He starts the decade a teenage pop idol. But the one-hit wonder who sang ‘Space Oddity’ is still very far from becoming the star who will one day define the 1970s. Not when he still has a band to find, a manager to sack, a mentally ill brother to save, a wife to marry and a rival called Marc Bolan to beat. Not when David Bowie still has no idea who or what David Bowie is.
Starting at the beginning of Bowie’s incredible ten-year odyssey changing the course of pop music, Simon Goddard’s bold and expressionistic biography weaves time, space, rock’n’roll and social history to relive Bowie’s 1970 moment by vivid moment.
Ottawa pop dynamo Andrew Cassara is set to “Shock” ears with the release of this, his new video — Part Two in a double release, available now!
The track serves as prime preview to the Ottawa, Ontario-based artist’s forthcoming Fall 2020 release, Freak On Repeat (Deluxe Version).
“This is probably one of my all-time favourite songs I’ve written to this very day,” Cassara shares. “I’m always pushing myself to try writing and singing what feels right for the song while also pushing myself out of my comfort zone to try something new.
“‘Shock’ did just that for me.
“When I was writing it,” he continues, “funnily enough I couldn’t help but picture myself in the movie Grease in the role of ‘Danny’ singing this song… It’s a feel-good song, and its a creation I want people to get off their feet for, to dance to and have the time of their life with.
“There’s just this energy that rushes through me whenever I hear it.”
To that end, let’s step back and look… No, listen wide:
Describing Andrew Cassara’s style in words doesn’t do it justice; hearing and feeling his music are really the only ways to fully appreciate the 24-year-old’s singular blend of funk, disco and pop. Fuelled by influences ranging from Shawn Mendes, to the Bee Gees, to artists like Jamiroquai – who, like Cassara, blur stylistic lines fluidly – both “Shock” and Freak on Repeat (SGMGroupArtists), may sound familiar, but are absolutely impossible to pigeonhole.
The album title alone telegraphs Cassara’s determination to blaze his own path and encourage others to do the same. “Freak on Repeat is actually a line from one of the songs, ‘Bad Bad,’ and I think it describes this record authentically. It’s about having the best time you can have, being yourself and having fun in the moment.”
Nowhere is that more evident than that first single, a track that channels the glitz and glitter of 70’s era disco while sounding cutting-edge current, and which Cassara describes as, “A fun, party tune about a night of lust and fun with a kind of Saturday Night Fever vibe.”
Although infectiously hooky, groove-driven tracks like “Fever (Bring the F**K mix)” and “Funkadelic” encourage listeners to celebrate life, Cassara’s drive to write about his own experiences with complete honesty finds him covering rougher ground as well. “I wanted to spread a positive message, but I also wanted to write about topics that are sometimes difficult to talk about.”
“You Are” for example, Cassara explains, was written explicitly about his personal struggles with mental health issues. “With ‘You Are’ I had a mission in mind: to tell my story and provide positive reinforcement to anyone listening by repeating lines like ‘you are loved’ and ‘you are strong’. It’s my story, but it’s also a message of inspiration I hope will help people tackle their own issues and give them a positivity boost.”
Similarly, “Love Again” deals with the lingering feeling that although something’s ended, a new start may be possible. “That’s also a real story,” Cassara says. “It’s a message that, rather than send directly to someone, I wrote into a song.”
Music has been Cassara’s go to means of expression since first hearing the Backstreet Boys at age four. “They were so inspiring. When I was a kid, I actually won a karaoke contest singing and dancing to their songs. They really paved the way for my passion for music.” His lifelong love affair with music, his determination to write, record and perform, however, is also rooted in his parent’s divorce and father’s subsequent move to the US, which happened right when he started getting into music. “I guess I was just looking for more positivity in my life. Now, when I write, it brings back a lot of those emotions and that plays a big role in my music.”
That said, Cassara’s insistence on replacing negatives with positives and his desire to lift people up permeates every tune on Freak on Repeat and is summed up handily with standout album closer, “Stay Rockin.” “That’s my motto,” Cassara says; his way of dealing with whatever life throws his way. “And putting it at the end of the record, I think, ties the whole album together.”
With previous releases including Lavender Feels, The Big Bang, and Freak on Repeat in its first iteration — as well as a series of singles — Cassara has performed in the US, South Korea, Singapore, Japan and Sweden and shared the stage with artists such as Shawn Mendes, Chromeo, Tyler Shaw, Lauv, and more. He’s also headlined the Youth X Canada Tour, performing for and engaging with audiences at youth centres across Ontario in an effort to encourage young people to share their own stories and mental health struggles.
“Shock” is available now. Freak on Repeat (Deluxe Version) is available October 16th, 2020.
Canadian singer/songwriter, pianist, producer, artist, and JazzFM radio producer/host Laura Fernandez says it’s Okay, Alright in this, her stunning new album of deeply intimate lyrical sojourns — available now.
Blending pop, jazz and classical influences throughout the vibrant collection, Okay, Alright navigates Fernandez’s varied styles and grooves through an expert rhythm section, string accompaniment, guitar, trumpet, and mandolin — all corralled to create a sonic texture all her own. Shaped by a fluid, even feeling piano and a voice that’s richly warm and enigmatically expressive, the release will have audiences believing and reeling on every word she sings.
“This album was a labour of love in more ways than one,” Fernandez shares. “I wrote these songs over my 20-year career as a songwriter and performer, but hadn’t released them yet; these were songs I wanted to keep safe, and to have a home in a collection.”
Several of the songs, she reveals, were written in some of her earliest days and have stayed close to her heart ever since, “like a living memory.”
While Okay, Alright may be a collection of previously unrevealed songwriting, the notion is par for the course when it comes to Fernandez and her discography. With her phrasing described as “beautifully executed amid expression that, is at times aching and bleeding, and at other times soaring with joy,” Fernandez first debuted her songcraft in 2003 with the melodic folk, rock-pop release of The Other Side, a breakthrough offering that won her the Best Soft Rock Award at the New York International Independent Music Festival. Her sophomore follow-up, the exploratory pop-folk x Latin and jazz Un Solo Beso, arrived in 2010, and was produced by JUNO Award-winning Billy Bryans.
Born in Madrid, Spain, with time spent in Switzerland before moving to Canada (Alberta, then Ontario — Toronto, specifically), she completed piano studies at The Royal Conservatory of Music, is an official member of the Steinway Artist roster, and has spent her multifaceted career pursuing both music and visual arts; some of her commissioned portraits include Margaret Atwood, Bill Gates Sr., and Sir Richard Francis Burton for the permanent collection of the Royal Geographic Society, as well as brands such as Estée Lauder, Air Canada, Microsoft, and more.
Her extensive collection of works have garnered a Ruth Schwartz Award, a New York Art Directors Club Award of Excellence, an Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Award, as well as a gold medal from the Canadian Library Association, multiple Toronto Art Directors Awards, and four Communication Arts Magazine Awards of Excellence.
The extension of her masterful artistry into music and production were decidedly natural, she shares. “Painting, and especially illustrating, for 25 years had become limiting for me. It wasn’t answering all my creative questions.
“Music has become a voyage of self-discovery for me,” she adds. “There are no rules here, and this is exciting and liberating to me. I love the social aspects of making music, as well as the fact it’s a more direct route to the heart.”
In return, Okay, Alright is the most direct route to Fernandez’s; the 12 original tracks — plus one cover — that made the cut from 29 options feel more like an intimate conversation among kindred kinds. “These songs have lived inside me like a secret whisper, never fading from my heart,” she muses. “This album is a musical diary and, for me, a soundtrack of my life over the past 20 years, and I hope the listener can feel what I felt when I wrote them.
“Yes, these songs are a study in emotion, honesty, and pain,” she continues. “There is self-doubt and longing, but there is also joy, imagination, courage, and wonder. Some of the songs have come from a place of understanding, and none of the songs are from the same relationship experience. It’s a journey through life and the struggles of intimacy and love, and one that you could also feel hope in.
“In the end, we make our own choices; we learn from them, and we grow, so there is deep feeling and there is acceptance. We experience what it is to be human, and we come to accept who we are.
hris Hillman is arguably the primary architect of what’s come to be known as country rock. After playing the Southern California folk and bluegrass circuit, he joined David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark and Michael Clark as an original member of The Byrds. He went on to partner with Gram Parsons to launch The Flying Burrito Brothers, recording a handful of albums that have become touchstones of rock-influenced country.
Hillman then embarked on a prolific recording career in various configurations: as a member of Stephen Stills’ Manassas; as a member of Souther-Hillman-Furay with J.D. Souther and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield; as a solo artist; and in a trio with his fellow former Byrds Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark.
In the 1980s, Hillman launched a successful mainstream country career when he formed The Desert Rose Band with Herb Pedersen and John Jorgenson, scoring eight Top 10 country hits. In the midst of his country success he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He has since released a number of solo albums with the most recent, Bidin’ My Time, produced by Tom Petty. In Time Between, Hillman takes readers behind the curtain of his quintessentially Southern Californian musical journey.
In September, 1972, the couple appeared on Jerry Lewis’ annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, broadcast from the Americana Hotel on 7th Avenue in New York City. Lewis introduced John and Yoko as, “…two of the most unusual people in all the world, and I don’t mean just in the world of entertainment. They fit no patterns, meet no standards except the standard of excellence. Ladies and Gentlemen, John Lennon and Yoko.”
“Nothing fancy, just the good old blues,” GRAMMY winning guitar master Duke Robillard says of his new album, Blues Bash — available November 20th, 2020 via Stony Plain Records.
To know Duke is to know he would say that, but there’s no downplaying this instant career highlight from one of the world’s best bluesmen.
As always with a Robillard release, the music is impeccable, classy, and powerful. The five-time Blues Award winner is in his element displaying a 50-year career authority, versatility, passion, and virtuosity with the inimitable ease that comes from being both a world class artist and a true historian, scholar, and curator of the craft.
“My concept was to make a straight vintage-style blues album with no frills or attempt at having catchy hook-laden songs,” Robillard says. “Just danceable blues with plenty of bright-sounding Fender guitar a la Ike Turner, Lefty Bates, etc. It was pretty much a reunion of sorts; I wanted the material to be simple, straight-ahead 50s-style blues and R&B, and a good listening or dancing record like the blues records I bought when I was a kid.
“Basically, a party album — that feeling is what I want to convey,” he continues. “Nothing fancy, just the good old blues.”
One listen confirms Blues Bash checks every box.
A celebration of timeless virtues and verities — and a celebration of celebrations itself — Blues Bash comes in at 10 tracks featuring two stellar horn sections, searing guitar and organ solos, and boogie boogie piano. Front and centre always, Duke plays gracious host to guests aplenty, and the collective roster spans the full chronicle of Duke’s recording career, including his earliest days at Roomful of Blues.
Blues Bash Track Listing Do You Mean It (feat. Chris Cote)
No Time
What Can I Do (feat. Chris Cote)
Everybody Ain’t Your Friend
Rock Alley
You Played On My Piano (feat. Michelle ‘Evil Gal’ Willson)
I Ain’t Gonna Do It
You Don’t Know What You’re Doin’ (feat. Chris Cote)
Give Me All The Love You Got
Just Chillin
GRAMMY Award-nominated vocalist, songwriter and producer Malika Tirolien delivers calls to “RISE” in this, her inspiring new genre-minting single — available now.
“This song is the celebration of change through unity and revolution,” Tirolien says. “It is the realization that we are living a historical moment: the rise of humanity’s consciousness and power.”
At first play, Tirolien’s soaring voice and conscious lyrics immediately set the stage for the Montreal-based artist’s forthcoming sophomore release — the second in her tetralogy marking the elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water — HIGHER.
Born in Guadeloupe and now based in Montreal, Tirolien has garnered International attention throughout the last decade, including for her electrifying performance on Snarky Puppy’s GRAMMY Award-winning album Family Dinner for the track “I’m Not The One.”
She’s also the lead singer and co-leader of GRAMMY Award-nominated nine-piece supergroup BOKANTÉ alongside producer and musician Michael League — who is also co-producing HIGHER alongside Tirolien.
Edmonton’s alt-pop singer/songwriter Wallish weaves her incredible artistry around raw-truth, emotionally biting lyrics to make her new single, “The Last Time” — available now.
“This song started with Troy Marshall coming to me with a new track he had composed,” the mind behind the music, Amy Wallish, recalls. “It was originally called ‘Abyss’ and it was pop-forward and trendy — everything I’m not, but I loved the edgy sound so I began writing.
“Listening to it brought up feelings of being lost in space and disappearing into nothingness,” she continues. “The truth is, this feeling was something I was used to. I have never been a very stable person and, since late junior high, I was always very transient in my relationships. Then, I proceeded to go to five different high schools and move six different times between the ages of 18 and 21.”
While she doesn’t aim to push boundaries for the sake of it, Wallish prides her craft on not backing away from the uncomfortable and controversial in order to say what needs to be said.
“I’ve always been a bit of a loner, and that is where I feel most myself,” she says. “When I’m in relationships, I feel myself start to change which causes me to break and leave without feeling remorse because the person they knew was never actually me.
“I have a hard time acknowledging this about myself, but Wallish is stronger than I am; she’s able to say the things I would never be able to say to someone, and she’s able to admit the hard truths about myself I’d rather not face.
“Because of this, ‘The Last Time’ reflects on my personal history of being transient or flaky — all those times I moved to a new place, had the best time with strangers, made superficial friendships, and then left without a word.
“It’s my history and I want to believe it will change. I want to believe there’s always hope this time will be ‘The Last Time.’”
This October, Polar Music/UMe celebrates Super Trouper, the album that soundtracked the Christmas season and far beyond 40 years ago. The first of only two albums that ABBA made in the 80s, Super Trouper was their sixth consecutive No.1 in Sweden, a chart-topper around Europe and a US Top 20 album. Powered by classic singles, including the title track, “The Winner Takes It All” and “Lay All Your Love On Me,” Super Trouper became the best-selling album in the UK in 1980.
Taking its name from a large follow spotlight used on stage, the Super Trouper album seems a bright, shining statement, but in 2020, we now realize on how many levels ABBA worked. Of course, there is the beautiful shining pop, forever remembered in the smash-hit musical and film Mamma Mia! and the full dancefloors that ABBA constantly inspires. But there is also the masked sadness – virtually every fan old and new is aware that the story of ABBA is entwined with two star-crossed unions and breakups, those of Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog, and Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad and Benny Andersson. Finally, the musicianship, production and arrangement, which makes Super Trouper sound as fresh and sparkling four decades later as when it was first heard in 1980.
Super Trouper is well-known, too, for its cover, of Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Björn surrounded by carnival performers: the original idea was to shoot it in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Unsurprisingly, that idea was rejected, and the cover was photographed in Stockholm. The circus has always been a powerful metaphor in art – throughout history, the joy of performance conceals an inner sadness. ABBA’s global No. 1, “The Winner Takes It All,” could not make this plainer. The first single from the album, it was released in August 1980, with lyrics written by Björn for his recently divorced wife Agnetha to sing: “There is so much in that song,” Agnetha was to say. “It was a mixture of what I felt and what Björn felt, but also what Benny and Frida went through.” It shot to No. 1 in the UK, becoming their first chart topper in over two years – and was followed in November by the joyous title track. Coming in July the following year, the thumping 12 inch of “Lay All Your Love On Me” helped keep Super Trouper on the UK charts for a staggering 43 weeks.
Being an ABBA record, Super Trouper’s album tracks are almost as well-known as its singles. Among them, the stomping “On And On And On,” the classic “Andante Andante,” and the super-poignant “Happy New Year,” with its lines “the dreams we had before are all dead, nothing more than confetti on the floor.” Super Trouper closes with “The Way Old Friends Do,” recorded live at their record-breaking Wembley concerts the year before, which underlines that no matter what, the bond between ABBA would remain forever strong.
Super Trouper is presented in an expansive half-speed master, carried out at Abbey Road by Miles Showell, and in keeping with recent releases there is a 7″ collector’s box, and ultra-collectible picture disc set. Its beam still blinds us, all these years later.
SUPER TROUPER – 2LP HALF SPEED MASTER
Strictly Limited Edition 2 x 12″ on black 180g heavyweight 45rpm vinyl / Gatefold sleeve / Half-speed mastered Abbey Road certificate of authenticity and download card
LP 1 SIDE ONE: Super Trouper / The Winner Takes It All / On and On And On SIDE TWO: Andante, Andante / Me and I
LP 2 SIDE ONE: Happy New Year / Our Last Summer SIDE TWO: The Piper / Lay All Your Love On Me / The Way Old Friends Do
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SUPER TROUPER – SINGLE BOX
Numbered, limited edition – three colored vinyl 7″ singles in one boxset with download card
SINGLE ONE: The Winner Takes It All / Elaine SINGLE TWO: Super Trouper / The Piper SINGLE THREE: Lay All Your Love On Me / On And On And On
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THE WINNER TAKES IT ALL / ELAINE – PICTURE DISC
SUPER TROUPER / THE PIPER – PICTURE DISC
LAY ALL YOUR LOVE ON ME / ON AND ON AND ON – PICTURE DISC
Highly collectible, strictly limited-edition picture disc 7-inch singles will be available to purchase separately via the ABBA Store, Sound of Vinyl and uDiscover. Preorder here.
