Ahead of her debut headline tour in early 2022, rising Hurworth-on-Tees soloist Jodie Nicholson has unveiled a spine tingling live session of her single ‘Second Sun’ – filmed by Jodie Canwell at The Old Church Studio, Northumberland.
Taking her cues from artists including Daughter, Warpaint, Lucy Rose, Bombay Bicycle Club, Pink Floyd and Laura Marling and her Dad’s love of prog rock, Nicholson subtly blurs the lines of genre expectations with warm soundscapes of indie, electro and folk-pop – with her ethereal vocals remaining constant over a diverse, explorative ground.
Nicholson’s songwriting explores what it means to feel alone in a familiar world, cradling vulnerability and loss with aching keys, pensive lyrics, mellow electronics and atmospherics from everyday, solitary moments.
In the intimate new session of ‘Second Sun’, Jodie reminds herself that sometimes you need to have faith in things getting better. “It’s one of those songs that’s shifted meaning as time’s gone by,” she tells, “though it began as a very personal, vulnerable thing, I think it resonates with a lot of people and serves as a big connector whenever I play it live. It’s good to be hopeful.
There’s always something really special to me about sharing vulnerable music in churches; big, wide open spaces where the sound travels for what feels like miles. The Old Church Studio is such a beautiful space and I’ve quietly been a fan of Jodie Canwell’s work ever since I first saw it. This felt like the perfect space and opportunity to create something beautiful together. I hope people love it as much as we do.”
Following videos for “The Comet” and “Animals in the Kitchen,” as well as a single-release for the opening track “Welcome,” Dylan Cox’s debut project, A Place to Meet, is finally out on all streaming platforms today.
Dylan Cox’s new EP was recorded in April of 2021 in the studio of Abraham Rounds and Sarah Walk in Los Angeles, who both produced the record. Abe, a percussionist, drummer, and composer who plays in the band of Meshell Ndgeocello, and often collaborates with Blake Mills, Andrew Bird, and Ethan Gruska, brought a deep musical knowledge and inspiration to the recording and its arrangements. Sarah, an accomplished and brilliant songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist was there to sew together many of the poetic meanings into arrangements. Also featured on the album is Jake Sherman on keys, a frequent collaborator with Abe and who also plays with Andrew Bird, as well as Nick Hakim, among others. On the stand-up bass is Alan Hampton, the long-time collaborator of Bird, and on lead guitar, Mateo Vermot, a young French guitarist.
A Place to Meet is part of the songs Dylan wrote while living at of La Villa Magnan in the southwest of France. Dylan often performed there to experiment with the enormous acoustic sounds of singing in big rooms. Part of the bigness of the vocals and the string-like melodies of the post-choruses, in this song and others, comes from these spaces, as well as the giant “orangerie” of the villa, a room originally built to nurse orange trees in the cold of winter. Dylan trained his voice and rehearsed there for over two years.
The EP is made of songs that think about language, what it can and can’t communicate, and a hope that in music, language can create a place that defies the limits of our connections with other people. In short, these songs express a hope for music, that making and listening to it is like making and finding family, creating a place where we can love the ones we love, near or far. “Animals in the Kitchen,” released in March of 2021, expresses the kind of joy and sadness that language’s inherent lack has. Songs on the album like “World Between” or “Joy” are celebrations of musical form, that creative invention can be ways of being close or getting close to those and to what we’ve been separated from, deprived of, or what we have lost. “The Comet” is an aching song about self-orphanage, and feeling through the built in aspect of every relationship, that we will lose the ones we love.
19-year-old Sadie Jean has been writing songs ever since she can remember. That’s why when the time came to think about college, she knew she had to follow her passion and is currently studying recorded music at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute. Now, only just a year into her program, Sadie releases her stunningly raw, debut single “WYD Now?” – a tender song about wanting to rekindle a past relationship.
The already viral single was first teased on TikTok in October and caught on like wildfire, garnering over 3M views, 500k+ likes, over 12k video creates of people using the song to relate to their own heartbreak, with over 160k pre-saves in just two weeks. After creating an “open-verse challenge” on her page for artists to add their own spin to the song, the single has been used and embraced by notable figures such as Conor Maynard, JORDY, MILES, Sad Alex, and many more. The glistening record is confessional, heartbreaking, and deeply relatable to her peers.
The record was made in Long Island with her best friends and frequent collaborators Grace Enger and David Alexander, after the trio hit it off at school and started holding regular writing trips together.
“On each trip, I would always end up writing songs about the same heartbreak, so I think David and Grace knew I wanted to reach out to my highschool boyfriend before I was even ready to admit it, which made writing this song an especially vulnerable and eye-opening experience. I didn’t think such a specific song could resonate with so many people, but after posting a clip on TikTok a few days after our writing trip, I was quickly proven wrong.” – Sadie Jean
Having earned critical applause for her melancholy indie-folk, Amy Jay now makes a remarkable leap forward with her moving and kinetic debut album, Awake Sleeper. The Florida-born, NYC-based singer-songwriter surveys profound emotional terrain, juggling fragments of memory and embedding her observations within a paradoxically lush sonic approach. Exploring the boundaries between acoustic and synthetic, minimalist and ornate, Awake Sleeper echoes a breathtaking cross-pollination of introspective songcraft, surprising textures, and hypnotic soundscapes.
“I want the listener to feel suspended in an outer calm and inner angst,” says Jay. “To go back to formative memories, to relive the sensory experiences that shaped them, and empower them to delve deep and process those emotions head on.”
Recorded at Brooklyn’s Mason Jar Music with producer Jonathan Seale (Feist, Fleet Foxes, Aoife O’Donovan), Awake Sleeper marks Jay’s third official project and first full-length release following a pair of well-received EPs – 2016’s Supposed to Be and 2018’s So It Is – that earned her national acclaim and nearly 1M worldwide streams.
After the release of So It Is, Jay fell into focusing solely on the business side of being an independent artist, devoting her substantial energies more towards the administrative than the creative. She spent her days staring at her computer screen rather than picking up her instrument, she wrote emails when she should have been writing songs, she pitched her music to playlists, booked shows and applied for festival slots, “all in the name of building a career without actually doing what I love about the career.” Before long “it was New Year’s,” Jay says, “and I thought, ‘What happened? This is not why I do music.’”
The pendulum swung and Jay was propelled to write as much as possible, looking for community to find support from kindred struggling spirits. “If there was a songwriting challenge,” she says, “I took it. Multiple seven-songs-in-seven-days challenges, another song-a-week for three months challenge. Anything to keep me accountable to improving the craft, pushing back against the temptation of having the wrong order of priorities.” Here she discovered, through shared sound bites and critiques, both a knack for collaboration and hunger for creative feedback.
Over the course of the year, “time and time again the inspiration for these songs birthed out of my internal processing through strangely meditative and overly stimulating commutes,” Jay says. “I rarely listen to media on the train because I want to be aware of my surroundings. What transpired often was a paradoxical way of forcing me to focus because there was so much going on around me. Thoughts percolated up on the same car of the same train at the same time every day. In the mornings, half asleep, brain waking up, and in the evening, drained from the day, back and forth on the A train to Harlem, my mind drifted to all sorts of places,” not unlike journal entries set to Jay’s own internal soundtrack, translating seamlessly to the album’s paradoxically lush sonic approach.
“It may have been the latest YouTube binge gone wrong. Or in the case of ‘Call My Name,’ reliving an argument from the night before,” Jay says. “There were times when I was so desperate to grasp the concept of truth, it felt like grabbing smoke and I would go numb. It was in this space that wrote ‘Sorrow.’
“Or moments where I would escape to imagining the simplicity of childhood,” she continues. “In my head, always, coping in a state of overwhelm, wishing I could yell it out, knowing no one would really hear me. But my voice ended up flowing out through these songs.”
By the fall of 2019, with a plethora of material in hand and a grown confidence in large part due to the encouragement of her peers, she took the bare-boned song skeletons and phone demos, trekked down to Mason Jar Music in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and set to work with longtime friend and producer Jonathan Seale. Seale enlisted a top tier line-up of NYC session players to fill in the sonic spaces in Jay’s often sparse songs, including Mike Robinson (Railroad Earth, The Jeff Austin Band) on guitar and pedal steel, drummer Jordan Rose (Cory Wong, Theo Katzman), guitarist Chris Parker, bassist Jeremy McDonald, Andrew Freedman (Henry Jamison) on piano and synths, and award-winning bowed-string instrumentalist Duncan Wickel (Molly Tuttle, Rising Appalachia) on violin and cello. Jay and Co. were also joined by her newly adopted, “distractingly cute and very sleepy” dog, Huxley.
“I had just adopted him a month prior,” Jay says. “I had waited years to be in a place to own a dog. He was the emotional support animal I never knew I needed. Having him there was one of the best parts about the process.”
As Huxley frolicked with Seale’s own studio dog, Blue, the Mason Jar sessions spanned fall and winter of 2019, wrapping up in February 2020, just under the COVID wire. “I’m so grateful I got into the studio before it all started.” Jay says. “It was so normal, really fun and collaborative. We had no idea what was coming.”
Awake Sleeper was profoundly inspired by Jay’s day-to-day life in New York City, conjuring its incessant energy, its ambient noise and constant motion, occasionally quiet but ceaseless in its flow. “Day in, day out…,” she sings on the vaporous “Lucid Dreaming.” In its own way, the album pre-imagines the city’s strange magic during the pandemic, its perpetual buzz lurking just below a sense of haunting solitude. Jay gave life to her songs with an idiosyncratic sound equally informed by experimental electronica, classical music, and post-rock as it is by traditional acoustic folk songcraft. “It was a conscious choice that the recording elements reflect the lyrical themes, like for example, when we doubled the vocals to mimic emotional duality, or repetitive instrumentation to evoke anxiety or stuckness,” Jay says. “The direction of the music was very much decided by how best to portray these themes sonically.” Built upon aquatic, insular rhythms more connected to the mind than the body, songs such as “Inner Critic” hew closer to the sounds in her head than the Harlem street where she lives.
“It’s calming and chaotic at the same time,” Jay says. “It constantly makes you feel something. There’s never any pure silence. And I think that’s true to my personality – I might appear calm on the exterior but inside there’s always something buzzing. ‘Monster’ is a perfect example, bringing the underlying hum of my anxiety to light.”
With no ability to tour or properly support Awake Sleeper, Jay decided to sit tight on the recordings. She spent the lost year performing the occasional livestream, keeping her powder dry until she could treat her first album as an occasion, a moment, a declaration of intent and identity.
“I wanted to do as right by this record as I could,” Jay says. “I’ve done other projects, but I didn’t feel as genuine or confident in my voice as I am now. I think I’m expressing myself better than ever. It does kind of feel like my first official statement.”
With the future looking somewhat brighter, Jay is now getting set to hit the road in support of Awake Sleeper. A graphic designer with a love for decorating and ambitious projects, she spent much of last year refurbishing a beat-up shuttle bus into a road-ready RV.
“It’s been a dream for a long time,” she says, “before van life became a trend. I love getting my hands dirty, I’m definitely a creative personality. So the idea of making a tour bus from scratch really appealed to me. Now, after many, many, many hours of books and YouTube and Facebook groups and Reddit, it’s a tiny home. It has solar panels and a roof deck;, we could even put a little amp on top and play shows. We can even record as we travel.”
Having made Awake Sleeper in what now feels like a distant past, Amy Jay is looking firmly towards the future, driven to continually push her songcraft towards new terrain while still honoring her remarkable debut album with the attention and self-love it so rightly deserves.
“It’s complicated,” Jay says, “because obviously I’m proud of this huge, monumental thing that I’m doing. I have to just remember it’s a time capsule, a glimpse into a life before the world crashed, snapshots of memories. We captured what was happening at the time, written in the past, relevant for today.”
D.C. native Devin Kowl grew up under the influence of chart-topping R&B, blues, and jazz — allowing him to craft a soulful musical experience that seeps into every aspect of his songwriting and production. A 4th generation entrepreneur running his family’s company, Kowl moved to Los Angeles to pursue music, he began performing for corporate and private events throughout the city. He’s been featured at the MTV Emerging Lounge, and Scion’s Got Talent event, among many others. Recently, he put all his time and attention into writing and producing his own music, a deeply soulful R&B style and true-to-life lyrics that get to the heart of who we are as humans.
On his new single, “Missing U,” Devin Kowl settles into the feeling of heartbreak and lets it guide him to the future. On a track that reflects on the act of falling out of love, his smooth vocals, lithe falsetto, and incredible melody create a sonic atmosphere rife with pain. Somewhere amid the soaring electric guitar and synth beats, Kowl injects a hint of hope that maybe this lingering pain will be disparate with time. With the release of his single, “Missing U,” Devin Kowl introduces himself as a performer, and songwriter, to keep watching.
With feisty, honest lyrics and an unrestrained vocal sensibility, set against edgy electro pop, YAQI is a rare gem among international artists. Launching onto the pop scene in China with 2016’s award-winning single, “Summer Bala,” she left the patriarchy of a traditional Chinese household to pursue her career in America. Embodying all that a woman can accomplish when stepping into the spotlight, YAQI has continued to navigate personal reinvention and ongoing racism, and has overcome various stereotypes. With a deep understanding of the inequity, struggle and pain of young immigrants, she is committed to inspiring other young women to step into the fullness of who they are as she blasts onto the pop scene in America with lead single, “I’m On It.” As an artist on the verge of a major breakout, YAQI’s flavorful artistry has led to a foray into acting and fashion. She unveils her fashion-music-dance video later this month, with new singles, “Imma Do Me” and “Daisies” to follow.
Daytona Starsky is bringing in some innovative heat this new year and we couldn’t be more hyped for his upcoming release, “Blame The System.” The forthcoming release, which is slated for January 13th, will be a part of his upcoming album “Mr. Action” due out in early 2022 on BK’s Super Fine Audio Label. The Dutch born, Brooklyn adopted artist, who’s making waves in his new city recently released another glimpse into his anticipated project with putting out the title track “Mr. Action” and his self produced/directed music video partnered with VEVO. Starsky gave us some insights into his visual’s by stating that, “The video, aptly described as an ‘involuntary acid trip,’ takes you through a voyage of continuously transforming visuals and sequences that keeps the viewers eyes locked and hypnotized. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a single hard cut and have the video feel as fluid as possible.” Starsky also offered his inspiration behind the concept, “I grew up watching a lot of MTV in the 2000’s and I always loved the music videos that tried to create an imaginary world for the particular artist or song. Acts like the Gorillaz, Outkast and the White Stripes had very unique ways of visualizing their sound and creating fictional or cartoonish versions of themselves and society. I was going through a lot of those memory lane music videos one day and was inspired to take the approach of these bands and create a sort of fictional version of this reality where there is this ‘Mr. Action’ controlling everything from the big tech CEO’s to the medical industry. I recently read Orwell’s 1984 and I think I was influenced by the totalitarian dystopian future and that worked its way into my vision of this character. I think sonically the song is reminiscent of the 2000’s alternative pop-rock era as well.”
Daytona Starsky continues to ride his musical journey on high notes, as his DIY visual for “Mr. Action” placed on VEVO’s Incoming Indie Playlist! The Jimi Hendrix-esque track has exceeded over 53K plays on Spotify, which shows how far his music grows in such a short window of time from its release date in November.
It’s a pleasure to soon reveal “Blame The System,” which is once again a guitar driven gem and hand made from Starsky’s genre fluid sensibilities and hip hop melodics, which bring together a Starsky production. The visionary artist explains that “Blame The System is hard to place in a single genre. It has clear elements of Rock and Pop but sticks them together using a funky bass line and Hip Hop production elements. It has many changes that make you want to listen to it again but never throws you off-guard. The high-pace hook and the catchy synths make it a sign-along track. The track is about feeling left behind, being alone, not feeling supported. The title explains it all, when there’s no one left to blame you blame the system and we all do in our own way.”
Get ready for a Starsky year, filled with new vybzz, sounds and a world that you’ll want to get lost in, as it truly is one of a kind! Keep connected with Daytona Starsky on his socials and don’t forget to check back in, as he’s always working on new ideas.
https://soundcloud.com/daytonastarsky/blame-the-system-single/s-RlVMlyOnWVT?si=d5b7d50e38b941b89452d3039dba66ef&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
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