Martin Ruby (aka Marco North), is getting ready to release his debut debut album, Heaven Get Behind Me, this Friday, Nov. 20, on WhistlePig Records. Written on a 100-year-old parlor guitar, and recorded in a Soviet-era living room on a collection of vintage instruments, including an 1887 August Pollman banjola and a 1929 Selmer tenor saxophone made in Paris. Eleven tracks wrestle with life’s messiest questions: examining regret, memory, religion, love, mental health.
Wayne Graham, the partnership of brothers Kenny and Hayden Miles, expertly take sounds from genres like folk, Americana and alternative Appalachia-region country and prove that stripped down guitars and drums are everything except boring. Their vocals are raw and honest, with a twang that reminds the listener of that classic, wistful country sound. Songs like “Chifforobe” and “One Percent Juice” add on blues-style rock’n’roll elements, really driving home that classic and yet modern sound. READ MORE…
Sara Rachele should have been in London, recording her latest musical project – but, hey, we know how that story went in this year. So Sara Rachele found herself at home instead. At home and musing on her folk origins – and songs she’d known nearly all her life. Songs like ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’She says it was the birth of an alternative project: “I wanted to sing some folk songs in the studio. And now, after being home, I thought, ‘while things are weird, keep music going.’” Fortunately she had the perfect home recording location to give her the live feel she wanted to imbue the songs with – her recently purchased new home is an abandoned church in rural Tennessee.
A fairy tale such as Hansel and Gretel—with its cannibal witch trapping two young children and preparing to cook them for dinner—reminds us of the perennial vulnerability of children to predatory adults. Layer on top of that the animal fear of being eaten. Or Jung’s archetype of the devouring mother. Pick your poisoned apple.
Pulitzer-nominated author Charles McNair, hailed by the late Ray Bradbury as “a genetic original”, doffs his cap to the Brothers Grimm in the opening chapter of The Epicureans. One of the characters jokingly references Hansel and Gretel by name. In German, no less. A wink to the reader but also a deft bit of folk-tale homage.
The anticipated new novel from McNair has been praised by Esquire’s Tom Junod as “a Grimm’s fairy tale for the age of income inequality.” You can pre-order a copy here, available in digital, hardcover and deluxe editions.
