Misley - Fashion for Women

Misley - Designed and Made in Spain

If we told you that Madeleine Davis has lived a life full of adventure some might easily argue that is an understatement. She grew up the daughter of a Gospel singing mother, and a pharmacist father in Columbus, Georgia, near the Chattahoochee River, with one sibling, a brother at home and a sister eighteen years older, who had pretty much left home by the time Madeleine appeared on the scene.

Madeleine Davis had a lengthy career with Boney M (By the Rivers of Babylon, Rasputin) and a small sample of her work in the studio and / or live performances includes artists such as Precious Wilson, Hoyt Axton, Peggy March, Terence Trent D'Arby, Rick Astley, Klaus Doldinger, La Bionda and Amanda Lear. She was in demand by producers such as, Ralph Siegel, Tony Monn, Michael Kunze, Sylvester Levay, Giorgio Moroder and Frank Farian.

She sang in church as a young child, acted on stage as a teenager (there is a motorcycle story we will get to in a minute) and she was a soloist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, while still in university.

“My father was a lot older than my mother. He was fifty-nine when I was born and he was seventy-five when I was eighteen.

I grew up with a father who was in World War I. He had so much information for me when I went to school. When he was a paperboy the Titanic sank, so he knew the information from the newspapers of that time. He told me information about the Titanic and I went to school with this information. In my day we only had encyclopedias and my teachers said to me, this information is not in encyclopedias where did you get this? I said my father was a paperboy at the time and this is the information that he gave me that was in the newspapers. The kids thought this was a hoot. These days you would call my father Wikipedia (she laughs heartily).”

As for her childhood she says, “My mom was a Gospel singer who would do concerts in churches. She was well-dressed and she had a wonderful accompanist. I saw from the beginning how to (present) concerts even though she was not a professional.

When I was little, I sang a lot with my mom, because I had a natural alto voice to her soprano. I said to various people that I did not want to be in show business and my father said that is what you are for. I told him I wanted to be a doctor and I thought that would stop him from talking about show business, (because he was a pharmacist), but it didn’t. (She laughs and says) he said, no you are not cut out to be a doctor.

I was adamant about being a doctor and I joined the Red Cross as a candy stripe nurse at the age of twelve. I went to Martin Army Community Hospital not far from my hometown in Fort Benning.

My father was friends with colleagues all over and he happened to call someone at the army and (convinced them) to play a mean trick on me, but it made me think I am definitely not for the medical profession. My father and one of his nurse friends cooked up a little scheme. I wondered why this nurse wanted me to help her draw blood. That is not what candy stripers did. We were mostly comforting patients, giving them water and magazines.”

Let’s just say Read More

The Brother Brothers

The new album Cover to Cover by The Brother Brothers, released on Compass Records is a solid album pulling songs from diverse genres and artists and as the title suggests all of them are cover songs. Although, it is not unusual at some point during a band or a solo artist’s career to release an album of cover tunes, this is the first time The Brother Brothers have done so, because they are usually recording their original songs, as they are skilled songwriters and arrangers.

David Moss, one-half of the duo sat down with Riveting Riffs Magazine recently, “I think you can tell this from this record that most of the songs are older and not that modern. We really cherish the songs that we grew up with. We listen to a lot of new music too, but when we are making music, we gravitate to older music and an older sound.  

Any musician has an arsenal of songs that they didn’t write, even if they are songwriters and I think when you are sitting on so many songs, you do them yourselves and when you do them in your own style, you go man, I should really record one of these. I like my version and I want to share it.

During the pandemic we released our album Calla Lily and we had not been able to tour it, so we barely played those songs out on the road. Calla Lily slipped by the wayside, but we thought if we put out an album of covers, we could fill a concert with both albums at the same time. It also seemed like a very good time to come into the studio and put out (a covers album) with the pandemic and the way touring had been.

As for the diversity of songs on the album, David Moss says, “We wanted to make a good album that people would want to listen to and that we wouldn’t mind listening to. The other thing was we wanted to introduce people to (things like) you might know who Richard Thompson is, but I bet you haven’t heard this song (Waltzing’s for Dreamers”). You might not have heard of The Revelers, but this is one of their great songs (“If You Ain’t Got Love”). The James Taylor song (“You Can Close Your Eyes”) some people might have heard that song, but I felt like I hadn’t heard it. Adam had brought it up and he knows more James Taylor than I do. Judee Sill’s “There’s A Rugged Road,” if anyone hasn’t heard of Judee Sill that they might think I need to dig into that. It was the idea.  

This is a collection of songs that we have always loved and we just do them our own way.”

The album Cover to Cover opens with the Tom T. Hall song, “That’s How I Got to Memphis,” which at first listen sounds like a love song, but listen more closely and, “It is a song about why people go to places they go and that is the way I have always seen it. It is also a song about somebody who is always chasing something they can’t ever have. In this case it is a woman, but he talks about how he follows her to Memphis, but I think it is also a metaphor for why people go to (those) places. It is not always for the best or for a happy reason,” explains David Moss.

Continuing he says, “I love the melody and I love the way it feels when you sing it. I also love how it can be interpreted, Read More

Ariana Donovan Making A Difference

There is an early twenties something young woman living in a small prairie city in Canada who is already making her mark on the world of modeling, but not quite the way you might expect. Ariana Donovan from Regina, Saskatchewan has been an advocate for providing a safe environment in which models (and other independently employed people) can work and she has coupled that with building a career as a creative director. What is even more remarkable is she is forging her career, while attending university with a major in Human Justice and a minor in film. Oh, did we happen to mention that pre-pandemic she was the first model to grace the runway in her very first fashion show? Well, we do not want to tell Arian Donovan’s story for her, so we will let her tell you.

“Modeling was never actually an interest of mine. It was just something that popped up for me. I grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan and there is not a whole lot to do here. Modeling and fashion is one of the ways I kept myself entertained for six years now.

Originally, when I got into modeling I had been falsely scouted online by a predator, who used to be an agent for a really big agency in New York. My mom called their office and they let us know about it (that he was a predator), so I applied to a local agency and I was accepted. I think I was a little naïve about (the stalker), but after my mom called the office, it made more sense. I was gullible and I didn’t pay attention,” she says.

Remember this experience, because it starts to inform the decisions she makes later.

Continuing Arian Donovan says, “I started to develop self-confidence, but then I received this offer and even though it wasn’t true I still wanted to pursue modeling, because now the interest was there. Also, when I was a kid, I was really into dressing up. I would wear my dresses and plastic heels that you can wear around the house. Whenever my grandmother would pull out one of those disposable cameras that could be purchased at Shopper’s Drug Mart, I would stop crying and pose. It was an interest, but not one that I was conscious of until I received the fake offer. I was sixteen when that happened.”

“I can’t name them, but the first agency scammed me. I was forced to pay seven hundred dollars for a photoshoot, just to see if they would sign me. Everything I did with them afterwards I had to pay a lot of money to do work for them and to be promoted. I found out later on that is sort of a normal thing, not the test shoot part, but the agency signing fee and it is never as expensive as (I paid). You have to do that every time. They were investigated and found to be scamming (others) and by that time I had already moved to Vancouver and I had signed with a different agency there. Most of the work that I did with the first agency was trade for print with photographers here.

Modeling was never actually an interest of mine. It was just something Read More

                                                   Carrera Couture

Woman On The Moon

Giulia Millanta who makes her home in Austin, Texas and is originally from Italy is a perpetual songwriting machine. Shortly after releasing her album Tomorrow Is A Bird two years ago, she began writing more songs, the best of which now appear on her album Woman On The Moon, to be released on April 8 (2022).

She explains, “It is part of my natural cycle. I release a record and then I take a little bit of time to promote and play shows and regroup. I then start writing again. I never write for a record, I just write.

Once I have thirty or forty songs, I start looking at them and choose what to record. I had a few songs that I wrote early in 2021 or maybe the end of 2020. I write often, but not every day, there are people who are way better than me at that. I write fairly consistently, probably every week. If you think about the fact there are fifty-two weeks in a year and I write every week, by the end of the year I have forty to fifty songs. Probably half of them nobody should ever hear and half of them are decent.

This one was different than my previous records, because I didn’t record it all at once and normally, I do. I (usually) sit down with all of my songs and decide which ones I want to record. I then go ahead and book my session and record everything in three days. This time I did it differently. In June of last year, I approached Gabe and I said, hey I have a few songs. Can we record them, because I think I want to release some singles? I wasn’t planning on a record. (She starts to laugh) We started recording and then one thing led to another. I ended up with twelve songs in the summer. Then in the fall I got back from Italy and I was making plans to release a record, but I wasn’t sure about some of the songs and I went back to Gabe and I said I have two other songs I want to record to replace the other two that I wasn’t sure about.

It wasn’t like a process that I was going to the studio to make a record. It was (more like) let’s record a few songs. Oh, let’s record a few more. Oh, all of these songs belong together and I have a record. It kind of happened is what I am saying.”

The album opens with the very pretty “Mad Man On the Moon,” which put the spotlight clearly on Giulia Millanta’s beautiful and ethereal vocals. The song is 3:33 in length and we cannot improve upon Giulia Millanta’s own words to describe her song, “Floating in a liquid sky, bathing in moonlight, wrapped in a tapestry woven from a dreamy guitar and a lonely piano, while the kick drum beats like a distant heart.”

“(The song) “Mad Man On the Moon,” was written one night in the middle of the pandemic and I had no idea what I was writing about when I wrote it. I sat at the piano and I wrote that song in twenty or thirty minutes. It is magical when that happens and I shouldn’t even take credit for it. It is a musical, magical thing. It is like dictation and someone is dictating to me. I don’t want to sound too crazy or do woo woo, but I am not coming up with anything, I am just Read More