It's been six years since the release of her well-received debut album ... this side of yesterday , but last month marked the return of indie-folk singer/songwriter Martha Berner with her long-awaited full-length follow-up Fool's Fanatsy along with her new band The Significant Others.   "Fool's Fantasy" from Cara Craig on Vimeo . The entire album was recorded at Chicago’s premiere digital recording studio Stranded On A Planet with producer & Significant Others' guitarist Scott Fritz, and was mastered by four-time Grammy Award winner Gavin Lurssen (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Cat Power, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, etc). While this new ...

The 2011 Album Buyers Guide Stuff You Should Try, From A-Z Welcome! You have just found one of the most exhaustive and well-considered lists of quality, new music available from 2011. Ultimately, this A-Z shopping list is a reflection of our own personal tastes. (There might appear to be some prominent omissions from this list - but this is our list here at RSL, and we stand firmly by these selections.. Of course, this being said, we did squabble this year over things... As it turned out, we just couldn't come to any agreement regarding the top two or three ...

by Alex Peterson • October 2011 “Vocabulary is my main instrument.” —Tom Waits   This is the first pull-quote from the back cover of Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters , a collection of rock journalism about the master of macabre and melodrama that follows his career from 1973’s Closing Time , his first album, to 2006’s Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards . The self-assessment is not only correct, but also characteristically simple and honest: the key to Tom Waits’ music, his appeal, and the even-/high-quality of his output over the past 40 years is language. He is a bleeding-heart lyricist, first and foremost.   Second and secondmost are the perennial obsessions within those lyrics: age, decrepitude, and loss. Or precisely the things that will creep up on a person over the course of their adult life. If read quickly and carefully, an idea of the course of Waits’ adult life is exactly what this book offers. What better way to get to know an inherently wordy musician than through reading a glut of conversations he’s had about his work? The only better way would be listening to his music, one would assume. And odds are, if you’re thinking of picking up Tom Waits on Tom Waits , you’ve done plenty of that already, and it’s left you wanting more.   Like his music, Tom Waits on Tom Waits is primarily for hardcore Waits fans. He’s a legend, without doubt, and his status more than merits a collection of rock journalism centering around him. But he’s never had the broad appeal of his most obvious American parallel, Bob Dylan. Unlike any book on Dylan, you won’t find this collection tucked into its own Waits section at the bookstore.   “[It’s] nice to know that a man with as much of a predilection towards evasion can come across this sincere.” The idiosyncratic nature of a book on a cult legend should ideally give it more leeway to print the odder aspects of its subject, the logic being that if it’s for the audience of a unique cult figure, it can be a unique cult book. Unfortunately, the counter-logic — that a book about a man without huge mainstream recognition needs to be more palatable if it wants to sell — runs through Tom Waits on Tom Waits as well.   It’s not a groundbreaking rock ‘n’ roll book. But, being (in part) a collection of fringe rock journalism from a specific period, it had the opportunity to. Had it organized all of its Waits-talks thematically, around the most interesting insights and personal revelations that reporters have been able to extract over the years, it might not suffer as much as it does from repetition. But it organizes the talks chronologically and, by the editor’s own admission, based on which reprinting rights were affordable. So it’s at best a sideways glance into lesser-known rock journalism: 1973-2006. In a way, this kind of book is always invaluable — where else will you find interviews from such a wide array of small publications like LA Free Press in 1975, Magnet in 1999, Stop Smiling in 2006? And simply talking to Waits is never less than entertaining. Who else refers to litigation as “like picking up a glass of water with a prosthetic hand” or to recording music as “like photographing ghosts”? Who else will gleefully admit, “I haven’t had fun since (a James Brown concert in 1962.) It’s just not a word I like. It’s like Volkswagens or bellbottoms or patchouli oil or bean sprouts. It rubs me up the wrong way. I might go out and have an educational evening, but I don’t have fun.”? Or speak fondly of his father, an alcoholic schoolteacher, before admitting, “I looked up to older musicians as father figures.”? Still, despite Waits’ constant witticisms, the book is on the whole a grab-bag, only intermittently incisive.   Little wonder that his lyrics have always touched on age. Waits seemed old at 23, when, eight years after dropping out of high school, he released his first album. Closing Time (1973) was filled with songs about cars that came off the factory floor when Waits was a toddler (“‘Ol ‘55”) and love affairs that would have taken place long before he was born (“Martha”). His music was old 20 years before he was, and the journey he’s been taking since 1973 has been a process of growing into the age and the hard-won wisdom his art has always tried to capture. Like a few other American artists of the 20th century, Waits was forced to realize his raw talent through a succession of public personas that would inevitably turn from an act he had adopted to protect himself from the limelight into his actual personality. When asked about his maturation by LA’s FolkScene KPFK in 1974, Waits poured out his exhausted heart: “I’m getting better I guess…You just have to go out there with the intention of trying to entertain when people don’t want to be entertained by you.” A year later, he told the LA Free Press , “I like to call what I’m doing an improvisational adventure.” Twenty years after that, he’d clearly paid the price of maturing in the limelight. “Whatever I tell you right now would probably be a lie,” he grumbles to the Observer ’s Pete Silverton in 1992 while doing press for Bone Machine .   “Comedian Martin Mull interviewed Waits as a character he’d created, talk-show host Barth Gimble, and thus connected with Waits on a level that both understood: that of the created persona.” This is probably true, save for all of the occasions Waits speaks of his wife, Kathleen Brennan. The book is literally divided by album, with a chapter culling together the press Waits did for 19 of his major releases. If read between the lines, though, the book is actually divided between the man Waits was before marrying Brennan, and the one after.   The first is the mischievous, sad sack poet you can listen to on the albums made between 1973 and 1980, the period of time when he was still young and struggling to build a persona while dealing with fame (albeit cult fame). The interviews he gave during these years were a greater or lesser mixture of cranky outpourings of frustration (Bart Bull’s 1977 piece “After a One-Night Stand” for the Phoenix Sun-Times ) and evasive/sardonic stream of consciousness-speak (Jim Gerard’s 1976 “Tom Waits for No One?” for the Northeastern Ohio Scene ). A typical yin/yang effusion from 1970s-era Waits goes, “I try to make myself up on stage… I try to avoid the unnaturalness of performing.”   The second man, the one in every interview and album since 1980, is the Waits who developed after meeting Brennan during pre-production on Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart , which Waits scored. After a brief courtship, Waits became a married man in 1981 and thereafter started putting out what is inarguably his best work. The post-Brennan interviews are on the whole no less sardonic than the earlier ones, but they’re also almost universally more peaceful. Of his wife, Waits has had nothing but the highest praise for 31 years. “She’s the brains behind pa,” he tells reporters over and again, quoting a lyric from an influence to describe a muse.   Waits can still be found grumbling and willfully evading silly questions after marriage; it’s just that it all seems to come from a complacent sense that doing press is necessary, and not all that painful. After the 1987 release of Frank’s Wild Years , Waits told Bill Forman of Music and Sound ...

A slowly creeping phenomenon of 2011 has been the indie drama "Martha Marcy May Marlene." Ever since its debut at Sundance in January, the psychological thriller, which has placed star Elizabeth Olsen as one of the hottest actresses around, has picked up some of the most glowing reviews of the year (read ours from Sundance here), and played virtually every major festival, currently unspooling at Toronto after cropping up at Cannes in the Spring. Public">Joe Public will get their chance to see it when it's released next month, but the company behind Sean Durkin's film are moving ...

Band spokepersons Hayley and Heather took time out from a hectic pre-tour schedule to deliver their song choices. Because they asked so nicely, this week's 5 Songs became 6... Hayley's 3: Unchained Melody - The Righteous Brothers (1965) Dancing Queen - Abba (1976) Joey - Concrete Blonde (1990) Heather's 3: Cornflake Girl - Tori Amos (1994) JS Bach - Cannon Alla Ottava played by Tatiana Nikolayeva (1992) Martha - Tom Waits (1973) Hear 5 Songs on ABC Dig Music: Attached Image(s):  Hayley and Heather from The Jezabels read more

Welcome to the fifth edition of New Music by Region . Every fortnight we aim to present the best new music in 8 major cities and regions from across the UK. With the help of regional correspondents, we plan to present our shortlist of new music in Brighton, Cardiff, Dublin, Glasgow, London, Norwich, Manchester and Oxford. New Music by Region #4 can be found here ! Name : Black Black Hills – ‘Billy's Bride’ Website : Soundcloud Correspondent : Gary Scattergood Until a fortnight ago, Black Black Hills were known as Pope Joan, a post-punkish Brighton four-piece famed for some intense support slots with the ...

Seeker Lover Keeper, alias Sarah Blasko, Sally Seltmann and Holly Throsby are taking to the road to showcase their first album together. The self-titled disc hits the shelves on June 3, and the band will embark on a national tour which kicks off on July 6 and takes in all capital cities and a few regional spots along the way. The trio will be joined by The Dirty Three’s Jim White on drums and Shahzad Ismaily who's previously toured with the likes of Tom Waits and Martha Wainwright on bass and guitar. Tour Dates: Wed, Jul 6 – The ...

What: Seeker Lover Keeper by Seeker Lover Keeper. When: June 3 through Dew Process/UMA. Key notes: Debut album for new indie-folk supergroup featuring Holly Throsby, Sally Seltmann and Sarah Blasko, who share vocal, piano and guitar duties. Recorded over two “hot weeks” in New York with Jim White (The Dirty Three, Cat Power) on drums and Shahzad Ismaily (Tom Waits, Martha Wainwright, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) on bass/guitar. Co-produced by the trio with Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey). From the presser: “Each track is written by one artist and sung by another, which ...

It’s the “supergroup” that just had to happen. Three of Australia’s most distinctive female voices – Sally Seltmann, Sarah Blasko and Holly Throsby – together as one. Calling themselves Seeker Lover Keeper, the trio will release their debut self-titled album on June 3 via Dew Process/UMA. Recorded over “two hot weeks” in New York, it sees Throsby, Blasko and Seltmann sharing vocal, as well as instrumental duties, and was produced by Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey), with The Dirty Three’s Jim White on drums and Shahzad Ismaily (Tom Waits, Martha Wainwright) on ...

Requested by Synthetic Colors • Compiled by Leicester Myth 01. Harry Nilsson - "Don't Forget Me" (Pussy Cats) 02. Eels - "It's a Motherfucker" (Daisies of the Galaxy) 03. Graham Nash - "Simple Man" (Songs For Beginners) 04. Tom Waits - "Martha" (Closing Time) 05. Daniel Johnston - "Some Things Last a Long Time" (1990) 06. Elliott Smith - "I Didn't Understand [Early Version] (XO Demos) 07. Nico - "Afraid" (Desertshore) 08. Randy Newman - "I Miss You" (Bad Love) 09. Wilson">Dennis Wilson - "Thoughts of You" (Pacific Ocean Blue) 10. Fiona Apple - "I Know" (When The Pawn...)

Glancing at what was around them at the time Dexys Midnight Runners (see posts passim) were going their own unique way proved to be more fulfilling than expected. In the chart announced on 1st August 1982, for instance, the theme to Postman Pat was at number 60. And that's barely the half of it. 40 Sylvian Sakamoto - Bamboo Houses/Bamboo Music Everyone knows of how David Sylvian turned on a dime from cheekboned New Romantic pin-up to experimental kingpin, but this was his first single after stepping off the Smash Hits gravy train and it still sounds like a ...

Je suis faible. On me demande 10 morceaux, j'en mets 12. Je dois faire une playlist, j'en fais deux. Je ne maîtrise pas l'art de la concision et l'indécision a chez moi statut de religion. Voici donc, en écho au Mercredix précédent, une sélection à la mémoire du soldat Kerviel, une playlist qui fleure bon le billet vert. - Les Mercredix / Tom Waits , Magnolia Electric Co. , Nick Cave , Julie Doiron , The Kinks , The Little Rabbits , Weird War , Gordon Gano , Martha Wainwright , The Black Crowes

Je suis faible. On me demande 10 morceaux, j'en mets 12. Je dois faire une playlist, j'en fais deux. Je ne maîtrise pas l'art de la concision et l'indécision a chez moi statut de religion. Voici donc, en écho au Mercredix précédent, une sélection à la mémoire du soldat Kerviel, une playlist qui fleure bon le billet vert. - Les Mercredix / Tom Waits , Magnolia Electric Co. , Nick Cave , Julie Doiron , The Kinks , The Little Rabbits , Weird War , Gordon Gano , Martha Wainwright , The Black Crowes

I'm trying to avoid working here, so here's another excerpt. Taken from 2001, I believe. FRIDAY AUGUST 17 2001 Clever, friendly and articulate, I notice I have no memory of the events that transpired more than three days hence. The sun beats down upon a town of ingrates and foreign students, each more desperate than the last. Headlines read of Helen from Big Brother's fondness for television and porridge in both the downmarket tabloids and 'intelligent' broadsheets. Everywhere is sound bite city. I think perhaps that I am old, or just misanthropic. The world is so much ...

Image found here Tom Waits – Martha A telephone call. An anguished monologue about the history of a utopian relationship. Back when there were no tomorrows. And the days were adorned with sentimental flowers. Storytelling that is perfection. About the past against the present. About the grace in aging and memories.  About regret. And a haunting quivering [...]