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Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon
The most poignant song from this beautiful and heartfelt collection of
songs is “Invisible Man,” and Paxton and McCutcheon would be quick to
tell you that this song is also about the invisible woman and invisible
child too. With words such as, “I am the invisible man / This really
was not my plan / Wherever you don’t look there I am / I am the
invisible man.” The song is
about the homeless, or the person you work beside that you never speak
with or some other person that society has overlooked or forgotten,
perhaps an elderly person. It draws attention to our need to do better.
John McCutcheon talks about his personal inspiration behind the song, “I
think I had just finished reading Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man (editor’s
note: not to be confused with HG Wells book of a similar title),
which of course is about the black experience in the United States.
During the pandemic, I remember contemplating the whole term of
sheltering in place and I thought there is a whole class of people who
have been sheltering in place for years in this country. Nobody knows
them. They are absolutely invisible.
Again, it was creating that character that isn’t me and isn’t Tom and
giving them a voice. I have no idea who came up with the line “wherever
you don’t look there I am.” Tom and I said, God wrote that song. We
aren’t that good.
It is not just the homeless down the street, it is the guy you work with
in your office or who shines your shoes or who picks up the garbage.
They are like accessories to most people. The guy who mows your lawn and
you pay him and you have no idea what his last name is. That is a kind
of invisibility. We are just looking through the other end of the
telescope to give a voice to that person.
Tom Paxton joins in, “I love that line too, but how about the
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Maia Sharp and Reckless Thoughts
From her home in Nashville (yes, she did indeed move from California a
few years ago), she talks about when the seeds for Reckless Thoughts
were first planted.
“The first song that I knew was going to be the beginning of a new album
project was “Kind.” I wrote that with Mindy Smith and Dean Fields in
2019. When we were finished with that one, I knew I needed to start
thinking about another project, even though Mercy Rising (the
previous album) wasn’t even out yet. I knew that one was already
finished. I knew that “Kind,” wasn’t going to be on Mercy Rising.
It already set the wheels in motion and I thought I guess I am going to
be making another record.
“Too Far Now,” was the next one. Those two songs are so different from
each other that they really presented a challenge. How am I going to
write or look through my catalogue for a body of work that makes sense,
so all of these songs can play together and sound like one animal. They
are the most different genre wise. I think my production, the vocals and
the lyric tone will be the thread through the songs. That is how it got
started, at least writing wise.
“Kind,” and “Too Far Now,” were done first, knowing that I had to get
them out, I had to get them recorded, so I could start to find a tone
for the next album. Those were done at Camp Senia studios, which is the
one that is owned by the drummer and bass player who played on this
record and on
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Misley - Fashion for Women
Misley - Designed and Made in Spain
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Rubén Yuste and Pretty Woman
Riveting
Riffs Magazine attended two performances in Barcelona and while still in
Barcelona we connected with several cast members with Rubén Yuste,
kindly consenting to be interviewed by us. (Editor’s note: We are
secretly hoping that when we relocate to Madrid in the fall that we will
be able to attend another performance.) Naturally
our conversation began with Pretty Woman the Musical, and we
wondered about the challenges presented by playing three very different
characters, and also if he had a favorite scene or two that he was in.
“My
favorite scene is when Mr. Thompson looks for Vivian to talk to her.
After realizing that she is a good person, |
Aida Ballmann - Actress - Spain
With recent films, and series completed in the past couple of years and
more in pre-production, we decided to start with one that was filmed
during COVID, a short film titled Five Minutes, written and directed by
Genesis Lence.
“I knew Genesis Lence from her photography and television series and
then she started writing and directing. This is not her first short
film. I think it is her second or third. She says she is very proud of
this (film) because it represents the way she wants to talk with her art
and it (reflects) her personality.
It was a very hard piece to shoot, because it was during the time of
COVID and we had to cancel it twice, before we could shoot it. That also
meant we had to do the rehearsals using Skype. The co-protagonist is my
sister Serai and it was the first time that we acted together. That was
great. She is younger than me and she has not done much (acting), but I
was really surprised to find out what a great actress she is.
The special thing about this (film) is it that it is just one piece and
she did not edit it by bringing together different
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King Of Air - Ben Brown
Ben Brown, an excellent guitarist, bassist and keyboardist is joined on
King Of Air, by saxophonist Tim Cappello (Tina Turner – “We Don’t
Need Another Hero,” Carly Simon, David Bowie and Peter Gabriel), Mick
Flowers who doubles as the drummer and producer, Matt Hubbard who also
plays keyboards, as well as the theremin and vocalists, Sally Allen and
Bianca Lugo. Jared Wenkman who also sound engineered Sayonara Sorrow,
is at the controls once again.
While the title song opens the album, it is the sixth track “Dancing
With the Village Girls,” that really grabbed our attention with an
almost Bowie like feel to it.
Ben Brown says of the song,
"Dancing With the Village Girls"
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Rachael Sage - New Album
She talks about the song, “One thing I wanted to convey with “Whistle
Blow,” is that moment when someone is able to find the inner strength
and to summon the courage to confront someone in a greater position of
power, whether it is in a workplace or in a relationship, when they know
that inappropriate boundaries have been crossed. When they have been
abused or wronged in some way. There are innumerable examples of this
every day when we watch the news. I have also experienced these dynamics
and just as a witness in society I see it recurrently. The story in the
video is interpreted through movement by the wonderful director Jenny He
and (we) were able to convey that specific moment when a human being is
able to say ‘No this is not right. I am not going to accept this anymore
and I am moving to a more positive space and away from this negative
energy and negative person.’
I
had not worked with Jenny before, but I saw some examples of her work
and I was blown away. I have never actually worked with a female
director in this capacity and it was exciting for me. She is very
talented and she trained at NYU. When we talked, we had a lot in common
and we shared a feminine sensibility and a specific sensitivity to music
that led to a wonderful
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Florence Dore
After spending an hour and one-half in conversation with Florence you
come away with deep respect for her insightfulness, smile at her quick
wit and due to her warmth and generosity you come away ninety minutes
later convinced that you must have been friends in another life.
We decided to begin with digging into the roots for her passions for
literature, writing and music. Where did this all begin?
She thoughtfully says, “I think it was the music. I would say the two
things are similar parts of me. It is my love of literary beauty related
to whatever that kernel of joy is when you are really small and your
enjoyment of music and your response to beauty that maybe is irrational
beauty and artistic beauty. I think they are
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If I Were the Moon, Children's Book
Let’s start with the song Jesse, “The song is an honest expression of
emotion and it was written for my daughter Lily. It was a song that came
out quickly and it felt beautiful. When I sang it live, people started
saying that should be a children’s book. That is how it came about.
The more you write you start coming back to themes that you realize are
important to you and that resonate with you. There were themes about
family, but I don’t think there were any in the children’s book realm.
Even this one happened organically. It wasn’t intended to be a
children’s book.
When COVID hit the lives of everybody changed in an instant. We were
thinking about different projects that we could pivot to. My wife works
in live events and she lost her job. I remembered what my fans had said
in their feedback to this song. I thought that sounded like a really
great idea and I became passionate
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Charlie Faye & The Fanimals
The album opens with the fun “7 Days of Fun,”
Charlie Faye talks about what inspired these songs, “Usually they were
things that just came to me as a parent and I would just think oh write
a song about snack time. They all come from different places. “Seven
Days of Fun,” I wrote, because Edie (Charlie’s daughter) and I had been
talking about the days of the week. I used to sing a song in Charlie
Faye & the Fayettes called “Seven Nights to Rock,” and in “Seven Nights
to Rock,” which I learned from a Nick Lowe recording. In (that song) you
get to yell out all the days of the week “(She mock yells out) Monday,
Tuesday…” I thought it would be great to have a song like that for kids
and Edie could learn the names of the days of the week. Guess what? It
worked. “Snack Time,” was obvious. Kids love snack time and everybody
loves songs about snack time. It is a time that already is generally
fun. I felt it was also important to write a song about bath time,
because when my daughter was younger,
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Beth Bombara Releases New Album
Confessing that she is really excited about this record she says, “We
were sort of coming out of COVID and we were getting back to normal.
When I wrote “Lonely Walls,” I was reflecting on my feelings and the
past year or so.
It started out as me reflecting on the pandemic, but I really wanted it
to be more open than that.”
The lyrics are open enough to interpretation that the listener might
find themselves thinking about a relationship or perhaps a difficult
time in their lives. It may also be as easy to interpret them as that
time during the pandemic that separated so many from the ones they
loved, whether they be romantic relationships or familial.
Beth Bombara goes on to say, that it (the song), “morphed into this
longing for one person.”
The melody meanders, an easy tempo, that sets the mood for more
reflections than missives.
She says about the fourth track, “Get On,” is a mixture of being about
procrastination, someone who is afraid to move ahead and just finds it
easier to make excuses for not moving forward.
“When I was writing this one, I was writing it to myself
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Misley - Fashion for Women
Misley - Designed and Made in Spain |
Diane Marino - I Hear Music
“I started (this
album) not long after COVID was in lockdown. I have lost track of the
years. What was that 2020 or something? A lot of people took advantage
of that time and there was a lot of creativity going on. That is
probably what happened here too,” recalls Diane Marino. Continuing she
says, “I was researching the songs and looking for the next project,
before COVID even hit and we said what are we going to do now. It forces
you to spend more time focusing on what you want to do. You weren’t
going anyplace. You weren’t working. You weren’t doing anything.
It
was (recorded in bits and pieces) and we have Chris Brown, our drummer
to thank for that. He has done all of my recordings. When COVID
prevented us from getting together in a studio in the traditional way we
thought it can’t be done, but it could. We are so used to playing with
Chris Brown, by instinct he knows how we play and he anticipates things
we will do musically. What Frank and I did, this is our secret formula
now, he would play electric bass and I would play electric keyboard,
because it is a lot easier to put that stuff down as a bed, a demo type
of thing. Chris can get those tracks filed and put the drum track to
that. I also had a scratch vocal on it. We had a click track going too
and he would sync up to that. As for the technical end I can’t explain
it, because that is Frank’s department. (she laughs) I don’t grasp it. I
just want to hear the music. We gave Chris maybe three songs to work on
at a time. He would send them back with the drum track and several
different ideas. We would like one way, but we weren’t sure yet and we
wanted to see what Chris could come up with.
Chris has a home studio that he does drum tracks in, and he actually
liked it, because it gave him the freedom not to have to watch the
clock. He could experiment
with different things and give us different ideas. He would say here is
one version and here is another version and we would pick out the one we
liked. We would sync it up to our tracks and then Frank would do all of
his bass tracks over again, so he could play upright (bass), and I would
do all of my piano tracks over, so I could play the acoustic piano here.
It is quite a process and everything else was layered on top of that. It
works great. It gives us that freedom of I don’t like what I did here,
so…When you are in a studio you are watching the clock and somebody else
is at the controls. We are just another customer to them. We had (with
this album) the complete freedom to experiment until we get what we
wanted.”
What they got
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Luke Leblanc
The very likeable artist said, “The whole time we were recording it, it
felt like everything melded together perfectly. It is a nice group of
songs. Erik Koskinen was the producer and I was very fortunate to be
able to surround myself with some good musicians too. It all just
clicked together very nicely.”
The title of the album has us stumped Luke.
“It is used a lot in psychology and one of the definitions is a
temporary defense against extreme stress. The person might lose
awareness of their identity and the awareness of where they are. I took
that term and as I have observed, and I think a lot of other people have
observed, as a collective society I think we are going through a fugue
state a little bit. In terms of a cultural and political divide (Many)
responses to generations of inequity and the pandemic are leading people
to take a step back. That is why I have the lines in the song, “Take
your mind off of it / I think we’re living in a fugue state.” Someone
told me the other day that a fugue is also a Classical music term. I
don’t know a ton about it, but it is like a chaotic sound. I think the
musical term came first,” he says.
Let
us take a step back. His first name Luke is after Old Luke in the song
“The Weight,” by The Band and his middle name is Young, because his mom
was a big fan of Neil Young, with whom he shares the same birthday.
“Neither of my parents played music and neither of them pushed me into
it. It was just my choice about something I was passionate about. My dad
was very supportive, as long as I had my homework done.
I appreciate artists like Neil Young, because they play whatever they
want to do at the time. Other musicians like Brandi Carlisle are still a
good example of that. If you try to put a genre on her, once you do, she
is going to go do something else,” says Luke Leblanc.
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Akash Sherman - Film Interview
As much as the entertainment industry is filled with stories of
successful performing artists who grew up in places like Los Angeles,
New York City and Nashville, there are an equal number of fabulous
stories of artists who grew up in obscure places, not obscure, because
they were unimportant, but more because one does not think of those
towns, cities and villages, as an incubator for creatives. Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada is one of those cities and this writer says that with
warmth and sincerity, as it is still the city considered to be my
hometown, even though I was born in Toronto.
Akash
Sherman, whose father and sister are both doctors and whose mother is a
pharmacist, one might have assumed would have been headed for more of an
academic career, in a cold, northern city, far removed from Canada’s two
Hollywood North cities, Vancouver and Toronto and where minus thirty and
minus forty degrees Celsius temperatures keep most people indoors,
unless you ski or snowboard. However, for the director and screenwriter
of the feature film Clara, which is experiencing a renaissance on
streaming platforms, and has been warmly embraced by mainstream
audiences and the science community worldwide, alas, it seems all but in
Canada, fascination with film started as a young child. This is where
our story begins.
Akash recalls his early influences, “When I was young and my parents
were busy and / or working they would plop my sister and I down in front
of the TV. We would watch the Disney animated movies. For me the
original Star Wars trilogy on VHS was pretty formative. It is a
tale that is often told by filmmakers of my generation and other
generations above me. Star Wars opened up so many doors in
people’s minds and made us think that anything is possible. As a young
kid I was pretty entranced by what was possible.
Fast forward a few years to the age of ten (we should mention he still
is only twenty-seven), I picked up my mom’s digital point and shoot
camera and I would play with Lego to create stop motion videos. I guess
at age ten or eleven I was already making little movies in stop motion
with Lego and Playmobile. Stop motion is taking multiple pictures of
little figurines and moving them frame by frame and inch by inch, so
that they are moving once you play all
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Actress Sara Deray
Those are the words of actress Sara Deray of Spain and she has had to
imagine a lot of things during her career, as she has played a nun (El
Sorbono del Cielo), an inmate in jail, a scientist who was the
mother to a cloned daughter (Órbita 9), she incredibly funny
as Mary Ann, in the television
series Yo Soy Franky (I Am Franky) for Nickelodeon (2016 –
Colombia), and she just finished her fourth season of the comedy series
El Pueblo, a Spanish Amazon Prime production, in which she plays
Maria Luisa.
Sara Deray’s ability to portray a broad spectrum of characters is due to
a combination of her skills as an actress and her culturally diverse
background.
She
explains, “My grandma was born in France. That was my mother’s mother.
She went to the United States when she was quite young and she decided
to become a U.S. citizen. She left her French nationality behind and
married an American guy. That was after she had my mom and she became
divorced from my grandfather. She then married the American guy. My
grandma married three times. The first time she married the father of my
mother who was a French guy and she got divorced when my mother was
fourteen. When my grandmother moved to the United States that is when
she got married the second time and then the American guy died. She then
married one of his best friends, because he had also lost his wife.”
You are thinking, well that is a bit diversified, but nothing that says
hey, look at this. Just wait! She continues, “I traveled a lot. I did
not grow up in Alicante (Spain). I grew up in Nigeria (she laughs). My
father was an engineer in the oil (industry), so he traveled for several
companies and sometimes there were American, Canadian, British or
Belgian companies. We traveled a lot, my parents, my sister, who is six
years older and me. When I was 18 months old, they took me by plane to
Nigeria and I spent my first six years there. I learned English in
Nigeria. I don’t remember learning languages. My mother always talked to
me in French, my father in Spanish and when I was in school in Nigeria
it was in English.”
We always came back here to Alicante, because my father’s parents were
here in Alicante (Spain). This was always the meeting point to come to.
Whenever my father’s contracts were over, we always came back to
Alicante. Then they would say okay Mr. Rodriguez
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