Tag: lobelia

Posted on

…for Blue Nile Fans

One of the biggest shifts in my music knowledge in the last year has been my now-obsession with The Blue Nile – I’d owned a couple of their albums for years, but never really listened to them much until going through my iPod earlier in the year finding undiscovered gems and fell completely in love with Paul Buchanan’s bleak-yet-optimistic take on the world.

So today, I’ve completed my collection of their album releases, by buying Peace At Last from the Amazon.com download store, but more interestingly, I also managed to find a couple of Paul Buchanan solo tracks on a compilation album called Seasons Of Light on eMusic.com – they are, as expected, beautiful. If you’re a Blue Nile fan and want another 8 or 9 minutes of glorious loveliness to help ease the years til they next put an album out, these two tracks are a great way to do that.

Been having a lot of fun on eMusic today – Lo. and I were going through the site looking at all the industrial, metal, grunge and punk stuff we loved in our teens, from Helmet to The Melvins, Prong to Black Flag, but found that in our advanced years, we were much happier with gentle old lady music, so settled on Tanya Donelly’s achingly beautiful Whiskey Tango Ghosts – and she used to be in the Throwing Muses, so is sort of alternative-ish, right? right?

Sometimes you just gotta embrace becoming an old lady… though the Therapy singles collection, and the first Fudge Tunnel album both sounded pretty damned fine – guess I’ll have to pick them up as part of next month’s 50 tracks, and feel all young and dudeish again…

(oh, and my eMusic tip of the day is to set up your computer so m3u files (the files used to play the previews on the site) open with Quicktime – it handles them SOOO much better than iTunes and doesn’t litter your iTunes playlist with redundant entries… )

Posted on

More youtube Steve/Lobelia videos…

Happy New Year! Hurrah! Hope your celebrations were fun…

here are three youtube vids of me and Lobelia live in Brighton about a month ago. Quality’s not great, but they were good performances for the most part. :o)

(Oh, and for those of you that have emailed me, I’ll get the download version of the new EP up ASAP, I promise! Sorry…)

Tea In The Sahara –

I Am Afraid Of the Dark –

Happy –

enjoy…

Posted on

busy busy busy

It’s all go here!

We’ll start with last weekend – two gigs, Saturday/Sunday.

Saturday’s was a gig with Lobelia in Brighton at the Sanctuary Cafe, opening for MAP – that’s and Peter Harris – both incredible acoustic guitarists, writers of sublime melodies and fantastic performers. Also on the bill before us was a marvellous singer/songwriter, Conrad Vingoe – as well as having one of the most rock ‘n’ roll names ever (not much chance of that domain name being taken), he writes great songs and has a gorgeous voice. All good. ‘Twas a small crowd, but the venue was intimate and sounded good, the people lovely and a fine time was had by all… I’ll put photos from it up on Flickr soon.

Sunday’s gig was back at Smollensky’s with Luca Sirianni, this time with Sophie Alloway on drums. The gig with Luca is becoming a fairly regular thing, and a whole lot of fun – the chance to play a lot of pop/latin/jazz tunes, do some interesting arrangements, get funky and get paid (a bit). Luca’s a fine guitarist, who does enough ‘dinner jazz’ gigs to know just the right kind of things to play, but also likes to stretch out, improvise and have some fun. It was the first time I’d played with Sophie, and she was a treat to play with – not having come the usual ‘3 years at music school’ route, she plays with the maturity of a player who’s been gigging twice as long as she has, because she learnt on gigs. One of my main gripes with so many drummers is the don’t listen well – they establish a beat and stick with it, instead of letting the grooves grow and expand. Sophie listened really well, and also – crucially – understood the space a drummer has to occupy in a trio. As usual, I hit my stride about half way through the second set, but that’s the price I pay for not playing with drummers often enough…

…Though that’s not the case right now – I’m in the middle of a really fun recording session with Patrick Wood and Roy Dodds – if you saw the last Recycle gig, you’ll know this is a pretty special trio… We spent most of yesterday setting up, but got about 20 minutes of amazing music recorded last night, and will spend much of today on it as well… except the time that I’m teaching – thanks to my going away for Christmas and January to the US, I’m having to fit in as much teaching as possible before I go, partly because lots of students want lessons before I go and partly because I need to earn as much as I can in order to be able to pay my rent, and renew my car tax in january…

in between all that, I’m booking things to do in the US (masterclasses and gigs in California), sorting out my tax return (spending a lot of time buried under piles of receipts) and somewhere this week, I need to fit in a few hours to record some tracks for an italian electronica project that I’ve been meaning to record some stuff for for over a year, and HAVE to have done before Christmas…

Add to that regular trips to the post office to send off CD orders for the new EP and people ordering other stuff as christmas presents, and you’ve got yourself one seriously overworked Stevie.

Roll on Ohio…

Posted on

New EP! New EP!

Right, with no advance notice at all, Lobelia and I have a new live EP available. It’s a pre-release of some of the tracks that will be on our live album, coming out towards the middle of next year, and features three bass ‘n’ voice duo tunes and two solo tunes of mine. Track list is –

Happy (7:34)
MMFSOG (4:09)
I’m Lost (5:11)
Rain (9:14)
Jimmy James (6:51)

The version of MMFSOG is by far the best take of that tune I’ve ever recorded, and the version of Jimmy James is an all-fretless one. The tracks were all recorded live at Power Base Studio in Nebraska earlier in the year.

“So how do we get one of these lovely very limited edition discs?” I hear you cry… All you have to do is send £5 via paypal or nochex, which includes WORLDWIDE POSTAGE AND PACKING. (send it to steve[at]steve[dash]lawson[dot]co[dot]uk please)

What’s more, if you buy this disc now, it’ll save you £2 when the album comes out.

The CD itself is a CDR with all the info printed on the disc, and comes in a pretty plastic clam-shell case, like these –

To make it easy, here’s a paypal button which goes straight to the ‘pay Steve £5 for his and Lo’s delicious new CD’ page –















and in the player below, you can listen to the first track from it – ‘Happy’. It’s fab! :o)


Steve%20Lawson

Enjoy…

Posted on

Gig – Sanctuary Cafe, Hove, E. Sussex Dec 8th


date
Sunday December 9th, 7.30pm-12pm
venue
The Sanctuary Cafe, Brunswick St East, Hove, Brighton, E. Sussex
details
Duo gig with Lobelia, opening for the excellent Map, featuring Max Gilkes. Have a listen to the tracks on his myspace page. Conrad Vingoe is also on the bill. Tickets £6 on the door.
weblinks
map (via google)

Max Gilkes (Map)

Sanctuary Cafe

Lobelia

Conrad Vingoe
Posted on

Two gigs, too many miles…

We’ve had two lovely gigs in the last couple of days, and some stupidly early mornings.

Saturday began with me heading into town to pick up a SatNav thingie – I knew better than to try big drives across Europe with maps and google-directions. So I got us a Garmin 250, which was the cheapest one to have proper European coverage (a lot of the low-end Tom Tom ones seem to have ‘European main roads’ – which is no good if you’re trying to find someone’s house, I guess!)

Saturday night’s gig was a house concert in Deal in Kent, in a beautiful Italian-style house, perfect for a house concert. The event was part-gig, part-church social, and it took a while for it to sink in for some of the people there that it was a ‘gig’ not background music for the party, but by the time Lo. got up to sing, everybody was rapt. All in a most enjoyable evening (and one of the biggest house concerts we’ve done).

Unusually for me, the routing of these two gigs was ideal, in that on Sunday morning we had to be at Dover for a ferry at 7am, and were staying 10 minutes away (anyone who’s ever followed the gig list for any tour I’ve done will know that it usually looks like a 2 year old drew the route with a crayon!) – so we drove to Dover, slept on the ferry, then SaNav’d our way though France, Belgium and Holland up to Amsterdam to the home of the lovely John Lester, and had quite a few hours to relax before heading over to KHL for the gig.

I, dear readers, am ALL about the SatNav – It saved us time, money, stress… it’ll pay for itself in about a month, given how many times I get lost usually on tour… You can program it to avoid toll roads, to tell you were the nearest petrol station is… it’s all good (yeah, I know, the rest of the world discovered SatNav some time in the late 90s, but like iPods and loopers with feedback control, I’m very late into the game…)

Anyway, off to KHL – a lovely venue that John had taken us to on our last visit to Amsterdam. The sunday night singer/songwriters night is booked by a local singer/songwriter Marijn Mijnands, and she was headlining the night with her band Ma Rain. It was just a half hour opening slot, but the reception was really warm, we sold a bunch of CDs, and will be back there sometime in the Spring, hopefully… All good. Ma Rain’s set was lovely too – her keyboard player Nico Brandsen is particularly fab, his choice of sounds for everything was perfect.

And now we’s chillin’ in Amsterdam. The cost of parking anywhere near the middle of the city is so high that we drove the car out to the edge to the Park ‘n’ Ride this morning, and got the tram back in, and then slept for about four hours, catching up on all the missed sleeps after the late nights and early mornings of the last few days…

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top