Author: Heather Savage

“Too Late Again” is the latest single from Boston’s exciting duo, Trisha and Thara. The teens, who also happen to be sisters, light up the scene with their melodic brilliance, all the while the musical undercurrent channels modern feels. Emotionally attached yet detached from lingering too much into the past, “Too Late Again” empowers and infuses the much-needed shot in the arm to the current mainstream music scene. For all you dreamers out there – “Too Late Again” hits all the right notes and perfectly matches the words you’ve been looking for when it comes to a boyfriend or girlfriend…

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Elio Quest has married two somewhat contrasting genres, with his newest single, “City.” With a rich falsetto, Quest employs a New Wave influenced chorus, with a solo verse that he raps. It’s as unusual as it sounds, but it’s also wondrous and captivating. At two minutes in total length, the piece almost feels like an infomercial or a snippet of a full song. As for Quest, he is not a newcomer, nor has he reached his creative peak; but he shows exactly what he’s capable of with “City.” INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/elioquest/?hl=en Born, Timothy Perez, Elio Quest began his musical career as…

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Tyler Mast’s return to the popular music arena, In the Company of a Friend, features nine tracks easily ranking among the best of the singer/songwriter’s career. Described as possessing “Chicago roots and a Green Mountain soul” implies that listeners will be treated to a steady stream of guitar, harmonica, and various shades of blue over the course of the release, but Mast confounds such expectations. The guitar contributions to this album are top notch and abundant, but the center of his musical universe isn’t the six string. URL: https://tylermastmusic.com/ His versatility as a keyboardist/pianist makes constructing his songs around those instruments…

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Slightly visceral and wholly more surreal than anything I’ve been listening to in pop music over the past few months, there’s something pretty cerebral about the melodies comprising the new single “Uncertain” from pianist Bonnie Milne, but not in the familiar sense that a lot of surreal indie content has been in the last year or so. The plodding tempo alludes to a darkness that the keys are only willing to explore so far, but there’s an open-ended mystique to the paths they cross along the way. This is too powerful for lyrics, and it’s justifiably presented as an instrumental…

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Striking away at the guitar strings with a balance that is as inviting as it is colorful and exotic, Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band make it clear that the business of delivering as melodic a performance as possible is their top priority in the opening cut of their new record Love Is Where You Are, “Devi.” There’s nothing quite as grand as the harmony between the vocal and the strings in this first track, but as we listen on in Love Is Where You Are, it becomes obvious that simplistic cosmetic elements are only a taste of what the…

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Pop music is no longer born out of individual scenes, but instead the collective community that has been fostered by the internet and social media specifically. As cloud servers have replaced the dingy clubs and flyer-covered telephone poles that used to symbolize the stomping grounds of a real music scene, we’ve luckily been exposed to a lot of content out of the underground that might not have reached across state lines, let alone entire oceans, to find its proper audience. Enter Morten Nygaard, an incredibly talented singer/songwriter out of Copenhagen currently blowing up on streaming sites from Europe to the…

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What is the importance of standing united in your music? I believe it’s human nature to seek community and acceptance, whether it’s in public or online. An artist’s vision can be shaped into an amazing ecosystem when an audience stands together. Uniting around music can embolden an audience to do some powerful things and create very meaningful experiences together. It results in the music having a greater impact. Most importantly, the music tells many stories, and not just your own. Does anything come first before music? I’m very quick to put family before music. There are many ways in which…

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Bay Area-based doom metal musician Iva Toric is far from your typical household name, but that could easily begin to change by the end of 2022 with her new album Dead Reckoning on the way. Mastered by the Grammy Award-winning Ted Jensen (Green Day, Alice in Chains, Evanescence) and featuring what Kerrang! calls “a mixture of elemental doom metal and haunting folk,” the wheels are in motion to make Toric’s sophomore release a landmark event. If all of this somehow isn’t enough to make you intrigued, this next piece surely will: Iva Toric’s latest single “Time to Die,” the second…

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It isn’t very often in mainstream pop that a singer/songwriter is willing to compete with an instrumental framing as oud as their vocal is, but you wouldn’t imagine as much just by listening to Brooke Josephson’s Showin’ Up. This player doesn’t just clash with melodies as grand as anything she’s ever performed against, but instead introduces us to a more focused sound on her part than a lot of listeners would have predicted ahead of Showin’ Up. Josephson has a diverse array of gifts for us to enjoy, but before this release, they just weren’t as obvious as they are here.  FACEBOOK:…

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What is the power of performing LIVE? Edem: Well, it’s always great to see musicians actually in the flesh. Gives us a sense of community and shared humanity. Not to mention playing loud is always good. The interactions of musicians on stage and their music then connecting with an audience is great symmetry. In this new paradigm we are forced into (separation/isolation), live venues where musicians and audiences can interact is crucial. Brett: For the Musician, nothing is better than performing live music. You get instant feedback from your audience which in turn enhances your performance. Music is sonic emotion, and without feedback from other people…

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What is the power of performing LIVE? JOHN: I love people and being around others. So the live experience is great just for that – loving them, and they love you back. When I’m performing with my brothers and sisters, and locking in perfectly with good vibes between the 4 of us , I feel right at home on stage. I like to walk over to Filia sometimes to solo; somehow it makes those solos come out better. I walk over to Evan for the intimate bridges, and look Allan in the eye on those more complex transitions. It doesn’t matter if there are 500…

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The three piece Steve Markoff, Patricia Lazzara, and Allison Brewster Franzetti debuted in 2019 with the giant eighteen track opus Timeless – Hits of Love and Hope From Pop, Rock & Soft Rock. It has surprising ambition. These three musicians take on the seemingly improbable task of taking a wide cross-section of popular songs from recent history and revamping them. It isn’t as country music, hard rock, or some other genre you might expect. Instead, the trio translated those familiar songs into an acoustic environment often led by Markoff’s alto flute and Lazzara’s concert flute. They released their sophomore effort Romances in Blue in…

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We get an early glimpse of what’s awaiting listeners on Bernadett’s release Redemption with its title song. It’s likely one of the crisper sounding songs included on Redemption and the assertive percussion sound gives the song the sort of urgency listeners usually flock to. It isn’t the driving factor determining the song’s success, however. Bernadett’s violin is, no doubt, the lead instrument throughout the entirety of the title cut. Her playing wears many faces. Bernadett whips out electric lines attacking the listener with as much ease as she coaxes more graceful, even eloquent, counterparts from the strings. It’s a varied…

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Pete Miller doesn’t need crashing drums guiding his every verse in the new single “A Light out There” to establish a sturdy rhythm for his debut release. With little more than the strumming of his guitar and a smoky vocal he calls his own, Miller takes us on an old-fashioned folk adventure that doesn’t feel especially retro given its sterling vitality. A player of his style never requires a lot of bells and whistles to entrance the audience, and in “A Light out There,” we’re introduced to one of the more talented rookies of his style right now.  These harmonies…

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Hello Katie! So lovely to speak with you today! Thanks for having me! What have you been working on lately? I have been working on a new full length record that will be out later this month! The project is called, “Limitless,” and it will be out on April 22, 2022 on Earth Day! It’s a 10 song record chronicling my journey from leaving Michigan before my move to Nashville. I’ve been working on it for the past 3+ years, so I’m quite excited to let it fly out into the world. I’ve also been enjoying co-writing with a lot of…

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Female voices are becoming some of the loudest in all of the new singer/songwriter movement emerging from the indie circuit in 2022, and among those I’ve been following closely this spring is none other than the highly skilled and naturally talented Alex Krawczyk. This player’s debut record, the eleven-track Le Olam, features a provocative dose of jazz, folk, and neo-Americana, and for all it lacks in a streamlined compositional structure it more than makes up for in originality. Le Olam shows us a strong-willed woman at the microphone who doesn’t need bells and whistles to make a statement, and she doesn’t mind giving…

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Instrumentally speaking, Larry Jay’s new EP Written in Whiskey isn’t treading any water that long-term country music fans aren’t used to, but this just might be the record’s most endearing point of intrigue. Rather than trying to dig into new ground, Larry Jay is taking the aesthetics of the old guard and repurposing them for his storytelling, which is something a lot of his peers neither have the ability nor the ambition to do well. The country music community is enjoying a lot of magic coming out of the underground right now, and this EP serves as a true nugget in my…

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It’s not every day that a debut album comes to the forefront of its genre with as mellow a demeanor as Sea Change, but that’s exactly what Corey Stapleton and The Pretty Pirates’ first release as a band seems to be dead set on accomplishing. Now, for some, the name Corey Stapleton might ring a bell: not in music, no, but Stapleton is already a celebrity of sorts having been a state senator and Secretary of State out of Montana. On top of that, he’s a veteran, and now, an accomplished country music star — I don’t know about you,…

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