Imagine if someone tried to create an iPod type device for the home in 1972 using mechanical technology…this is what it would look like.
Dan Zanes and Friends’ ‘Lead Belly, Baby!’ Features Chuck D., Billy Bragg, And More
Dan Zanes discovered Lead Belly’s music on the day he got his first library card. On ‘Lead Belly, Baby!’ (out 8/25 on Smithsonian Folkways), the GRAMMY-winning family music performer presents a fresh vision of Lead Belly’s music for a new generation with a little help from his friends. Along with guests including Chuck D., Billy Bragg, Aloe Blacc, and Valerie June, Zanes brings the music of this American icon back full circle to its original home on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
“Lead Belly’s music made me want to play as a 7-year-old, and I’ve been doing that ever since,” says Zanes, who wrote an essay called “Lead Belly, The Grey Goose, and Me” that accompanies the 15-track album. “Lead Belly was the reason I started making music, and Lead Belly was the template for everything I’ve done in family music. I consider him to be the father of modern family music.”
‘Lead Belly, Baby!’ begins, appropriately, with Zanes picking a 12-string acoustic guitar on “More Yet.” Soon, he’s joined by a full band of friends, including a group of children who sing with him.
The album’s songs, many of which have become folk standards, are performed in a variety of styles, showing the broad impact of Lead Belly’s music. “We wanted to bring his approach into the 21st century, to make a living folk record for an icon whose legacy is very much alive,” Zanes says. Zanes acknowledged Lead Belly’s love of wordplay by bringing in MCs including Chuck D. and Memphis Jelks, who trade lines on the popular 19th-century dance song “Skip to My Lou.” Billy Bragg joins Zanes for a psychedelic folk interpretation of “Rock Island Line,” the railroad song that became the anthem of the British skiffle craze of the 1950s. A version of “Cotton Fields” sung in Spanish and English pays tribute to both Lead Belly and norteño great Ramón Ayala, who also had a hit with the song.
Called “the family-music genre’s most outspoken and eloquent advocate” by Time magazine, Zanes, a New Hampshire native who made several albums as a member of the Del Fuegos during the ’80s, has been performing for families since releasing ‘Rocket Ship Beach’ in 2000. With his band, Dan Zanes and Friends, he has released more than a dozen albums and has toured the world sharing handmade 21st-century social music with enthusiastic crowds of kids and kid sympathizers. His ‘Catch That Train!’ won a Grammy for Best Musical Album for Children in 2007.
Zanes and his fiancée, Claudia Eliaza, are pioneers in the sensory-friendly performance movement. The Kennedy Center recently commissioned the two to create the first sensory-friendly folk opera, Night Train 57, slated to premiere in October. “For me, the folk experience is about inclusion and participation — welcoming people in,” Zanes says. “The spirit of Lead Belly’s music that affected me as a 7-year-old drives me to want to create and present in a sensory-friendly atmosphere today.” In addition to making other national performances of Night Train 57, Zanes will tour as “The Lead Belly Project” beginnning in fall 2017.
It is fitting that ‘Lead Belly, Baby!’ will be released by Smithsonian Folkways. The album represents a homecoming of sorts for music of “The King of the 12-String Guitar,” Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter (c.1888-1949), who was a foundational artist for Folkways Records and recorded his most famous work for the label and its founder Moses Asch in the 1940s. Lead Belly was famous for his love of performing for children, often giving concerts at schools around New York. Smithsonian Folkways highlighted this side of the singer with 1999’s ‘Lead Belly Sings for Children’, a collection of songs originally recorded in children’s concerts and studios during the 1940s. In 2014, Smithsonian Folkways celebrated the legacy of one of America’s most treasured 20th-century icons with a career-spanning, 5-CD box set called ‘Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection.’
‘Lead Belly, Baby!’ is Zanes first album for Smithsonian Folkways. It includes a 40-page booklet with lyrics to all songs and liner notes by Zanes and Jeff Place, the Senior Curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections.
‘Lead Belly, Baby!’ Track List:
1. More Yet (feat. Shareef Swindell)
2. Rock Island Line (feat. Billy Bragg)
3. Ha-Ha This-A-Way (feat. Tamar Kali)
4. Julie Ann Johnson (feat. Jendog Lonewolf)
5. Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie (feat. Madame Marie Jean Laurent & Ceddyjay)
6. Polly Wee (feat. Father Goose and Little Goose)
7. Boll Weevil (feat. Aloe Blacc and Pauline Jean)
8. New York City (feat. Claudia Eliaza)
9. Skip to My Lou (feat. Chuck D. and Memphis Jelks)
10. Take This Hammer (feat. Valerie June)
11. Cotton Fields (feat. Sonia de los Santos, Elena Moon Park, & José Joaquin Garcia)
12. Red Bird (feat. Ashley Phillips)
13. Whoa Back Buck (feat. Donald Saaf with Isak and Ole)
14. Stewball (feat. Marley Reedy)
15. Relax Your Mind (feat. Neha Jiwrajka)
Yusuf / Cat Stevens Returns With ‘The Laughing Apple’ Out September 15
Yusuf / Cat Stevens, one of the most influential singer-songwriters of all time, will release his highly anticipated new album, The Laughing Apple, on September 15. The album will be released under his Cat-O-Log Records logo exclusively through the label that launched his career 50 years ago, Decca Records.
The Laughing Apple follows the common ‘60s template of combining newly-written songs with a number of covers – except that all the covers are from Yusuf’s 1967 catalogue. The Laughing Apple celebrates some of his earliest material, presenting the songs as he has always wished they had been recorded.
“There are some I always wanted to hear differently,” he explains. “Many of my earlier recordings were overcooked with big band arrangements. They crowded the song out a lot of times.”
Yusuf produced The Laughing Apple with Paul Samwell-Smith, the original producer behind Yusuf’s landmark recordings, including 1970’s Tea for the Tillerman, which contained the classics “Wild World” and “Father and Son”. That multi-platinum album became a benchmark of the singer-songwriter movement, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has named it one of the definitive albums of all time.
The Laughing Apple takes listeners to that little garden where the Tillerman sat under the tree, with a charming new illustration by Yusuf. That picture harks back to Tillerman’s younger days when he worked as an apple-picker. Yusuf also has illustrated each of the 11 songs on The Laughing Apple in his naive style, resembling a storybook — for those whose hearts have never really grown old.
When all things were tall,
And our friends were small,
And the world was new.
Those words of Cat Stevens’ Silent Sunlight now seem to reflect most accurately the sentiments of The Laughing Apple. “As you grow older, the sweetness of youth, as Wordsworth expressed in his poem “Splendour in the Grass”, get stronger,” says Yusuf. “Looking back and emotionally drawing on the themes of childhood possibilities and disappointments is what exemplifies this album, for me.”
The new album also marks the return of Yusuf’s longtime musical foil, Alun Davies. Davies, whose graceful acoustic guitar is an essential component of Yusuf’s classic sound, first appeared on 1970’s Mona Bone Jakon and recorded and performed with Yusuf throughout the ‘70s. The Laughing Apple‘s newest songs — “See What Love Did to Me”, “Olive Hill” and “Don’t Blame Them” — possess the reflective insight of a spiritual seeker and the melodic charm that made Yusuf beloved by millions during the ‘60s and ‘70s and still speak to a younger, wide-eyed generation.
‘Mighty Peace’ is the first inspired song Yusuf wrote while still beating the folk-club path in London during the early ‘60s. The song laid fallow for more than 50 years, and, with a newly added verse, finally has made it onto an album. “Mary and the Little Lamb” reflects a similar story: it is an unreleased song that existed only on an old demo, and it also has a new verse. “Grandsons” updates “I’ve Got a Thing About Seeing My Grandson Grow Old”, which now has hung around long enough to fulfill its biographical destiny. (Yusuf is the beloved grandfather of eight little grandkids.) The original version appeared for the first time on the 2000 edition of The Very Best of Cat Stevens.
Other highlights of The Laughing Apple include new versions of ‘Blackness of the Night’, “Northern Wind (Death of Billy the Kid)”, “I’m So Sleepy” and the title track, four songs that appeared in their original incarnations on New Masters, a 1967 album largely unknown in the US.
The album also contains “You Can Do (Whatever)”, a song originally intended for the film “Harold and Maude” that remained unfinished until now.
2017 is a milestone marking 50 years of Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ amazing musical history. In 1967, Decca released his debut album, Matthew and Son, on its Deram Records subsidiary.
Yusuf’s music has established him as a timeless voice for all generations. His songs are used regularly in films and television shows, with “Father and Son” playing during a crucial scene in the blockbuster movie Guardians of the Galaxy 2.
A recipient of The World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates’ Man of Peace award and the World Social Award, Yusuf continues to support charities such as UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Tree Aid through The Yusuf Islam Foundation in the UK.
Full tracklisting of The Laughing Apple below:
- Blackness of the Night
- See What Love Did to Me
- The Laughing Apple
- Olive Hill
- Grandsons
- Mighty Peace
- Mary and the Little Lamb
- You Can Do (Whatever)!
- Northern Wind (Death of Billy the Kid)
- Don’t Blame Them
- I’m So Sleepy
Åke Blomqvist Teaches You How To Disco
Åke Blomqvist (1925-2013) was a Finnish dance instructor, and together with his wife Leena, he ran dance schools in Helsinki, Tampere and Lahti. Åke was the host of a dance program that went on Saturday in Finnish TV. In 1980, he showed how to dance disco, and enough of my yakkin’, let’s boogie!
Tegan And Sara Announce “The Con” Cover Album For Charity
This week was the ten-year anniversary of the release of Tegan and Sara’s acclaimed album The Con. To mark the date, the dynamic duo announced an album where 14 different artists will cover the album’s various tracks. Proceeds from the album, to be released Oct. 13, will benefit the duo’s foundation supporting “economic justice, health, and representation for LGBTQ girls and women.” They posted a note on their website today.
When we released The Con exactly 10 years ago today – July 24, 2007 – we had been on earth for 9,390 days. Another 3,650 days have passed since then and if we’re lucky we could live another 12,510 days. In a way, we’re at the hallway point of our lives; “halfway to death” as our Dad ominously told us on his 35th birthday. This was also the kind of existential number-crunching we were doing during our 26th year on earth in 2007, and The Con was born from that experiential panic.
To commemorate the impact The Con had on our career and songwriting, today we are very excited to announce The Con X: Covers, a new album featuring 14 of our favorite artists covering all 14 songs from the original album. When I hear another band or artist cover one of our songs it can be indescribable and pleasantly disorienting – creating hope where there was originally hopelessness or joy where there was only ever regret. A pop song can become a claustrophobic ballad, or an anguished confession might be transformed into a euphoric mantra. In some ways hearing someone else interpret something so familiar is a way to finally be freed from the personal history of the song and to hear it for the first time.
The Con X: Covers will be released on October 13, 2017, and we are especially excited to announce that our record label, Warner Bros., will be donating net album proceeds to The Tegan and Sara Foundation, working in support of LGBTQ girls and women. Our next announcement will include the full list of artists (be patient!), and for now we want to thank each and every one of them for donating their time and talents to this cause that we are so passionate about.
xo Sara (and Tegan)
Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” Featured In Steven Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ Movie Trailer
Steven Spielberg showed the first trailer for his next film, Ready Player One, at Comic Con in San Diego this weekend. What was even cooler was to hear Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” providing the soundtrack to ax exciting chase scene featuring hundreds of VR-controlled police robots.
https://youtu.be/VE71JOvLPvE
Siri Can Sing Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’
I wonder now if I give Siri a few lines I made up, can she can finish the song for me?
This West Hollywood’s 10,000 Square-Foot House Is For Sale And Comes With The Smiths’ Reference
From the street, the Oberfield residence in West Hollywood now for sale contains the crisp, white cement panels that clad the residence’s exterior rise a modest 18’ from the street. However, almost secretly tucked away towards the back and the panoramic views, a clean, modern 10,000-square foot home emerges containing two main floors, a basement, a grand lawn, infinity pool, and an all encompassing view of the Los Angeles basin.
And a cool Smiths’ reference below.
Oberfeld Residence
West Hollywood, CA
2012
10,000 sf
From the street, the crisp, white cement panels that clad the residence’s exterior rise a modest 18’ from the street. However, almost secretly tucked away towards the back and the panoramic views, a clean, modern 10,000-square foot home emerges containing two main floors, a basement, a grand lawn, infinity pool, and an all encompassing view of the Los Angeles basin.
Kids In The Hall Show Why Doors Fans Aren’t Made, They’e Born
“Greatest hits albums are for housewives and little girls! You’re not serious, you don’t want to be a Doors fan.”
An oldie, but a goodie…
Can An Eyeglass Commercial Make You Cry
You bet. Way to go, Pearle Vision. I’m a mess.
https://youtu.be/C4PbTeOIHe4