Aimee Goes Digital

The ever forward thinking Aimee Mann has worked out that her some of her fans have never bought any of her songs digitally. They want full CD quality that you don’t get with MP3s, and they want tracks that aren’t available digitally, (like b-sides and “album-only” tracks).

So she is launching the Aimee Mann Digital Store where you can now purchase Aimee’s digital songs directly on aimeemann.com!

All songs are available as MP3s and lossless FLAC files.  (They’ve even included a lower quality 128kb MP3 option for a discounted price)

Most of Aimee’s catalogue is available, including b-sides, and previously album-only tracks! Included here are the b-sides and acoustic sessions from The Forgotten Arm and Smilers, and the tracks from disc 2 Lost in Space Special Edition.

And for a limited time, you can download for free, a live version of Aimee singing “The Engine Driver” with members of the Decemberists backing her up.

They will be adding live tracks and other rarities so check back regularly.

http://store.aimeemann.com/

Aimee Mann – Concert Review

Australia had waited a very long time to see Aimee Mann performing live in concert. Too long. She is one of the great pop songwriters of the last couple of decades and although this status has not exactly been rewarded with a plethora of pop hits it has rewarded her with respect and an ardent following around the world.

The people that ‘get’ Aimee Mann, really get her – a good proportion of the audience that turned up to her concert at the Palais gave the impression of being familiar with just about every song she has ever recorded and they weren’t shy in displaying that knowledge by way of requests. It was like stumbling in to a meeting of a secret society. I regard myself as a long time and  solid fan of Aimee Mann’s work but I felt like a virtual ‘newbie’ amongst this crowd.

Aimee Mann was either delightfully spontaneous and random or surprisingly jerky and nervous. I’ve had both suggestions made to me since the concert and in reality the truth is probably half way between the two. It was a new audience for her and the fact that the Palais was noticeably less than full may have given her cause for concern. She did seem like she was feeling her way early in the show and her early interactions with the crowd did seem like slightly nervous attempts to break the ice.

She seemed to abandon the set list early in the show and play a combination of randomly chosen songs with those selected by the audience. This meant that songs from albums like Everything’s Different Now and Whatever were noticeable thin on the ground. The charming Amateur, That’s Just What You Are, Par For The Course were the only representatives from I’m With Stupid.

But the songs that were played were hardly disappointing. She extracted several songs from her Academy Award nominated soundtrack to the film Magnolia. Of these the duelling pianos of Momentum and  the intoxicating Build That Wall were  highlights. Her new album Smilers was also represented  – most notably by Freeway and 30 Today.

The rest of the set came from the albums Lost In Space, Bachelor No.2 and The Forgotten Arm (including the hypnotic Video) as well as a couple of B sides and rarities.

Of course the format of the tour did limit the choice of songs. Mann was joined by two musicians – both multi instrumentalists – Jamie Edwards and Jebin Bruni (who had featured on The Forgotten Arm).  While both are exquisitely talented and in conjunction with Mann herself, were able to cover a lot of musical bases quite brilliantly the three piece format probably eliminated some of the more buoyant, delectable pop-rock songs in Mann’s catalogue such as Fifty Years After The Fair, Lucky or Superball – all of which could have lightened up the overall balance of the set.

It comes down to personal taste really. My favourite element of Aimee Mann’s music is her ability to craft almost perfect pop melodies and deliver incisive and poignant lyrics in the context of such delightful confectionary. For others its her more melancholy and frankly ‘sad’ songs that weave a spell. There was more of the latter than the former but that didn’t prevent the concert from being satisfying.

An interesting contribution was the stripped back version of the Til Tuesday pop hit Voices Carry which deconstructed the song to its spooky essence.

I get the feeling that this is an artist for whom two concerts are never exactly alike. She has an exceptional catalogue and she prepared to delve into it and take some risks. And that surely is a good thing. Oh and it probably should be noted that her voice is just great. She wraps her vocals around these songs in a wonderful way and extracts every nuance from the music and the lyrics. Her singing is often taken for granted but it really is outstanding.

Hopefully it wont be another quarter of a century before she returns.

Shelley Harland

The first Australian album from transient singer-songwriter and producer Shelley Harland is intriguing to say the least.

 

Red Leaf is unashamedly a ‘pop” album but in an era where “pop” has become even more of a dirty word this album is a statement that “pop music” need not mean Idol contestants warbling sickly imitations of disposable genres.

 

For those needing an easy entry point intro Shelley Harland’s music references like Aimee Mann and Natalie Merchant may be useful, but there’s little echoes of artists like Mazzy Starr (a less maudlin version thereof!) and Fleetwood Mac laced through these songs. She actually reminds me of the revered and long missing in action Syd Straw. You kinda get the feeling that if Anton Fier was casting for a Golden Palominos collective these days he would have found Shelley Harland.

 

Then you get a song like Friday which is just an irresistible cheery pop song that wouldn’t be out of place on a Sheena Easton album! And while that probably sounds like a back-handed compliment, the song is just so endearing that its hard to be too dismissive. It’s kinda like those early Frente singles.

 

Harland has commuted between London, New York and Sydney and has evolved as a largely self taught musician who has mastered everything from dance music to electronica to working with the likes of John Cale and a host of underground and not-so-underground dance and electronic luminaries.

 

She’s got an extraordinary voice – it’s a delicate as gossamer and as pure as the proverbial driven snow and yet she manages to inject appropriate doses of shade and light into these songs – on a song like Sorry there’s a pain in the voice that reveals a maturity that a pop poppet could not have summoned.

 

There’s a lot more to this artist than meets the eye and it’s no surprise to me that Elvis Costello has recruited her as the opening act for his Australian tour – readers of this site are the types that are probably going to see Costello so I’d recommend that you get there on time and catch the early part of the show.

 

Shelley Harland is probably capable of more challenging and risk-taking music that Red Leaf provides but this album finds her fighting the good fight to give 2009 pop music a good name. On songs like Panic To Control, Stranger, In The Dark and the title track she succeeds admirably.

Grant Lee Phillips Album In 2009

The extraordinary Grant Lee Phillips has completed a busy 2008 and is looking forward to 2009 with cautious optimism. In a newsletter posted on his website Phillips reports that he has been working on new songs during the last year and anticipates recording and releasing them this year.

That is good news for his solid Australian fanbase. Since releasing a string of extraordinary albums with his band Grant Le Buffalo starting with Fuzzy in 1993 Phillips has continued to fulfil the highest standards as a solo artist.

His solo albums Ladies Love Oracle, Mobilize, Virginia Creeper,  Nineteen Eighties (a covers album) and Stranglet have added to a superb body of work and his tours here have met with a rapturous response.

Recently Grant Lee Phillips has been touring with Aimee Mann as a part of her now traditional Christmas tour.

“It’s always a hoot to be among Aimee?s traveling troupe.” He says on his website.  “This year the caravan consisted of Aimee, her band, singer  Nellie McKay, comic Morgan Murphy, along with myself and the always funny Paul F.Tompkins. Other special guests along the way included comic Patton Oswalt, actor John Krasinski, comic Todd Barry, singer Amos Lee, and comic Fred Armison of SNL.”

Aimee Mann has never toured Australia and we can only hope that both Mann and Phillips see fit to visit our shores in 2009.

Phillips is now an artist very much in the independent mode and he seems satisfied with his way of doing things.

“I’ve seen the face of the music business change a great deal over the last few years and it’s been a challenge to wade through it all. That said, it’s deeply heartening that beyond the smoking wreckage of what was once the music business, there are still people who long for and appreciate new and interesting music. That faith
drives me onward.”

Joe Henry for Sydney Festival and beyond

Joe Henry, highly esteemed songwriter, producer and teller of tales is visiting Australia in early 2009 as part of the Sydney Festival, where he will perform three concerts, plus two shows in Victoria.. Joe will be joined at each show by the accomplished double bassist David Piltch.

Described by the San Francisco Weekly as a “literate purveyor of a kind of folk-imbued, smokily jazzified, contemporary “adult music” that in a far better world would reside at the top of the pop charts,” Joe Henry is something of a legend among music fanatics.

In a career spanning more than 20 years, Henry has left a unique imprint on American popular music.  As a songwriter and artist, by turns dark, devastating, and hopeful, he draws an author’s eye for the overlooked detail across a broad swath of American musical styles – rock, jazz and blues – rendering genre modifiers useless.

On his own albums, Henry has collaborated with many remarkable American artists, including Don Cherry, T Bone Burnett, Victoria Williams, The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris and Marc Perlman, guitarists Page Hamilton, Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot, Daniel Lanois, Jakob Dylan, and even Ornette Coleman in a rare appearance for the jazz icon.

Allmusic’s Thom Jurek, recently wrote that Henry “has moved into a space that only he and Tom Waits inhabit in that they are songwriters who have created deep archetypal characters that are composites—metaphorical, allegorical, and ‘real’—of the world around them and have created new sonic universes for them to both explore and express themselves in.”

Henry’s most recent album is 2007’s Civilians, his tenth record, which landed on many year-end “best of” lists and has been hailed as one of the artists finest works. Billboard magazine for example said, “Henry’s superb Civilians succeeds not only as a melodic collection of poignant short stories, but also as a potent picture book of America gone wrong.”

But Joe Henry is a man with many talents. As an album producer, Henry’s influence has shaped the sound of iconoclastic artists including Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, Ani DiFranco, Bettye LaVette, and Aimee Mann. In 2003, he earned a Grammy Award for his production role on Solomon Burke’s astonishing comeback record Don’t Give Up On Me, and recently worked alongside his hero and good friend Loudon Wainwright III to create the score for the hit film Knocked Up, material which later became Wainwright’s full-length Strange Weirdos.

And what might you need to know about the incomparable David Piltch? As a renowned double bassist, Piltch is the tasteful player of choice and general musical collaborator for the likes of k.d. lang and Holly Cole among others. In the studio, he has consistently brought his deft touch to recordings by artists such as Madeleine Peyroux and Loudon Wainwright III. There are few who can walk the line between jazz, Americana, art pop and friendly experimentalism quite like David Piltch.

Friday Jan 23 – Corner Hotel – Melbourne

Saturday Jan 24 – Meenlyan Town Hall

Tuesday Jan 27 – The Famous Spiegeltent (Sydney Festival)

Wednesday Jan 28 – The Famous Spiegeltent (Sydney Festival)

Thursday Jan 29 – The Famous Spiegeltent (Sydney Festival)