 | | | | |  | Solomon Burke, the King of Rock and Soul, completes his Americana trilogy with NASHVILLE, a collection of country songs produced by Buddy Miller and recorded at his Nashville home.
After exploring singer-songwriter pop with the GRAMMY Award-winning DON'T GIVE UP ON ME and down-home soul with the GRAMMY-nominated MAKE DO WITH WHAT YOU GOT, Solomon returns to one of his first loves, country music. NASHVILLE contains Solomon's soulful versions of classic country and country-tinged songs (by Tom T. Hall, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Don Williams, and others) and previously unrecorded soon-to-be standards by Patty Griffin and Gillian Welch, who also contributed vocals. Country divas Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Patty Loveless also make guest vocal appearances. It all adds up to one of the most affecting marriages of country and soul ever recorded. |
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| | | | | | TROUBLE, Ray LaMontagne's acclaimed 2004 RCA Records debut, quietly sold over 250,000 copies, the grassroots result of listeners throughout the world hearing the New Hampshire-born singer and songwriter and telling others about him. Here was a passionate new voice - rough and silken, panoramic and local.
Yet for his follow-up album, TILL THE SUN TURNS BLACK, LaMontagne demanded of himself a recording that did not revisit the same ground on which he had premiered with such uncommon command. "I just wanted to have something different than a collection of songs," he says. "There's nothing wrong with that, I just didn't want to do it again."
On the eleven songs that comprise TILL THE SUN TURNS BLACK, all of this is audible: the demand for meaningfulness, the requirement of emotional relevancy, the struggle of working through material in the form of songs that refuse, until properly recorded, to leave the artist alone. The music, horn-warmed soul classicism that turns decisively yet inevitably into broader expanses of sound, extends with heart and skill the vintage Rhythm and Blues and Americana folk-country that made LaMontagne famous on TROUBLE. |
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| | | | | | "With any trilogy," says John Mayer, "the third in the series blows it open." On CONTINUUM the singer/songwriter/guitar slinger meets that challenge head-on. Mayer's third studio album follows the multi-platinum ROOM FOR SQUARES (2001) and HEAVIER THINGS (2003) and marks his first turn as producer. It is his most soulful, cohesive collection yet and he says its no accident that this project is where all of his efforts, his potential, and his disparate influences fully come together.
Mayer points to one song in particular as the turning point for CONTINUUM. "I wrote 'Gravity' last summer, and it changed everything," he says. "You talk less when you trust that people understand you. 'Gravity' had to be sparse. And when I listened to it - for the first time, holding back - then it was a whole new game. That might be the most important song I ever wrote."
With "Waiting on the World to Change," Mayer shot for something even more ambitious - something like an attempt to explain his generations attitudes about politics. "It's meant to shed a little light on inactivity and inaction," he says, "because I don't believe that inaction is disinterest, I think inaction is preservation nobody wants to get involved in a debate in which the rules and the facts will change so that they'll lose. So we end up with this other option, which is, I guess well just have to wait for things to get better." |
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