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Nancy Naigle's Christmas Presents
This writer read
Christmas Joy and did not
want to put the book down, because the storylines and the characters
were so well developed that you felt like you knew them personally. Joy Holbrook one
of the two main characters in Christmas Joy learns that her Aunt Ruby in
Crystal Falls has been injured from an accident and so Joy travels from
her high profile job in the big city to the small town of Crystal Falls
to help out with feeding her aunt’s farm animals, do some Christmas
decorating and help out with Molly. You will not see the little girl
Molly in the movie edition, but as Nancy Naigle says it is difficult to
condense 70,000 or 80,000 words contained in a novel into a movie script
of approximately 20,000 words. So Nancy who is
Joy Holbrook? “The Christmas
story came from me. As a career girl (She was a Vice-President with a
financial institution) for a lot of years I was really proud (of my
career) and I missed a lot of birthdays, I missed a lot of family time
and it wasn’t until I hit forty and I started opening my eyes to the
kinds of things I was missing that I realized how important those things
were that I would never get back. Joy’s character is much younger than I was, but
the whole idea behind that story was that she was a professional girl
and she was very good at her job. Her aunt (Ruby) needed her help. She
had this big promotional opportunity right at her fingertips and being
there to handhold that and hopefully make that happen was important to
her. I wanted her to make the right decision, so it turned out good for
her. That is where the
whole story
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Stellar Album by Mandy Barnett
It becomes
immediately apparent on this album that the producers Marco Giovino
(Norah Jones, Robert Plant, and Patty Griffin) and Doug Lancio (Gretchen
Peters, John Hiatt, and Patty Griffin) ensured that Mandy Barnett was
accompanied by musicians who understood that their role was to
compliment Barnett. They become the perfect dance partners with Mandy
Barnett leading the way and like any truly great performance you find
yourself caught up in the moment. Tom West’s organ sets the mood, Viktor
Krauss is on bass, Giovino keeps beat on drums and Lancio is the
guitarist. Grammy Award winning sound engineer Gord Hammond from The
Nuthouse studio in Sheffield, Alabama does a superb job. Released on Dame Records, Mandy Barnett’s own
label and distributed by Thirty Tigers,
Strange Conversation is a
collection of songs that is a “must have” for anyone who truly
appreciates well thought out song selections that showcase a singer and
make you sit up and go “wow.” In 1962 The Tams released the song “It’s All
Right (You’re Just In Love),” and Barnett puts her own stamp on the
tune, as she brings it back to life with a new arrangement and a
stunning classic R&B performance. It feels like you just stepped into a time
machine and you find yourself in the midst of an era when R&B ruled the
day. Barnett’s phrasing is impeccable and you want to join in the
conversation when she sings, “Come
on tell me about this feeling now / I hear the birds are singing / I
hear the church bells ringing,” and the response is sung back to her
by Ann and Regina McCrary, “It’s
All Right you’re just in love.” Sign
us up for concert tickets! Mandy Barnett is the real deal! The McCrary
sisters
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Interview with Brad Cole
Brad Cole grew up
in a suburb of Philadelphia and despite the fact it was a burgeoning
scene for Doo Wop, Pop Music and Rhythm and Blues in the late 1950s and
throughout much of the 1960s, Cole was drawn to music far removed from
what most people his age were listening to at the time. “That is a somewhat amusing part of it, because
when I was a kid after a certain time I had no interest at all in
listening to AM radio and bubble gum Pop music. Even The Beatles and
stuff I became a real snob about. I was a Jazz purist and a Classical
purist and I was that way for much of the rest of high school. By the
time The Beatles’ Abbey Road
came out, which was 1969 that is when I started getting reacquainted
with mainstream Pop and Rock. I also liked Cream (Eric Clapton, Ginger
Baker, Jack Bruce). I came back to it, but I missed a chunk of it. I
definitely missed all of the stuff that was going on in Philadelphia.
Number one I wasn’t sure I was going to become a professional musician
and number two it wasn’t the kind of |
Karin Risberg and Angel Blue
Risberg has a 2019
tour planned with her friend Country music singer Cina Samuelson as the
duo Honky Tonk Angels, a duo that still performs at times with Kerstin
Dahlberg as the trio Three Chicks. The group Three Chicks has been
performing together since the 2010 Lida Country Music Festival in
Sweden, while Honky Tonk Angels made their debut in September of this
year (2018) when they performed at the Sweden Country Music SM. So where did this
all begin for Karin Risberg? Her answer is not surprising, as she
continues the long line of outstanding Swedish singers and musicians who
have come from small towns and villages throughout the country.
“I was born in a
small town called Skelleftehamn
and it is in the
north of Sweden, eight hundred kilometers north of Stockholm. It is very
close to the Arctic Circle. I grew up in a family with my mom and my dad
and a little sister. My mom used to sing in the choir and she also sang
for me every night when I was going to sleep. She was the only (musical
person) in our family. My father always encouraged me. He heard me
singing all of the time when I was a little girl. He was proud of me, so
he had me sing everywhere that I went with him. They started to pay me
with chocolates and things like that. He was a ship broker and he took
me onboard all of these big, big boats.
I got to sing when I was very little.
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Hayley Sales - "Like Never Before"
Sales, took time out from her busy schedule to
sit down with Riveting Riffs Magazine to discuss at length her album
Slightly Out of Tune, which
will be released in the spring of 2019 (She
has posted some songs on YouTube), her twin careers and to share a
little bit about her life. The self-described romantic co-produced her
album (and yes she really does
know her way around a recording studio) with her father Richard
Sales, known for his work as a producer and sound engineer with the
Grateful Dead, The Ramones and Miles Davis. The songs on
Slightly Out of Tune range
from those that invite the listener to dance, such as the opening track
“I Don’t Believe,” and the retro infused “Waiting It Out,” backed by a
stellar horn section and the soulful “Out of Tune,” to her romantic love
letter “Like Never Before,” co-written with Sharon Stone. Often punctuating our conversation with light
laughter Hayley Sales talks about her musical influences, “I have always
been in love with Judy Garland who was my first influence. When I was
five years old I was madly in love with her and that introduced me to a
different time. In some ways I was that absolute dork. I didn’t know
that Pop culture existed until I was eleven or
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Andrea Miller - Maybe Today
Andrea Miller recently released her new album
Maybe Today, composed and
arranged by Michael Cunningham, an album that they hope to tour with
full orchestral support. She talks about
the album, “They are all of Michael Cunningham’s arrangements and
compositions. It is almost like I am the voice of Michael Cunningham on
this particular album. These are his wonderfully orchestrated string
arrangements. A lot of his original material is on the album. We did some covers, “It’s All Right With Me,”
“The Water Is Wide,” and “You Would Be So Nice To Come Home To.”
He wrote everything else on the album.
I love his writing so much and he in turn likes my voice a lot,
so we decided to make an album together. Originally, we met
online through Facebook and he asked me to do a couple of songs in a
work for hire session work. We both really dug each other’s musicality.
One thing led to another and it took us about two years to finish the
album. It wasn’t funded by anything or anybody.” |
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Arrica Rose's New Album
In describing
Low as the Moon, Arrica Rose
says, “I think for me the theme became reaching for the silver lining
when it seems to be the most obscured and finding the brighter side when
hope seems to be lost. I went through some challenging times and people
around me were going through challenging times. There was a point when I
did not want to be working on anything and I used this set of songs to
help pull me through that place that I was in. It was cathartic. It
helped me to process some of the things that I was going through at the
time. These songs are
specifically written for this record. Everybody in the band and the
producer that I work with everyone was going through a bit of upheaval,
so it took a while to make this record. I started writing these songs
around 2015. I worked on this collection of songs for about six months
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Jesse & Noah and Neon Pike
Jesse says, “We
cut three songs to begin with and it was going to be a tip our toe in
the water kind of a thing, but we realized we might as well keep on
making an album.” Noah says that
they wrote about forty songs in total and then they picked the best ones
for this record. The album opens
with the up-tempo love song “Unconfined,” driven by Jesse and Noah
Bellamy’s acoustic and electric guitars and featuring some great fiddle
playing by Lillie Mae Rische who also provides background vocals for
this tune. Although, Jesse &
Noah have always played the guitars on their previous albums, we asked
why it seemed for Neon Pike that their talent as superb guitarists seems
even more highlighted. Noah says, “We
brought in more musicians and other engineers, so we were able to focus
more on our parts because of that, whereas before we were producing and
engineering a lot of it ourselves. It took the pressure off with not
having to do that.” To which Jesse
adds, “We could just come in and be the players and not have to worry
about (the rest). We were also able to cut it a little more live.” Both men are
multi-instrumentalists a
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Tom Saviano - Interview Part One
One might say that
Tom Saviano’s journey to becoming one of the most respected individuals
in the music industry began with his childhood in a multi-ethnic
neighborhood in Chicago. On the other hand it is far more likely that we
can say that odyssey began with his father Albert who was born in 1920. “My dad came through the depression. By the
time he was fifteen they were six years (removed) from the ’29 crash.
There were fourteen children in the family and there was not enough
money to buy each of the children instruments, so he waited until he was
married to my mom and I think she helped him buy his first instrument.
(When he was
growing up) he wanted to play so badly, while he watched his older
brothers play (an instrument) that he would play a paper accordion. It
was almost sad and funny at the same time. He was so hungry to be a
musician that once he got a horn he just ate it up. That is all he did. He found Zilner Randolph (Jazz trumpeter) when
he saw Lil Armstrong, Louis Armstrong’s
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Nobody's Girl Releases Waterline
Drummer J.J.
Johnson keeps the beat on “Waterline,” David Grissom on electric guitar
leads the way eloquently and bass guitarist Glenn Fukunaga is his equal. BettySoo from
Nobody’s Girl took time out from her busy schedule and her touring to
talk to Riveting Riffs Magazine about “Waterline,” and the new album. “The song
“Waterline,” is the most straight ahead Rock song on the record. It is a
little less Pop and positive. David Grissom’s guitar is all over it and
he is really fantastic. The song is about things slowly coming apart. The metaphor used
in the song is of water rising and you do not realize it until you are
under water. You are in the middle of a disaster. As you get older and
you get into adulthood there are things that don’t turn out the way that
you wanted them to and there were signs all along the road.
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Billy Thompson Sizzles
As for recording the songs, “Stranger,”
“Hourglass,” and “Phoine” at Ultratone Studio in Studio City, California
where it was recorded by Johnny Lee Schell (Marcella Detroit, John Lee
Hooker Jr., Bonnie Raitt, Joe
Cocker) and calling up old friends Tony Braunagel, “Hutch” Hutchinson
and Mike Finnigan, Billy Thompson says, “I feel the bluesier stuff
always works great with those guys. I recorded four songs, but I only
used three and the fourth one will be on the next album. I think those
guys are the cream of the crop when it comes to Blues based playing.
They are some of the best players in the world. Mike Finnigan played
with Jimi Hendrix when he was twenty-two and Tony Braunagel was with
Back Street Crawler, which became Free with Paul Rodgers and he played
with Eric Burdon.” The album opens
with the somewhat funky “Burn It Down Bernadette,” cuts to the jumping
“Phoine,” a song on which Thompson’s guitar seems energized by
Finnigan’s splendid organ and vice versa. The third song on the album “Black Rain,” is
poignant in its social commentary, Thompson explains, “Black Rain was
inspired by all of the shootings that have been happening for a good
long while. I was thinking about Ferguson when Ferguson first happened.
Then I got thinking about Virginia Tech and some of these other
instances, which were
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Hallmark Christmas Movies
Some may argue
that the Hallmark tradition of Christmas movies is just simply good
business for Crown Media the parent company and nothing more than that.
If that is the case then why is it good business? What makes so many
people want to tune into the movies each holiday season and why in
recent years, including 2018 have Hallmark Christmas movies consistently
been some of the top rated shows in their time slots? Perhaps it is a
longing on the part of many for a time when things seemed simpler.
Whether they actually were or not or perhaps our memories of yesteryear
have become a bit fuzzy is not the point, because that longing for a
simpler time, when stress is replaced even for a few minutes
with the joy of knowing that things can be better, is still real. What is often
overlooked at Christmas, as families get together or there are office
parties to go to and friends to visit, is there are those who spend
Christmas alone. That loneliness combined with the merriment that exists
and should exist at this special time of the year can often be painful
to those for whom Christmas just becomes
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Interview with Louise Goffin
Goffin says, “Releasing this song the week of
Valentine’s Day made sense. It’s an upbeat love song. The conventions of
this holiday push so many buttons. What’s love? Are people supposed to
feel less-than if they’re not in a relationship? The cultural messages
for Valentine’s Day are full of myths that have nothing to say about
love being a state of being. The myth is that love is a state of having.
“Good Times Call,” is not about roses, chocolates and chivalry. When we
are open to loving ourselves as we are while loving and allowing others
to be who they are, that’s when the good times call." Louise Goffin originally wrote “Good Times Call,”
with songwriter / producer Chris Seefried and singer / songwriter Ethan
Burns, with Burns being the intended singer. Goffin’s recording provides
us with the perspective of an empowered woman. "Whenever cars are involved in songs, it’s 98% the
man driving. It makes a nice change to hear a woman say what “Baby,
drive my car means," she says. Recently Riveting Riffs Magazine chatted with
Louise Goffin and we could have covered a wide variety of subjects that
relate to this very talented lady’s life, but we decided to ask her for
her
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Diane Marino at Her Best!
Marino talks about her decision to delve into
Lynne’s catalogue, “I wasn’t too familiar with her, but I heard the name
years ago. While I was doing a gig up in New York my drummer was Vince
Ector and he was Gloria’s drummer for the last fifteen years of her
life. He knew all of the material very well.
We were doing a tune called “I Am Glad There Is You,” which I
recorded on another album many years (earlier) and I didn’t realize it
was one of her signature songs. When we played it on the gig Vince told
me that. Then he said her big song was “I Wish You Love,” and that I
know and I sing it too. It got the wheels
turning and I investigated her catalogue of music. I thought these are
really cool tunes. I had not heard a lot of them. She also recorded a
lot of standards, but the songs that we picked out for this CD I had
never heard before.” As for why this particular selection of songs
she says, “It is a combination of the song and how she sang them. It is
great stuff. How do you put your finger on how it struck you
emotionally? When I listen to her versions, I go wow.
She was very dynamic and very soulful. I sang from the heart and
the soul and it just went right through me. That is what brought me to
these particular songs and in listening to more of her music I came to
appreciate who she was and what she did.” |
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