November 19, 2009 8pm
Circus
1227 N. High Street
(614) 421-2998
$10
18+ - under 21 pay $2 surcharge at the door
Carrie Rodriguez
http://www.carrierodriguez.com/
Pigeonhole Carrie Rodriguez at your peril. Sure, she’s done a lot of duets. She plays a fiddle. (a mean one at that.) She’s recorded songs with a pleasing, folksy twang.
But don’t think you know what you’re getting. Not yet 30, and with a critically-acclaimed solo record and several well-received duet records in her wake, the classically trained singer/songwriter has just begun flexing her artistic muscles, still figuring out how far her talents will take her. If you’re looking for someone playing it safe and sticking to tried-and-true ways of music making, as the title of Rodriguez’s daring new album aptly states, SHE AIN’T ME.
“Because I took some chances, wrote with some new people and actually co-wrote most of the songs on the album, it’s very different,” Rodriguez notes.
Also different: Malcolm Burn’s dense production, bulging with thoughtful details, yet always serving the song. “If the song doesn’t hold up on its own, without all the production, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it,” Rodriguez says. “And he was much more into the vibe than perfection-which is good for me, because my tendency is to try to make things perfect.”
The songs on SHE AIN’T ME, Rodriguez’s second solo outing for Manhattan/Back Porch, come from an introspective place, rife with self-assessment and questioning. “It comes from having to really look within yourself when you’re forced to be alone, and to not be afraid of that process,” Rodriguez says. “Taking some time off from the road this year to write allowed me to do some growing and reflecting that I often put aside when I’m touring all the time.”
Long before Carrie Rodriguez was a fiddle-toting, mandoguitar-slinging Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter, she was a junior violin student in Austin, Texas, absorbing the influences of an opera-obsessed mom and folk-singing dad. “In kindergarten, we had a pilot program at my public elementary school to teach five year olds Suzuki violin lessons,” Rodriguez recalls. “They would give the lessons during naptime, and I must have gotten out to go to the bathroom. And I remember walking down the hallway and hearing these violins scratching out ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ I was immediately drawn to that and came home and told mom I wanted to take violin lessons.”
“Also,” she adds, “I really hated naptime.”
Group lessons soon led to private lessons, which led Carrie to a conservatory program at Oberlin. Enter Lyle Lovett, a family friend, who invited Carrie to sit in with his band at soundcheck in Cleveland, an experience that was both inspiring and frustrating. “My feel was awful and I knew it,” she recalls. “But I was mesmerized by [Lovett fiddler] Andrea Zonn. I wanted to do what she was doing.”
Rodriguez transferred to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where she found no shortage of resources for transforming “violin” into “fiddle.” “Casey Driessen is now one of the greatest American fiddle players on the scene (plays with Bela Fleck, Tim O’Brien), and he was my roommate,” Rodriguez recalls. “He taught me one of the first fiddle tunes I ever learned.”
Berklee also set the table for a love of collaboration, which led to three duet records (and many touring miles) with singer/songwriter Chip Taylor, who was instrumental in helping Carrie to realize her debut album, SEVEN ANGELS ON A BICYCLE. The Associated Press raved, “…her voice has a character few achieve. Rather than a support player taking a minor turn, she uses her first solo album to mark her ground as a singular talent.” For SHE AIN’T ME, Rodriguez knew it was time to form new collaborations and she ended up with an impressive list of co-writers, including Gary Louris (Jayhawks), Dan Wilson (Semisonic), Jim Boquist (Son Volt) and Mary Gauthier.
“I feel the most comfortable when I have someone to react to,” Rodriguez says. “The process was completely different with each person I wrote with. For example, with Mary Gauthier we sat down one rainy afternoon in New York City and wrote the entire song, more or less. With Dan Wilson we just came up with a little melody and a few snippets of words while we were in the same room. Later, I wrote the verses, he came up with a great chorus, and we put the song together via e-mail and a few phone calls.”
Lucinda Williams wasn’t among the co-writers, but she makes her presence felt, singing backup on “Mask of Moses” while singing Carrie’s praises elsewhere. After receiving a copy of SEVEN ANGELS ON A BICYCLE from Chip Taylor, Lucinda told the New York Times “…I have to say I am very impressed. She’s got something unique in her voice that’s very subtle and a little smoky and sweet. I detect a certain wisdom in her, and yet a sense of wonder as well.” Rodriguez recalls, “Lucinda had sent me this beautiful email, saying how much she loved my record, and how she really saw something special there. And if I ever wanted to open up for her, that’d be great. It was like, wow! Merry Christmas!”
Rodriguez subsequently toured with Williams, and also sat in on fiddle during Lucinda’s sets. And it was on the heels of a night out with Williams that Rodriguez met Malcolm Burn-whose work on she’d admired on Emmylou Harris’s WRECKING BALL (engineer and musician) and Chris Whitley’s LIVING WITH THE LAW (producer and musician)– for an early chat about her next record. “I was pretty hung-over that morning, in my pajamas, looking like a train wreck,” Rodriguez admits. “And Malcolm comes over, looking all dapper in his vintage three-piece suit.”
Appearances were quickly dismissed as Malcolm made spot-on suggestions about Carrie’s songs, and offered production ideas that made her feel her own project would be a worthy addition to the “desert island discs” Burn has already recorded. “I knew immediately that this was the guy,” she recalls.
The result is a record that lives up to its name-an expectation-confounding statement, equal parts organic folk and expansive atmosphere, yet one that comes closest to revealing what Carrie Rodriguez is all about. Think you already know? Think again.
Romantica
http://www.romanticamusic.com/
At first glance the irony is thick on Romantica’s new release America. Penned by an immigrant Irishman who writes a fair bit about his homeland, and delivers his nostalgia in a lilting Belfastian inflection, the only thing ‘America’ about it seems to be the new soil on which he’s singing. But listen to all this Irishness couched in the musical landscape of historically American country and folk music painted by the swirling pedal steel guitar of Eric Heywood (Ray LaMontagne, Son Volt, Richard Buckner) and the emotive fiddling of Jessy Greene (Wilco, Jayhawks, Minus 5) and it comes clear why Rolling Stone’s Melissa Maerz called it “Americana, (that’s) something more than the sound of the states” You’ll hear fingerprints of true American artists, Gram Parsons, Ryan Adams, Bruce Springsteen, and Iron and Wine, as well as a few from across the pond such as, Damien Rice, Nick Drake and Van Morrison.
Mariachi horns on a tex-mex train, The National Side chronicles the transplanting of singer Ben Kyle’s family from the green shores of Ireland to the Northern Americas. Kyle’s mother was a hockey player on the Irish national side, and his father a medical doctor before they moved to the United States in 1994. Ixcatan describes an outlaw shooting in the mountains of mid-Mexico in haunting and brooding but sublimely beautiful colors. The gravity of Kyle’s voice hovering upon the weightlessness of Mr Heywood’s soaring steel guitar creates a holy tension that paints death in the most transcendent of lights.
Recorded entirely at home, in a studio built by the band, and almost entirely through one microphone and one pre-amp, Ben Kyle’s lush and effortless, airy vocals set the tone for this oft-times breezy and sometimes haunting, atmospheric record. Guitars, keys and essential harmonies come courtesy of Luke Jacobs. Steady, subtle and often poignant percussion is contributed by touring veteran James Orvis. And as mentioned above, string duties are performed by Romantica’s latest addition, Jessy Greene. who brings a wealth of experience and depth from her history of pop and americana endeavors.
This is the follow-up to Romantica’s debut It’s Your Weakness That I Want which sat comfortably in the CMJ top 200 for over 2 months and received sustained airplay on Twin Cities FM megastations KQRS and Cities 97, as well as MPR’s influential indie station, 89.3 The Current. It also won numerous awards including Best Americana Album at the 2004 Minnesota Music Awards and two International Songwriting Competition awards: On My Mind took 2nd place in the AAA category in 2004 and Mexico took 1st place in the Performance category in 2005. An early release of America’s lead track Queen of Hearts won 2nd Place in the Americana category of the same competition this year!
The early critical response has been promising:
Paste Magazine gave the album 4 Stars**** and said, “Romantica is here to save the day. Most albums with such ambitious titles fall flat in the attempt; Kyle, in songs and voice that sit comfortably between Jeff Tweedy and Ryan Adams, dwells comfortably in the long shadows cast by his forefathers while leaving his own undeniable stamp on the proceedings. Top notch.”
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has called it one of the “10 best Local albums of 2007″ Chris Riemenschnieder writes, “In a perfect world, the soccer, er, football ditty “The National Side” would score on local FM stations.”
Romantica just returned from 3 weeks on the east coast. They’ll be touring extensively in the US and the UK this year in continued support of their new disc.