a lot of animosity amongst a certain crowd of people towards the commercial artists ‘cos they’ve changed it, but I Just feel like the country has changed. People who were Hank Williams fans, their sons and daughters and grandchildren don’t all live without air conditioning at the end of a dirt road.

“And in a weird way, relating that to my own music, I felt it was okay to not worry about being ‘country’ enough. You don’t need to have that hard luck kind of background to feel feelings or be able to express those universal emotions. Everybody’s got ‘em. I worked on Wall Street, but I wasn’t a high-flying banker type. I was a secretary for a long time.


“If you do any kind of work like that, it’s humbling, whether you’re working for a big company or not. I was there so that I could do my radio show on the weekend and be in a country band.” Ah yes, the radio. Not content with learning her chops in numerous duos and garage bands, Cantrell also trained as a Dj at Columbia University before volunteering at the free-form station WFMU in New Jersey in 1993, hosting on award—winning weekly show called Radio Thrift Shop (Irish listeners may have heard her co—host John Kelly’s Mystery Train).


“Having an outlet on the radio definitely gave me a place to figure out my point of view,” she says. “You hear a song that breaks your heart and want somebody else to experience that too. I felt that was like a weird secret society of radio music freaks that I entered a long time ogo. It’s been a part of me developing a voice as a performer.”


Any weird correspondence from insomniacs or guys serving the proverbial five—to-ten?

“I had one guy send me his arrest record. He was a guy who robbed ATM machines. He sent me an article about his arrest and also — this was the strangest thing — the security camera image of him that was used as evidence of him just caught after he’d ripped off a machine.”

Speaking of lawlessness — has she heard about Steve Van Zant’s new outlaw country station?
“You know, of course, from Jeremy about it?’
Nope.
“How did you find out about it?”
From an article in Billboard.

“Oh... my husband runs it! Little Steven hired Jeremy to actually programme it. He was there with the Underground Garage that he’s done as a syndicated radio show on terrestial radio, and he was signing a satellite deal, and he got the bee in his bonnet to do this outlaw,country thing. He
needed a guy who could actually bring it to reality, so they got Jeremy to do it ”

That’s not the only radio connection. During her Camden show, Contell welled up when dedicating a song to her late friend and mentor John Peel, who described her debut album as his favourite record of the last 10 years, comparing her to Roy Orbison.

“I had mixed feelings about it,” she admits. “I didn’t want to mention John Peel just to hear people go, ‘Raaaa’, ‘cos he really did do me a great service in being so vocal about my music on the radio. But aside from that I did get to be friends with him and I always felt like this weird thing, like I didn’t want to be working John, ‘cos you know you couldn’t ‘work’ him. He wouldn’t have it. And I’m not the type, porticularly in my own music, so I still have this weird tentativeness about mentioning him or trying to seem like I was getting over on his popularity, but I felt like it was worth mentioning tonight, if I could get through the moment, which I barely did.

“We had just been to his birthday party in August, and he said to me, ‘I hope you’re writing some of those narrative songs, Laura, ‘cos I like those the best’, It was such a huge loss. Like any other dear friend or dad or whatever, there’s no replacing that person.”
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Post by Who Shot Sam? »

Laura's the in-studio guest on KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" today:

http://kcrw.org/show/mb
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Post by Who Shot Sam? »

Just watched this set. I must say that, having seen Laura tour with EC and listened to a few other live bits, her voice doesn't do much for me - kind of thin and lacking something IMO. Her music is very pleasant, but nothing about it makes me want to run out to the record store. All kind of low-key and respectable.
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Post by johnfoyle »

Here's are scans of the book - compiled by a distant relative of Laura's- that featured a song on the new album


ImageImage

Image

ImageImage
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Post by johnfoyle »

Laura's hitting the road , starting in the next few days .

http://www.lauracantrell.com/gigs.asp


August 16
Beachland Tavern
15711 Waterloo Road
Cleveland, OH
Tel: 216 383 1124

August 17
Schubas
3159 N. Southport
Chicago, IL
Tel: 773 525 2508

August 18
Club Cafe
56 South 12th Street
Pittsburgh, PA
Tel: 773 525 2508

August 28
Howl Festival
Bluegrass Ball
Tompkins Square Park
New York City
Free Concert!!
5:00 p.m.

September 12
Colston Hall (Bar)
Bristol, England
Tel: 0870 4444 400
with Holly Williams

September 14
Academy 3
Manchester, England
Tel: 0161 832 1111
with Holly Williams

September 15
Rescue Rooms
Nottingham, England
Tel: 0115 958 8484
with Holly Williams

September 16
Little Theatre
Gateshead, England
Tel: 0191 232 1232
with Holly Williams

September 19
Montgomery Theatre
Sheffield, England
Tel: 0114 276 7093
with Holly Williams

September 20
Carling Academy Islington
London, England
Tel: 0870 771 2000
with Holly Williams

September 21
The Musician
Leicester, England
Tel: 0116 255 4854
with Holly Williams

September 22
Carling Academy 2
Liverpool, England
Tel: 0870 771 2000
with Holly Williams

September 24
Queen's Hall
Edinburgh, Scotland
Tel: 0131 668 2019
with Holly Williams

September 25
Whelan's
Dublin, Ireland
Tel: 01 478 0766
with Holly Williams

October 2
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 5
Speedway Meadows
Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, CA
Free Concert with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, The Knitters, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Ralph Stanley, Hazel Dickens, Earl Scruggs, Ricky Skaggs, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and more!!

October 4
El Rey Theater
5515 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
Tel: 323 930 7112
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Post by johnfoyle »

Bump, bump!

Laura in Bristol tonight - anyone go?

She spoke about her current faves recently -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jh ... over12.xml

Daily Telegraph ( London)

Overheard: Laura Cantrell
(Filed: 09/09/2005)

Beginning a new series, we ask musicians what they are listening to at the moment. This week, the New York country singer chooses two albums from the alternative country scene


I have really been enjoying a group called Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell. They have an album called Begonias, inspired by the old country duets. They started with an appreciation of the whole George Jones and Tammy Wynette style and from there they wrote lovely, original songs together. Often in the more alternative area of country music you find vocalists that are – and I put myself in this category – not as classically accessible voices, but Caitlin and Thad both could have been stars of country music at any time. They have those beautiful, full voices.

Robbie Fulks is also someone who has operated in what they call in the States ‘alternative country’ but who has very strong roots in what was good about Nashville: the commercial country music of the past that is still inspiring and worthwhile. I think Robbie is one of the most entertaining writers, whether he is writing a ballad or a real shit-kicker song. He even writes really good novelty songs, even though I know he doesn’t like to be known for them, he always has a couple of songs on an album that make you laugh out loud.
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.epost.co.uk/displayNode.jsp? ... ebarsearch

Evening Post ( Bristol)

MESMERISING, ETHEREAL AND MELODIC NIGHT WITH LAURA


14 September 2005

But by any criteria Laura Cantrell makes an unusual star. Her voice lacks strength and her vocal range is limited, her lyrics are on the ordinary side and, despite having lived in New York for 20 years, the girl from Tennessee is so steeped in bluegrass and the American folk tradition that everything she sings sounds like it has come straight from a front porch on Walton's Mountain. But none of this actually matters one iota.

For the ethereal frail quality of her voice, her melodic songs and the charm of her performances weaved a strong magic that completely enveloped the Colston Hall Bar. So mesmerised were we that she could have sung Three Blind Mice and we would have cheered in delight.

Inevitably, most of her songs were taken from the new album, including the very difficult Bees, Old Downtown, about revisiting her Tennessee home, and California Rose, which she wrote about Rose Maddox of the pioneering country act The Maddox Brothers and Rose.

But she did most of her older favourites as well, including Churches Off The Interstate, Not The Tremblin' Kind, When The Roses Bloom Again and Mountain Fern. And there were covers too, including her gorgeous version of Robert McCreedy's Two Seconds.

She was accompanied by a three-piece string band, including Jay Farrar's guitarist Mark Spencer, and their tight, sympathetic playing and close harmonies contributed a great deal. She seemed to be really enjoying herself. And so did we - the shouts for an encore were loud and extended.
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