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Plus a gallery from a great concert with unexpected audience participation! Narrative songwriting is a staple of American music, but it’s not easy to do well. The charts are full of derivative, clichéd, sentimental songs that do sell well enough, … Continue reading
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Tomorrow night Eliot Bronson, Dean Fields, Jason Myles Goss and Andy Zipf will wrap up their 15-day, 15-city tour at The Evening Muse in Charlotte, NC. In five previous posts you can read about the tour and what was planned. … Continue reading
Tonight’s profile is the last in the Parlor Sessions profiles, which means that the tour starts in just a couple days. If you’re in or near Charlotte, Atlanta, Richmond, Wilmington, Asbury Park Middletown, Cambridge, Philadelphia, DC, and especially the tour’s first stop in New York City, you probably need to get your tickets soon! The tour starts June 5, makes a stop a night for 10 nights, and then is over!
Now that I’ve introduced Andy, Jason and Eliot, three fantastic artists whose music I, myself, have just discovered, I’ll come clean now and say that the order of these profiles wasn’t 100% random. Because I’d stated this series of posts with questions for Dean Fields about the tour itself, it felt like it would give the series a sense of symmetry if I also ended with his interview, so I made a decision to do so early on.
Plus there was the fact that I knew his music and how good it is already. I’d even interviewed him before for this site, and knew that savvy readers could find that. So I wanted to get the word out about the Eliot, Jason and Andy. Now, though, let me introduce you to Dean Fields, the only guy I know who turn stepping in dog crap into a love song, or make telling a woman she takes too long get ready seem, like a compliment.
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Today we continue our series of profiles on the artists of the Parlor Sessions Tour with Eliot Bronson who was born in Baltimore where The Sun called him a “folk singing wunderkind.” The year after earning that praise he moved to Atlanta where he’s also earned similar praise from the press and built a sizable following. He formed the duo The Brilliant Inventions which won a number of awards and built a sizable regional following until 2010 when his partner decided to pursue a career in photography.
For his part, Eliot continued his music career, releasing a solo album, Blackbirds in 2011, and an album called Milwaukee with his band the Yonder Orphans in 2012. He continues to receive accolades for his work, including first place in the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest (http://www.merlefest.org), an award whose laureates include Gillian Welch, Johnny Williams, and Tift Merritt.
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Today’s Parlor Sessions Profile is of Jason Myles Goss, a songwriter with uncanny ability to step outside of himself and write songs from another point of view that ring utterly true. He’s a storyteller whose songs can transport us into the boxing ring, to the boardwalk on Coney Island, to a fishing boat in Maine, to name a few places.
In describing the influences on his most recent album Radio Dial, his website states:
…in his latest collection of songs, Jason displays a broad range of influences, from the stark and eclipsing lyricism of Gillian Welch and A. A. Bondy, to the lush, melody-driven, pop/rock ambitions of Ryan Adams’ “Gold” and The Wallflowers’ “Bringing Down the Horse.”
I do hear that, but I’d add there is something Springsteenesque in his ability to evoke the working class so empathetically in his lyrics.
He’s now based in Brooklyn, but he grew up in Hopedale, MA, and in 2003 at the age of 21, when he was selected as a finalist in the first Newport Folk Festival Songwriters’ Contest, he was the youngest finalist by 10 years. It’s one of a number of awards and accolades he’s received.
Yesterday I posted the responses of Andy Zipf to a series of questions about the Parlor Sessions Tour. I asked Jason Myles Goss, another of your four musical “hosts” in the Parlor the same questions. His answers make me think maybe he’ll be the comic relief in the minivan. They’re followed by a video of “Black Lights,” one of those evocative narratives songs I mentioned in the beginning of this piece, from his most recent album Radio Dial. Continue reading
The Parlor Sessions Tour, set to begin in 5 days at Rockwood Music Hall in NYC, sounds like it’ll be my favorite kind of show. It’s 4 singer-songwriters playing together in small venues and interacting with one another. In addition, as Andy Zipf puts it, “We really want to bring the audience into the experience.” Yesterday I posted a short interview with Dean Fields explaining a little about about the tour. Today I’m posting the first profile of the 4 artists who’ll be traveling in the Parlor Sessions minivan, starting with Andy Zipf, not because I’m going in reverse alphabetical order, but simply because his responses were the first I found when pulling the four responses up on my computer.
It seemed an appropriately random way to choose which to write first for a tour that doesn’t have a clear hierarchy of acts. This will not be 4 acts playing in order of ascending importance, building to the headliner, but rather a “mutual admiration society” as Dean Fields called it. Watching artists interact is always interesting, and it’s another reason to come see this show.
So who is this guy with a name so full of consonants? He’s definitely someone who believes music can have a lot of power. Continue reading