Tag: Easy Star All Stars Dub Side of the Moon

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Easy Star All-Stars Team Up with Macy Gray on Swooning Rendition of Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”

Founded and led by producer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Michael Goldwasser, Easy Star All-Stars have established themselves as one of the top reggae acts on the international scene for the better part of the past two decades. During that period, they’ve managed to tour in over 30 countries on six continents while bringing together fans of reggae, classic rock, dub, indie rock and pop into one big family through their collection of critically acclaimed reggae tribute albums that includes 2003’s Dub Side of the Moon, 2006’s Radiodread, 2009’s Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band and 2012’s Easy Star’s Thrillah — and 2010’s remix album, Dubber Side of the Moon. And before you go off and think that they’re just a tribute band, they’re not; they’ve also released two efforts of original material, 2008’s Until That Day EP and 2011’s First Light.

Continuing their run of reggae tribute albums across classic rock, dub, indie rock and pop, the acclaimed local reggae outfit will tackle David Bowie‘s beloved classic, 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars. Slated for an April 21, 2023 release through their own Easy Star Records, Ziggy Stardub is a reggae re-imagining of the beloved album, featuring guest spots from Macy Gray, Steel Pulse, Maxi Priest, Fishbone, Living Colour‘s Vernon Reid, The Skints, Mortimer, The Expanders, Samory I, and a lengthy list of others. 

Pre-order packages of the album are available here, including royal blue colored vinyl along with CD and exclusive t-shirt offerings.

In the lead-up to Ziggy Stardub‘s release on Thursday, I’ve written about three of the album’s previously released singles:

  • “Starman,” featuring Maxi Preist. The Easy Star All-Star rendition is a warm and soulful dub take on the original that retains the rousingly anthemic hook everyone and their grandmother knows but places it within a shuffling, reggae riddim paired with warm blasts of Rhodes, some cinematic strings and Maxi Priest’s effortlessly soulful delivery. 

  • “Moonage Daydream,” featuring Naomi Cowan and the legendary Alex Lifeson. The Easy Star All-Star rendition  “Moonage Daydream” is a hazy dub-leaning take that makes loving nods to the original, with a full string seciton and a flute solo from Jenny Hill, that takes the place of Bowie’s recorder solo from the original. Cowan contributes a soulful, rock goddess vocal that I’d argue would make both Bowie and Tina Turner very proud. The song closes out with a trippy and inspired David Gilmour-like guitar solo from the legendary Lifeson. 

  • “Five Years” featuring the legendary Steel Pulse. Rooted in a soulful and slow-burning reggae riddim, the Easy Star All-Stars rendition lovingly retains the soaring string-driven hooks and choruses, and the weary, apocalyptic sigh-like vibe of the original. 

Ziggy Stardub‘s fourth and final pre-release single “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” features the acclaimed, multi-award-winning singer/songwriter, musician and producer Macy Gray. Pairing a deceptively laid-back vibe with strutting riddims and a coolly swaggering horn line with Macy Gray’s imitable and deeply sensitive delivery, the Easy Star All-Star rendition manages to retain the swooning and empathetic commiseration of the origin. Oh, how much all of us at one point or another, just needs to hear “Oh, no you’re not alone!”

“The main key was finding an emotive and groundbreaking vocalist, and we did just that with Macy Gray, who is truly inimitable in every song that she sings, including this one,” Easy Star All-Stars’ Goldwasser explains in press notes.

The Five Guys burger chain recently named Easy Star All-Stars as their Featured Artist of May. The chain will be playing an Easy Star track every hour in every store for the entire month.

Directed by Stefano Bertelli, the accompanying stop-animation video for “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” follows two stray street cats on a journey through a sleepy evening in an intricately made paper town.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Easy Star All-Stars Team up with Steel Pulse on a Soulful Rendition of Bowie’s “Five Years”

Continuing their run of reggae tribute albums across classic rock, dub, indie rock and pop, the acclaimed local reggae outfit will tackle David Bowie‘s beloved classic, 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars. Slated for an April 21, 2023 release through their own Easy Star Records, Ziggy Stardub is a reggae re-imagining of the beloved album, featuring guest spots from Macy Gray, Steel Pulse, Maxi Priest, Fishbone, Living Colour‘s Vernon Reid, The Skints, Mortimer, The Expanders, Samory I, and a lengthy list of others. 

Pre-order packages of the album are available here, including royal blue colored vinyl along with CD and exclusive t-shirt offerings.

Earlier this month, I wrote about two of the album’s previously released singles:

  • “Starman,” featuring Maxi Preist. The Easy Star All-Star rendition is a warm and soulful dub take on the original that retains the rousingly anthemic hook everyone and their grandmother knows but places it within a shuffling, reggae riddim paired with warm blasts of Rhodes, some cinematic strings and Maxi Priest’s effortlessly soulful delivery. 

  • “Moonage Daydream,” featuring Naomi Cowan and the legendary Alex Lifeson. The Easy Star All-Star rendition  “Moonage Daydream” is a hazy dub-leaning take that makes loving nods to the original, with a full string seciton and a flute solo from Jenny Hill, that takes the place of Bowie’s recorder solo from the original. Cowan contributes a soulful, rock goddess vocal that I’d argue would make both Bowie and Tina Turner very proud. The song closes out with a trippy and inspired David Gilmour-like guitar solo from the legendary Lifeson. 

Ziggy Stardub‘s third and latest single “Five Years” features the legendary Steel Pulse. Rooted in a soulful and slow-burning reggae riddim, the Easy Star All-Stars rendition lovingly retains the soaring string-driven hooks and choruses, and the weary, apocalyptic sigh-like vibe of the original.

Directed by Robert Bartolome, the accompanying video portrays the end of the world — and its eventual rebirth — on a miniature scale. It’s a gorgeous and unsettling reminder of the fate that we’re marching lockstep towards, and of the fact that nature will eventually reclaim everything once we’re all gone.

Continuing their long-held tradition of playing on April 20 — 4/20 y’all! — the acclaimed reggae outfit will be playing an album release show at Sony Hall. 

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: the bird and the bee’s Jazz-like Take on Van Halen’s “Hot For Teacher”

Last month, I wrote about the Los Angeles-based indie pop act the bird and the bee — singer/songwriter Inara George and seven time Grammy Award-winning producer and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin, who has worked with the likes of Sia, Adele, Beck, Kendrick Lamar, Foo Fighters and Paul McCartney — and as you may recall, the act can trace their origins to when the duo met while working on George’s 2005 solo debut All Rise. Bonding over a mutual love of 80s pop and rock, the duo decided to continue to work together in a jazz-influenced electro pop project.

The Los Angeles indie pop duo’s debut EP Again and Again and Again and Again was released in late 2006. They quickly followed that up with their self-titled full-length debut in early 2007 — and with their earliest releases George and Kurstin quickly developed a reputation for bringing a breezy elegance to their work, which finds them putting their own idiosyncratic twist on time-bending indie pop.

Although serving as the long-awaited follow up to 2015’s Recreational Love, the bird and the bee’s fifth album, Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 2: A Tribute to Van Halen actually closely follows 2010’s critically applauded Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 1: A Tribute to Hall & Oates. And while Van Halen‘s most anthemic and beloved work may initially seem like an unlikely vessel for the Los Angeles-based duo’s sound and approach, George and Kurstin are both lifelong fans of David Lee Roth-era Van Halen. Back in 2007, George caught her first-ever Van Halen show — and it was the first tour to feature David Lee Roth as the band’s frontman since 1985. George was so charmed by Roth’s presence, that after that show, she approached Kurstin about writing a song for Roth. The end result was the swooning serenade “Diamond Dave,” which appeared on their 2008 sophomore album Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future. “We asked him to be in the video, but instead he signed a picture and gave me the yellow top hat he’d worn at the show I saw, which I thought was very sweet,” George says in press notes. “When we were trying to figure out who to cover for the second volume of Interpreting the Masters, we were both a little bit like, ‘Oh my god, can we really do it?’ But then we just went for it.”

Slated for an August 2, 2019 release through No Expectations/Release Me Records, the duo’s fifth album features an impressive backing band of guest musicians including Justin Meldal Johnsen (bass), who has worked with Beck and Nine Inch Nails; Joey Waronker (drums), who has worked with R.E.M and Elliott Smith; and Omar Hakim (drums), who has worked with the David Bowieand Miles Davis assisting the duo in making familiar David Lee Roth-era Van Halen anthems completely their own, imbuing even the most over-the-top tracks with a slinky intimacy.

Interestingly, for Kurstin, an accomplished jazz pianist, who once studied with Jaki Byard, a pianist that once played in Charles Mingus‘ band, one of the greatest challenges he had translating Eddie Van Halen’s virtuoso guitar work into piano arrangements that kept some of the spirit and vibe of the original. “I know there’s a jazz influence with the Van Halen brothers, so I tried to channel some of the things that I felt might’ve influenced Eddie,” Kurstin notes. “In a way ‘Eruption’ is almost like a piece of classical music, so I mostly treated it that way as I interpreted it for piano,” he adds, referring to the iconic instrumental guitar solo from Van Halen’s self-titled debut. 

While creating arrangements around Eddie Van Halen’s guitar work will reveal the duo’s ingenuity and playfulness as interpreters and arrangers paired with a deeply nuanced reading of the material, which is influenced by their deep and profound emotional connection to the band.“I remember being 10-years-old and seeing their videos and feeling both excited and totally terrified—I responded to them in this very visceral way,” George says in press notes. Kurstin, who also is a lifelong fan, actually got a chance to work with Eddie Van Halen in the early 80s when the Grammy Award-winning producer and multi-instrumentalist was a 12 year-old member of Dweezil Zappa’s band. “I got to hang out with him in the studio and go backstage when Van Halen played The Forum, which was a really big moment for my younger self,” Kurstin recalls.

The album’s two singles found the members of the bird and the bee taking on Van Halen’s “Panama” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love.” The duo turned “Panama” from a power chord-based arena rock anthem into a sultry club banger, centered around shimmering and arpeggiated synths, bright blasts of twinkling piano and cowbell, a wobbling Bootsy Collins-like bass line and George’s sensual vocal delivery. Their cover of”Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” was a slinky and shimmering New Wave-like take that recalled New Order and It’s Blitz-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs while imbued with a feverish quality.  The album’s third latest single finds the band taking on “Hot For Teacher,” the last official single that band released with their original lineup.  Featuring drummer Omar Hakim, who has worked with David Bowie, Sting, Daft Punk, Weather Report, Madonna, Kate Bush and others and a spoken word cameo from Beck, the bird and the bee deliver a swinging bop jazz-inspired take that actually pulls, tugs and teases out the jazziness of the original — particularly within Eddie Van Halen’s dexterous guitar solo-ing. Interestingly, much like Easy Star All-Stars take on Dark Side of the Moon, the bird and the bee version of “Hot For Teacher” isn’t a purely straightforward cover — rather, it’s a subtle and mischievous modernization that retains the spirit and intent of the song in a thoughtful and loving way.