'Folk Rock' Bands // p 2 of 4

Father John Misty

Joshua Michael Tillman, born May 3, 1981, also known as Father John Misty and previously J. Tillman, is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, drummer and record producer.

Fleet Foxes

Fleet Foxes is an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington. Their first two albums were released by Sub Pop and Bella Union, with their third by Nonesuch and Bella Union. The band came to prominence in 2008 with the release of their second EP, Sun Giant, and their self-titled debut album. Both received much critical praise and reviewers often noted the band's use of refined lyrics and vocal harmonies. Fleet Foxes' second studio album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011, and their third album, Crack-Up, was released on June 16, 2017.

Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over a mutual appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on—Skjelset's mother Peggi was a keen listener to both Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold's father Greg was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two shared an interest in the music of Dylan and Brian Wilson. Pecknold played bass for Seattle's Dolour on a US tour in 2005, shortly before forming the first incarnation of Fleet Foxes.

Originally going by the name "The Pineapples", a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pecknold decided upon "Fleet Foxes", suggesting that it was "evocative of some weird English activity like fox hunting". Pecknold took up the role of principal songwriter, both singing and playing guitar, while Skjelset played lead guitar. The original lineup was filled out by Casey Wescott on keyboards and backing vocals, Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson on drums and backing vocals. Pecknold's late-sixties pop style caught the attention of the Seattle producer Phil Ek and he helped them record their first demo in 2006, the self-released Fleet Foxes EP. Ek was impressed with the band's songwriting, and on hearing Pecknold for the first time, noted, "It was obvious he had talent coming out of his ass." By late 2006 the Seattle press began to take notice of the band; Tom Scanlon of the Seattle Times stated that he was impressed with the band's lyrics and musical maturity. By the end of the year, Lumsden had been replaced on bass by Craig Curran, who would also handle many of the band's vocal harmonies.

With growing popularity on the local circuit, the band set about making their first album in early 2007, spending time in the studio with producer Ek in addition to recording material at home. However, funds for recording were tight, so the band members cobbled together what funds they had, which limited the time they had in the studio, and so the majority of the tracks were recorded in various band members' apartments, other spaces, or the basement of Pecknold's parents' house.

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Fruit Bats

Fruit Bats is an American rock band formed in 1997 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Noted as an early entrant into the folk-rock boom of the early 2000s, the group has had many personnel changes but revolves around singer/songwriter Eric D. Johnson.

History

In 2000, Eric D. Johnson was an instructor at The Old Town School of Folk Music, led his own space-rock band called I Rowboat, and was a guitarist in various groups, including Califone and The Shins. He also had a four-track solo outlet called Fruit Bats, which he had been working on since 1997.

Fruit Bats had begun to evolve into a band with the inclusion of I Rowboat members Dan Strack and Brian Belval and in 2001, their debut record Echolocation was released on Califone's imprint, Perishable Records. Tours followed with the likes of Modest Mouse and The Shins.

Fruit Bats signed with Sub Pop in 2002 and have released four albums with the label including Mouthfuls in 2003, Spelled in Bones in 2005, The Ruminant Band in 2009 and Tripper in 2011.

Johnson also joined The Shins in 2009. Their song "Humbug Mountain Song" spurred new fan activity. In an interview with Reverb Magazine's Nick Milligan (Australia), Eric D. Johnson has said of The Ruminant Band: "I shouldn't say I had any strong ideas about how I wanted The Ruminant Band to differ from our other records, but I knew that I definitely wanted it to. Previously, when I did those other albums, I think I set rules for myself. This time I didn't try to go by the book so much. I also let the other [band members] play, rather than me being in charge. I played very little on this record – I wrote the songs and the vocal arrangements, and played some piano, but for the most part everything else is the band. That trust is something that comes with time. I had four years to sit and think about it. It can get lonely when you're doing the – quote unquote – solo thing. My band is really talented, so I wanted their voices to be heard."

The song "When U Love Somebody" from the album Mouthfuls can be heard in the 2010 film Youth in Revolt.

The music video for "The Ruminant Band" from the album The Ruminant Band was shot in El Monte, California and directed by The General Assembly. Eric D. Johnson is the only member of the Fruit Bats to appear in the video. He is backed by a fictitious band that includes legendary guitarist, Willie Chambers of The Chambers Brothers.

In June 2011, Johnson appeared in the music video for "You're Too Weird" from the album Tripper. The video was shot in Hollywood, California and directed by The General Assembly.

In November 2013, Johnson announced the demise of the Fruit Bats on the band's website. The band played a handful of live shows, which also marked the 10th anniversary of their album Mouthfuls, in the Pacific Northwest, with their final show in Portland on November 16, 2013.

Johnson announced via Twitter in May 2015, "I'm doing Fruit Bats again", and linked an Instagram photo of a handwritten letter, indicating that an album will be released in 2016. Additionally they have scheduled 2015 tour dates with My Morning Jacket. The album Absolute Loser was released in 2016.

Johnson is also the cofounder of the Huichica Musical Festival, in Sonoma, California, along with Jeff Bundschu, owner of Gundlach Bundschu winery. Johnson started this festival in 2009 to give him and his friends a place to play.

Musical influences

According to an article in The Aspen Times, lead singer Eric D. Johnson's musical influences include 70s AM radio, which he listened to while growing up in Naperville, Illinois, and The Grateful Dead.

One writer described the band's fourth album, The Ruminant Band, as one that ..."revels in early ‘70s SoCal bliss and other alt-country permutations," with elements reflective of classic rock icons including Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac and Three Dog Night.

In a music blog entry in the Chicago Sun-Times from 2010, the band's influences include The Byrds, The Kinks' album The Village Green Preservation Society, pop radio from the late '70s and early '80s, and Supertramp. According to the same blog post, lead singer Johnson said of his musical style, "I started out a hippie, but I've always had that pop jones -- and that's been plenty revolutionary, at least for me."

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Gregory Alan Isakov

Many musicians have day jobs to make ends meet. However, few artists maintain the lifestyle kept by Gregory Alan Isakov. The Colorado-based indie-folk artist is a full-time farmer who sells vegetable seeds and grows various market crops on his three-acre farm, while also tending to a thriving musical career.

“I switch gears a lot,” he says. “I wake up really early in the growing season, and then in the winters, I’m up all night. I’m constantly moving back and forth.”

Isakov had an easier time balancing his two passions while making his fourth full-length studio album, Evening Machines. In between farm duties, the multi-instrumentalist wrote and recorded in a studio housed in a barn on his property. Like the farm, this studio has a communal atmosphere, filled with instruments and gear stored there by musician friends—gear Isakov always leaves on, just in case inspiration strikes.

“Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, so I’d walk into the studio and work really hard into the night,” he says. “A lot of times I would find myself in the light of all these VU meters and the tape machine glow, so that’s where the title came from. I recorded mostly at night, when I wasn’t working in the gardens. It doesn’t matter if it’s summer or winter, morning or afternoon, this music always feels like evening to me.”

^{Source GregoryAlanIsakov.com}

J. Tillman

Joshua Michael Tillman (born May 3, 1981), also known as Father John Misty and previously J. Tillman, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer.

Maintaining a steady output of solo recordings since 2004, Tillman had been a member of or toured with Demon Hunter, Saxon Shore, Fleet Foxes, Jeffertitti's Nile, Pearly Gate Music, Siberian, Har Mar Superstar, Poor Moon, Low Hums, Jonathan Wilson, and has toured extensively with Pacific Northwest artists Damien Jurado, Jesse Sykes, and David Bazan.

He has also made contributions to albums by popular artists, including Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Kid Cudi, and has produced one album for Matthew Daniel Siskin, known as Gambles.

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Jimmy Hunt

Jimmy Hunt is a Canadian singer-songwriter from Quebec.

Originally from Saint Nicolas, a suburb of Quebec City, Hunt began performing on the local music scene in Montreal in 2000. With the band Chocolat, he released the album Piano élégant in 2008 on Grosse Boîte. In the same year, he appeared on Cœur de pirate's debut album Cœur de pirate as a duet vocalist on her song "Pour un infidèle".

He subsequently released a self-titled album as a solo artist in 2010. He was nominated for two Félix Awards in 2011, in the categories of Contemporary Folk Album of the Year and New Artist of the Year. He also won three awards at the same year's Gala alternatif de la musique indépendante du Québec, winning for Songwriter of the Year, Video of the Year and Singer-Songwriter Album of the Year, and was named one of that year's Révélations Radio-Canada.

He followed up with Maladie d’amour in 2013. The album was a longlisted nominee for the 2014 Polaris Music Prize, and won the Juno Award for Francophone Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2015.

He has also been a two-time nominee for the SOCAN Songwriting Prize, for his songs "Ça va de soi" in 2011 and "Nos corps" in 2014.

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Joan Shelley

Joan Shelley is a songwriter and singer from Louisville, KY. She draws inspiration from traditional and traditionally-minded performers from her native Kentucky, as well as those from Ireland, Scotland, and England, but she’s not a folksinger. Her disposition aligns more closely with that of, say, Roger Miller, Dolly Parton, or her fellow Kentuckian Tom T. Hall, who once explained—simply, succinctly, in a song—“I Witness Life.”

Her perspective and performances both have been described, apparently positively, as “pure,” but there’s no trace of the Pollyanna and there’s little of the pastoral, either: her work instead wrestles with the possibility of reconciling, if only for a moment, the perceived “natural” world with its reflection—sometimes, relatively speaking, clear; other times hopelessly distorted—in the human heart, mind, and footprint.

Since the 2015 release of her fourth album Over and Even, Shelley has crossed the country and toured Europe several times as a headlining artist, joined by guitarist Nathan Salsburg and sharing shows with the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Doug Paisley, Daniel Martin Moore, the Other Years, and Michael Hurley. She has opened for Wilco, Chris Smither, Andrew Bird, and Richard Thompson. Jeff Tweedy produced her 2017 record “Joan Shelley” at The Loft in Chicago. She’ll be familiar to readers of guitar-centric magazines for having appeared, in the same season, on the covers of Fretboard Journal and Acoustic Guitar. Her sixth and most recent album, “Like the River Loves the Sea,” was released to wide acclaim in Uncut magazine, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Mojo, and Q magazine.

^{Source joanshelley.net}

Kevin Morby

Kevin Robert Morby (born April 2, 1988) is an American musician, singer and songwriter. He has released four albums including Harlem River (2013), Still Life (2014), Singing Saw (2016) and City Music (2017), all of which achieved critical acclaim by indie critics. During live performances, Morby is accompanied by his backing band consisting of Meg Duffy on guitar, Cyrus Gengras on bass, and Nick Kinsey on drums.

Kevin Morby was born in Lubbock, Texas on April 2, 1988; his family relocated around the U.S. due to his father's employment with General Motors before settling in Kansas City, Missouri. Morby learned to play guitar when he was 10. In his teens he formed the band Creepy Aliens.

17-year-old Morby dropped out of Blue Valley Northwest High School, got his GED, and moved from his native Kansas City to Brooklyn in the mid-2000s, supporting himself by working bike delivery and café jobs. Morby has stated he had "loved New York from the movies" he'd seen, "I just wanted to experience it". He later joined the noise-folk group Woods on bass. While living in Brooklyn, he became close friends and roommates with Cassie Ramone of the punk trio Vivian Girls, and the two formed a side project together called The Babies, who released albums in 2011 and 2012.

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Larsen Gardens

By Jeffrey Brown

Sarah Edmonds, the sole member of Larsen Gardens, told the Daily Cardinal she is on the road looking for magic.

Now, in the opening stretch of her self-booked tour, she lives in her minivan, occasionally staying with friends when possible. The long, uninterrupted stretches of solitude are an experience Edmonds considers sacred saying, “The chance to be alone is a chance to connect to yourself.”

Edmonds’ story begins with piano lessons as a child in Salem, Oregon. She was always fascinated by musical composition. She then moved to Nashville for school and purchased her first guitar — what would become her primary instrument — at 19 or 20 years old.

As a singer for a 16 piece jazz band in the Nashville area, Edmonds grew very familiar with the works of June Christy, Sarah Vaughn and the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald. She said performing the work of these female jazz icons taught her to express the sultry, sensual and intimate side of her voice.

But, these songs, being of their time, center traditional gender norms and the male gaze. She loved the music but felt it could use some updates on its treatment of relationships — something that empowers “the feminine side we push down when we’re scared.”

That’s a large part of what goes into Larsen Gardens... (continued)

^{Source dailycardinal.com}

Levon Helm

Mark Lavon "Levon" Helm (May 26, 1940 – April 19, 2012) was an American musician and actor who achieved fame as the drummer and one of the vocalists for the Band. Helm was known for his deeply soulful, country-accented voice, multi-instrumental ability, and creative drumming style, highlighted on many of the Band's recordings, such as "The Weight", "Up on Cripple Creek", and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Helm also had a successful career as a film actor, appearing as Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), as Chuck Yeager's friend and colleague Captain Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff (1983), as a Tennessee firearms expert in Shooter (2007), and as General John Bell Hood in In the Electric Mist (2009).

In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer which caused him to lose his singing voice. After treatment, his cancer eventually went into remission, and he gradually regained the use of his voice. His 2007 comeback album Dirt Farmer earned the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008, and in November of that year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 91 in its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2010, Electric Dirt, his 2009 follow-up to Dirt Farmer, won the first Grammy Award for Best Americana Album, a category inaugurated in 2010. In 2011, his live album Ramble at the Ryman won the Grammy in the same category. In 2016, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 22 in its list of 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time.

The Band

Helm returned to the group, then referred to simply as "the band", as it was known around Woodstock. While contemplating a recording contract, Helm had dubbed the band "The Crackers". However, when Robertson and their new manager Albert Grossman worked out the contracts, the group's name was given as "The Band". Under these contracts, the Band was contracted to Grossman, who in turn contracted their services to Capitol Records. This arrangement allowed the Band to release recordings on other labels if the work was done in support of Dylan. Thus the Band was able to play on Dylan's Planet Waves album and to release The Last Waltz, both on other labels. The Band also recorded their own album Music from Big Pink (1968), which catapulted them into stardom. Helm was the Band's only American member.

On Music from Big Pink, Manuel was the most prominent vocalist and Helm sang backup and harmony, with the exception of "The Weight". However, as Manuel's health deteriorated and Robbie Robertson's songwriting increasingly looked to the South for influence and direction, subsequent albums relied more and more on Helm's vocals, alone or in harmony with Danko. Helm was primarily a drummer and vocalist and increasingly sang lead, although, like all his bandmates, he was also a multi-instrumentalist. On occasion Manuel switched to drums while Helm played mandolin, guitar, or bass guitar (while Danko played fiddle) on some songs. Helm played the 12-string guitar backdrop to "Daniel and the Sacred Harp".

Helm with the Band at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, 1976 Photo: David Gans
Helm remained with the Band until their farewell performance on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, which was the subject of the documentary film The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese. Helm repudiated his involvement with The Last Waltz shortly after the completion of its final scenes. In his autobiography Helm criticized the film and Robertson who produced it.

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Lucinda Williams

Three-time Grammy Award winner, Lucinda Williams has been carving her own path for more than three decades now. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Williams had been imbued with a “culturally rich, economically poor” worldview. Several years of playing the hardscrabble clubs gave her a solid enough footing to record a self-titled album that would become a touchstone for the embryonic Americana movement – helping launch a thousand musical ships along the way.

While not a huge commercial success at the time Lucinda Williams (aka, the Rough Trade album) retained a cult reputation, and finally got the reception it deserved upon its reissue in 2014. Jim Farber of New York’s Daily News hailed the reissue by saying “Listening again proves it to be that rarest of beasts: a perfect work. There’s not a chord, lyric, beat or inflection that doesn’t pull at the heart or make it soar.”

For much of the next decade, Williams moved around the country, stopping in Austin, Los Angeles, Nashville, and turning out work that won immense respect within the industry (winning a Grammy for Mary Chapin Carpenter’s version of “Passionate Kisses”) and a gradually growing cult audience. While her recorded output was sparse for a time, the work that emerged was invariably hailed for its indelible impressionism — like 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which notched her first Grammy as a performer.

The past decade brought further development, both musically and personally, evidenced on albums like West (2007), which All Music Guide called “flawless…destined to become a classic” and Blessed (2011), which the Los Angeles Times dubbed “a dynamic, human, album, one that’s easy to fall in love with.” Those albums retained much of Williams’ trademark melancholy and southern Gothic starkness, but also exuded more rays of light and hope. This all lead to the 2014 release of Williams’ first double studio album Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone. The album received overwhelming praise from the media and fans, thus proving that Williams’ songwriting is as strong and important as it has ever been.

^{Source lucindawilliams.com}

M. Ward

Matthew Stephen "M." Ward (born October 4, 1973) is a singer-songwriter and guitarist from Portland, Oregon. Ward's solo work is a mixture of folk and blues-inspired Americana analog recordings; he has released nine albums since 1999, primarily through independent label Merge Records. In addition to his solo work, he is a member of pop duo She & Him and folk-rock supergroup Monsters of Folk, and also participates in recording, producing, and playing with multiple other artists.

M. Ward was raised in Ventura County, California, and moved to Portland, Oregon after college. Growing up, Ward taught himself songs by The Beatles on his brother's guitar, and began recording demos on a four-track analog tape recorder when he was about fifteen. Ward continues to only record analog, and starts all of his songs as demos on the same recorder he has had since his teens.

Ward's solo debut, Duet for Guitars #2, was released by Co-Dependent Records in 1999, then re-issued by Howe Gelb's Ow Om record label in 2000. Described by Joshua Klein of Pitchfork as "ragged and lo-fi...recorded on a shoestring and not necessarily worse for it," Duet for Guitars #2 soon went out of print for a second time, before being reissued by Merge in 2007.

Ward's second album, End of Amnesia, was put out by Future Farmer Records and Loose Music (Europe) in 2001. In a retrospective review, Ryan Kearney of Pitchfork compares the album to a contemporary band, Sparklehorse, saying that "both Linkous and Ward are country- and folk-influenced artists who scratch unavoidable, but nominally disruptive marks on the traditional blueprint. Sparklehorse had released It's a Wonderful Life to critical acclaim earlier in the year.

A collection of live recordings, Live Music & The Voice of Strangers, was a self-released disc that was sold at his shows in 2001.

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Madison Cunningham

As its title suggests, Revealer—the new album by Madison Cunningham—is full of confessions, intimations, and hard truths the Los Angeles singer-songwriter-guitarist might rather have kept to herself. It’s a warts-and-all self-portrait of a young artist who is full of doubt and uncertainty, yet bursting with exciting ideas about music and life, who has numerous Grammy nominations but still feels like she has far to go, who turns those misgivings into songs that are confident in their idiosyncrasies. It’s also a rumination on music as a vehicle for such revelations, what’s gained and what’s lost when you put words to your innermost feelings. “There’s a sense of conflict about revealing anything about yourself—not just what to reveal, but whether you should reveal anything at all,” she says. “When you have to vouch for yourself and present a true picture of who you are, that can get confusing very quickly. This record is a product of me trying to find myself and my interests again. I felt like somewhere along the way I had lost the big picture of my own life.”

Reassembling that picture resulted in songs full of odd turns of phrase, skewed imagery, and witty asides; Cunningham writes to figure things out, and she doesn’t settle for easy answers or pat platitudes. Instead, more often than not she pulls the rug out from under herself, playing both straight man and comic relief. “I’m not immune to a piece of bad news, I just do what I must to move on,” she sings on the percolating opener “All I’ve Ever Known.” If it sounds like a cry of determination and fortitude, Cunningham immediately undercuts herself: “Give me truth but put me under so I don’t feel a thing.”

These are dark, funny songs for dark, not-so-funny times. “I wanted this work to reflect how I was taking in the world at that moment, and I promised myself I wouldn’t withhold the good or the bad from this self-portrait. I couldn’t have planned for the startling range of emotions a pandemic would bring on — sorrow, depression, anger, anxiety, fear, apathy. Much less writing during one. While I could take some comfort in knowing other people were experiencing those very things, I had yet to understand how many conflicting emotions a person could carry at once.” The confusion she shared with the rest of the world, however, was compounded and complicated when her grandmother died unexpectedly. Suddenly, the pain became unbearably personal. Revealer became a way for her to work through all of those overwhelming emotions. With rich strings eddying around her measured guitar strums, “Life According to Raechel” is a catalog of missed opportunities and lost time, all the visits she never made to her beloved grandmother, all the important details that make up a life. “There’s always something left unsaid,” Cunningham sings. “Were your eyes green? Were they blue? What was it that I forgot to ask you?”

She offers no resolution, no closure, no comfort at all—which is exactly what makes the song so honest about grief. “You’ve got this wound that’s never really going to heal,” she says, “because you’re going to feel the absence of that person for the rest of your life. It’s never going to be resolved. When I realized that, I turned a corner I knew I wouldn’t come back from. When I was able to finally be honest about what it felt like to grieve her, I was able to properly grieve the state of the world and the other things I had lost. Like earning your first gray hair. You could pluck it, but it would just keep growing back.”

The rest of Revealer didn’t come easily, but the songs did come. “Songwriting wasn’t this romantic outlet. It was not fun. It was a constant reflection of how poorly I was doing as a human being. I didn’t want it to be true, because it’s such a humbling thing to admit to needing help.” To capture the rawness of those emotions and the urgency of these new songs, Cunningham recorded as she wrote, finishing a song and then taking it to the studio within a matter of days. She worked once again with Tyler Chester, her longtime producer and collaborator, who manned her debut, 2019’s Who Are You Now and her 2020 covers EP Wednesday, and she also brought in producers Mike Elizondo (Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Mastodon) and Tucker Martine (Neko Case, Sufjan Stevens).

Cunningham has already proved herself to be a deft and imaginative guitar player, but Revealer foregrounds her spry staccato playing so that it becomes a musical signature. “I’ve always been interested in different ways of approaching the guitar that challenges the way I think I should play it. I tried to explore that more fully and intentionally on this record. I pulled some inspiration from non-Western styles, like Afropop and South American music. I wanted to make the guitar sound more integral to the song structure and less like, ‘now here comes Mr. Electric Guitar.’”

While experimenting in the studio, Cunningham found ways to make familiar instruments sound unusual and unsettling. On the hard-driving “Your Hate Could Power a Train”—which directs its most withering observations inward rather than outward—she transforms a simple ukulele into something dark and menacing, drawing out the song’s darker undercurrents. “I plugged it in and detuned it an octave with a pedal, so it has this wild, undefinable sound. I used that as the main instrument on that song because I wanted it to feel out of control, frantic, and angry. There were so many moments like that, when I felt liberated to stop and take a deep dive and explore sounds. I used to think there’s no use in messing around. But actually there’s only use in messing around. You have to explore, because the best ideas come from childlike curiosity.”

Eventually she emerged with a set of songs prickly with emotions and revelations, an album full of contradictions that somehow speak to a unified truth. Revealer reckons with her recent past, but also defines her future. Hoping that she would be singing these songs for many years to come, she planted secret messages to her future self: promises and reminders that she believes might continue to reinforce the lessons she learned during the writing process. “No one’s holding you back now!” she exclaims on “In From Japan,” which she recorded with Martine. “That statement wasn’t true when I wrote it or when I sang it, but I chose to keep that line. That’s a very beautiful part of the songwriting process: Sometimes you write things for your future self to grab onto. You write some idea or sentiment that you hope you can eventually find meaning in.”

As Cunningham learned while making this album, the songwriting process is just as open-ended as the grieving process. That idea is at the heart of Revealer, which is more than simply a document of a dark time in her life. It’s a survival guide, a chronicle of growth and change written by the artist who finds joy in the process and beauty in the mistakes. “Doesn’t it feel strange when you say it out loud?” she asks on “Who Are You Now.” “Time to act your age, no one’s gonna show you how.”

^{Source madisoncunningham.com}

Magnolia Electric Co.

In March 2003, while on tour, Molina announced that he would rename the band Magnolia Electric Co., retaining the stylistic direction of the album of the same name. Molina also continued to release solo work under his own name. The first such release came in January 2004, as the full-length vinyl release Pyramid Electric Co..

Though Magnolia Electric Co. and Pyramid Electric Co. were originally intended as a double album, the latter seems to be the stylistic polar opposite of the former.

Engineered by Mike Mogis, who also engineered Ghost Tropic, Pyramid found Molina alone at the microphone with only his voice and a piano or guitar. Magnolia Electric Co.'s first official release was a live album, Trials and Errors, followed by a studio album, What Comes After The Blues, and an EP, Hard To Love a Man, all released in 2005. In 2006, Molina released two more records: the sparse solo Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go and the more conventional Fading Trails with Magnolia Electric Co., the latter culled from three separate sessions over the previous year.

It is not entirely clear when Songs: Ohia became Magnolia Electric Co. In interviews, Molina claimed that he considered the tenure of Songs: Ohia over after Didn't It Rain, which would make Magnolia Electric Co. the eponymous debut album under the new name. The name "Songs: Ohia" appears nowhere on the artwork of the album and only a promotional sticker on the cellophane wrapping connects it with the prior name. Nevertheless, Secretly Canadian still promotes the album under the Songs: Ohia moniker. On the other hand, the Magnolia Electric Co. live album Trials and Errors was recorded on April 16, 2003, at the Ancienne Belgique club in Brussels, at a time when the band was still touring under the Songs: Ohia name. Pitchfork Media later reported that name change would be made official after the Spanish tour in October 2003.

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Mark Lanegan

Mark William Lanegan (born November 25, 1964) is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. He released more than 10 studio albums and was the lead singer for Screaming Trees. He was also a member of Queens of the Stone Age. Lanegan is known for his baritone voice, which has been described as being "as scratchy as a three-day beard yet as supple and pliable as moccasin leather."

Lanegan began his musical career in 1984 as the frontman of the psychedelic grunge band Screaming Trees, with whom he released seven studio albums and five EPs before they split up in 2000. During his time in the band, he also started a solo career and released his first solo studio album, The Winding Sheet, in 1990. He has since released a further 10 solo albums, and has received critical recognition but only moderate commercial success. Following the end of Screaming Trees, he became a frequent collaborator of Queens of the Stone Age and featured on their albums Rated R, Songs for the Deaf, Lullabies to Paralyze, Era Vulgaris, and ...Like Clockwork.

Lanegan has also collaborated with various artists throughout his career, including Kurt Cobain, with whom he recorded an unreleased album of Lead Belly covers. He also performed with Layne Staley and Mike McCready in the band Mad Season. He also formed The Gutter Twins with Greg Dulli in 2003, released three collaboration albums with singer Isobel Campbell, and has contributed to releases by Melissa Auf der Maur, Martina Topley-Bird, Creature with the Atom Brain, Moby, Bomb the Bass, Soulsavers, Tinariwen, The Twilight Singers, and Unkle, among others.

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