Photo Courtesy of Charlie Faye & The Fayettes is Protected by copyright © All Rights Reserved
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Charlie Faye & The Fayettes Photo Courtesy of Charlie Faye & The Fayettes is Protected by copyright © All Rights Reserved |
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Charlie Faye & The Fayettes
“In fact that happened at a show of ours last weekend. Someone who
wasn’t really familiar with us, came up to us after the show and that
person said I thought these were all songs from the sixties until you
said something about that you had written all of these songs. I think
that happens a lot,” says Charlie Faye. The Whole Shebang opens with a song co-written
by Charlie Faye and Bill Demain, “1-2-3-4,” feels like it stepped out of
the sixties, but more importantly resonates with the audience in 2019.
The first four lines recall that feeling of meeting “the one” with “1,2,3,4,
That was all it took / A heartbeat and a look, and I was so gone / Felt
my whole world tilting left and right / And suddenly a light just came
on…” It is easy to
imagine being at a Charlie Faye & The Fayettes concert and everybody
being up on their feet dancing to their music. These are songs that
their fans are going to be singing back to them and singing with them. Bill Barrett
delivers an outstanding harmonica solo on “1-2-3-4.” The second song on the album
The Whole Shebang “I Don’t
Need No Baby,” showcases the vocals of all three ladies and in our
opinion is the best song from an outstanding collection of tunes. The
song was written by Charlie Faye. This song is so good that you will
love it whether you are eight years old or eighty years old. The song is
a conversation between a woman and a man, as
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Hope Juber Interview Part One
“I have had readings of my movie that I wrote
with my partner Ellen Guylas (Full
House, Newhart,
Three’s Company,
Who’s The Boss?) I am very
passionate about this particular project, because it is totally mine,”
says Hope Juber. For those not familiar with her work, among
other things she has acted in, worked on and produced the television
series for, movies of and musicals based on
Gilligan’s Island and
The Brady Bunch, both of
which were created by her father Sherwood Schwartz. “I had the idea
for this movie a few years ago and I brought it to my partner Ellen
Guylas and we started talking about it. It was the only project I ever
took to my dad. I told him all the different ideas I had and what I was
working on. When I took him this one he said you keep going with this
one, because this is your commercial hit movie. He said I want you to
keep going. Will you promise me you will? I said yes. I have been
working on it for a long time and I am hopeful, because this is a movie
that has to be made. It is a very expensive movie, so it involves major
studio involvement and that is not easy to do. It is going to take me a
while. I won’t say exactly what it is now, but it is a big family movie.
I am very passionate about it. Right now what I am focusing on is casting the
Brady reading. We have a reading of
A Very Brady Musical, which
is going up in New York in February. We are going to be doing a reading
for a couple of producers and we would like to get that up on the stage.
It is coming up to the fiftieth anniversary of The Brady Bunch, which is
amazing to say that, but it is true. We would like to get a production
of the musical going. We are thinking of an Off-Broadway production.
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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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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
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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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Nichole Wagner
Nichole Wagner says, “(The song) “Winner Take
All” is interesting to me, because a lot of my songs tend to be very
storytelling, so they cover a large period of time. “Winner Take All,”
is about a moment shorter than the actual song. It is that last few
seconds while the sun was setting on this breakup that I was going
through, but that is not when I wrote the song. I wrote the song a
couple of years after the breakup. Things
in your mind get triggered and you think about what it was like to be in
those very few seconds and if anything could have possibly changed the
outcome. It is a song that came together fairly quickly
and I wrote it in maybe an hour and one-half, which is also unusual for
me. I tend to sit around with songs and work with them instead of just
letting them come. There were a couple of verses that got cut, because
they didn’t say anything new.
They just delved into more of what went wrong in the
relationship. It turned out it didn’t really matter, because the song is
not about the relationship, so much as it is about the last few
seconds.” As to whether or
not Nichole Wagner finds it easier to write about those more personal
times, while still sitting with those feelings or if it is
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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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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.
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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.
All of us have lived in Texas for a long time and I grew up around a lot
of flood culture it just seemed like a very salient metaphor for us,”
she says.
As for why the group decided to name the album after the song
“Waterline,” BettySoo says, “We had the most emotional investment in
that song. We also felt that the forming of the group, the record deal
and with all of the momentum that it was a demarcation point for all of
us. Even though, it is a grim marker, a waterline just expressed how we
felt.”
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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 to a year and then we started making the record.”
In her songwriting Arrica Rose likes to create word pictures with tones
and shades others seldom, if ever use and it draws the listener in. “I am trying to
provoke a feeling. I am not trying to be so precise in my wording in an
actual scenario, but I am trying to describe said scenario that will
capture the most feeling for my listeners. I utilize that in songs,” |
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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 not police
oriented shootings, such as San Bernardino with the terrorists. It is
making me ill. If you think about these schools it just keeps getting
worse and worse with the copycat scenario.
It is just too much and I felt
like I needed to write something. I just want to say how can we stop
this? People need to think about it. |
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Best Selling Author Nancy Naigle
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.
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All written material, all photographs and all designs are protected by
copyright © and patents by the writers, photographers, editors,
designers, musicians, songwriters musicians and filmmakers who contribute to
Riveting Riffs Magazine or have by consent allowThe 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 not police oriented shootings,
such as San Bernardino with the terrorists. It is making me ill. If you
think about these schools it just keeps getting worse and worse with the
copycat scenario. It is just too
much and I felt like I needed to write something. I just want to say how
can we stop this? People need to think about it. |
