Mamma Mania - ABBA Tribute

Andy Summers

Molly Tuttle

On the heels of two Grammy-winning albums in succession, with her band Golden Highway—2022’s Crooked Treeand 2023’s City of Gold—plus a nomination for Best New Artist, Molly Tuttle returns with a solo album that’s her most dazzling to date: So Long Little Miss Sunshine.    Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson, Eric Church, Cage the Elephant), the fifth full album from the California-born, Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one highly unexpected cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.”     Tuttle’s career, which began at age fifteen, has charted a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. On this album—a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad—she goes to a whole new place. Her stunning guitar work is more up-front on this album than ever before. (One of the most decorated female guitarist alive, Tuttle was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, at age twenty-four, and won again the following year, with nominations nearly every year since; she has also won Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award.) So Long Little Miss Sunshine also features Tuttle playing banjo, something she’s never done on one of her albums before.    “I like to be a bit of a chameleon with my music,” she says. “Keep people guessing and keep it full of surprises.”    Tuttle has been slowly building this collection of songs over the last five years, while also writing and releasing two hugely successful albums and a six-song EP (last year’s Into the Wild) and playing more than 100 shows each year with Golden Highway. Along the way she’d send songs to Joyce, who she first started talking to about collaborating on the album a few years ago.    “I’ve been wanting to make this record for such a long time. Part of me was scared to dosuch a big departure, and that went into the album title So Long Little Miss Sunshine. It’s like, ‘You know what? I’m just not going to care what people think. I’m going to do what I want.’”    The album was recorded with a group of musicians that includes drummer/percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, bassist Byron House, and Joyce on multiple instruments.Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) also plays banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, as well as singing harmony.    Tuttle also conceived the artwork for So Long Little Miss Sunshine, which features multiple Mollys, each wearing a different wig except for one with nothing on her head at all. (“I probably own as many wigs as I own guitars,” she says.) Tuttle has been bald since she was three years old due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata; she acts as a spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.     “I love raising awareness,” she says. “I talk about it onstage a lot and broaden it to include anyone who’s ever had something that makes them stick out and look or feel different from others. Playing my song ‘Crooked Tree’ live is very meaningful to me, because it’s a moment where sometimes I’ll take off my wig and talk about my struggles with self-acceptance.”    One album track, “Old Me (New Wig),” is “about leaving all these things behind that don’t serve you anymore,” she says. “Parts of yourself that really aren’t in your best interest, like low self-esteem, anxieties, and not feeling confident. Learning to own these different aspects of my personality but not letting them control me is another theme of the record that inspired the album title and the cover art. Those are all things I’ve struggled with through the years—just feeling like an impostor, like I wasn’t good enough. I like singing this song because there are dayswhen I still have to tell myself to leave that stuff behind.’”     Most of the So Long Little Miss Sunshine songs were co-written with Secor, who is also Tuttle’s partner. “We spend so much time together, we live together, and anytime I have a song idea, or he has one, it’s just so easy to transition from whatever we’re doing into writing a song.”    Although they were written indifferent timesand circumstances,Tuttle found to her surprise that the songs were all tied together by interwoven themes. The opening track, “Everything Burns”—a dark, intense, big-guitar song—was written in 2020, during the chaos and division of the start of the Covid pandemic. Itmight as easily refer to the current chaos and division in America since Election Day 2024, though. In fact, they recorded it the day after the election.    There are several songs about traveling—sometimes down the open road, like “Highway Knows” and “Oasis”—but also back in time, as on “Easy” and “Golden State of Mind.”    The record also tells“akind of coming-of-age story,” Tuttle says. “‘Golden State of Mind’ is one of the songs I feel is a through-line to that. It makes me think about people I’ve been close to in the past that I’ve drifted away from, and about growing up and figuring out who you are.”    That theme is in turn picked up in the beautiful ballad “No Regrets,” one of the last songs Tuttle wrote for the album. “It’s about looking back on your life and thinking, ‘Well, maybe I could have done things differently, but if I hadn’t made certain mistakes or gone down certain roads, then I wouldn't be here.’ And I really like where I am now!”    So Long Little Miss Sunshine closes, as her last two albums did, with an autobiographical song, “Story of My So-Called Life.”“This is me looking back on my life, from growing up to going to school in Boston to moving to Nashville to where I am now—taking stock of all these pivotal moments throughout my life that made me who I am. I feel like after I’ve said so much in all the other songs, it’s just kind of nice to end it on a note of, ‘Here’s how this all came to be,’” she says.    *****    Earlier this year, Tuttle played guitar and sang on Ringo Starr’s new country album, Look Up. She also played with him and a host of other stellar musical guests at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and Grand Ole Opry as part of his televised Ringo & Friends shows. She was inspired by his fearlessness in following his passion for country music. “It is cool to see someone like that who has done everything you could imagine doing in a music career and he’s still just so psyched and still has a list of things that he wants to accomplish,” Tuttle says.    Looking back on her own career, Tuttle admits that she also has pursued what interests her: “It has never been a cookie-cutter thing where I’m just going down a straight road. I always had this crooked path.” 

Girl Named Tom

Small-town sibling trio Girl Named Tom seeks to create harmony in a world divided. With their distinctive harmonies and heartfelt performances, Bekah, Joshua and Caleb Liechty won the hearts of America while becoming the only group to ever win NBC’s “The Voice.” In addition to their chart-topping covers (“River,” “The Chain,” & “Dust in the Wind” among others), GNT writes original music that will almost certainly project them to becoming the best-known harmony trio of their generation.   With their debut EP, "Another World," Girl Named Tom sweeps the listener into reflective space, exploring fond memories, global issues, and intimate conversations. Audiences have been "...blown away by the musicality and harmonies, creativity, honesty, beauty. This sibling trio is stardust." Crazy World exhibits "crystal clear lead vocals, driving (and unique) percussion, and after 3 minutes build up an amazing section of their 3 voices intermeshing together."   Based in the Midwest, Girl Named Tom performed all over the country during the band's first year before the pandemic struck. Now, after winning The Voice, they cannot wait to hit the road and visit new fans!

Four Stix - Led Zeppelin Tribute

Ozzmosis

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.”

Eric Johnson

The guitar has been very good to Eric Johnson, earning him international renown as a player, composer, recording artist and live entertainer as well as an ever-growing audience of admirers. And Eric Johnson has been very good to the guitar, spotlighting its myriad melodic, sonic and lyrical splendors, paying homage to its heroes and innovators, collaborating and playing with many of its finest contemporary talents, and fostering its continuing vibrancy as a primarily instrumental genre in popular music. “He's an extraordinary guitar player accessible to ordinary music fans,” notes the Memphis Commercial Appeal. That’s because Eric Johnson plays music and not just the guitar. He is also a gifted player of the piano (his first instrument) as well as songwriter, singer and song interpreter. Or more succinctly, Eric Johnson is a diverse, versatile and fully realized musical creator who plays guitar like no one else. The pivotal event in Johnson's rise to becoming, as Guitar Player says, “one of the most respected guitarists on the planet," was his million-selling, now-classic 1990 album Ah Via Musicom (which loosely translates as "communicating through music"). It was his second release, following Tones, his 1986 major label debut. Musicom yielded three Top 10 singles – "Cliffs of Dover," which has become Johnson's signature song and won a Best Rock Instrumental Grammy, and "Trademark" and "Righteous." It made him the first artist to ever score three Top 10 instrumentals. Now, 28 years later, he revisits that landmark recording with a 2018 tour on which he will play the album – hailed as a "masterwork" in Amazon.com's review – in its entirety. The Austin, Texas-based Johnson also closes out 2017 with a new album, Collage, that combines five new original songs with five covers that reflect both his inspirations and range: An acoustic version of Jimi Hendrix's "One Rainy Wish," The Beatles classic "We Can Work It Out" in a Caribbean groove, B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby," the surf rock classic "Pipeline" and Stevie Wonder's 1966 #3 pop hit "Uptight (Everything's Alright)." The years prior to Ah Via Musicom and since are rich with accomplishments. Over the now five studio albums that have followed it – Venus Isle (1996), Bloom (2005), 2010's Up Close (and its revised European version Up Close – Another Look, now being issued in the US), EJ (2016) and the latest – Eric has broadened and enriched his rock guitar palette and further delved into his love for blues, jazz and country. He's earned six Grammy nominations, has topped or been listed high in countless greatest guitarist lists in music publications, and been featured on the cover of most every guitar magazine, many more than once. Johnson released an album in 2014 with jazz guitarist Mike Stern, Eclectic, that also landed him on the cover of Downbeat. His catalog further includes a collection of outtakes, demos and live treats, Souvenir (2002). And in 1998 his never-before-issued very first album recording from some 20 years before, Seven Worlds, was finally released by its producer (All Music Guide hailed as a "classy false start to a great career"). As an ardent live performer who regularly tours, "Few rock guitarists can take an audience on an unforgettable journey like Eric Johnson can," observes Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles. His primary live performance configuration is as a trio, most often with some of Austin's top players, including drummer Tommy Taylor and bassist Kyle Brock, who toured with him following Ah Via Musicom's success and return for the 2018 outing. He's also done acoustic tours both solo and as a trio with noted players Peppino D'Agostino and Andy McKee, and electric guitar tours with his hero B.B. King and pal and peer Sonny Landreth. His concert performances have been captured on a number of releases. Europe Live (2014) "serves as a fine introduction to this stunning musician," says All Music, as also do the his two Live From Austin TX CDs plus a DVD from his "Austin City Limits" performances and Anaheim Live (2008). Eric's side project Alien Love Child as well released an in-concert disc, Live and Beyond, in 2000. His 1996 tour with Steve Vai and Joe Satriani hit stores the following year as G3: Live in Concert. Johnson is an avid admirer of fellow guitarists past and present, and has recorded and/or performed with such other notables as Chet Atkins, B.B. King, James Burton, Jerry Reed, Steve Miller, John McLaughlin, Jimmie Vaughan, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Dweezil Zappa, Adrian Legg, John Petrucci and others. He has paid homage in song to such players as Jerry Reed (“Tribute to Jerry Reed” on Bloom), fellow Texan Stevie Ray Vaughan (the Grammynominated track “SRV”) and Wes Montgomery (who Johnson saluted in his Ah Via Musicom song “East Wes”). He has to date appeared on eight Experience Hendrix tours paying homage to one of his seminal guitar icons. Eric's artistic journey began in his teens in the Austin clubs, not long after joining the psychedelic rock band Mariani and later touring with the jazz-rock fusion group The Electromagnets. Eric's burgeoning reputation and touts from both Prince and Christopher Cross helped win him a deal with Reprise Records in the mid 1980s. The album that resulted, Tones, failed to chart. But it did earn him his first Grammy nomination for the song "Zap" and landed him on the front of Guitar Player magazine with the cutline: "Who is Eric Johnson & why is he on our cover?" Once Ah Via Musicom hit, the Los Angeles Times noted how he had already "been compared with rock's immortals." But Eric himself modestly demurs. "I don't think I'm a rock god. I just keep playing. It's fun, and I'm glad people enjoy it."