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'Folk Pop' Bands // p 1 of 1

Darren's favorite bands for his Song Of The Day filtered by Folk Pop
505 Bands
Beabadoobee

Beabadoobee

Beatrice Laus[a] (born 3 June 2000), known professionally as Beabadoobee (/biːbəduːbiːˈ/; stylized in all lowercase), is a Filipino-born British singer-songwriter. Since 2018, she has released four extended plays under the independent label Dirty Hit including Lice (2018), Patched Up (2018), Loveworm (2019) and Space Cadet (2019). Her debut studio album, Fake It Flowers, was released in October 2020.

Beabadoobee served as a supporting act for labelmates The 1975 during several legs of their Music for Cars Tour, as well as American singer Clairo during her Immunity Tour. She was nominated for the Rising Star Award at the 2020 Brit Awards, and was presented with the Radar Award at the 2020 NME Awards. Beabadoobee was also predicted as a breakthrough act for 2020 in an annual BBC poll of music critics, Sound of 2020.

Early life

Laus was born in Iloilo City, Philippines on 3 June 2000 and moved to London with her parents at the age of 3. She grew up in West London listening to original pinoy music as well as pop and rock music from the 1980s. While she was a teenager, she listened to indie rock including Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Florist and Alex G. She was expelled from Sacred Heart High School before completing her thirteenth year at Hammersmith Academy. Laus spent seven years learning to play the violin, before getting her first guitar second-hand at the age of 17. She taught herself how to play the instrument using YouTube tutorials. She was inspired by Kimya Dawson and the Juno soundtrack to start making music.

Source Wikipedia

 'How Was Your Day'

'How Was Your Day'
Monday, October 19, 2020

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Larsen Gardens

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

 'Halfway There'

'Halfway There'
Thursday, November 3, 2022

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Madison Cunningham

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

 'Dry As Sand'

'Dry As Sand'
Monday, April 8, 2024

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