Today, We would like to feature 3 emergents and remarkables artists who ‘ve got their exposure on the Fox TV series Bones (Bavid Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel).

These features have already generated an amazing amount of exposure like Irish Susan Enan since she catch our eyes (and since several monts before) with her new song “Bring On The Wonder” featuring and guesting back vocals, our Lovely Canadian Grammy Awards Sarah McLachlan.
Since her debut solo EP in 2003, Enan has toured extensively in Europe and the US and has opened for Tony Bennett, Roger McGuinn (in the UK and USA), Aqualung, Damien Rice, Tom McRae, Mike Doughty (of Soul Coughing), and toured the USA for 38 dates with Over The Rhine. With Sarah McLachlan on her sides, Enan is accomplishing a promising career.
The two other features of the day are British Eliza Lumley, a beautiful and surprising jazz vocalist and Californian Sarah Lov recently signed with Canadian label Nettwerk.

All of these 3 features are working on their respective debut album and there is no doubt, we will review them as soon as they will be released !

01. Susan Enan Feat Sarah McLachlan - Bring On The Wonder

02. Eliza Lumley - Black Star

03. Sara Lov - Foutain

The husband and wife duo have worked, lived and breathed for music since the moment they met nearly ten years ago when Adam joined Shannon on stage at a gig in Atlanta. They had an undeniable connection and their musical collaboration took root immediately, both of them drawn to timeless sounds and artists – Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, Aretha Franklyn, DBob ylan. The easy harmony was impossible to ignore.

Covers gave way to original material in their shows, and day jobs supported their creative habit. They worked tirelessly at music in different configurations, playing live and writing whenever they could over the next four years. Their personal relationship began to flourish as did their music. If their career was to continue to develop, Nashville was in their future. And in 2002, the couple married and made the move to from Georgia to Tennessee.

As it does for virtually all aspiring musicians who make it their home, Music City became a crash course in musicianship, songwriting craft and discipline. The level of talent around them pushed The Wrights to improve and develop. “We were surrounded by friends, acquaintances and strangers who could knock your socks off any day of the week,” Shannon says.

One such person was hit songwriter and producer Paul Kennerley (Ray Charles, Marty Stuart, Waylon Jennings, The Judds). “We met him at the perfect time,” Shannon explains. “Adam and I are such music lovers. After moving through the big machine at RCA, we were aching to be around someone who was a music lover as well.” “Sometimes the industry can make you feel like love has nothing to do with it” adds Adam.

Adam and Shannon regarded their new material with Kennerley as some of the best they’d ever done. The high point came when the legendary Solomon Burke cut “You’re The Kind Of Trouble” on his acclaimed 2006 album Nashville, produced by the iconic Buddy Miller.

“That was a real feather in our cap,” Shannon says. “You open up the album and there’s Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Don Williams, Bruce Springsteen songs. And little ole us.”

Subsequent touring – with ACR label head Alan Jackson in arenas, on their own club dates, the Grand Ole Opry, fairs and festivals – further honed their sound and prepared them for a second round of recording. As with their first album, noted producer Keith Stegall and engineer/co-producer John Kelton were at the controls.
“We wanted most of the songs to be duets,” Adam said. “We worked really hard at trying to find and write songs that we loved,” he continued, “we’re really proud of what we’ve recorded.”

The Wrights’ musical growth continued to find appreciation with one of their earliest supporters: Jackson. “He really liked what we were doing,” Adam says. “He wanted this music to have a chance.”

And why not? As The Wrights clearly demonstrates, Adam and Shannon have developed the kind of sound not heard in decades. Conway and Loretta, Johnny and June, George and Tammy - they made albums together. They toured together.

The Wrights recall that era by singing with the conversational ease of people who spend every moment with one another. Which, of course, they do. And love has everything to do with it.

The Wrights
by The Wrights
Original Release Date: January 29, 2008
Number of Discs: 1
Genre : Americana
Label: Mailboat Records
Buy Album: Click Here

This is officialy the cover for Sarah McLachlan’s first Best-Of : Closer, release on October 7, 2008, featuring two new studio tracks : “U Want Me 2″ and “Don’t Give Up on Us”.

Dido’s third album, Safe Trip Home, will be released in early November 2008. Right now, you can hear an exclusive track : “Look No Further”.

The Works, Jonatha Brooke’s seventh solo release, is a full-length album of previously unheard lyrics by Woody Guthrie, set to original music written and performed by Brooke. Brooke is one of a select group of artists to be invited by Nora, Guthrie’s daughter into the Guthrie Archives to create new works from his vast collection of lyrics, prose, poetry and artwork. Brooke co-produced The Works with the legendary Bob Clearmountain (Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones). Recorded over a two-month period in New York City, several acclaimed musicians including keyboardist Joe Sample (Eric Clapton, B.B. King), bassist Christian McBride (Sting, Diana Krall), drummer Steve Gadd (Paul Simon, Eric Clapton), and steel guitarist Greg Leisz (Joni Mitchell, k.d. lang, Wilco), joined Brooke in the studio. The album features duets with artists Keb’ Mo’ on ‘All You Gotta Do Is Touch Me’; Eric Bazilian on ‘There’s More True Lovers Than One’ ; Glen Phillips on ‘Sweetest Angel’; with a special guest appearance by Derek Trucks playing slide guitar on ‘New Star.’

There are several songs on this album that stand out, but the opener “My Sweet and Bitter Bowl” is one of the very best with verses possessing the haunting dark edge of a traditional Appalachian folk tune. “You’d Oughta Be Satisfied Now” is another stunner, building on that classic Guthrie folk style with a bluesier depth to the guitar work. Both songs bring out the throatier tone of Jonatha’s voice.

The album contains also two completely original songs - the lusterless “Little Bird” and the much more interesting “Taste Of Danger”. Yet it’s the Guthrie-Brooke songwriting combination that produces the real magic here.

This album is Brooke’s highly creative work ever on a record and will definitely have a place in your heart and memories.

The Works
by Jonatha Brooke
Original Release Date: August 26, 2008
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Bad Dog Records
Buy Album: Click Here

All You Gotta Do is Touch Me

The Making of The Works
[See post to watch Flash video]

Powerful and distinctive 21-year-old singer/songwriter Hilary McRae, the first developing artist to be signed to Hear Music delivers her debut album Through These Walls, featuring the infectious single “Every Day (When Will You Be Mine).” Her refreshing style and captivating melodies seem to have time traveled to this decade from the 1970s echoing the vintage pop/rock of the ’60s and ’70s while blazing headlong into a territory all her own with vibrant rhythms and textures of old-school, horn-drenched, uptown Joss Stone-like’s R&B and a dynamic setting for the timelessly bittersweet songs and rich. This stunningly accomplished newcomer, pianist and vocalist graduated from the prestigious Berklee School of Music has penned ALL of the songs on this album! McRae’s vocal instrument is capable of withering intensity one moment, hushed intimacy the next — a perfect match for these songs of uncommon candor and humanity — songs that could only have emanated from an “old soul”.

The album also introduces another remarkably gifted newcomer in producer/guitarist Zach Ziskin, McRae’s longtime musical collaborator. It was Ziskin who had the crucial idea of enlisting the legendary Charlie Calello, who has arranged music for legends such as Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen, to create the horn parts. “I’ve loved horns since I was a kid listening to Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire,” she confirms, “but I never thought of my own music in that way until we started making the record. Charlie came up with stellar horn parts; I was blown away by his ideas and let him do his thing. I was amazed at how much they added to the feel of the songs and the overall recording.”

At once vibrant and deftly nuanced, the horns serve as a sort of wordless Greek chorus behind McRae’s vocals, providing a texturally rich counterpoint to her songs of romantic anguish — laden with missed opportunities, what ifs and lingering heartache. “I definitely got my heart stomped on, more than once,” she acknowledges. “That’s probably why these songs are so raw.” The opening “Everyday (When Will You Be Mine?),” is suffused with yearning, while the following “Consider Me Gone” is delivered with a mixture of hurt and defiance, as a deftly manicured guitar solo from Ziskin redolent of vintage Steely Dan takes over in the extended outro. That leads into “Why Can’t Now Be Our Time,” burnished by brass accents that recall the Chicago of “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” Subtly yet vividly, the track evokes an ill-timed romance in the Boston winter, as the horns suggest bare limbs standing vigil over a snow-covered expanse.

It closes out with McRae scatting in the manner of Ella Fitzgerald, a hint of hopefulness in the gesture. It’s rare to find such a juxtaposition of raw emotion and refined musicality in contemporary music; but then, McRae is not your everyday contemporary artist. She began writing these songs during the two years she spent at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, which had awarded her a scholarship to study songwriting after an audition during which she sang one of her originals and Don Henley’s “Heart of the Matter.”

Additional song ideas came to her during the summer of 2006, while she toured Central and South America as the keyboardist and backing vocalist for Latin superstar Christian Castro. By the time she returned home to Boca Raton, Fla., where she lives with her father, Hilary possessed the material and the self-belief to take the next step. “I got to a point of deciding whether I was going to focus on songwriting or performing,” she recalls, “so I went to my dad and said, ‘Listen, I really want to try to do something with these songs, and I want to do it as an artist.’

He was very generous in his response, and what started out as a Christmas present got a little out of hand. Because of his support, it turned into something really great — something beyond my wildest dreams.” She then called on her friend Ziskin. They’d met when Hilary, then 16, was preparing to record her first set of demos as half of a duo, and Ziskin, a skilled guitarist and aspiring producer, recognized the immensity of her raw talent and eagerly took on the project. “Zach has been such an inspiration to me over the years.” When they reunited on the album project, Ziskin’s overarching vision brought another dimension to the material, but retaining the girl-at-the-piano torchiness that is the album’s heart and soul. “Zach saw what it could be from the beginning and knew how to convey it musically,” she says. McRae describes the players — starting with the ace of rhythm section, handpicked by Ziskin, of bassist Fernando Perdomo and drummer Derek Cintron — as “musical gurus who know everything about everything.

Fernando and Derek are two of the most talented and genuine people I know,” she says. “I’ve learned so much from playing music with these guys and from working with Zach; together, they really brought this record to life.” When Ziskin played the finished album for his cousin, industry veteran Bruce Berman, it started a fortuitous chain of events. Blown away by what he’d heard, Berman in turn played the record for his friend and fellow vet Larry Frazin, who was hooked as well. After agreeing that this was the most impressive new artist they’d heard in ages, the two came up with the concept of launching a new label venture, with McRae as their partner and her album as the first release. Hilary happily agreed, leading to the formation of Stone Road Records. While Stone Road was setting up the album release, Frazin was visited in his office by longtime friend Alan Mintz, the head of music for Starbucks Entertainment.

Mintz was there on other business, but after hearing McRae’s album, an excited Mintz told Frazin it was just what he’d been looking for, and a deal was made on the spot to release the record through Hear Music — a label launched by Starbucks and Concord Music Group whose roster includes Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. It appears to be a marriage made in heaven, uniting a young artist with a truly adult sensibility and a label that prides itself on committing only to artists of quality and distinctiveness. Asked about her aspirations, McRae considers the question for a moment before offering her answer. “I really hope to have a long career,” she says, a Mona Lisa smile briefly flashing across her classic features, framed by blonde tresses. “And I hope to keep getting my heart broken so that I’ll have something to write about.”

The line mirrors one of McRae’s memorable choruses: “This is my love song for you,” she sings. “I know it’s sad, but it’ll do.” It will indeed.

Through These Walls
by Hilary McRae
Original Release Date: April 15, 2008
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Hear Music / Stone Road Records
Buy Album: Click Here

Hilary on The Early Show

Everyday - Music Video
[See post to watch Flash video]

Armed with little more than an acoustic guitar and her fragile alto, San Francisco folk singer/songwriter Emily Jane White’s dark folk-rock has caught our attention by offering complex tales of melancholy and isolation. While comparisons to contemporaries like Cat Power and Hope Sandoval are frequent, Emily’s music owes a clear debt to classic female jazz and blues singers such as Billie Holiday. Fooling around with music since pre-school, Emily started on piano around the same time she learned to read, eventually picking up the guitar during her college days at UC Santa Cruz. While doing stints in an array of college punk and metal bands, she began writing her own songs and fronted her own group, the Diamond Star Halos.

After graduation Emily picked up and moved to Bordeaux (France), where she performed with a bevy of independent French artists, further honing her songwriting skills. Upon returning stateside, she moved to SF and began recording 4-track demos, formulating the songs that would ultimately become her debut album, Dark Undercoat.

The release of Emily’s debut album Dark Undercoat Recorded in 2006 with Wainwright Hewlett on Double Negative Records, has seen her win praise from the Fader, Flaunt, and Spin, the San Francisco Weekly compared her writing to that of Cormac McCarthy as Undercoat’s ten songs balance melody and minimalism in their relatively sparse compositions. That space gives the songs room to breathe and unfold, giving them a depth to match their ear-catching appeal.

Her song “Wild Tigers I Have Known” recently appeared on the soundtrack for the Cam Archer film of the same title and Rolling Stone placed Emily in their top 5 Hot List, describing the aforementioned song as “melancholy as a rainbow glimpsed through the bars of a prison window”.

This summer, Emily is touring in France with LES FEMMES S’EN MELENT Festival.

Wild Tigers I Have Known - Music Video

Dark Undercoat - Music Video

Dagger - Music Video

The title of Jesca Hoop’s debut album, Kismet, could easily refer to the twists of fate that led to its existence. Certainly it seems like destiny that Hoop would land a five-year tenure as nanny to the children of Tom Waits, whose influence is spattered generously across Kismet. Another bit of good fortune came in 2004, when Waits’s publisher, Lionel Conway sent a demo version of “Seed of Wonder” to the highly influential radio host Nic Harcourt at Los Angeles station KCRW, who helped make the song one of the most requested in the station’s history. Without an official release to her name, Hoop was tapped to open for the Polyphonic Spree during its summer 2007 tour.

And although the planets may have aligned to expose Hoop’s curious muse to the world, the brilliance of Kismet rests squarely on her shoulders. Hoop is easily the most creative singer-songwriter to emerge from the Los Angeles environs in years. Many of these songs were written years before she moved to the hills of L.A., and they sound way older than that. The cabaret melodies of “Silverscreen” and “Out the Back Door” summon the flapper bobs and cigarette holders of 1920s Germany; “Enemy” and “Havoc in Heaven” reach back even further, to ancient Celtic folk music.

From any other singer, Kismet might have been a novel but soulless pastiche of retro sounds. Instead each song fleshes out a world of Hoop’s own creation, inhabited by her shape-shifting voice, which veers from a Bjork-like impishness to the wistful jazz phrasings of the great torch singers to a rapturous pure alto. Tough as it is to imagine a single person tackling a pagan call to arms (”Do not trust the guise of a woman old and wise/ For truly she is the white bone demon” from “Havoc in Heaven”) and a moving elegy to New Orleans (”Love Is All We Have”), Hoop nails ‘em both.

One of the best songs on the album, “Intelligentactile 101,” is sung from the point of view of a gestating baby that can’t wait to be born so it can touch stuff (”Now I’m swingin’ from the stars/ And an umbilical cord/ My toe, oh my toe/ I want your fingers on my toe”). No surprise she sounds so comfortable as a fetus — Kismet bursts with an omni-directional creativity you don’t often find in grown-up humans.

Eccentric as it is, Kismet wants to be a pop record. Co-producers Damian Anthony and Tony Berg coat a number of songs in heavy drum tracks and vocal layering, even bringing along the Police’s Stewart Copeland to supply beats on a revamped “Seed of Wonder.” Hoop is at her most effective when her voice rings out sans obstruction, as on the jarringly beautiful “Enemy.” But if it takes a snare drum, bass guitar, and vocoder to get Hoop’s pagan pop on the radio, bring it on. All the glossifying production tricks don’t diminish the spectral power of Kismet one bit.

review by Etan Rosenbloom

Kismet
by Jesca Hoop
Original Release Date: September 18, 2007
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Red Int / Red Ink
ASIN: Click Here

Money - Music Video

KCRW

As a songwriter and a performer, Sarah Masen has won the enthusiasm of critics and a committed, eclectic fan base for over 10 years. Whether immersed in electronica or as solo acoustic broadsides, her work speaks to all things awkward, political, dysfunctional, and seemingly mundane. Intense attentiveness to her music has been known to lead listeners toward jumping, jiving, weeping, wailing, and laughing through gnashing of teeth.

Originally from the suburbs of Detroit, Sarah now lives in Nashville with her husband, author David Dark, and their three children. In recent months, she’s taken to recording music with the members of Bulb and making little handcrafted EPs, with each sleeve following the snowflake model of containing a slightly different work of art. Three titles are available on-line: Woman’s Work Is Alchemy, Magic That Works, and A History of Lights and Shadows at Sarah’s website : http://www.sarahmasen.com/albums

Once upon a time, CCM genius Charlie Peacock started a little record label called re:think with hopes of putting the art back into Christian artistry. Aside from allowing him more creative control over his own music, it helped foster a young unknown band called Switchfoot. The only other artist to come out of re:think’s all-too-brief five-year run—and really, one of the primary reasons Peacock formed the label—was a literature major at Michigan’s William Tyndale College by the name of Sarah Masen.

Those who remember Christian radio from ten years ago may recall the singer/songwriter for her pop hits “All Fall Down” and “Downtown,” but Masen was never really a pop artist at heart. Rooted more in folk music, as heard on her 1995 independent debut The Holding and 2001’s Word Records release The Dreamlife of Angels, she seemed to let her career fade away to focus on motherhood (her husband is author David Dark, a regular contributor to Books & Culture and other CTI publications). But in the supposed downtime, she has kept active musically by contributing vocals to Pristina (an electronica collaboration with Joey B. of The Echoing Green) and indie band Bulb.

After a lengthy six-year wait, fans can finally relish new music from Sarah Masen, though by somewhat unconventional means. As an independent artist, the music is only available through her official site and MySpace page. Though the songs will be available for digital download in time, hard copies are available for order. Rather than release a single album, Masen has elected to compartmentalize her songs into three separate EPs for $5 each. But a trio of releases seems rather unnecessary, since listeners are likely to either want all three or none at all.

Woman’s Work Is Alchemy is the sparsest of the bunch, and thus the toughest to take. With a stripped-down acoustic folk sound reminiscent of early Jewel crossed with Sufjan Stevens’ less intricate recordings, the EP seemingly explores the role of women in light of the Bible. At least that seems to be the case with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (a Christmas song, not the nursery rhyme) and “Burt and Elvis” (drawing on Romans 8:22-23 to reflect on motherhood and the anticipation of eternity). Plus “The Snake and the Love of God” concisely draws together the fall of man in Genesis with redemption through Christ’s sacrifice. But “Dream in My Dream” and “Together” are tougher to decipher, and may try the patience of some listeners, despite their stronger melodies.

A History of Lights and Shadows is a better grouping, and perhaps the most overall accessible of the trio. There’s more to the sound, layering guitars, keyboards, and more intricate overdubbed harmonies over Masen’s acoustic guitar. Again she evokes Stevens’ work with the mocking melody of “Let’s Kill Him,” inspired by the mob mentality that led to Christ’s crucifixion. The fragile folk style recalls Jewel and even Kate Bush when expressing the fine line between fear and hope (”Try”) or waxing poetic on the rest found deep within the grace of God (”The River”). Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman even contributes by handling recording duties on the beautiful “So Long So Long.”

Magic That Works falls somewhere between the other two. Its sound is even more accessible, in some cases adding percussion to the mix of guitars and keyboards, which helps alternate versions of “Together” and “Dream in My Dream” sound more richly textured, resembling Aimee Mann or Kendall Payne. But those songs are still as vague as they were on the Women’s Work disc, and even though Masen’s Christian imagery is present throughout, her ideas aren’t always understood in “Therapeutic/Charismatic” and “When I Was a Little Girl.”

You could say Masen’s occasionally obtuse songwriting has always been her greatest strength and weakness. Though she expresses faith artfully in fresh ways, it can be confusing to grasp (and it doesn’t help that her alto voice sometimes gets buried in the mix). Some will defend it by saying most Christian listeners don’t appreciate smart songwriting, but there’s still something to be said about good communication being the ultimate goal, too.

That said, all three EPs are still recommended (the star rating is an average of all three discs), particularly to the faithful fans as well as those longing for more of a creative, “alternative” presence in Christian music. This isn’t music for the passive listeners, unless you’re looking for sleepy alt-folk to relax with—it requires active listening to grasp the songwriting. That may not be for all tastes, and even frustrating for many, but it does mark a welcome return for Sarah Masen, who’s still doing her part to put the art in Christian artistry.

Review By Russ Breimeier, www.christianitytoday.com