Vic Chesnutt and Victoria Williams Surprise Tour

If there was a couple of artists who you were expecting to see in Australia this year it’s highly unlikely that Vic Chesnutt and Victoria Williams were those artists. Well surprise, surprise they are both touring and what’s even better is that they are touring together as a double bill.

I kinda like the way the press release describes them so I’ll go with that:

Finding inspiration in nature, inanimate objects and things unseen, Victoria Williams has been crafting her unusual brand of country folk music in the wilds of Southern California for nigh on twenty years now. Her songs are gems glowing with California sunshine, settled with desert dust and steeped in the southern sensibilities of her home state of Louisiana, immersing you in vivid pictures of the rural south and have been covered by musicians from all over, from Lou Reed to Lucinda Williams. Since releasing Sings Some Ol’ Songs in 2002, she has been lending her skills to a glorious gaggle of travelling musicians known as The Thriftstore Allstars and touring extensively with kindred spirit M Ward.

Most people don’t see the wonder in dirt and filth, or the humour in the often cruel machinations of the world, but Vic Chesnutt does. He’ll enlighten you in his own language of weathered experience. Hailing from Athens, Georgia, he’s spent much of his career reflecting on the darker corners of life and shining a little light in there with that distinctive, wry creak of a voice, often aided on his amazing albums by a rotating cast of musicians including members of Lambchop, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fugazi and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra. Since last year’s brilliant Dark Developments album collaboration with fellow Athenians Elf Power and The Amorphous Strums, he’s taken to the road again touring his particular take on beauty and living.

Both Vic and Victoria have been the subject of high profile tribute albums. Sweet Relief: A Benefit For Victoria Williams was released in 1993 after Victoria was diagnosed with multiple scleroris. Artists who contributed versions of Victoria’s songs included Pearl Jam, Lou Reed, Soul Asylum, Lucinda Williams, Matthew Sweet, Evan Dando, The Jayhawks and more.

It’s an album well worth searching out if you can find it.

This led to the creation of the Sweet Relief Fund, a charity that aids professional musicians (of any stature) in need of health care.

Gravity Of The Situation – The Songs Of Vic Chesnutt, featured tributes from Smashing Pumpkins, Madonna, REM, Garbage, Live and Sparklehorse amongst others.

Tour Dates:

Thursday 9 July, East Brunswick Club Hotel, Brunswick East, Vic
Friday 10 July, The Factory Theatre, Enmore, NSW
Saturday 11 July – The Troubadour, Fortitude Valley, Qld

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)