Tag: premiere

LISTEN: Thomas Csorba, “What’s Left of Mine”

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Artist: Thomas Csorba
Hometown: Dallas, Texas
Song: “What’s Left of Mine”
Album: Thomas Csorba
Release Date: September 25, 2020

In Their Words: “When Beau Bedford and I sat down to write this song, we fell into a story of a man at a pivotal moment in his life. The speaker in this song is looking his lover in the eye and saying, ‘I love you, but there’s some living I need to do.’ He’s at a crossroads: Do I spend this precious time with the one I love, or do I go and find myself? The risk there is heavy, and you can hear it in every line he utters. I found a big part of myself in this character. As I’ve stepped into marriage, I’ve been thinking a lot about sacrifice. Wherever I devote my time, my love, my energy, I know that another part of me needs to be sacrificed.” — Thomas Csorba

Photo credit: Austin Leih

WATCH: Handsome Ghost, “Weeds”

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Artist: Handsome Ghost
Hometown: Worcester County, Massachusetts
Song: “Weeds”
Album: Some Still Morning
Release Date: September 18, 2020
Label: Photo Finish Records

In Their Words: “‘Weeds’ may be the brightest song on our record. The melody, the production — and the lyrics too. It’s about anticipating the inevitable end of a relationship (sounds sad, I know), but recognizing that you’re both going to move on and find your own way, independent of one another. In the simplest terms, it’s: ‘I’ll be here, you’ll be there — but I’m still going to care about you and I hope you think about me too sometimes.’ The song comes from a good place, a steady state of mind.

Nick Noyes has worked on all of our music videos for Some Still Morning and ‘Weeds’ is his latest creation. Typically the three of us will build up a visual concept together — but ‘Weeds’ is all Nick. He had a vision and we trust him and basically said, ‘Go for it, brother.’ Nick and I didn’t speak about the meaning of the song beforehand — and I’m glad we didn’t — because he interpreted it completely differently. To Nick, the song is about memory. About longing for a moment in time that is no longer there. The visual focuses on that feeling and explores it further…without explicitly referencing memory or flashbacks or anything of the like. I love how the video turned out, I find it very powerful and strange at times. And I mean that as a compliment.

“I also love that listeners, in this case someone extremely close to the band, can interpret a song completely differently than it was intended. That’s the best part about music, in my opinion. Once you put a song out there, it’s any listener’s right to make it their own and define what it means to them.” — Tim Noyes and Eddie Byun, Handsome Ghost

Photo credit: Mitchell Wojcik

LISTEN: Ron Pope, “Turning Back” (Feat. Emily Scott Robinson)

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Artist: Ron Pope
Hometown: Marietta, Georgia
Song: “Turning Back” (featuring Emily Scott Robinson)
Album: The Builder
Release Date: September 17, 2020
Label: Brooklyn Basement Records

In Their Words: “There are so many songs about those first few seconds when you’re falling in love and your brain is constantly on fire. ‘Turning Back’ is about something that happens long, long after that. Jeff (my writing partner on this song) and I were talking about grown up love (we’re both married and have little ones); at this point in my life, a quiet moment with my wife feels like a real luxury. Whenever we get those simple, sweet moments, we cherish them. This is an entire chapter of the love story that nobody ever writes about; here we are, deep in this thing, still loving each other with absolutely no intention of turning around. It’s different than the beginning, but it’s deeper and that much more beautiful as a result.” — Ron Pope

Photo credit: Blair Clark

LISTEN: Garrett Owen, “Souvenir”

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Artist: Garrett Owen
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
Song: “Souvenir”
Album: Quiet Lives
Release Date: September 18, 2020

In Their Words: “I wrote the opening guitar figure and first verse to ‘Souvenir’ a long time ago. I showed what I had written to a friend — ‘I put our love in a jar and drove it around in my beat-up car….’ He thought it was catchy. I started slowly trying to coax the rest of it out of myself and used it as an opportunity to take some really tricky chord work in the chorus and impose a massive key change for the second chorus. I have a lot of songs inspired by a long-term relationship I was in; the rest of the lyrics are a mix of abstract expressions of pain and emo-dramatic statements about how things with her ended.” — Garrett Owen

Photo credit: Melissa Laree Cunningham

WATCH: Alan Bibey & Grasstowne, “Hitchhiking to California”

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Artist: Alan Bibey & Grasstowne
Hometown: Walnut Cove, North Carolina
Song: “Hitchhiking to California”
Album: Hitchhiking To California (set for release January 2021)
Label: Billy Blue Records

In Their Words: “When I was 16 years old, I got the opportunity to play in a regional band that included a musician named Wes Golding, and the seeds of a lifelong friendship were sown. A few years later, I began playing professionally with the New Quicksilver, and we recorded the original version of a song Wes wrote called ‘Hitchhiking to California.’ That was back in 1985. So when we started to record this new project for Billy Blue Records, I had the idea to redo the song, and Jerry Salley and I both agreed we’d love a third verse, which was not included in the original version. With Wes Golding’s blessing, Jerry and I wrote a new verse and reworked a few other things in the song for its new release.” — Alan Bibey

Photo credit: Tina Farmer
Video by Solid Rock Studios, Point Pleasant, WV

LISTEN: Victoria Bailey, “Tennessee”

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Artist: Victoria Bailey
Song: “Tennessee”
Album: Jesus, Red Wine & Patsy Cline
Release Date: September 18, 2020
Label: Rock Ridge Music

In Their Words: “I first heard Johnny Cash’s rendition of this Rick Scott song while driving through snowy Tennessee a few winters back. I was heading down toward Leiper’s Fork in my little rental car, stopping all along the road to pet horses and listening to all my favorite country legends along the way. This song really sums up how I feel about the South and Tennessee as a whole. I love the little pleasures in life that Tennesseeans hold near and dear: family traditions and small town simplicities.

“My favorite verse in the song is, ‘We got a cabin in the country / And a creek that rolls nearby / And a dog that won’t even bark at a firefly.’ That’s exactly what I saw all around me exploring Tennessee on that trip — just a lot of pure joy and friendly folks! Recording this song was SO much fun. My band fell in love with the lyrics as much as I did. We tried to stay pretty true to the sound of Cash’s recording, but we sprinkled a little bit of our own sound into it as well. It was such an honor recording this song, especially because it represents a state I have come to love oh so very much!” — Victoria Bailey

Photo credit: Stefanie Vinsel Johnson

LISTEN: Will Kimbrough, “My Right Wing Friend”

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Artist: Will Kimbrough
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “My Right Wing Friend”
Album: Spring Break
Release Date: October 23, 2020
Label: Daphne/Soundly

In Their Words: “I wrote ‘My Right Wing Friend’ after reading a dear old friend’s Twitter posts. I knew if we communicated personally, we would still be those dear old friends who shared 40 years of memories, from high school through his college and my early touring years, through the time we raised our children. We’d always been political opposites. And we’d always had friendly debates and agreed to disagree. It’s tougher now, in a way — with a glance, you can find something to hate about people you love. I am learning to communicate personally with my right wing friend. That way, we keep our friendship alive. This is a love song to friendship. As my friend said, after he heard the song for the first time, ‘Come over here and let me kiss you on the lips, my left wing friend.’ Still laughing. Still friends.” — Will Kimbrough

Photo credit: Sadie Kimbrough

BGS 5+5: Blitzen Trapper

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Artist: Blitzen Trapper
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Latest album: Holy Smokes Future Jokes
Release Date: September 25, 2020

Answers provided by Eric Earley

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Michael Stipe was my favorite songwriter as a kid, his lyrics were so strange and uncanny. I’m thinking of Reckoning and Murmur, some of the most anachronistic lyrical content ever. There were no lyric sheets or online lookups back then so I was always trying to figure out what he was saying. His songs always had the feeling of a riddle or a magical text, the imagery was dreamlike and over the years I’ve tried to emulate that in certain ways. Tom Waits was a large influence later in my twenties, his bizarre comical lyrical storytelling and character voices were inspiring, I’m thinking of Rain Dogs in particular.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

There isn’t any favorite, lots of weird amazing ones for sure, playing “Heard It Thru the Grapevine” with Stephen Malkmus trading weird, collapsing solos with Stephen as he made up the words because we were too lazy to learn the lyrics. I think we were in Cleveland, but I could be wrong. Playing Big Star’s “Feel” with Jody Stephens on drums and Mike Mills on backing vocals in Austin, Texas, that was surreal.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

Most of my favorite songs have literary origins, whether it’s a particular Cormac McCarthy novel like Blood Meridian (“Black River Killer”) or a general religious text like the Bardo Thodol (the new record is based largely on this book). Biblical imagery has made its way into countless songs I’ve written as a result of childhood influences and pervasive cultural resonances. I’ve also started writing a lot of songs from reading specific poets, using their wordplay to inspire different turns of phrase. Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, to name a couple, I’ve also used Finnegan’s Wake and Gravity’s Rainbow to generate wordplay and imagery.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I’ve been playing music since I was a child, so being a musician was never really a choice. I didn’t think of it as a career for a long time. I went to college for physics and math, studied painting, learned classical fingerstyle, became a sous chef. Finally in my late twenties I decided to drop everything and play music, mostly because all the songs I was writing were keeping me up at night, but I didn’t have any vision for the business part of it. Spent seven years playing unattended shows in Portland. Got a record deal off a random song on Myspace and suddenly was touring and making money.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Experimentation is the only way to realize the vision of reality you want to hear, so never grow static in style or voice, always move forward, never sit still sonically. Don’t write angry, only from a place of emptiness without sentimentality, nostalgia without regret. Don’t try to please anyone, only follow your instincts.

Photo credit: Jason Quigley

WATCH: Jeremy Ivey, “Things Could Get Much Worse”

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Artist: Jeremy Ivey
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Things Could Get Much Worse”
Album: Waiting Out The Storm
Release Date: October 9, 2020
Label: ANTI-

In Their Words: “I don’t write a whole lot of positive songs, but I try to have one per record at least. So this my positive message for the world. These are the good old days no matter how bad they seem. Just remember, life could suck a lot more. This song was written in about ten minutes, this is our first take in the studio and the video was shot in a couple hours. All in the moment and off the cuff, the way it should be! Also, watch out for Elon, I don’t trust that guy.” — Jeremy Ivey

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

LISTEN: Delta Spirit, “What Is There”

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Artist: Delta Spirit
Hometown: NYC, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Austin, Montreal
Song: “What Is There”
Album: What Is There
Release Date: September 11, 2020
Label: New West Records

In Their Words: “’What is There’ is an acrostic poem that I wrote for the guys in the band, with each verse directed at a specific person. I wrote the song in the winter of 2018 while living in Oslo. We had just decided to give the band another go and I was feeling sentimental about the journey we had been on since 2005. We were all just kids trying to break into this business. Each of us had been burned by the major label system with other projects. Starting Delta Spirit with my best friends, traveling the world, and playing music that meant the world to us was such an improbable miracle, but then it felt inevitable. There were moments when we lost our way as brothers and as creative collaborators, but since the break, we have found new and better ways to communicate. And that feeling of inevitability is back.” — Matthew Logan Vasquez, Delta Spirit

Photo credit: Alex Kweskin