Lissie Covers Fleetwood Mac in “Go Your Own Way” Video

Among other things, Lissie produces a truly prodigious amount of excellent music covers.  Out this week is the video for her cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” which featured on her most recent EP: Covered Up With Flowers.  The video is actually a live recording, featuring a somewhat more “slick” visual style than the sessions that brought us her previous releases of “Bad Romance” and “Nothing Else Matters.”

Even so, it’s a lovely way to start a Friday morning.  Check it out:

And if you really want to blow your mind… watch Lissie violate the “No Stairway” rule here.

First Listen: New Songs from Katie Davis

Photo by: David Speranza
Photo by: David Speranza

Friend of the blog, past feature, and all-around excellent singer-songwriter Katie Davis has released three new songs via YouTube, and you lucky devils can hear them after the jump.  The songs are currently in the form of home recordings which feature just Katie and her guitar.  The result is three wonderfully intimate recordings that feel both confessional and cathartic, with a haunting quality that remains long after the songs have ended.

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Mailbag: Summer-Winter – Bewildered

Summer-Winter is a band from Pittsburgh, PA that features Terry O’Hara and several contributing musicians from Pittsburgh and NYC.  The music that results is mature, nuanced, and beautiful.  On Terry’s most recent album – Bewildered – the influence of bands like Mojave 3 simply can’t be overlooked.  The album is gentle in its langour, and recalls introspective moments of sitting on someone’s back porch and sipping whiskey deep into the twilight.  Perhaps even more compelling, however, is the path that this album took to arrive into the world.  A journey that its simple disclaimer – “The second album from Summer-Winter, Bewildered, was feverishly written in a week during dreamlike spells of insomnia.” – doesn’t really capture.  Let’s take a look…

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Mailbag: Anja McCloskey – And Her Head

Anja McCloskey is a singer-songwriter and accordionist from the U.K. who writes dramatic songs that positively burst with atmosphere and texture.  Her latest single (and accompanying video) “And Her Head,” which was inspired by a tragic event in her grandfather’s life, is a stirring mix of strings, violin, as well as Anja’s trademark vocals and accordion.  It’s a bold choice, certainly, to center a musical career around an instrument that many regard as a novelty, but there is no hint of irony here.  For Anja, the accordion is a thing of beauty and love.

Here’s how she describes it: “Ever since my grandpa started playing his accordion to me as a little child I have wanted to play it too. I just love the deep and full sounds and the little quirky noises the accordion makes and I don’t know any other instrument that can be so versatile and expressive.” Despite the thematic components of her songs, Anja is quick to challenge the assertion that this is Folk music: “I didn’t grow up or learn in a folk environment at all,” says Anja. “The accordion is obviously a folk instrument and I have been exposed to a lot of folk-inspired music since living in the UK, but my music owes just as much to classical.”

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New Music: Sonya Cotton – It Is So

Sonya Cotton’s new album – It is so – (released this week via bandcamp and her personal website) is a beautiful, touching collection of songs dedicated, as Sonya writes, “…to the life and spirit of my mother, Karen Imparato Cotton.”  The album also contains the track “Song For Eric,” a tribute to Sonya’s friend Eric Bayer who died of cancer shortly after her own mother succumbed to the same disease.  Given these moments of great loss, it might be expected that an album like It is so would be somber and funereal.

And yes, there is sadness and loss in It is so. And yet, the album is also a wonderful celebration of life in all its forms.  As Sonya writes: “The album is a tribute to my mother who passed away two years ago; she had cancer.  In addition to exploring loss of many kinds (loss of life, of safe space, of hope,) the songs are also, as I see them, prayers, and celebrations of love.”

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