songwriters
Adam Sweeting
To be born into the extraordinary Wainwright dynasty is to be born onstage, and Rufus has seized his birthright in a giant bear-hug. Mere weeks after the death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle, from cancer in January, the lanky, somewhat Heathcliff-like Rufus was back on the campaign trail with throttles wide open. In the pipeline for early April are his new album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu, and a new production of his opera Prima Donna at Sadler's Wells.Rufus has grown up in public, and that's where he feels most comfortable. More retiring personalities might have locked themselves Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Commissioned by Josef Weinberger Ltd on the occasion of Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday today, In Good Company is a unique three-part collage of intimate conversations I have had with some of Sondheim’s closest colleagues and collaborators. Michael Cerveris, Ted Chapin, Barbara Cook, Daniel Evans, Maria Friedman, Angela Lansbury, Patti LuPone, Cameron Mackintosh, Julia McKenzie, Hal Prince, Jonathan Tunick and John Weidman share their experiences, their recollections, and their often very personal insights into what makes this man such a colossus in the world of musical theatre.Since Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If music writers love to place artists in genres, it is a more-than-usually fruitless task with Magnetic Fields, the brainchild of “composer, multi-instrumentalist and bubblegum purist” Stephin Merritt. Many people discovered Magnetic Fields (named after the surrealist André Breton’s novel Les Champs Magnetiques) with their 3-CD box set 69 Songs, which was released in 1999. The titles themselves suggested some of his musical playgrounds, such as “Punk Love”, “Love is Like Jazz” or “World Love”. Others referred sometimes obliquely to Billie Holliday, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
If ever there was a classic case of artist and audience meeting on terribly comfortable ground, Karine Polwart's performance at last night’s fundraiser for the Green Party was it. Held in a beautiful converted church, there was more than a trace of the Vicar of Dibley lurking around the edge of the proceedings. Whatever your political affiliations, the Greens undeniably put on a good spread: it was organic beer, home bakes and Curious Colas all round, a repast matched only in its wholesomeness by a lot of thoroughly fine if sometimes overly polite musical manoeuvres.A gifted singer and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable kitsch. I was failing to make much sense of the place and fell back on a technique which I’ve often found produces results when somewhere unfamiliar – ask the musicians themselves who they most respect. One name kept coming up – Guy Clark, who it became obvious was a city legend, a songwriters’ songwriter. I turned up at Clark’s house at 11 in the morning, and he offered me a drink from an already open bottle of Bourbon. I asked him for an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Bob Dylan has reminded us recently, The Christmas Album is one of those music industry traditions more likely to deserve an ignominious burial rather than praise. Fortunately, Thea Gilmore has galloped to the rescue with Strange Communion, an artfully shaped collection of songs that shines flickering light into the mystical roots of the Yuletide season."I don't call it a Christmas album, I call it a seasonal album," she warns, with almost lawyerly caution, though there's no denying that two of the songs do have "Christmas" in their title (she refers to it as "the C-word"). But what she had Read more ...
howard.male
Portuguese singer-songwriter Sara Tavares trades in understatement. She strokes rather than strums guitar chords, her two percussionists are more likely to brush a drum than whack it hard, and her soft close-to-the-mike voice specialises in gentle yearning rather than soul-girl histrionics. So the intimate space of the Jazz Café seems much better suited to her than, say, the Barbican where she had the unenviable task earlier this year of being a viable support act to the larger-than-life Malian diva, Oumou Sangare. As it turned out, Sara did a perfectly good job of warming up Oumou’s Read more ...
tom.russell
To mark the release of Tom Russell's superb new album Blood and Candle Smoke this week, the cowboy singer-songwriter reports on his trip earlier this month to the Mexican city of Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, just over the border from where he lives in El Paso, Texas.
"Down below El Paso lies Juarez, / Mexico is different, like the travel poster says…" Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard, "Mexican Divorce"That was the summer of "birds falling out of trees," as the Apaches might say. Looming weirdness. I'm in a beat-up Juarez taxi cab, inching slowly away from the Read more ...