JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Janet Jackson.
Tag: singer/songwriter \
Lyric Video: L.T. Leif Shares Lush “Gentle Moon”
L.T. Leif (they/them) is a Canadian-born singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, who has spent stints residing in the Canadian prairies, Finland, Iceland and the Pacific Northwest — and is an adopted member of the Scottish DIY music scene. Their life and work is rooted in the self-sufficient spirit of the Canadian prairies and is informed by their travels.
Leif first cut their teeth with Calgary-based orchestral pop outfit The Consonant C. Since the group’s split back in 2011, Leif has explored different configurations and approaches, including experimental noise collaborations with the Bug Incision crew, playing sold-out shows with punk-hearted OK JAZZ, drumming with slacker-rock bands Hex Ray and Hungry Freaks, playing synths with Astral Swanns’ Matt Swamn, and even singing in a witch choir, Hermitess. Leif’s admirers including K Records founder and label head Calvin Johnson — they toured together with The Believer Magazine.
As a solo artist, Leif has collaborated with a collection of friends, releasing 2016’s double album Shadow on the Brim/Rough Beasts and her first release on Lost Map Records, last year’s Lost Cat cassette compilation of live and unreleased tracks, Introducing L.T. Lief. Throughout each of those releases, Leif’s spirit is collaborative generative, experimental and kind. The band members and the parameters of the project are ever-evolving, but as Leif says of the overall project, “to the friendships and the moment, we are grateful and stay true.”
Leif’s recently released album Come Back To Me, But Lightly was demoed in a room on Glasgow‘s Great Western Road and made intercontinentally with contributions both remote and in-person from pals near and far. The album features lush and sensual songs about “the body, loss as a decision, and knowing your own desire as a radical act,” the Canadian artist says. “It has a lot of imagery and thought from the northern places I’ve been living, and takes inspiration from minimalist writers, painters, and thinkers. This album comes from a six-year long space of change, from a life I was living as someone afraid of my own brain and body, into someone a lot more openly unshiney. Painful and seeping. I think that distance and decisions and loss and conflict are all things that can birth you into a different kind of being.”
Come Back To Me, But Lightly‘s latest single “Gentle Moon,” is a lush and beguiling tune rooted in a gentle, kindly spirit paired with an arrangement featuring glistening pedal steel, twinkling keys, strummed guitar and Leif’s expressive vocals singing lyrics that make references to the cosmos, the human body and longing. The song feels warm, deeply-lived in and unabashedly earnest.
New Audio: Alexa Dark’s Cinematic and Sultry “Villain”
Rising singer/songwriter, musician and pop artist Alexa Dark is a global citizen, who has spent time in Barcelona, Munich, London, NYC, and Los Angeles. Dark’s work draws from her multicultural, global upbringing and eclectic music taste, including Françoise Hardy, Portishead, Nancy Sinatra, Arctic Monkeys, and others. as well as her love of film noir and French New Wave cinema. While living in London, the rising singer/songwriter and musician began writing her own songs and poetry as a teenager, and eventually playing in and around town — both solo and accompanied with an acoustic guitar and in different bands. Those experiences helped her develop and hone her artistic direction, as well as her sound and presence.
Dark relocated to New York, where she quickly became part of the downtown live music scene and began working on recording new material with Matt Chiaravalle. Since singing with AWAL, the rising pop artist has busily released a batch of noir, alt-pop singles over the past couple of years that sounds as though it could be part of a 60s era Bond movie femme fatale soundtrack.
Adding to a growing profile, she has opened for Ghostly Kisses, NoSo, Julian LaMadrid, and a lengthy list of others, while receiving profiles from Apple Music’s New in Rock and New in Alternative playlists and coverage from Earmilk, She Shreds, Blackbook, and Story+Rain’s “Her Life is Her Art,” alongside Sydney Sweeney, Rainsford, and others.
Dark’s debut EP is slated for a March 3, 2023 release through AWAL. But in the meantime, the Barcelona-born, New York-based artist recently shared the EP’s latest single, “Villain.” Centered around twinkling piano, soaring strings, a simple backbeat paired with Dark’s expressive and sultry delivery, “Villain” sounds as though it were inspired by Poritshead, Tales of Us-era Goldfrapp, and 60s Bond movies. While continuing a remarkable run of brooding and cinematic material, the new single features a narrator, who describes the sensation of watching herself repeatedly self-sabotage. The narrator expresses a desire to be good, to do the right thing but feeling lured in the direction of being bad — and deep down enjoying it,
“‘Villain’ is realising you might be the villain of your own story,” Dark explains. “It’s accepting the shadowy parts of who you are, while hinting towards a darker, painful underlying origin story which makes the villain, the villain.”
She continues “. . . I wanted to explore the multifaceted nature of the ‘villain’ in me, and how my past obstacles, my fears of love and heartbreak, play in shaping this version of myself. I wanted this to be the lead song to my EP, as I think it captures the arc of the story I’m trying to tell throughout the seven songs – the darker side of femininity, how heartbreak and loss might shape us into being something other than ‘the hero’ in our story, and how most often times the battle between the good guy and the bad guy takes place inside of us, facing off ourselves.”
Throwback: Black History Month: John Lee Hooker
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to John Lee Hooker.
New Video: Donnie Doolittle’s Darkly HIlarious “Resurrect Me”
Donnie Doolittle is a Charlotte-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Although Doolittle studied piano and guitar as a child, he cut his teeth fronting a series of popular local bands in the early 2000s, including garage pop act Stone Figs, doom rock outfit Little Bull Lee and dark, psychedelic solo project Dreamy D.
Back in 2018, Doolittle recorded the first version of upbeat psuedo-lovesong “When a Woman,” a song inspired by 1970s Aussie thrilled Wake in Fright, while visiting his friend, producer Jesse Clasen in New York. Originally conceived as a Dreamy D, the collaboration marked a shift in his songwriting and creative process, and later became the first single under his own name. “That song just felt different: I was evolving, and I wanted to start fresh, releasing tracks under my own name,” he says. “The new music feels more true to who I am as an artist and as a person.”
As a solo artist, Doolittle crafts moody, synth driven material that hover between dark, retro-pop and melancholy rock that blends bright, pop-leaning melodies into ominous and cinematic soundscapes. Described as “Southern New Wave,” to “Goth Americana” by the press, his genre-bending sound has frequently been compared to Orville Peck, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Iggy Pop. He pairs each release with carefully-honed imagery and thematic narrative videos, meant to engage a range of senses. “I want to provide a full experience—to use my resources to create a palpable ambiance,” Doolittle says.
Doolittle’s Jesse Clasen-produced self-titled, full-length debut is slated for an April 7, 2023 release. The 12-song album reportedly features arrangements that weave together modern and vintage synths (most notably, the Mellotron and 80s-era Roland Juno 106) with electric guitar, bass and drums to create songs that drift mood-wise between vibrant and gloomy. Informed by Doolittle’s love of the work of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Lee Hazlewood, the album’s cinematic arrangements help to draw listeners into multifaceted sonic worlds, laced with sharp, narrative lyrics that touch upon religion, gender, pop culture and sexuality with a light, subtly ironic touch. “I like to play around with religion and sex,” says Doolittle. “Feeling jaded about God and the world, but also firmly attached to both. I think that’s a big part of Southern culture, and who I am as an artist…for better or worse.”
Along with the album announcement, Doolittle shared the album’s latest single, the slow-burning and broodingly cinematic “Resurrect Me.” Featuring twangy and reverb-drenched guitars, glistening and atmospheric synths paired with Doolittle’s baritone paired with big hooks and a buzzing guitar solo, “Resurrect Me” manages to sound a bit like a synthesis of the Twin Peaks soundtrack, Bruce Springsteen‘s “Tunnel of Love” and Orville Peck, while rooted in a bittersweet heartache.
“I started writing this song after learning about so-called ‘resurrection men,’ body snatchers in the 18th and 19th centuries that would exhume corpses from graveyards and sell them to medical schools for research and teaching purposes,” Doolittle explains. “I was interested in the idea of someone seeing value in these buried and abandoned vessels, and putting in the work to give them a second chance at showing their worth above ground. I related to the dead people in this scenario.”
Directed by North Carolina-based producer and director Josh Rob Thomas, the accompanying video is a darkly hilarious visual that follows Doolittle’s corpse on a wild adventure as its passed along a rotation cast of odd companions. “As heavy as the inspiration was, I thought we could lighten the mood with the video. Influenced by absurd films like Weekend at Bernie’s (which didn’t age too well) and Swiss Army Man, we took my corpse on an adventure with a rotating cast of companions,” Doolittle explains. “Fun was had with most of them, but only one character cared enough to put me to rest. I’ve assembled a very talented production team and we stepped up our game for this one. I hope you enjoy it.”
Throwback: Black History Month/Happy 75th Birthday, Rick James!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and the 75th anniversary of Rick James’ birth.
Throwback: Happy 72nd Birthday, Phil Collins!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Phil Collins’ 72nd birthday.
New Video: Whose Rules Share Breezy and Anthemic “I Don’t Care”
Marius Elfstedt is a Norwegian producer, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who grew up on a flower farm in a Hasler, Norway, a rural area roughly an hour outside of Oslo. Four years ago, while exploring his family’s farm, he came came across an abandoned cabin and then re-purposed it into a recording studio, where he writes. produces and record music with his friends and artists like Dev Lemons, Tigerstate, Selmer, Ralph Castelli, Elah Hale, Isabelle Eberdean, Mall Girl, Svømmbesseng, Joe’s Truly, Bikelane, Fish, Overcity, Pikekyss, and others.
Elfstedt works and records his own material as Whose Rules. Back in 2020, the Norwegian producer and artist released his self-titled debut EP, which he followed up with a handful of collaborative releases with Dev Lemons.
The Norwegian producer and artist’s full-length debut, Hasler is slated for a February 22, 2023 through 777 Music. The album was created from the solitude found within the walls of pandemic-related isolation within the walls of his Hasler, Norway-based studio, in the middle of the Scandinavian wilderness. Wooden log walls, haplessly strewn posters, old second-hand couches and a teeming collection of guitars and synths helped create a perfect environment to escape into a world of creation.
Written and produced entirely by Marius, Hasler is the culmination of years of sonic experimentation and rumination — both melancholic and hopeful — over adolescence gradually blossoming into adulthood. Thematically and lyrically, the material touches upon loneliness. love, friendship and self-doubt while sonically the album pairs whiting electronics and indie rock.
Hasler‘s third and latest single “I Don’t Care” is a woozy yet breezily melancholic bop featuring shimmering, strummed acoustic guitar-driven melody, fluttering synths, and a buzzing guitar solo paired with Elfstadt’s languid, delivery, instantly catchy melodicism and a penchant for easy-going yet anthemic hooks. “This is the first track I made for this LP. After a long time with writer’s block, this song pops out of nowhere,”Elfstadt explains. “The dissonant guitar melody reminded me of Weezer’s ‘Undone’ and ‘Say it Ain’t So‘ which I thought was dope.”
Directed and shot by Fabio Enzo, the accompanying video for “I Don’t Care” follows the Norwegian producer and artist on the family farm, at the studio and while watching a glorious sunset.
Gabriel da Rosa is a Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and guitarist. Growing up in rural, southern Brazil with a radio DJ for a father, de Rosa was exposed to a wide variety of music from his his homeland. But it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles that he began curating Brazilian records and DJ’ing himself.
da Rosa wound up bonding with Stones Throw Records‘ label head, founder, artist and DJ Peanut Butter Wolf over their shared love of Brazilian music. The Brazilian-born artist began writing his own bossa nova, inspired by traditional bossa nova but with a contemporary edge with Pedro Dom, a musician, who has worked with some of Brazil’s best, internationally known artists like Seu Jorge, Rodrigo Amarante, and Latin Grammy Award-winner Ian Ramil.
The Brazilian-born artist signed to Stones Throw last year. The label released his debut single, “Jasmin parte 1,” a song that details the enchanted feelings of first meeting someone, but doubting whether that connection will actually last. As de Rosa puts it, “the song is about “wanting to remain in an eternal fairytale.”
His second single “Bandida” was a swooning and swaying, wine-drunk Bossa nova rooted in its creator’s thoughts while in solitude, featuring strummed guitar, da Rosa’s heartbroken and weary delivery and a mournful sax line parried with the genre’s traditional, shuffling rhythms. As da Rosa explains, the song came about after an idle night spent in, drinking wine and strumming his guitar. “The wine and my guitar brought out some bittersweet thoughts — all day, I’m surrounded by amazing people, real friends and acquaintances, but at the end of the day, I’m alone,” he says.
da Rosa’s full-length debut, É o que a casa oferece is slated for a February 17, 2023 release through Stones Throw Records. For Gabriel da Rosa, the appeal of bossa nova is its emotional as well as musical depth. He says, “When you listen to it, you feel blissful – it evokes happy memories. That’s what I’m trying to do on the album.”
The album’s latest single “Cachaça” is named for Brazil’s most popular spirit, and as a result, it evokes being in a Brazilian boteco (bar), swaying drunkenly to the music, lost in your thoughts and memories. But it’s not a sad song. Rather, it’s celebratory. It’s a song celebrating both love won and lost — and well, drinking a bit too much.
New Audio: Reno McCarthy Shares Wintry “Picture in Picture”
With the release of his full-length debut, 2019’s Counterglow, Montréal-based singer/songwriter, producer, and JOVM mainstay, Reno McCarthy quickly received attention for his remarkably self-assured songwriting.
Following the death of his father in 2020, McCarthy wrote Angels Watching Us Dance EP, an effort which saw the Canadian artist crafting stopped down, strikingly sensitive material informed by loss and heartbreak.
McCarthy’s sophomore album, 2021’s Run Up River featured three singles I wrote about on this site:
- The introspective yet upbeat “Sundown,”
- The slickly produced, St. Lucia-like ode to hesitation and indecisiveness, “For A Moment.”
- “Nothing Less, Nothing More” is a slow-burning song that manages to evoke the uneasy swoon of a new relationship with both sides entering uncharted waters with themselves and each other.
The Montréal-based JOVM mainstay began the year with the recently released Picture in Picture EP, which features title track “Picture in Picture.” Featuring strummed acoustic guitar, gently padded yet skittering drum beats, a sinuous bass line paired with fluttering and atmospheric synths paired with McCarthy’s plaintive crooning and his unerring knack for big, razor sharp hooks, “Picture in Picture” sees the Canadian artist balancing folk intimacy with pop bombast. Thematically, the song touches upon the existential threat of environment damage and the alienation of modern life, while evoking cold Montréal nights.
Throwback: Happy 85th Birthday, Sam Cooke!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the 85th anniversary of Sam Cooke’s birth.
Throwback: Happy 37th Birthday, Kevin Parker!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Tame Impala mastermind, Kevin Parker’s 37th birthday.
New Video: JOVM Mainstay Laure Briard Shares ’70s-Inspired “The Smell of Your Hair”
Laure Briard is a Toulouse, France-based singer/songwriter, who has a had a highly uncommon path to professional music. Briard bounced around several different interests and passions for some time: She studied literature and criminology and even acted a bit, before concentrating on music full-time in 2013.
After the release of her debut EP, 2013’s Laure Briard chante la France, Briard met Juilen Gasc and Eddy Cramps, and the trio began working on the material that would eventually become her full-length debut, 2015’s Révélation. Inspired by Françoise Hardy, Margo Guryan and Vashti Bunyan, Révélation featured modern and poetic lyricism.
Briard then signed with Midnight Special Records, who released her sophomore album, 2016’s Sur la Piste de Danse. Repeated trips to Brazil inspired and informed her next three efforts –2018’s Coração Louco EP, 2019’s Un peu plus d’amour s’il vous plâit and 2021’s En Voo EP, which were heavily indebted to Bossa Nova and saw the Toulouse-based artist writing and singing lyrics in Brazilian Portuguese and French. Those three efforts were rooted in a successful series of collaborations between the Toulouse-based JOVM mainstay, the equally acclaimed JOVM mainstays, Latin Grammy Award nominated, Brazilian psych rockers Boogarins, Marius Dufflot, and her longtime collaborators Vincent “Octopus” Guyot
The JOVM mainstay’s fourth album Ne pas trop rester bleue is slated for a February 10, 2023 release through Midnight Special Records. Inspired and informed by Joshua Tree, a remote national park that’s a no man’s land, where space and time seem to stretch on forever. An odd fantasy land, where America’s simultaneously obsolete and haunted by its myths and past legends. But ultimately, the album celebrates rebirth and letting go.
Although Ne pas trop rester bleue took three long years to finish, the album was enriched and informed by her travels, and as a result, the effort was liberating. Reportedly much lighter and more optimistic than Sur la piste de dance, an album rooted in broken destinies, disillusionments and heartbreaks, Ne pas trop rester bleue is a cathartic, deeply autobiographical effort that allows the Toulouse-based JOVM mainstay to essentially free herself from lingering ghosts — and to conjure new ones.
The album’s material is influenced quite a bit by the legendary Carole King, Lee Hazlwood, the poet Don Gibson and Bobbie Gentry. Briard continues her ongoing collaboration with Julien Gasc and Vincent “Octopus” Guyot, who assisted in the material’s arrangements. Sonically, the result is an album that draws from soul, pop and country featuring string and brass arrangements paired with the JOVM mainstay’s breezy delivery.
Featuring twinkling keys, brooding and shimmering strings and soulful brass arrangements paired with Briard’s coquettish delivery, Ne pas trop rester bleue‘s latest single “The Smell of Your Hair” sounds as though it could have been a unreleased track from the Tapestry sessions that was cut from the album. And much like Tapestry, “The Smell of Your Hair” tells a story about a heartbreaking encounter — but in this case, with a lonesome cowboy type in Joshua Tree, where fleeting passion under the desert sun was lulled by birdsong and the sound of wind. And instead of lamenting over the inevitable separation and giving into bitterness, heartbreak or even melodrama, the song’s narrator attempts to turn heartbreak into a playfully sunny and sensual memory.
Directed by Benjamin Marius Petit, the accompanying video for “The Smell of Your Hair” features Briard and her band playing in a full, behind-the-scenes styled visual. Fittingly, Briard and band are in ’70s-inspired costumes, playing in a ’70s-styled white box studio. Shot from four different camera perspectives, the clip utilizes diverse image styles and distortion effects (wide angle, fisheye, 360 tracking…), evoking “a psychedelic LSD trip in Woodstock, but also a mixing of eras, with visual references that could belong at once to the 70’s and to contemporary times,” explains the director Benjamin Marius Petit. “The goal was not to make a strictly ‘retro’ clip but, to best reflect the atmosphere of Laure’s music, to keep one foot in the past and the other in the present.”
Live Footage: Dayglow Performs “Then It All Goes Away” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”
Sloan Struble is a 20-something Aledo, TX-born, Austin, TX-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and JOVM mainstay best known as Dayglow. Struble can trace the origins of Dayglow back to when he was a teen, growing up in a Fort Worth suburb that he has referred to as a “small football-crazed town,” where he felt irrevocably out of place.
Much like countless other hopelessly out of place young people everywhere, Struble turned to music as an escape from his surroundings. “I didn’t really feel connected to what everyone else in my school was into, so making music became an obsession for me, and sort of like therapy in a way,” Struble recalled in press notes. “I’d dream about it all day in class, and then come home and for on songs instead of doing homework. After a while I realized I’d made an album.”
Working completely on his own with a minuscule collection of gear that included his guitar, his computer and some secondhand keyboards he picked up at Goodwill, Struble worked on transforming his privately kept outpouring into a batch of songs — often grandiose in scale. “Usually artists will have demos they’ll bounce off other people to get some feedback, but nobody except for my parents down the hall really heard much of the album until I put it out,” Struble recalled. With the self-release of 2018’s Fuzzybrain, Struble received widespread attention and an ardent online following — with countess listeners praising the material’s overwhelming positivity.
In 2019, Struble re-released a fully realized version of Fuzzybrain that featured Can I Call You Tonight,” a track that wound up being a smash-hit back in 2020, as well as two previously unreleased singles “Nicknames” and “Listerine.”
2021 saw the release of Stubble’s sophomore album Harmony House, an album that was inspired by the 70s and 80s piano-driven soft rock that he had captured his ears. Interestingly, around the same time, he had been watching a lot of Cheers. “At the very beginning, I was writing a soundtrack to a sitcom that doesn’t exist,” Struble recalls. And while actively attempting to generate nostalgia for something that hadn’t ever been real, as well as something most of his listeners had never really experienced. Thematically, the album concerns itself with a deeply universal theme — growing up and coping with change as being an inevitable aspect of life.
The album featured the infectious and sugary pop confection “Close to You,” a track indebted to 80s synth-led soul — in particular Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald‘s “On My Own” Cherelle’s and Alexander and O’Neal‘s “Saturday Love” and other duets, but imbued with an aching melancholy and uncertainty. He then made his national late night TV debut on Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he, along with his backing band, played “Can I Call You Tonight.”
Last year, Struble released his third Dayglow album, People In Motion. Entirely written, played and produced by Struble, the 10-song album continues his reputation for crafting upbeat, optimistic, hook-driven pop rooted in his desire to steer clear of conflict and offering someone something to love.
The album featured “Second Nature.” Arguably the funkiest and most dance floor friendly single Struble has released to date,””Second Nature,” is sort of like a slick synthesis of 80s pop, Daft Punk, The 1975, and LCD Soundsystem, with glistening synths, Struble’s plaintive vocal, an infectious vocodered vocal-driven hook and an in irresistible, feel good vibe.
“‘Second Nature’ is one of the most ambitious songs I’ve made so far. I didn’t think it would be a ‘Dayglow’ song until the rest of People in Motion started to take shape,” Struble says in press notes. “I made so many versions of it— I just kept writing more and more melodies and ideas. The Logic file ended up being like this 15 minute jam that I eventually condensed to be the near 6 min song it is.
I was really inspired by songs like Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long,’ Michael Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Starting Somethin’, and of course Daft Punk. I just love songs that have repeatable chord progressions that never seem to even reach their potential— they just keep going on and on. Lyrically and musically I wanted to create a song that felt like that. A song that just celebrates itself and the joy of dancing and making music. It doesn’t even feel like ‘Second Nature’— it feels completely innate and natural to make music to me. I love it more than anything and it feels like what I was made to do, and ‘Second Nature’ just grasps that idea and runs with it confidently.”
The JOVM mainstay was recently on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he performed album single “Then It All Goes Away,” an exuberant, feel good, pop anthem, which sees Struble harmonizing over a strutting bass line, twinkling keys, copious, DFA Records amounts of cowbell and the JOVM’s unerring knack for big hooks. Even in a live setting, Struble and his backing band are having themselves a helluva time, playing a fun song.
“I made “Then It All Goes Away” after coming home from my Fall 2021 North America tour. I started writing the bassline during my morning coffee and I finished the full composition by the end of the day. It felt so fresh and natural to write-I was just having fun honestly. It felt like a year’s worth of unconscious ideas all came to the front of my brain at once and just spilled out. I was really just thinking of my fans the whole time making it and imagining ‘how can I make a Dayglow song that feels so familiar, yet feels like a brand new experience entirely?”
Throwback: R.I.P. David Crosby
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates the life and work of David Crosby.