Tamar Berk - The Grahams - Stephen Wilson Jr - Jacob Weil
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| Photo - Brandon Mosquera |
Noted indie darling Tamar Berk is excited to unveil tiny injuries, her third solo album. The album itself follows singles “drop in the bucket” and “if u know, u know”. To celebrate the album’s release, Tamar Berk is also elated to share the music video for “cash out”, the album’s latest single. An array of emotions are explored throughout tiny injuries courtesy of songs that incorporate elements of indie pop, alternative rock, and singer-songwriter slow burns.
Lead single "drop in the bucket" shows the evolution of emotions over time in a relationship. Alternative rock and indie pop are cleverly blended to create a fun and energetic sound. With its engrossing guitar and assertive vocals, this song evokes Liz Phair and Snail Mail with its wistful synth and pulsing guitar. The second single "If you know, you know" uses Tamar Berk's passion to explore existential crisis caused by loss, reminiscent of Soccer Mommy and Aimee Mann. With latest single "cash out" Tamar Berk blends cinematic, guitar-driven alternative pop with indie folk flavor on a track that is captivating and soothing.
When discussing her new single, Tamar Berk writes: “In the middle of moving my mother from her house to an apartment, I wrote the two sentences for "cash out" on one of those small airplane napkins. It had been a year since my father died, so I knew this would happen, but I wasn't prepared for the emotional devastation I would undergo during those two weeks. After packing up the house and going through all of my dad's belongings, I was absolutely crushed. With each passing day, I became more and more depressed and numb. The shock was still fresh in my mother's mind, but she was mostly angry and scared, and I was dealing with my own private hell. My next stop was to get home, so I took the little napkin they give you with your drink and I wrote "I've got no promises left in me, I'm getting ready to cash out." When I got home, I sat down at the piano and wrote it. As I had written it that day, I pretty much kept it the same.
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The Grahams have shared their new single “A Good Man,” which appears on the duo’s upcoming self-titled album, out September 8 via 3Sirens Music Group. Accompanied by a playful music video, “A Good Man” is a vulnerable reflection on the indelible impact of experiencing true love. The new single is one of ten reimaginings from The Grahams, which finds the duo revisiting fan favorites to reflect their artistic growth over the last decade.
“‘A Good Man’ was never a question for this project,” shares Alyssa Graham, who is one half of The Grahams with Doug Graham. “I think people love it because it’s so honest. The reimagining plays up that naked honesty with a fresh layer of tenderness and playfulness — and less of its old twang.”
“A Good Man” follows the anthemic “Glory Bound” and the serotonin-boosting “The Wild One,” which have been praised by Magnet Magazine, RIFF Magazine, The Alternate Root, Americana UK, Americana Music Association and more. The Grahams’ new self-titled album takes 10 songs from their catalog and pours them through a new filter – what they’ve learned, how they’ve changed, and perhaps most centrally, how they sound today. While these songs bear some resemblance to their Americana roots, they lean harder in a new direction, weaving threads of the duo’s other influences: the bands they grew up with, the input of collaborators, and the ever-evolving love affair that now includes their child. Track by track, the changes are transformative, stripping the songs down in some cases and dressing them up in others.
The Grahams credit much of their newfound ease to the record’s team who are seasoned all-stars in their own right. Recorded at their own Nashville label and studio 3Sirens, the new album was engineered by their longtime friend and producer Dex Green, and produced by Dan Molad (Lucius, Coco) who they first worked with alongside the late Richard Swift on Kids Like Us. In addition, these recording sessions feature Ray Jacildo (The Black Keys) on keys, Jack Lawrence (Jack White) on bass, and Lucius, who lend mesmerizing backing vocals to several tracks and feature on “Lay Me Down.”
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Southern Indiana-born, Nashville-based artist Stephen Wilson Jr. has released new single “patches” from his upcoming debut double album søn of dad, out September 15 via Big Loud Records. With its deceptively breezy melody and easygoing chorus underscored by melancholic slide guitars, the song touches upon the importance of learning to live with the scars, scratches and holes in our lives. Today, Wilson also announced that he will join The Lone Bellow on tour for another string of dates this winter.
Of the song, Wilson shares: “My scars got scars. Graffiti on graffiti on graffiti. ‘patches’ is a playful song with a serious message. A life lived not avoided. øne packaged with consequences and fibrosis. A built-in collagen-based repair system showing the world the road map to where we’ve been. Wearing scars we’ve earned like we’ve earned ‘em.”
Informed by Wilson’s wildly diverse background as a boxer, a scientist (he has a degree in microbiology and chemistry from Middle Tennessee State University) and a songwriter, søn of dad is a 22-song tribute to his late father, to be released exactly five years to the day of his death. Album centerpiece “Father’s Son” and its stirring music video received praise from CMT, Whiskey Riff and Rolling Stone who named it one of the “Best Country Songs of 2023 So Far.”
“Writing and making this album has been very therapeutic for me to learn who I am and what my existence looks like after my father. Because life has to go on,” Wilson says. “I'm living my own life, but it's like his death bookended what life he should have had onto mine and I'm carrying it around like a train car.”
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After years of crisscrossing North America, Europe, and the U.K., playing in bands such as Sam Weber and Luca Fogale, Jacob Weil found himself with a collection of his own songs that he was ready to share. The indie-folk debut record, Lived In, was produced by Sam Weber. The album’s production is fast, innovative, and intelligent, and the songs are filled with strength, grit, tenderness, courage, and nostalgia. And, like a string of images, Weil leads us through observations and experiences that have led him to where he is now.
Co-written with Luca Fogale, the focus track “9999” is about multiple realities – more specifically it represents the nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine ways out of ten thousand that your life could have gone, had you made one specific decision, as opposed to another. It’s a reflection on a life, a relationship, whatever, where you made a decision, and things ended up one way instead of another.
In this situation, the song is about a relationship that felt so right, where everything was so perfect, and yet it didn’t work out. It’s about imagining a multitude of realities, in which, if you lived the same life 10,000 times, you just happened to be living in the one where things didn’t work out.
“The album started off as a collection of songs from different periods of my life – periods of significant growth and change,” explains Weil. “I didn’t begin with a set throughline between them, but it became apparent later on as I was looking back at them that they all shared a commonality - a reflection on what it feels like to be part way through one’s life and have a mind, body, spirit and even home that feel ‘lived in.’”
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