Tag: shakespeare

MIXTAPE: Rose Betts’ Cottagecore For Your Ears

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

I feel like I’ve been living a cottagecore life since always. All my interests outside of music line up: I sew my own clothes, read old Russian literature, and I love horse riding, long forest walks, and filling my house with wild flowers and candles – and dreaming of picnics out of baskets, dressed in long skirts with ribbons in my hair and champagne in tea cups. My upcoming album, There Is No Ship, is a love letter to my homeland, [the UK], where a cottagecore lifestyle is a bit easier to achieve than here in LA. But, here’s a playlist with some songs that make me feel closer to it. – Rose Betts

“Do It Again” – John Mark Nelson

John Mark Nelson and I met at a session and as soon as we got to talking about books I realized he was a total keeper and we’ve been friends since. His vibe is so cottagecore. The man’s car smells like a pine forest and he bakes his own bread. I feel like his voice is so cozy and this song just feels like a day inside with the rain against the windows and pleasant feelings of being in love.

“Snow In Montana” – Michigander

My sister considers it illegal to listen to Christmas songs outside of December, but this has to be an exception. I love this song. On whatever side of Christmas I listen to it, it either makes me wistful about the one to come, or pleasantly melancholic about the one just passed. “Snow In Montana” makes anywhere feel cozy, which is quite a feat if you live in LA. I listen to it in the car on the way home from Trader Joe’s with bags full of vegetables and cheese and flowers feeling all stocked up and ready to light candles and get flower-arranging. I own so many small vases so that I can crowd my house out with flowers and make it feel like a garden.

“Deeper Well” – Kacey Musgraves

Her voice is so smooth and rich, I love it. And, her songs have this warmth and natural quality to them that I just want to sink into. Makes me want to rent a cabin in the woods with friends and get a campfire and hot cider going and watch the sparks fly up into the night.

“Wells” – Joshua Hyslop

I’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables lately and those books are so full of nature and the simple life, they make me really want to run away to Prince Edward Island, pick apples, and make jam. This song has that natural feel, like a little stream you sat by for a while and had a beautiful time, but all the while knew you couldn’t stay forever. Anne as a character is wonderfully joyful, but also so tragic, so the meeting of those two qualities felt expressed in this song somehow.

“Inconsolable” – Kate Gavin

A friend who knows me well sent me this song and I listened on loop for days. I love the instrumentation, that lovely fiddle part! One of my favorite things about being a musician is that when my musician friends come round they just start playing whatever instrument is in the house. The other week my friend came round and our hangout consisted of cups of tea, me sewing a top, and him going through my pile of sheet music on the piano. This song has that feeling of shared music… maybe it’s the harmonies or those lovely melodies, either way it reminds me of impromptu musical moments that are just so lovely.

“Bishops Avenue” – Rose Betts

For about a year and a half, some friends and I had the run of a mansion on Bishops Avenue in North London. We put on plays, painted out in the orchard, had renaissance parties and banquets in the ballroom, and it was one of those golden times when everything is just a little more precious and glittery. I feel like it’s how I always want to live, banquets by candlelight and then some creative frivolity of some kind. Moving to LA, it’s hard to find orchards and dilapidated mansions to play in, but I found some playfellows who get into the spirit with me so I get close.

“Tier Abhaile Riu” – Celtic Woman

This song has such a strong feminine energy to it, reminds me of all my creative friends who enrich my life so much. My friend and I hosted an evening where we invited just women to come and share stories and we lit candles and drank Champagne out of teacups and it was total bliss. Something about women together in candlelight talking feels ancient and holy and special in a way nothing else is.

“Skye Boat Song” – Bear McCreary, Raya Yarbrough

I’m lucky to have a twin who lives in Scotland, so I get to visit a lot and even lived there for a while in lockdown. It’s such an amazing part of the world. There is a beach near her village where I’d go for walks as often as I could, where the seals sing and the sky stretches out like a great pearl above your head. So much of songwriting is about finding the silence in the noise, so that the song has space to blossom and so many songs came from those walks. This song I’ve known since before I could remember hearing it, but it became more well known to the world when they used it as the title track for Outlander. This is a beautiful version. It sounds like Scotland to me, full of low skies and colossal lochs and mystery.

“The Author” – Luz

Some songs are so lovely they make me want to stop listening and write a song instead. This is one of those. I’ve started trying to write a poem every morning, just something small to start my day creatively. Then I punch a hole in the paper and hang it off some fairy lights I have around my bed. I think we are all the authors of our own life, which isn’t what this song is saying, but it’s so darn romantic and in its existence turns the singer into the author that tells the girl how she feels. If that makes sense…

“Sigh No More” – Joss Whedon

I heard this song in Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing and it takes a Shakespeare poem and sets it to music. I always really liked it. I have a little book of Shakespeare’s sonnets that I’ve carried around for years and I’m always trying to learn a new sonnet. If I’m bored at some LA party, I’ll get it out and read a sonnet and it puts me in a better mood.

“The Stars Look Down” – Rose Betts

This is off my first EP and I sound so young, which is kind of embarrassing, but also sweet. It’s like hearing a past version of me. I was reading a lot of Russian literature when I wrote this song and it was the mansion period of my life (which I mentioned before for “Bishops Avenue”). I’d just discovered Tolstoy, was reading War and Peace, and this song is full of the stories and vignettes in that book, heroism and love and dreaming and nights of glory followed by disastrous heartbreak. Books have always been where I get the most inspired for my songs, the quality of the writing makes me work harder at my lyrics.

“Mexico” – The Staves

The Staves are a group of sisters who actually come from a town right by the one I grew up in. It’s a place called Watford and is a bit of grey hole of a place. It’s surprising that these three beautiful singers came out of it. I guess music and beauty can come from anywhere, which is how I feel about my life. There’s beauty in everything, and if there isn’t you can bring it. My little apartment in LA is pretty boxy and lightless, but once you add candles and art and music it’s suddenly a little bohemian enclave where I can rest and be creative. Me and family sing together and there’s nothing like families harmonising, which is why I chose this song. Reminds me of the supper table at my childhood home, where we sing before we eat and sometimes after too, and whatever argument or trouble that’s going on disappears for a moment.

Photo Credit: Catie Laffoon

The Show On The Road – Lucy Rose

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

As host Z. Lupetin travels across the UK this month, we bring you Lucy Rose – a talented singer/songwriter who grew up in the same lyrically fertile plain as Shakespeare. She has made albums filled with twisty tales of sharp-tongued, black-hearted people searching for redemption, and navigating the rough rivers of supernatural sorrow that refuse to let us go as we grow up.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

On her newest No Words Left, Rose has gone back to her roots a bit, forsaking the glossy Brit-pop direction toward which some of the powers-that-be wanted to push her, peeling back her sound to reveal just the thorny, pure fruit inside. The result is intense. Interlocking singing conversations in the tone of a toothy, hushed scream, she questions our relationships with ourselves — and maybe even God — to find who we really are behind the suffocating velvet gauze of our multiple social media personalities.

BGS 5+5: Amy Speace

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Amy Speace
Hometown: originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Latest album: Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne

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

I remember from way back, because I started playing piano at age 3 (or so the story goes) and started formal lessons at 5, that I could disappear into my own world at the piano, inside the sound. I didn’t understand it but inside music was always this safe space for me.

So it’s hard to pinpoint when I wanted “to be” a musician because my earliest memories are that I was a musician. I just understood music from the start. Not that I didn’t have to work and practice, but it just made sense to me. So I’d chase that feeling back to being too short for my feet to hit the pedals practicing scales on my grandmother’s black upright piano.

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

Definitely all forms of storytelling. I didn’t write a song until I was about 28 but all through my childhood, I wrote poetry and stories and plays. I drew and painted. I read everything I could get my hands on. In college, I was a dual major in English and Theater and got obsessed with Shakespeare, Performance Art and Avant Garde Theater and Improv Comedy.

Then I went to NYC after college to study classical acting at The National Shakespeare Conservatory for two years and for the first time in my life started going to art museums and got lost in the big physical paintings of Pollock and Rothko. I lived in the Lower East Side and in Greenwich Village and really really loved living in that kind of Bohemia in my 20s.

I worked three jobs, one of which was as Lainie Kazan’s assistant on Broadway and in her cabaret shows, where I got the chance to meet so many legends of the theater. I hung out with dancers and clowns and actors and musicians and poets and we were all broke and idealistic and scrappy and I went to every show, every concert, every happening I could talk my way into.

I mean, there’s not really an art form out there that hasn’t moved me to tears and to want to create something of my own in response, from seeing Sondheim on Broadway to a poetry slam in the Lower East Side to my friend dancing burlesque. It all kind of informs whatever soup is all up there in my head, processing the pictures and the emotions and the memories. But when it gets down to pen on paper and crafting a song, I think that’s when film is really my guide: I think like a director/screenwriter/playwright. What’s the entry point in the story? What do you see out there? What’s the landscape like.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Easy. That will be the next one I write after I finish this one I’m working on. Because it’s always like starting over at the beginning and I go through all the fears that I’ll never write another good song again and I’ll just sink into the ocean of bad cliches and stolen melodies.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

Probably the earliest, honestly. I was in 8th grade, Curtin Middle School in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I was a very awkward, permed hair, 14-year-old. Bookworm, nerd, and not really that cool. I had joined chorus for the first time (I didn’t think I was a good singer) because my best friend Laura was a good singer and convinced me to join.

The end of the year the choir did a musical theater revue. I was kind of a class ham, very theatrical, did all the accents, and the choir director gave me a solo doing “Adelaide’s Lament” from Guys and Dolls because I could fake a good thick Bronx accent. I will honestly never forget how I felt when I stepped out onstage and the lights were on me and I disappeared into this character. It felt like the crowd roared and I got a standing ovation and the next day was like a freaking Christmas parade…

I went from being the new kid at school to everyone looking at me as if for the first time. The choir director took me aside and really encouraged me to study voice. She said, “I hear something in there…I think that you have a gift.” And literally, from that moment on, I knew I wanted to be onstage singing. I literally felt like I’d found myself that night.

I’ve had incredible stage moments, like being onstage at Town Hall in NYC opening for Nanci Griffith to a sold-out crowd — and you could hear a pin drop. To playing Gruene Hall with Guy Clark a few years before he died. To the first festival stage I was on at Glastonbury a few years back. Even to some incredible house concerts and small clubs. But that first time, it’s still so present to me, that I think that’s my favorite memory because it was when I first felt that I knew something true about myself.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”

Fascinating question. I don’t hide. I bring me into all the he’s and she’s and they’s and you’s in my song. If I don’t understand the characters’ passion, their desire, I can’t write it. So there’s got to be some autobiography in there, even if it’s masked by someone else’s story, even if it just creeps through two words in a bridge.

If I only wrote about my life and what was going on with me, literally, well, I’d have a short catalogue of songs because my life isn’t that interesting to sustain a career of writing about it. I don’t have time to hike the Himalayas or to be the captain of a ship. I’ve got a 16-month-old and an album coming out and I’ve got to get posters out and keep up with FaceTwittInstaHell. I’m tired. All the time.

Plus I have songs that need to get out and I have literally only the 30 minutes when my son may be napping to get a chorus idea down. So I have to find stories in newspapers or thieve parts of conversations I overhear or steal what you say that rhymes that you don’t even hear the rhyme. I’m always listening for ‘language of lyric’ to show up in my life and then, if I’m lucky and I can catch it, I keep it in a notebook for those naptime writing sessions.

So I may not let on that the “you” is actually “me” but it’s always a little bit of me.

Photo credit: Neilson Hubbard

WATCH: Paul Kelly, ‘My True Love Hath My Heart’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Paul Kelly
Hometown: Adelaide, Australia
Song: "My True Love Hath My Heart"
Album: Seven Sonnets & a Song
Release Date: April 22
Label: Gawd Aggie/Cooking Vinyl America via RED Distribution

In Their Words: "'My True Love Hath My Heart' was filmed live in the studio last December as we wrestled it down. It’s the only sonnet on the record not written by Shakespeare. Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, wrote it some time before Shakespeare began his great sonnet sequence. The words are quite a mouthful for our modern tongues, but Vika Bull’s smarts and great articulation made her my first choice to tackle this piece.” — Paul Kelly 

Photo credit: Helga Leunig