The Moon Looked On shows Bowditch’s continued growth as a musician and vocalist, showcasing her superb songwriting skills, and the terrific collaboration she’s developed with The Feeding Set. She continues to grow in both the innovative quality of her work, and in the risks she’s prepared to take artistically.
A review of The ABC Checklist for New Writers by by Lorraine Mace and Maureen Vincent-Northam
Mace and Vincent-Northam are both experienced freelancers, and provide readers with the benefit of their experience. The overall result will be a shorter learning curve and fewer rejections. Topics covered include such things that all new writers need to know, like writing a bio, how to research the market, how to format a children’s picture book, writing a cover letter, avoiding common grammatical problems, invoicing, and a whole lot more.
Against the Fable of One True World: Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters
Sometimes after walking in Manhattan late at night, a bit melancholy, though enjoying the faces, the buildings, the lights, I would stroll into a downtown music store and put on head phones at one of the listening stations and hear some of the songs on pianist Herbie Hancock’s 2005 album Possibilities: I liked the songs on it featuring Christina Aguilera (“A Song for You”), Annie Lennox (“Hush, Hush, Hush”), and Jonny Lang with Joss Stone (“When Love Comes to Town”). Herbie Hancock, who began playing the piano when he was seven, has long found ways of combining his own musical sophistication with popular taste.
A Musical Statement of Significance: Lucinda Williams, West
West is a significant musical statement; and it is more impressive for arriving at its significance by unusual directions, such as in the songs “Mama You Sweet” and “Unsuffer Me” and “What If” and “Wrap My Head Around That.”
Reclaiming Tradition: Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Dona Got A Ramblin’ Mind and Colored Aristocracy
Although it has been said that early black string bands influenced country music performers such as the Carter Family and Hank Williams, there are still few available historical recordings of black string band music—possibly as few as fifty pre-second world war recordings; recordings by respected performers such as the Mississippi Sheiks, who recorded for the Okeh label (a history documented by writers Charles K. Wolfe and David C. Morton and sometimes presented by institutions such as PBS)—and thus, the youthful Carolina Chocolate Drops are performing a service as much as producing quite distinctive entertainment.
Rahim Alhaj, When the Soul is Settled: Music of Iraq
Music heard often brings to mind other music—it is the echo of the human, the similarity of imaginative play in different parts of the globe; and some of the rhythms Rahim Alhaj with Lebanese percussionist Souhail Kaspar perform recall Spanish music to me (“Taqsim Maqam Bayyat-Husayni”). The music has the rigor of an old tradition, and the energy of a particular musician and moment (“Taqsim Maqam Hijaz”), with some of it sounding like the forming and explosion of bubbles.
What One Young Man Made of His Freedom: Liam Finn, I’ll Be Lightning
Finn achieves what seems a personal voice—not the voice one speaks in but the voice one thinks with, the voice that is changed when one feels, the voice others usually do not hear: a voice of sensitivity and serenity, a voice of imagination and investigation. What “once was fun will later be boring,” he sings, with a cello-like throbbing nearby.
Energy, Honesty, Intelligence, Tradition and Possibility: The Clash, London Calling
It was an effect both real and illusionary: expectations were challenged, a new model constituted, but traditions—though modified—continued. London Calling, then two albums of shiny vinyl, nineteen songs of changing moods and distinct musical movements, was their breakthrough recording, produced by Guy Stevens.
Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, featuring B.B. King, Robbie Robertson, Robert Plant, Olu Dara, Corinne Bailey Rae, Norah Jones, and Ben Harper
Harper’s singing is exuberant and pleading nearly at the same time; and the Skatalites, a Jamaican band that often perform reggae and ska, give the song a subtle Caribbean rhythm. Yet, it is Toots and the Maytals in the Domino-Bartholomew seduction song “Let the Four Winds Blow,” produced by Toots Hibbert, that is quite full of soul. With Dean Frasier’s hot saxophone playing and the doo-woppish background singing, and a very clean uptempo production, the song “Four Winds” really lives.
An Unusual Voice: Lizz Wright, The Orchard
I do not think that I like the compositions on Lizz Wright’s The Orchard as much as I do those on Wright’s Salt and Dreaming Wide Awake: while being interesting, even nourishing, fruits of labor, they do not have as pleasing a shape or taste; but Wright sounds more free and Wright’s voice is as distinct as that of Anita Baker or Tracy Chapman, and is as likely to be, as theirs have been, among the defining voices of a generation.