HHMM: Congratulations on the album. It’s a great record, but I’m not the only one who thinks so. There’s been a really good reaction to it. Are you thinking that maybe this is the right band for the right time?

TT: Yes I do. I know it’s the right band for the right time. Whether its successful or not – we’ll see. There’s absolutely nothing in the way of us understanding that we’re supposed to be together. That’s what we use to determine how right it all feels. You can never control who is going to like what, but for us, what id really great, is that will be the cherry. We are already successful because we found musicians that gell; we found each other. That’s the biggest part of the success for us.

HHMM: The sound you have seems to be the right sound for the time. We recently had Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears down here, and they are in the same ballpark as you, and they did real well also. That soul rock mix is sounding good right now.

TT: We are in a time, when its after when things got so fluffy for a while and then after the fluff, it got so indie and dark, so I think the rock element of what we are doing as opposed to a straight rhythm & blues or straight soul sound is letting people connect to something that doesn’t feel to light hearted, but also lets people get out of their heads. I definitely feel like the music we are creating now is part of the zeitgeist…but…what I love about what we are doing is that there are people who are die-hard vinyl spinners, people who didn’t just get their record players two years ago – they come up and say they love the band and they compare us to people who are my heroes. That’s when you feel like some credibility is getting to you. These are not just people who are listening to records because someone told them it was cool, these are people who have a real idea about what might be cool, as far as a real retro sound is concerned. And then its even better when they say that we are not just doing a mock version of it, but we are adding something new to it. Because that is the fear – when you are doing something that is so inspired by your past heroes that you end up sounding like a replica.

HHMM: It’s good that people don’t think that the band is just an invention of a smart manager.

TT: Exactly. I’m glad that there are so many videos that show who we were before we got a big manager, so people know that its authentic.

HHMM: With You Tube, now it’s very hard to hide your past, and in your case that’s a good thing.

TT: You Tube is huge. Whenever I hear somebody complaining now that they don’t have a major record label or something like that I just think, ‘well everything you need is at your hands right now’.  I’d like to find out how much money a record company would have to put into a band to get them the same amount of exposure that you can get in one week doing it independently now. I can reach 7 million people this week, if I want to. Twenty years ago what would a record company have to do to have a new band reach 7 million people. That would have required a major television appearance and them having to pay a lot of radio stations… It’s amazing to me what we can do now as independent artists.

HHMM: As I said to Black Joe, it’s nice to see a black guy out the front of a band of white guys showing them how to groove.

TT: (laughs) I like to stay away from statements like that. (laughs) But so long as there are people like you that don’t stay away from it, means I don’t have to say it!

HHMM: The video for Blues Hand Me Down is kinda like a wild house party. Is that the vibe of the live shows?

TT: Oh completely. It was our idea to make sure the first video came out like that. We didn’t want to be put in some big setting. We chose instead to be in  a small setting, and we wanted to have the audience so close with us, because we don’t like to do shows, we like to have parties. That’s the most important thing, that people come and participate in the show, they are part of the event as opposed to watching the event from the outside. Sometimes when I think back to our live shows I sometimes wonder if I was a little ruthless with the audience, but I like to command people to get out of their heads and have a good time. I will do everything in my power as a frontman, and the band will do everything in their power as musicians to make sure you forget everything else while you are in the room. That is our mission.

HHMM: do you find there is a wide cross section coming to the shows, from young hipsters to traditionalists.

TT: At our shows you get the 17 year old boy musicians, you get the young girls in their 50’s outfits, the hipsters, the soul scene people, the 60 year olds who give us the authenticity nod, black, white, every ethnic group… The music kind of strips down to basics and when you are down to basics then it means every one around has a common feeling about it. When you start doing things too far on the outside it excludes people. You want to be as basic as we can and then wreck people’s basic sensibilities! These people end up hanging out together. On any of our social media sites you have 17 year olds having real conversations with adults, because our fan base doesn’t talk down to people. It’s pretty mind blowing actually. I’m very blown away by the diversity of our audience.

HHMM: It’s interesting, that community based thing. A few years ago the band s that encouraged that were the jam bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead. Did you pick up that cue from those guys?

TT: No we didn’t pick up the cue from them, but I’m glad its gone that way. You are not the first person I’ve heard that from and I’ve thought about that. The Troublemakers is our fan base, and they thought of that themselves. They have sites in Italy and Germany and in the UK. There are pages of discussion there and none of them are about Vintage Trouble, They are together because of us but they become a community. They take vacations together. They travel together, they rent hotel rooms and they invite us to come and party in their hotel!

HHMM: When you listen to the album I feel like it must have been real important for you to get songs like Gracefully on there, where you can really slide into a vocal.

TT: Yeah, but not because of the vocals. Songs like Gracefully and Not Alright By Me are important to me because I want us, as a band, to touch as many parts of a persons emotional scale as possible. I want people to heal, and love and fuck, and be mad and be happy and be political and forget about politics, you know what I mean. Certain songs are going to give me the space to do that. We didn’t choose the songs. When we went into those sessions we didn’t know we were making an album, so it wasn’t that well thought out. It just became an album.

HHMM: When you get people comparing your singing to Otis Redding or Curtis Mayfield, is that a mind blowing thing?

TT: It’s not…and please don’t take this statement as an ego based statement…but I know how great a singer I am. For me honestly, it’s a relief. I know how hard I work and I put in a lot of time. I’m a technical worker but I’m also a person that wants to be as raw and free and out of my head as possible. And I’ve done it all of my life. So when people say things like that I know that mu work is being received to a level that I feel it should be received. I also am humbled when people say that because I didn’t know what it was going to feel like.

That’s a lot of different aspects of distinction and yet they somehow manage to co-exist often with a single song.

Of course the album is sung in a deep ponderous tone that embodies every bit of his 77 years, but it’s an apt voice for a man simultaneously contemplating his mortality and wrestling with his flickering romantic urges as he does on the closer Different Sides, where he croons against the angelic voice of Dana Glover. Soaring high notes were never his long suit anyway. Glover performs another virtual duet with Cohen on Come Healing , another white mans gospel song.

The album opens with Going Home, an insightful letter to himself where he describes his correspondent as ‘a lazy bastard, living in a suit’.  He sings/speaks the words in a voice that is so intimate that he almost disconcertingly present in the room.  Amen is slow and light and it almost evokes the inevitable rise to a celestial plain that it considers.

The highlight is the triumvirate of the elegiac, intimate Show Me The Place, the slinky, seductive groove of Darkness and the stark, emotionally brutal Anyhow.  The former is a hymm-like song that recalls the delivery of Tom Waits, and provides one of the most powerful and yet humble lyrics on the album. Jennifer Warnes makes her only appearance on the album on this track with an incredibly gentle vocal contribution. Darkness is built around a quietly insistent rhythm and perhaps is Cohen’s statement about the financial predicament that ironically re-generated his career. Anyhow is a barroom lament where he pleads, “I know you have to hate me, but could you hate me less”. By the end of the song as he mixes and repeats his pleadings provided more coherently earlier in the song, you actually start to feel sorry for his emotional state.

There’s one school of thought that will suggest that Cohen has simply continued to trade in a very safe commodity, and one that will provide very few surprises, but to me this is hardly a criticism. The surprises are there but they are a matter of degree not magnitude.  A sense of perspective is needed also, something that is often lacking in considerations of Cohen. This is a man in his late 70’s making his first album in over seven years. The sheer quality of these songs is astounding and there are many of these that wouldn’t be out of place on his finest albums. Do they exceed any of those songs in terms of quality? Does it matter? The point of this album is not to compete with himself.

Old Ideas could have been a semi-apologetic parting gesture but it’s actually an unmitigated triumph.

In the running for a cash prize of $30,000 thanks to PPCA, the following shortlisted artists have been acknowledged for producing albums of outstanding quality and creativity.

ABBE MAY, ADALITA, BOY & BEAR, GOTYE, GURRUMUL, JACK LADDER, KIMBRA, THE JEZABELS, AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Artists from all genres of music were invited to submit their full length albums, and were judged on the strength of the album alone by a judging panel of 42 media, industry and artists. I should note that the author of this website is one of those judges.

“2011 was a big year for Australian artist album releases – The 7^th Amp produced a long list twice as long as most of the previous prizes highlighting how many great albums were released in this country. It was tough on the judges – they had to spend their festive season listening to over 50 albums and making experienced judgments on each. It was tough to determine the top 9 of these and many artists – like The Panics, Oh Mercy and The Orbweavers – were very close to the final cut. Some of the other albums singled out by the judges were by: Skipping Girl Vinegar, Oscar & Martin, Ben Salter, Big Scary, Eagle & The Worm, Grace Woodroofe, Husky, Leader Cheetah, Phrase, Teeth & Tongue, Josh Pyke and Drapht. We congratulate all entrants for their efforts and especially the nine which are now shortlisted for The 7^th Amp,” says The Australian Music Prize Director Scott B. Murphy.

PPCA supports new Australian music with their continued pledge of the prize money. This year, PPCA also joins with The Amp to present “Amped Up In Conversation” – a unique forum for the music industry to announce the winner of the 7^th Amp. Held on Thursday, March 8^th from 12 noon, the forum will be a sit down lunch with special international guest speaker, David Fricke from US Rolling Stone.

Judges comment: As a first time judge of the AMP I have to say I am satisfied with the process. Every album was given a good chance to be heard and there were judges strongly advocating albums from a wide variety of genres. Of the Shortlist there was only two or my Top 9 that made the cut but I know that several of my favorite albums were in the next group that Scott mentioned above. There was only a couple of albums that I think may have been under-rated by the judging group; one because it came from a veteran act and its quality may have been taken for granted. I can see why each and every one of the albums that made the Shortlist got there, even though there is around three on the list that I really didn’t like that much at all.That’s why you have a reasonably diverse judging panel.  I’m looking forward to seeing who emerges as the winner, and I’d be keen to offer my services again, if I’m invited.

Long-time Cult collaborator and producer Bob Rock (Metallica, Bush) – who produced one of The Cult’s most successful albums, the platinum album Sonic Temple, put the finishing touches on the album after much of the initial work being done by co-producer Chris Goss (Queens of the Stone Age, U.N.K.L.E., Masters of Reality).

The new release features founding members Ian Astbury on vocals and Billy Duffy on guitars, with drummer John Tempesta and bassist Chris Wyse. “We have had the opportunity to work with two of the most influential and talented producers in the world today,” said Astbury. “They pushed us beyond our comfort zone, and helped us craft Choice of Weapon.

In a recent Rolling Stone interview Ian Astbury spoke of some of the thoughts behind the record and typically he is looking at the big picture. “I think what needs to be said is that we have to start looking inward. Our spiritual lives are almost bankrupt. The material systems are not going to fix where we are. Moving the furniture around, metaphorically moving the furniture around – getting a new president, or putting a new, fresh coat of paint on something – isn’t necessarily going to change the root causes. We’re human beings, we’re organic, we’re dependent upon the environment, we’re dependent upon this living planet. It’s a fact. And it’s a fact that we cannot fight. But all our fighting is more about semantics, political systems, languages, structures, charts, graphs. It’s almost like we want to be right, but we don’t want to win.”

After a decade when he fought a few inner psychological demons  Adam Ant performed some gigs in England in 2010 . From there He then built up his new band Adam Ant and the Good, The Mad and the Lovely Posse’.

2011 was spent building on that momentum and culminated with Ant returning to the studio back where he recorded the album ‘Adam Ant Is The Blueback Hussar In Marrying The Gunners Daughter’, now set for a June 2012 release on his own label Blueback Hussar Records.

Blueback Hussar has also signed Georgie Girl and Her Poussez Posse. They’ll support Adam Ant on the Australian tour.

In a 2011 interview with Vive Le Rock, Adam Ant, the writer heard a preview of the album in its current state and his comments were positive. “Even before the final mixes its sounding great, a mixture of tough, hard neo-industrial songs that sound like the Physical era Ants. He co-wrote those tougher songs with Chris McCormack of 3 Colours Red and there are some really cool twangy rockers written with Boz Boorer, Morrissey’s guitar player. There’s a couple of slower, almost ballad –like songs and a brace of off the wall angular moments that hark back to the groundbreaking Ants of the debut Dirk Wears White Socks album.”

Sounds promising.

Adam Ant dates are:

March 23, Sydney, Enmore Theatre

March 27, Perth, Metro

March 30, Melbourne, Palace

April 5, Adelaide, Thebarton Theatre

April 8, Brisbane, Tivoli

The band split after their album Exit The Dragon proved to be prophetically titled, and it wasn’t until the mid 2000’s that band leaders Nash Kato and Eddie ’King’ Roeser could play together again.  It took until last year for them to release a new album, the impressive and distinctive Rock N Roll Submarine.

Now Urge Overkill are returning to Australia for a short tour and Ed Roeser provided me with a wide ranging and detailed interview about then, now and tomorrow.

HHMM: Great that you are coming back to Australia again. Do you find this is a country that seems to understand and appreciate the bands entire history, rather than just one album and an appearance on Pulp Fiction.

ER: It all depends. Maybe we have constructed it in our minds. Everybody loves Australia but we like to think we have a special affinity, ‘a special relationship’, as President Bush said. There are people that are wholly unaware of our early catalogue everywhere we go, and we are stunned to the degree that many people will not know who you are talking about until we say, ‘Well, we were in that movie Pulp Fiction”, and they’ll say “Oh you’re that band!” You get all kinds. Not being ubiquitous, you don’t know what to assume. Most people who end up writing stuff have a sense of the history and all that and certainly we’re very proud of that. We broke into the game, right before there was a game as it were.  We do have plenty of history to talk about and it makes interviews tough because there is so much scuttlebutt from the past, so its tough to do short interviews.

HHMM: With the new record, some people have commented that it picks up where Exit The Dragon left off, whereas other people say that it reminds them of the Touch and Go albums. Where do you see it fitting in with your catalogue?

ER: It wasn’t something that we noticed or really thought about, but we did get a lot of comments where people said it picks up where Dragon left off, and on top of that, Dragon was my favorite Urge record. It was a very dark time for us, but we’re very happy with what came out of the Exit The Dragon sessions – but it was fractious time.  It was a honest record I think. Some of the devil may care fun, was missing on that record and we couldn’t manufacture it, but some of the positive things that we have on this record – when people talk of it reminding them of Touch and Go – we did have a less smoothly organized experience, it wasn’t a corporate product and we felt like it didn’t have the polish that a major record would have – and that was fine too. Of course you got that on Exit The Dragon too. It wasn’t polished but it was very much me or Nash isolated on our own projects whereas this record has the feel of a bunch of guys just kinda having a good time. And that feeling I associate with the Touch & Go times. Maybe our sunniest record was Saturation but we were very conscious of bringing self-consciously glossy production elements on that. We didn’t have the means or the desire to do that on this record but I wouldn’t rule it out in the future. What makes me happiest is that after this amount of time between records there is a something that people recognize as us. It’s like pornography, you know it when you see it. With Urge, they know it when they hear it and that’s what brings the smile to the collective face of the band. I don’t know what that quality is, but I think our true believers were happy with the record and we didn’t have any illusions of coming back and taking over the world, but for those who waited and told us they were anticipating this for a long time, most of them were very pleasantly not let down. That’s the last thing you want to do. We were doing a record to follow what I think was a very weird, interesting progression of records . We put it together over such a long period of time that I think all the ineffectual elements feel out and we go a properly eclectic mix of songs. It was hard to narrow it down from the various ideas we had over the years. We’d been at it for quite q while on and off. Not living in the same town anymore had a lot to do with the eclectic nature of it. There were tracks taken from various different sessions we had and it can be a slippery slope to do a record like that but I think in the end it came together in a way that we are happy with and I think takes some of the pressure off. We are very much looking forward to continuing in this vein now because I think we made it a little harder on ourselves than we had to. This is all supposed to be fun and we were getting a little revved up over the years and probably judging a little too harshly what was going to go on there. We like to think we have a high bar for songs, but sometimes putting on things that are ideas that are not polished or finished or not conceptually realized is more interesting as well. Guided By Voices is one of my favorite bands and you see them with ideas sketched out and they are good and they put them out.

HHMM: I find this record really creeps up on me. Songs like Effigy and She’s My Ride are very immediate and you love them straight away, but other songs like The Valiant or Touch To A Cut creep up on you a bit more. Is that the way you look at it?

ER: We sat with these cuts for a while. We had other songs that didn’t make the record. These were songs that already stood the test of time for us, even though they were unfinished, They were in a demo form that we came to believe were done. The Valiant has a lot of production ideas on it. We knew it was a strong song but we fleshed it out quite a bit and there are a lot of instruments on it. We had a stripped down version of it that was cool.  We were pretty hard on ourselves and we thought that we had a record that would reward people who spent some time with it. It would be something where people weren’t reaching for that CD fast forward button. In the end its an interesting journey I think and that’s part of the fun and the challenge of the way we see putting together a record. We want it to flow. It doesn’t have to be a concept record but we all know that classic record enjoyment of the days of yore. That doesn’t mean the kids today don’t appreciate it. Being a dad myself I hear that the kids are still up with the classics like us, so that’s cool.

HHMM: Looking back at Saturation, it’s amazing that there are actually a number of people who think it’s their favorite album ever. That’s a pretty extreme reaction to have but there are some people who feel that way. Does that strike you as an amazing thing.

ER: At that time there was an optimism that bled into the record and I think all the anticipation of us thinking, “Wow are we going to be big rockstars” and that excitement came through. We had these big producers The Butcher Brothers who were really good at keeping things fun. Those guys had been producing hip-hop records for the longest time but they had grown up with The Beatles. They were veterans in the recording studio but they had gone into this niche of doing mainly hip-hop records which frankly isn’t that interesting to do. We were all just kinda amazed at what was coming out of the speakers. I think the record had no sense of disappointment and no sense of us being under the pressure cooker of expectations – which is kind of how it ought to be. We weren’t questioning our choices at all and we just happened to have the right amount time and the record wasn’t over-thought. We were able to do some things with production that we had always wanted to do and it was the first time that we had enough time to perfect things but not too much time. The technology didn’t exist yet where you could sit and perfect things. We were using tape and they had a legendary Neve board that sounded great and they were able to bring that sound to the tracks. But I do hear people say that a lot and I do have great memories of it. It was a real weird stroke of luck that the guy that signed the band hooked us up with The Butchers. They were like these mischievous little Italian guys who had that really rude Philadelphia sense of humor, but they were really smart guys. They were not the stereotype producer. It does flow and it goes down easy. The way that it ends with Heaven 90210  – that was the very first thing we did with them, just to check out the studio. It was a very straight-forward song but for the first time we had the time to put some production touches in there. I think another reason it worked out that well is that we did have time to prepare. We had done quite a bit of demoing at home in our basement studio, that we kept. If something sounded really crazy that we could never recapture we’d just keep it. For being a major label they understood that we weren’t trying to do something to be taken that seriously, but still was serious music from an aesthetic sense.

HHMM: You mentioned the word ‘mischievous’ when talking about the Butchers  and its funny you should say that because to me that’s the spirit of Saturation, and its something that it shares with bands like Cheap Trick or Mott The Hopple or Thin Lizzy. Were you aware of being in the tradition of those kinds of bands?

ER: I think so. It’s not a manufactured thing. It’s just something that happens in the everyday of the recording of the record. You get some in-jokes happening and some fun and it filters in. You are not going to get that when you have a whole lot of animosity in the band. We had less of that at that time. After that record the recreation was more from drugs than from good clean fun, which was what Saturation was all about.  In a lot of ways we’ve been lucky in our career to be recording at the right time and with the right amount of preparedness. I think that something you create when you have limited time and recording is an event. Now everything is digitized and you have everything at your fingertips. You don’t even need to remember the day some guitar track was recorded. It’s all kind of not real. If your guitar is out of tune a bit, ‘no problem, we have a machine for that.’ We still had mixing that was not automated so if you wanted to change something in the mix somebody had to stand there and run that fader so that no two mixes were exactly the same.

HHMM: At that time guys like me in the media and guys at record companies and people in bands, we were all talking about the ‘alternative scene’ and ‘alternative rock”. What the hell was that all about?

ER: I don’t know. I think it came about as a way to separate what was supposedly new from everything that had come before, but I don’t think there was anything new about it at all. I don’t think it was any different to what happened in the punk rock years when you had bands that were actively at odds with the record companies about what was acceptable and what was good. The term ‘alternative’ did indeed have a couple of years of currency and the dream was over pretty quick as I remember it. It really didn’t take very long for those stations, at least in Chicago to go to pop commercial stations, and they are all out of business now. I don’t think anything was being re-invented but for a few years it was better than having the new Michael Jackson album as the main point of interest. For a while it was a welcome change to have that happen.

HHMM: From that era when Urge Overkill were ubiquitous and everyone wanted to be your friend was it a time when you made life-long friends out of your peers or did everyone kinda just drift away when the dream was over?

ER:  By that time in my life I was maybe 27, 28 and I didn’t get as caught up in it as some did. I had more a stable relationship and life and I probably didn’t get as burned as the other two guys did. With Blackie, he probably had an opportunity to get deeper into the life of drugs than he would have without being a rockstar for a few years and that was a life-destroying event for him. The thing that was most disappointing thing was that the band itself didn’t survive those expectations and I do feel that there were people who depended on the scene. Things were working just fine for us thank you very much but because we weren’t as big as Pearl Jam it was decided that somebody was doing something wrong. All of a sudden we supposedly needed a whole new team and that kind of factionalism really fucked us up. Like you said, there was a big element of that. When you’ve got it going on, you are never wrong and everybody is going to be your buddy, even though they are the last person who knows anything about music and about how we got our brand of music to taken seriously. There was some elements from the Hollywood establishment and elsewhere that did foul things up and are any of those people around now? Certainly not!

HHMM: I understand that you are quite well advanced on the next record.

ER: Well, we haven’t done that much writing, but we have plenty of ideas from the last one. Before we did much thinking about it, we did go in for a couple of days and were able to put down some stuff that came about really easy, compared to how slowly the last stuff went.  I think its going to come out pretty quick and its going to be an easier project. I’m all in favor of less thinking about it and more moving ahead. It ends up being the most interesting music to listen to.

THURSDAY 8TH MARCH: MELBOURNE, THE ESPY Tickets $45 + bf from www.espy.com.au, ph: 1300 762 545 or in person at the Espy Bottleshop and all Oztix outlets

FRIDAY 9TH MARCH: BRISBANE, THE ZOO Tickets $40 + bf from feelpresents.oztix.com.au, ph: 1300 762 545 or in person at the venue box office and all Oztix outlets

SATURDAY 10TH MARCH: SYDNEY, THE GAELIC Tickets $44 + bf from feelpresents.oztix.com.au, ph: 1300 762 545 or in person at all Oztix outlets

Also playing the Golden Plains Festival 2012

A new Apple album was rumoured all through last year, but until now there had been no word from the label on an actual release. Apple confirmed that Epic had put her fourth record on hold at a concert in Los Angeles in November, explaining to fans that “I can’t remember [how to play] any of my new songs because they’ve been done for a fucking year.”

This is not the first time an Apple album has met with delays. The songwriter began work on Extraordinary Machine in 2003, but after label holdups, leaks and re-recordings, the disc was finally released in 2005 following a “Free Fiona” campaign led by her most hardcore fans.

Apple’s full catalogue consists of her stunning debut Tidal, When The Pawn and the remarkable Extraordinary Machine. We can only hope the new album maintains her strike rate.

But from the first song on this solo album, Apollo Bay, (which incidentally name-checks the 12 Apostles and Victoria Bitter), Finn is searching for something, that gives him a framework that isn’t determined by the next gig or the next post-show party.

Clear Heart Full Eyes is Finn’s Nebraska, – but it isn’t a folk or acoustic album, just a less celebratory, more melancholy, use of rock instruments and some additional colors provided by slide and sullen dobro.

Finn again populates his songs with named characters and places but they seem almost incidental to his self-examination as he dares to ponder life outside (or after) the band scene. In Rented Room he considers the position of a single man wondering what went wrong with his overly optimistic life plan, and there’s an element of “but for the grace of god go I” about the song. Several of the songs even find him playfully wrestling with issues of spirituality, although the context remains from his band days, when he offers “It’s hard to suck with Jesus in your band”.

This is a valuable point of punctuation in his compelling musical evolution, and one that has probably re-invigorated him for the forthcoming Hold Steady album.

One of those moments is on the harrowing Company Man, when she dissects a failed relationship with a surgeon’s skill utilizing a sparse background that has a similarity with Adalita. A similarly dark mood pervades Faking Your Best, a song that offers a revealing honesty. Your Comedown has a knowing, sneering edge that belies its exhilarating pure pop melodicism, while Skydive is an unashamedly shimmering pop rock tune, slightly ‘by-the-numbers’, but hard to dislodge from the sub conscious.

Connolly’s golden voice is her cornerstone, but producer Josh Schuberth (Josh Pyke, Ben Folds) coaxes an intimate and sassy performance from her when she could have been satisfied with riding the wave of the irresistible melodies easily to shore. She is prepared to strive for more than the regulation guitar-pop parameters and is rewarded with an album with a deeper luster than mere surface sparkle.

The dominant sound on this album is the Hammond B3 of Ike Stubblefield and many of the tracks are virtual duets between Foster’s delicious soulful vocal styling and some conversational contributions from the B3. There’s a cool restraint in her singing that allows her to sit in the groove created by the music rather than stomp all over it, as many other modern soul belters would have chosen to do.  This is most notable on her cover of Adele’s Set Fire To The Rain, which she invests with a welcome subtlety.

While covering Adele is a brave thing to do in the current climate, it’s not the only, or even the best cover song that Foster attempts on this album . The Band’s It Makes No Difference is performed soulfully, while  and the iconic Johnny Cash song, Ring Of Fire is re-invented as smouldering blues to good affect.  Another interesting and effective choice is  Los Lobos’ This Time while her duet with William Bell on You Don’t Miss Your Water is a powerful effort as well.

Her version of The Black Keys’ Everlasting Light is another song that benefits from her substituting a luxurious groove for the original’s mechanical grind. Any album covering both The Black Keys and Adele, has to be a first!  The album closes with a remarkable acapella rendering of the traditional lament, The Titanic with the Blind Boys of Alabama, joining Foster for a vocal tour de force.