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Woman On The Moon
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.
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Carla Olson - Triple Threat
The seeds for Americana Railroad, the album, began to take
root in the early 1990s with Carla Olson, Gene Clark and Saul Davis,
Carla’s manager and husband.
Carla Olson says, “It was a nice idea to be a vehicle for a couple of
Gene’s songs, one of which is “I Remember the Railroad,” and not many
people know about it unless you are a big Gene Clark fan. Also, his
songs, “Train Leaves Here This Morning,” and “Kansas City Southern.”
Gene was a railroad guy. I remember buying a package of shirt patches
that they used to sell in train stations and train shops and I bought
four or five of the Rock Island Line. I gave a couple of them to Gene
when we were first hanging around together in the eighties. He said this
is so cool I am going to sew them on my jean jacket as soon as I can. He
was a huge reason why we tried to cobble this together. The other song
was The Long Ryders’ song that Stephen McCarthy wrote called “Here Comes
That Train Again.”
Those were the songs that started the ball rolling.”
We wondered what attracted Carla Olson to create a concept album around
the theme trains.
She explains, “I am a child of the fifties who walked home with her
buddies, while listening to The Beatles, the Stones
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French Designer Alice Berry Atelier
Alice
Berry Atelier
website
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Madeleine Davis - One of a Kind!
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
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Sylvia's New Album
The opening song for the album “Avalon,” transports the listener to
Camelot and the days of King Arthur. Sylvia and Verlon Thompson wrote
“Avalon,” a beautifully orchestrated song with lush vocals by Sylvia.
For any child, any teenager, any adult whoever wished you could close
your eyes and open them to find yourself in a magical place, Sylvia
invites you to take her hand to travel to a place where the walls are
made of freedom and every tear becomes a shining star.
Normally, we would not credit so many musicians, but they earned their
due on “Avalon,” guitars, both electric and acoustic by John Mock, as
well as mandolin and percussion. Matt McGee played bass, Skip Cleavinger
played the Uilleann pipes, oboe by Somerlie Pasquale, Emily Bowland on
clarinet, trumpet (Jeff Bailey), French horn (Jennifer Kummer), violins
by Conni Ellisor and Mary Kathryn Van Osdale, viola (Betsy Lamb) and
cellist Nicholas Gold.
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Kincső
Nóra
Pethő
Obviously, only the Gaia part is taken from the Greek goddess, as
Kincső
Nóra
Pethő
explains, “I
am like a computer program from the future who becomes a real person by
the end of this 70-minute show. It was called Heroes of the Future
and it was part of Planet Budapest 2021. There were about fifty
actors and actresses working on this project, which was intended to
raise the interest of kids for protecting the environment. For one week
(in early December) the program ran from morning until evening. It was a
wonderful experience to see how enthusiastic the kids were! I felt great
about contributing to such a good goal!”
Continuing
she says, “We
talk to the children about how in the year 2100 there is not enough air,
and the environment has been destroyed. (The message is) they have to be
conscious of what they are doing in the present in 2021.
When we had some rehearsal groups and I could see a small guy, who was
ten years old and he wore glasses. I was sitting in a box and at first,
they could only hear my voice. They could not see me. I could see the
boy talking to the other kids. We wanted it to be
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Beatrix Löw-Beer
Artists such as
Beatrix Löw-Beer
are the reason why people are discovering the saxophone for the first
time. When you watch her concert performances or videos to promotional
videos everything from her movement to her attitude and her costumes
exhibits an exuberance for performing music. One is never left with the
impression that you are watching someone playing an instrument, because
her saxophone becomes an extension of her persona.
Take us back to where this all began.
“I grew up in Augsburg, which is one hour from Munich, which is the
capital of Bavaria. It is in the south of Germany, very close to
Austria. Augsburg is the third largest
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Rain Perry - A White Album
She says, “It is definitely a concept album. It
is somewhat of a sequel to my album Cinderblock Bookshelves, and
it was a memoir in music about me growing up as a hippie kid raised by
my dad. This record, A White Album, is me looking back at my same
life and my same family, but through the lens of race. It is called A
White Album, because it is me telling my story. I think most larger
topics are best addressed through people and it is my way of wading into
a fraught conversation and to talk about some issues that we seem to be
having a hard time talking about right now.” Although the
common thread is raising awareness of societal issues, the songs on the
album do not come across as preachy or even protestation, but instead
seem to be asking the question, why are we still here after all these
years, far removed from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and yet
in many ways the needle seems to have barely moved. “Thank you, that
is what I was shooting for. I think the best way to empathize is getting
to know somebody and to see the way they are trying to solve the
problems we are all trying to solve, how to be happy, to be fulfilled,
and to be successful in life. I don’t think anybody really changes by
being lectured.
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Sayonara Sorrow - Ben Brown
He says, “The song, “What Will Happen to All
that Beauty,” was inspired by novelist and activist James Baldwin. James
Baldwin was a writer and activist in the sixties and seventies. I was
reading some of his writings a few years ago and the line “What Will
Happen to All that Beauty?” is a direct quote from one of his essays
called The Fire Next Time. At the end of his essay, he talks
about what will happen to the beauty that is blackness. He equates
beauty with blackness. He says what will happen to the beauty of
blackness, in the United States if we don’t reconcile the racial
injustices. He said this in 1968. When I read that line it sounded
profound and like a great title. Shortly thereafter I heard music in my
head that seemed to fit the mood and the tone, so it went from there. I
made a YouTube video with a quote from James Baldwin and some stock
footage of 1960s civil rights activism.”
Ben Brown takes the lead vocals on the song,
“What Will Happen to All
that Beauty,” while producer Mick Flowers lays down
the drumbeats, Jeff Brown plays bass
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Julia Helbich - Actress / Host
Acting represents just one of the many facets of Julia Helbich’s career
and education, including, her television hosting in which she has
established a noteworthy career, as an interviewer of top athletes, both
American and European, she also has an MBA Global Management, an MBA in
Business Administration, two bachelor’s degrees, one in political
science and the other in the arts.
For now, her primary focus is on acting and continuing to interview
others.
“It is a tough decision to go to a new road in your career, but that is
what you have to do. You have to go a few more steps, to see where it
(takes you) because if you don’t you will stay in the same place,” she
says
Finding herself attracted to the arts is not an accident with Julia
Helbich.
“It
is definitely in the family. Let’s start with my parents. My dad,
Wolfgang Helbich was a
very famous conductor and my mom Ortrun Helbich sang in my father’s choir. That is how
they met! Later on, my mom managed my dad, because he traveled all over
the world conducting. He was an amazing conductor and musician. He was a
typical musician and conductor who worked late at night. He also
composed his own
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Laura Blossom - Madrid's Finest
Laura Blossom is what many would consider to be a late bloomer when it
comes to acting.
“I started acting when I was twenty years old. My uncle,
Balbino Lacosta is an actor in Madrid and I often went to the theater to
see him. He was the only (person in the arts) in my family. My
grandmother and my mother played piano, but as a hobby,” says Laura
Blossom.
She explains another factor that led to her pursuing a career in the
arts, “There was an acting course at the university where I was studying
art history and I thought why not and I loved the course.” Laura Blossom grew
up in Zaragoza, the capital of the autonomous region of Aragon located
in northeast Spain. The city is located between Madrid and Barcelona. “It is a big city, but not as big as Madrid. There are theaters there, but I had to move to Madrid, because in Zaragoza you can’t live from art and from acting, because
“It is a big city,
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Misley - Fashion for Women
Misley - Designed and Made in Spain |
Executive Producer Jeanette B. Milio
Jeanette B.
Milio’s story begins in a small town outside of Cologne, Germany, where
she was raised by a single mother, who was a hairdresser. At first
glance this would appear to be an inauspicious start and far removed
from the life she built as a movie mogul, but she credits in part, her
success to lessons learned from her mother (more about that in a
minute). “I didn’t have any
idea of what this industry would be like.
The
one thing I remember that drew me to storytelling even as a child, is
that I would come up with little stories and I would engage all the
children on our street to perform the stories in Saturday morning
theater pieces on the stairs in front of our house. I invited all of the
other neighborhood kids to come and watch the plays and to pay ten
pennies. I think I was ten or eleven when I started doing that.
I liked to tell a story and I liked to play with kids on the street, so
I thought maybe we can do something here that everyone benefits from. At
the end of the play that we performed we shared the money and we bought
candy with it.
The storytelling was always in my brain, because I was a bookworm and I
liked to write. I have always done that even as a child.
I studied business
and I never really went into the entertainment industry. My first
exposure was when I worked for a temp agency, while I was studying. The
temp agency placed me as a secretary to replace a secretary who was
going on vacation at RTL television, which is a larger German network
that is located in Cologne. While I was there it gave me the first sense
of what it was like to work in this type of environment. Lucky for me I
worked in the entertainment department where we produced all of the
shows that we had bought as formats from the U.S., like Price is Right,
Family Feud and so forth. We produced those formats for the German
network, as German game shows. As the secretary I was the hub for all of
the producers. At any given time, we had between thirty-five and forty
producers working on these different shows.
I was there for five years and then I was offered the (opportunity) to
run a show for another network station that was a German sports channel.
That was a daily health magazine show that ran every day at noon. It was
the first time that I produced a show on my own, with a team of segment
producers who were working for me.
I started working in Germany, first with network stations and then I was
hired by a production company in Munich to be a film producer. I started
working on a television series for ARD, which
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Ana Muñozo - Costume Designer
Ana Muñozo studied fashion design and in fact
spent four years at the beginning of her career in the industry and
established a fashion brand with some colleagues.
“On white fabric
we hand painted the prints ourselves and we made a color chart for every
season. We designed
accessories such as ties, fans, umbrellas, scarves and dresses.
Actually, the original idea were nightshirts, I remember when I showed
them to a client, she told me that she saw them as dresses and I said,
"as long as you sell it, I don't care if they wear it to dinner or to
dream." We did everything ourselves, the boxes, the labels, they were
exclusive and on the label the client could see the number of the
series. (There might be) a series of fifteen and you bought number four,
therefore you knew that there were only fifteen of that model. We did
fashion shows in different places like the international "fashion cafe"
and we also participated in some collective exhibitions. I also worked
at different times as a stylist for several publications,” she says.
Ana Muñozo grew up with her parents and one older sister in a rural area
outside of Barcelona, before they moved into the city.
Her ties to both the fashion world and theater run several generations
deep, “My mom was an excellent tailor. I grew up surrounded by buttons,
fabrics and sewing.
My great-great grandfather and his siblings acted in his village since
the theater companies did not go there. His brothers were the actors,
and he was the promoter. This was the connection my family has with art
and fashion,” Ana Muñozo explains.
She continues, recalling, “I spent most of my time drawing. I was
drawing all day and then I decided to draw clothes for my dolls. My
mother made dresses for my dolls, but she wanted to know what I had
drawn. My mother made the dresses that she wanted, but I said mom! (you
can hear the childlike inflection in her voice as she recalls)! She
sewed what she wanted. They were beautiful but different than my
(drawings).”
During her teenage years, “If I said to my mother for example, I want a
jacket for this weekend, my mother would make it for me in a day. It was
incredible.
I was influenced by the fashion of the moment, but I never wanted to
have to wear my designs. This is weird. I think this is weird. I think
in that moment I didn’t know what I
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Derek Siow - Actor Interview
Before we get into
Derek Siow’s acting let’s spend a moment or two talking about his other
passion, screenwriting. “I write sci-fi,
drama and comedy and I write mainly because I just crave that creative
outlet. In my younger days I wrote a lot of songs (oh right we forgot to
mention his music, but we will!) but my writing is more focused on
screenplays now. I was really fortunate last year when one of my comedy
scripts placed as a semi-finalist one of the screenwriting competitions
so I’m always looking at the various options on where to take my
projects,” he says. Derek Siow’s acting career got a big push in 2013 when he played the character Lee in the feature film Piercing Brightness.
“This was a very thought-provoking film. It was more a piece of art than
anything else and it was screened at various film festivals, as well as
the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary
Arts (London). My character Lee was a Chinese immigrant that meets this
local British woman and her mother who is an alien seeker. It explored
the similarities between aliens from another world and people from other
countries. A lot of the themes are still relevant today,” he explains.
Speaking of aliens, Derek Siow is passionate about the science fiction
genre, but he assures us he has both feet firmly planted on this planet.
Elaborating on that he says, “I love everything about science fiction,
and I have ever since I was a kid. In science fiction, you can just let
your imagination run wild, there’s no limits. Growing up in the 80s, I
was a huge Star Wars
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Cozy Rebel
A Collection from drezz2imprezz and Beatrix Reuschel
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Maia Sharp - New Album
The person in “Things to Fix,” stands in contrast to “John Q Lonely,”
from Maia Sharp’s 2008 album Echo, and he was also dealing with a
relationship that had come to an end.
She explains, “It shows that I
have been doing it long enough that we can compare the end of a
relationship thirteen years ago compared to the end of a relationship
now.
“John Q Lonely,”
is just a crab and his reaction to being hurt is just takes his football
and he is going home. He is not going to play this game anymore. He
closes himself off. His reaction is to pout. If love didn’t like me then
I’m not going to like love.
“Things to Fix,” is a pretty different mindset. It is open and she is
aware enough to see that there is something at the very top of my list
that I’m avoiding, but the crux of the song is procrastination. It is
when you have something in front of you that you should really be
prioritizing. All of a sudden, the screw in the doorknob is the
most important thing, because you will do anything to distract yourself
from the most important thing you should be working on.
The biggest difference between the songs is “John Q Lonely,” was a title
that I had, and I brought it to my co-writer Mark Addison who I
had been writing with on and off since my first album. It was from a
phrase that we liked, and we created a character. “Things to Fix,” is
real. I moved to Nashville at the end of 2019, and I found my place a
couple of months later. Anytime you move into a new house there is
always something. There are little things that…as cool as the previous
owners were, there are always little things.
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