Humbird

Songs, at their best, reflect something of where we are, where we've been, or where it is we're going. Sometimes all at once, right when we need it.    Humbird makes music in pursuit of exactly this phenomenon. With deep roots in the midwest heartland, Humbird also travels like a bramble, fusing experimental folk and environmental Americana genres in a mosaic of theaters, clubs, gardens, festivals, barns, caves, and other strange locations. Siri Undlin, the songwriter behind the moniker, forges an explorative embodiment of the narrative folk song and balladry tradition for these modern times, inviting a whole host of collaborators and listeners to add and expand the music.   On June 30th, in tandem with a debut performance on the mainstage at the venerated First Ave, Humbird shares Help Me Willie Nelson! - a new single about the ways we’re pushed and pulled in a chaotic world. A lighthearted romp of a song that nods to a classic Americana sound of summertime, open roads, and the legend himself. This release also marks Undlin's first release on Nettwerk.   Still Life (2021), Humbird’s sophomore record, focuses on small domestic moments in the context of global events. In particular, the record details the lived experiences within Siri’s neighborhood in South Minneapolis during the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a city police officer. It is an album that cultivates soundscapes and intentional lyrics that tell braided stories. It reckons with anger, grief, and white supremacy while carving out reflective, fertile space to process current events.   Humbird’s debut full-length album, Pharmakon (2019) a careful look at that which can both cure and wound us: love, ambition, winter, and sea shells, to name a few lyrical topics. The record received critical acclaim from tastemakers such as Folk Alley and 89.3 The Current and amassed significant streams online. Not long after the album's release, Humbird, along with so many fellow traveling musicians, were grounded by the global pandemic. Responding to the times, Humbird and friends took to backyard campfires, forests, and planetariums (in over 100 pop-up locations) to perform acoustic ballads and fairytales with original improvised scores for micro audiences, adapting to the moment and crisis at hand.   Since returning to the road, Undlin and her bandmates have toured full-time across the US, UK and Ireland. With plenty of new music on the horizon, Humbird continues to share reflections that combine and subvert genres and perspectives via recordings, performances, zines, stories, and more.

Shane Guerrette

It's the old way of doing things that inspires a new sound for upstate NY based artist, Shane Guerrette. Drawing influence from classic soul and roots rock genres, Shane has only just begun to craft his own retro flavored sound. With a recent self-released debut album called 'Here's Hoping' and plans of touring in the near future, you'll want to keep an eye out for what's to come from this rising star.

Samantha Fish

The first-ever collaborative album from Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues is a body of work born from a shared passion for pushing the limits of blues music. As one of the most dynamic forces in the blues world today, Fish has made her name as a multi-award-winning festival headliner who captivates crowds with her explosive yet elegant guitar work, delivering an unbridled form of blues-rock that defies all genre boundaries. Dayton, meanwhile, boasts an extraordinary background that includes recording with the likes of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, touring as a guitarist for seminal punk band X, working with Rob Zombie on the soundtracks for his iconic horror films, and releasing a series of acclaimed solo albums. Produced by the legendary Jon Spencer of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Death Wish Blues ultimately melds their eclectic sensibilities into a batch of songs both emotionally potent and wildly combustible.           As Fish reveals, the making of Death Wish Blues marked the culmination of a musical connection forged in her hometown of Kansas City over a decade ago. “It was always a big deal when Jesse came through town to a play a show—we first met when I was 20, and I kept up with him through the years,” Fish says of the Beaumont, Texas-bred musician. “I’d been wanting to do a collaborative project for a while and went to see Jesse perform in New Orleans, and right away I knew he was the guy. We got together and had this vision of making something of an alt-blues record, but it turned out to be so much more exciting and layered than I ever imagined.”           The follow-up to Fish and Dayton’s 2022 EP Stardust Sessions—a three-song effort featuring covers of classic tracks like Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here In The Morning”—Death Wish Blues took shape at Applehead Recording & Production in Woodstock, a studio situated on a 17-acre farm once home to The Band’s Rick Danko. Over the course of 10 frenetic days, the two musicians joined forces with bassist Kendall Wind, keyboardist Mickey Finn, and drummer Aaron Johnston, cutting most of the album live and unleashing a bold collision of blues, soul, punk, funk, and fantastically greasy rock-and-roll. With Fish and Dayton sharing vocal and guitar duties, the sonic power of each track is exponentially magnified by Spencer’s production work, endlessly tapping into the rule-breaking ingenuity that’s made him a cult hero. “Jon’s indie-rock royalty and he’s always been ahead of the game as far as moving the blues forward,” says Dayton. “For this album we wanted to keep everything blues-based, with a lot of inspiration from people like Albert King and Magic Sam on the lead-guitar parts, but we also wanted to have fun with that and take it somewhere new and different and way outside our wheelhouse.”           One of the first songs that Fish and Dayton wrote together, the album-opening “Death Wish” immediately established the free-flowing nature of their collaboration. “Samantha sent me that melody and I went into my writing room and started coming up with some lyrics inspired by all these true-crime documentaries I’d been watching,” Dayton recalls. “It turned into a song about men taking advantage of women, and I knew that Samantha could really chew on those lyrics and sing them with a lot of attitude.” Anchored by a hot-tempered vocal performance from Fish, the result is a prime introduction to Death Wish Blues’ incendiary sound, at turns gritty, exhilarating, and indelibly hypnotic. Later, on “Riders,” Fish and Dayton offer up a ferociously groove-heavy track built on their fiery vocal back-and-forth, reaching a majestic frenzy in the song’s final moments. “‘Riders’ is about being musicians and troubadours and having one-night stands with whatever city you happen to be in,” says Fish. “Every city is personified as a love interest or partner, and in the end you just move on to whatever adventure is coming up next.”           Although Death Wish Blues serves up plenty of swagger and bravado, much of the album embodies a powerfully raw sensitivity. “As we were writing some of the love songs you hear on the record, I really had to open up my heart to Samantha to get to the core of what we wanted to express,” says Dayton. “It was good for me to allow myself to be that vulnerable, and I don’t know if it’s something I would’ve been able to do when I was younger.” On “Trauma,” Fish and Dayton spin a strangely thrilling portrait of heartbreak, taking on a furious momentum as Dayton lays his pain and frustration exquisitely bare. Building a heady tension between its slow-burning verses and hard-hitting chorus, “Settle for Less” unfolds as an achingly moving meditation on self-worth. “The sentiment of that song is that if you settle for anything short of what you deserve, that’s exactly what you’re going to get,” says Fish, who co-wrote the track with her frequent collaborator Jim McCormick (Tim McGraw, Trisha Yearwood). And on “No Apology,” Death Wish Blues slips into a moment of heavy-hearted outpouring, with Fish’s graceful yet gut-punching vocals riding the line between tender longing and unapologetic self-possession. “‘No Apology’ is about fighting with the one you love and wanting to push through and make everything okay again,” says Fish. “It’s a love song but sort of twisted, because that’s the only kind of love song I write.”           Another irresistibly soulful track, “You Know My Heart” closes out Death Wish Blues with a spellbinding duet illuminating the pure magic of their musical chemistry. “That’s the first song that Jesse and I finished together,” Fish points out. “He sent it to me to one morning and told me he’d woken up the night before with that melody in his head, and we started singing it together and fleshing out the verses. It turned into a song about being far from your loved one and maybe things aren’t going the way you want, but you know they’ll love you through your worst and see your better intentions through it all. I thought that was a really beautiful way to end the record.”            Throughout Death Wish Blues, Fish and Dayton let their more lighthearted side shine on tracks like “Supadupabad,” a gloriously carefree piece of blues-funk complete with references to sipping Courvoisier from crystal cups. “That song was way out of my comfort zone, but it felt good to get sort of silly and just have fun with it,” says Fish. “It’s like a two-minute party, and I don’t think I could’ve ever come up with something like that on my own.” Thanks in part to Spencer’s direction, the recording sessions for Death Wish Blues also included such unexpected moments as building the off-kilter beat of “Dangerous People” by banging on beer cans gathered from the backyard. “What I loved about working with Jon is that we brought in a bunch of songs that we’d demoed on acoustic guitar, and he’d go in and find a way to add all these unique parts that I never would’ve envisioned,” says Fish. “Sometimes it was jarring at first, but everything ended up fitting so perfectly.” Looking back on the album-making process, Fish also notes that Spencer helped to uncover certain facets of her voice that she’d never explored before. “Jon records vocals with character; it’s about attitude rather than perfection,” she says. “I learned a lot about taking on the character of the song, and about singing with different inflections to really get the emotion across.”           For both Fish and Dayton, the making of Death Wish Blues helped fulfill their longtime mission of opening up the blues genre to entirely new audiences. “I’ve played all kinds of music in my life, punk and country and Americana and so much else, and for me this was another wonderful rabbit hole to fall down,” says Dayton. “I love that it’s coming at a moment when we’re starting to see the resurgence of rock guitar for the first time in a long time, and I think it’s going to turn a lot of people on to a kind of music they’ve never experienced before.” Fish adds: “The main reason why I make music has always been the connection it creates with others. It’s a way to communicate with the world around me, to tell stories that people can then take and apply to their own lives and maybe feel more understood. We had such a fun time making this album, and I hope that it leaves everyone with the same feeling of joy that we all felt in the studio.”

Manic Spring

Ariella McManus and Nicolaas Kraster

Robin Trower

The Robin Trower story started in the mid Sixties when he began his recording career in the Southend rhythm and blues band The Paramounts. But the first time Trower pinged on rock’n’roll’s radar was in 1967, with Procol Harum – house band of the Summer of Love. Though he did not play on their mega-hit ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’, he completed five albums and many tours with them before breaking away for a solo career in 1971. Robin  admits that ‘the big break for me was Gary Brooker getting me to join Procol. That opened up the whole world. Without that I would never been able to go on and do what I’ve done.’ He rates leaving PH ‘the best career decision I ever made’ Trower modelled his own band on the power-trio blueprint of Cream and Taste, and, of course, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. His atmospheric, effects-laden Stratocastering brought inevitable initial comparisons with Hendrix, but he quickly made his own mark.  Robin along with the vocal talents of James Dewar, a hard-living Scot, whose voice will always be associated with the Robin Trower Band proved to be a musical powerhouse. Robin soon found himself outselling Procol by a considerable factor as he tuned in to the heavier zeitgeist of a new decade, his second album, ‘Bridge Of Sighs’ reached the Top 10 in the States. This collection of songs is in every budding guitarslinger’s  reference library, and has Influenced a generation of musicians. The success of Bridge of Sighs gave Robin the freedom to explore his musical limits. “In City Dreams” and “Caravan to Midnight” ( both produced by Don Davis) demonstrated  Robin’s maturing song writing abilities and strong connection to the Blues. As punk and new wave attempted to redefine the musical landscape, Robin’s distinctive style of playing retained a sizeable live following in the United States. Radio, however was listening in another direction. In the late eighties, Trower’s recorded output became more sporadic. And in 1984 he split from long-time label Chrysalis Records. In the Nineties, a brief reunion with Procol Harum gave Trower breathing space to reassess the direction of his solo career. He was now, he concluded, aiming to fulfil himself musically rather than sell tonnage. ‘For the past ten years I’ve just been making albums for my own heart,’ he recalled to this author in 2001. ‘The great joy of having my own label (V12 Records, owned jointly with manager Derek Sutton) is that you haven’t got to make music to please some guy behind a desk. You can please yourself and make the music you want’… The first V12 album ‘20th Century Blues’ appeared in 1994 and saw him backed by drummer Mayuyu and bass player/vocalist Livingston Brown. As the decade progressed, Robin decided to take on a share of the lead vocals. ‘I thought to myself there aren’t any blues artists that aren’t singers…I thought I’d give it a go. When you write songs, you’re always gonna get a twist put onto them by whoever sings them. When you sing it yourself it tends to come out how you heard it in your head when you wrote it.’ With his stock still high among his fellow performers thanks to albums like 1997’s ‘Someday Blues’,, the late Nineties saw him hooking up with Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry for two albums, ‘Taxi’ and ‘Mamouna’, plus a European tour. It was a rare chance for European fans to see him live as, at this point, he was still concentrating on gigging in the States. 2000’s ‘Go My Way’ saw Trower sharing the spotlight with bassist/vocalist Richard Watts. As Robin later explained, ‘Go My Way’ was an album he rated highly. ‘It’s really where I live, that kind of blues; slightly spacey…I just like it. I like some of the other areas as well, but that’s my hometown.’ In 2002 Robin ran into Davey Pattison at Jimmy Dewar’s funeral. The chance meeting led to ‘Living Out Of Time’, released in 2003. It also featured Dave Bronze on bass and Pete Thompson on drums, a rhythm section he’d worked with many years earlier. So this was ’back to the future’…but with a difference. Young blues guitarist Eric Gales had supported Robin on a previous American tour and so impressed Trower that he wrote some songs for him. Robin and Eric never did have the chance to collaborate on recording them, but those songs formed the basis for “Living out of Time”. 2005 brought ‘Another Day’s Blues’, After this, Robin and legendary Scots rocker Jack Bruce got together to discuss remixing two of their Eighties collaborations for future reissue, but soon realised it would be more interesting to make it a hat-trick by recording a new album. The first meeting took place in February 2006. Robin and Jack’s joint venture, ‘Seven Moons’ was revealed to the public almost two years later. Recorded in trio format with drummer Gary Husband, the result combined their talents more satisfactorily than its predecessors. ‘The main thing that changed,’ Trower confirmed, ‘is that we co-wrote all the music on this record. Before, we each brought our own songs, but now I write the lyrics and Jack and I do the music together; I think it’s a much better gel.’ He still regards Bruce as ‘one of my heroes from the Sixties.’  ‘By adding what he does, he makes the song into something much, much larger. All those dimensions are added compositionally just by him playing bass and putting the vocal melody to it.’ The next two albums were 2009’s ‘What Lies Beneath’, and 2010’s ‘The Playful Heart’. Both proof that Robin Trower still has the wherewithal to rock the world. Livingston Brown had heavy input into both records, and the latter disc – recorded with the road band of bassist Glenn Letsch, Pete Thompson and Davey Pattison – was particularly satisfying. The vibe is more contemplative than the power-rock of his early years, still the quality and passion is present in every single note. The 2012  set “Roots and Branches” is a revelation, a mix of covers - the roots - and new material - the branches. The entire set is tribute to an artist still growing in power and dexterity, but most of all in emotional expressiveness. The CD garnered praise from both sides of the Atlantic as the many rave reviews attest. Something’s About To Change released in early 2015 confirmed a world-class musician at the top of his game. With his own V12 record label allowing Trower to bypass the spirit-sapping protocol of the conventional record industry, it comes to no surprise this album sounds so vital. While palpably influenced by Trower’s deep love of post-war U.S. blues, its personal themes and visceral music mean that it will resonate with every generation. This set of songs differed from the caltalog as Robin himself played the Bass on them.  "As a songwriter and a performer, you use everything at your disposal to put into your songs," reflects Trower. The latest release is titled Where You Are Going To. The new CD is more of a rocker, but still squarely based in Robin's love for Blues. Robin's voice is much more confident on these ten new studio recordings, and the guitar work is stunning. A continuation of Mr Trower's creative upsurge. The songs remain the cornerstones. The artist’s astonishing fretwork may sometimes take top billing, but the all-original material of Where You Are Going To speaks of the gas in his creative tank. "There is some sort of feeling of emotional release," he says, "when you play a note that rings out right."  Leading the line, of course, is Robin himself, playing bass again, alongside his unmistakable soul-in-fingers guitar parts. Chris Taggart played Drums, and Livingstone Brown co-produced and did the mixing/mastering The current century has seen Robin wowing fans old and new on both sides of the Atlantic. The stadiums he filled in the Seventies may be a fond memory, but the upside is that audiences in clubs and theatres can witness the magic at closer quarters. Robin will return to the stage in the US for a six week tour in Spring 2017. It will feature a trio, Robin’s favourite line-up, with Richard Watts on Bass and vocals, and Chris Taggart on drums. Make no bones about it, Robin Trower is an axeman’s axeman. He’s been a Fender Stratocaster endorsee ever since Jethro Tull’s Martin Barre let him try one before a gig in the early Seventies, and now has his own signature model – an honour accorded to few. Robin Trower live is an experience not to be missed. Whether you play guitar, or just enjoy a brilliant soulful player, come out and see the show. You will walk away smiling.  

Will Dailey

Kurt Vile and The Violators

Kurt Vile: Bottle It In   Travel can inspire in surprising ways: Kurt Vile discovered as much making his first record in three years, the eclectic and electrifying Bottle It In, which he recorded at various studios around the country over two very busy years, during sessions that usually punctuated the ends of long tours or family road trips. Every song, whether it’s a concise and catchy pop composition or a sprawling guitar epic, becomes a journey unto itself, taking unexpected detours, circuitous melodic avenues, or open-highway solos. If Vile has become something of a rock guitar god—a mantle he would dismiss out of humility but also out of a desire to keep getting better, to continue absorbing new music, new sounds, new ideas—it’s due to his precise, witty playing style, which turns every riff and rhythm into points on a map and takes the scenic route from one to the next.   Using past albums as points of departure, Bottle It In heads off in new directions, pushing at the edges of the map into unexplored territory: Here be monster jams. These songs show an artist who is still evolving and growing: a songwriter who, like his hero John Prine, can make you laugh and break your heart, often in the same line, as well as a vocalist who essentially rewrites those songs whenever he sings them in his wise, laconic jive-talkin’ drawl. He revels in the minutiae of the music—not simply incorporating new instruments but emphasizing how they interact with his guitar and voice, how the glockenspiel evokes cirrocumulus clouds on “Hysteria,” how Kim Gordon’s “acoustic guitar distortion” (her term) engulfs everything at the end of “Mutinies,” how the banjo curls around his guitar lines and backing vocals from Lucius to lend a high-lonesome aura to “Come Again.”   These journeys took Vile more than two years to navigate, during which time he toured behind his breakout 2015 album b’lieve I’m goin’ down, recorded a duets album with Australian singer-songwriter-guitarist Courtney Barnett, opened for Neil Young in front of 90,000 people in Quebec, famously became a clue on Jeopardy, hung out with friends, took vacations with his wife and daughters. “I’ve been bouncing around a lot and recording all over. My family would meet me in the middle of America, and we’d go on a road trip somewhere. I would record in between all that stuff.”   Let’s start in Philadelphia, Vile’s hometown and a perennial inspiration. The first song recorded for Bottle It In became the album’s opener: A quintessential Violators tune featuring longtime band members Jesse Trbovich, Rob Laakso and Kyle Spence, “Loading Zones” is a paean to the City of Brotherly Love as well as an explication of his peculiar parking strategy. “I park for free!” he and the Violators all proclaim, proudly and defiantly, as he moves his car from one loading zone to another, always avoiding meter fare and parking tickets. The song dates back to the b’lieve sessions, but it took Vile a while to figure out how to put the song across. “It ended up feeling too weird for the last record, and I’m glad I waited because it had to grow into a guitar jam. I don’t think I was ready for the swagger it took to deliver such a ridiculous concept. It’s about owning your own town. It’s about knowing a place like the back of your hand.” And if that curious guitar tone—the one that sounds like a distorted voice, sounds familiar, it’s because Vile used the same kind of pedal that his friends/idols Sonic Youth used on 1995’s “The Diamond Sea,” which at 27 minutes is roughly the amount of time Vile can leave his car in one Philly loading zone. Coincidence?     From there Vile headed west. In April 2017, he trekked out to Indio, California, to catch the Stagecoach Festival and sit in with his friends the Sadies (“my favorite modern band”). Inspired by Willie Nelson’s epic set, Vile spent a few days in Los Angeles working with producer Rob Schnapf at his Mant Sounds studio. “He does these really cool pop things, weird versions of pop songs,” says Vile of Schnapf, who has produced albums for Beck, Elliott Smith, and Guided by Voices, among many others. The two had previously worked together on “Pretty Pimpin,” the leadoff track on b’lieve that became a number-one AAA radio hit. Their second collaboration was similarly inspired: Featuring backing vocals from Cass McCombs, the eleven-minute title track is full of ominous bass rumbles, hazy-steady drumbeats from Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, delicate harp stabs from Mary Lattimore, and what sounds like chewy distortion leaking out of a David Lynch flick. “I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. I didn’t know ‘Bottle It In’ was going to be that long. It’s sort of like living something rather than having it all planned out. You have to go out there for the experience and the inspiration.”    Months later, when a lengthy Violators tour ended in Salt Lake City, Vile let the momentum carry him further west, where he recorded several more songs with engineer/producer Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, the War on Drugs) at The Beer Hole in Los Angeles. Another epic came out of that meeting, the loping “Bassackwards,” the album’s beating heart and Vile’s most compelling evocation of how he sees the world. “I was on the ground circa Planet Earth, but out of sorts,” he sings over a gently psychedelic bed of backmasked guitars. “But I snapped back, baby, just in time to jot it down.” Other songs were put to tape during sojourns to Portland, Oregon, and to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where fellow Violator Rob Laakso co-produced. The bulk of Bottle It In was bottled up at Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with Peter Katis (Interpol, the National) engineering and producing. Bottle It In captures the spontaneity of these impromptu sessions, revealing Vile as a diligent and singularly determined musician.   These recordings are the destinations, but the journeys were just as important, whether they gave him time with his wife and kids or an opportunity to get some writing done. “For a while I was terrified of flying, so I would be listening to whatever country songs I was obsessed with. I’d have George Jones blasting in my ears. Or, I would be reading something about country music. Or, I would start writing songs in that flash of being afraid, being swallowed by life. I’m up there on a plane drinking wine because like everybody else I’m afraid to die. And I wrote ‘Hysteria’ up there.” That new song, with its woozy guitar fanfare, captures mid-flight queasiness well, as Vile daydreams about escaping the flight: “Stop this plane ‘cause I wanna get off,” he sings. “Pull over somewhere on the side of a cloud.”   Bottle It In is about place only insofar as it is about the people in those places: friends and family, bandmates and music heroes, colleagues and collaborators. There’s a lot of love in these big-hearted songs, a lot of warmth toward everyone in Vile’s orbit and even toward those whose paths he’s yet to cross. “Loved you all a long, long while,” he sings on “One-Trick Ponies.” “Looked down into a deep dark well, called all of your names.” The jangly country-rock tune serves as a valentine