Tag: NPR

This morning, NPR published an article focused on 11 Oregon artists to watch in 2021, and we are thrilled that Eastern Oregon’s Margo Cilker was included. While we were planning on keeping this one under wraps for a bit, this seems like as good as time as any to announce that we will be working with Margo to release her debut album, this November.

Margo Cilker is a woman who drinks deeply of life, and her debut record Pohorylle, is brimming with it. For the last seven years, the Eastern Oregon songwriter has split her time between the road and various outposts across the world, from Enterprise, OR to the Basque Country of Spain, forging a path that is at once deeply rooted and ever-changing.

The record, which carries gentle nods to Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, and Gillian Welch, shines under the instincts of producer Sera Cahoone, whom Cilker first came across in 2019 while planning her first full-length. Cahoone quickly got to work assembling a first-rate band: Jenny Conlee (The Decemberists) on keys, Jason Kardong (Sera Cahoone, Son Volt) on pedal steel, Rebecca Young (Lindsey Fuller, Jesse Sykes) on bass, Mirabai Peart (Joanna Newsom) on strings, Kelly Pratt (Beirut) on horns, and the album’s engineer John Morgan Askew (Neko Case, Laura Gibson) on an array of other instruments. The record also prominently features effortless harmonies from Sarah Cilker, Margo Cilker’s sister and frequent touring partner.

Stay tuned for more news in July, when the first single will be premiered by The Bluegrass Situation.

 

We are honored to have David Dondero appear on this week’s episode of NPR’s All Songs Considered. His single “Easy Chair”, from his latest LP, The Filter Bubble Blues, was featured. Give it a listen here, and then pick up the LP.

We’ve still got a few Limited Edition White LPs at the Fluff and Gravy Store, along with black LPs, cds, and digital formats.

 

 

 

 

Anna Tivel’s latest single, Fenceline, has been added to NPR’s Heavy Rotation!

“Ever since Elliott Smith broke out in the late ’90s, Portland, Ore. has been a hotbed for indie folk troubadours. Laura Veirs, M. Ward, Laura Gibson, and, most recently, Haley Heynderickx have all found inspiration on the banks of the Willamette River. But Anna Tivel is perhaps the most underrated of them all. She’s long been adept at writing arresting but sparse songs, anchored by vivid storytelling lyrics that showcase her uncanny ability to paint landscapes with words. Her latest single, “Fenceline,” is no exception. The song is the first track released from Tivel’s forthcoming album, The Question, due out April 2019. But with this record, her superb compositions have been elevated to new heights. With the help of producer and multi-instrumentalist Shane Leonard and engineer Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens), Tivel has crafted a truly goosebump-inducing soundscape.”

The digital single is available now on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere else. The full length LP will be released April 19, 2019 and can be pre-ordered via the Fluff and Gravy store, including Limited Edition color vinyl.

Ann Powers includes Anna Tivel’s “Small Believer” on her annual Top 10 Unheard Albums list for NPR’s The Record. The single, “Alleyway”, clocked in at #67 on NPR’s Best 100 songs of 2017 list. Powers opines that the album “repeatedly achieves this exquisite balance of the quotidian and the sublime with imagery that’s deeply poetic without being fussy, in musical arrangements that form like intuition around Tivel’s insights.

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Anna Tivel’s fourth studio album ‘Small Believer’ is a collection of patchwork stories drawn from conversations with strangers, on the road, in restaurants, bars, and rest stops. Produced by guitar mastermind Austin Nevins (Josh Ritter, Anais Mitchell), the songs float on a raft of electric guitar, pump organ, and sparse bass and drums.

‘Small Believer’ is spacious and honest, a lyric-driven exploration of the things that move within us. Tivel takes great care with every syllable and every story, chipping away until what remains is blindingly true and deeply affecting.

The record is available now on lp, cd and digital formats, as well as at Spotify, iTunes and Amazon.

Limited edition gold vinyl, hand-numbered to 125 is in short supply.

In Today’s installment of NPR’s Songs We Love, Anna Powers highlights Anna Tivel’s “Illinois”, from her most recent LP, Small Believer.  “A compassionate chronicler of those lives often overlooked, Tivel is simultaneously clear-eyed and open to dreaming”, Powers suggest. We couldn’t think of a more fitting description.

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Anna Tivel’s fourth studio album ‘Small Believer’ is a collection of patchwork stories drawn from conversations with strangers, on the road, in restaurants, bars, and rest stops. Produced by guitar mastermind Austin Nevins (Josh Ritter, Anais Mitchell), the songs float on a raft of electric guitar, pump organ, and sparse bass and drums.

‘Small Believer’ is spacious and honest, a lyric-driven exploration of the things that move within us. Tivel takes great care with every syllable and every story, chipping away until what remains is blindingly true and deeply affecting.

The record is available now on lp, cd and digital formats, as well as at Spotify, iTunes and Amazon.

Limited edition gold vinyl, hand-numbered to 125 is in short supply.

“Don’t Come To Me”, from Nick Jaina’s Primary Perception evolved from an attempt to write a sympathetic indie-pop song from the perspective of a largely unloveable politician. The track was called “unshakeable” by Spin, and was featured on NPR’s Heavy Rotation, as well as Morning Edition. When it came time to create a video, Jaina teamed up with director Seth Whelden, from Portland-based production company, STNDRD, and choreographer, Candace Bouchard, from Oregon Ballet Theater.  “I’ve been working on composing music for ballet over the last few years, and there is not a better feeling than making music that people dance to, in any style or context”, says Jaina. “I asked my friend Candace Bouchard from Oregon Ballet Theater if she would humor watching me dance at a club and offering some direction on which moves worked. I also asked her to choreograph a routine for some real ballet dancers. The idea was that I would come in with my untrained moves and disrupt this beautiful thing they created, but in the process maybe I could suggest in them some autonomy. I mostly am wary of musicians acting in music videos. We’ve all probably spent too many hours watching musicians try to act. So why not just try to dance instead? At least the results, if not professional, would perhaps be endearing in their awkwardness.”

Enjoy the video, in all of it’s awkward beauty, here.

[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M47iv0sg-6k[/youtube]

On his 2013 lp, Primary Perception, Nick Jaina took a gamble, gathering only the people in the studio who wanted to be there and figuring out what song to play only once they were all assembled. It was a completely non-scripted experiment. Often no one had heard the song prior to the session and the four to eight people in attendance would just work out an arrangement right there in the studio, sometimes with three guitarists working at the same time, sometimes with three drummers. Almost all of the instruments were recorded live and the experiment kept everyone focused on the song at the moment, not thinking of what was to come, and arranging their part while they could simultaneously hear what everyone else in the room was doing.

For a limited time, you can order Nick Jaina’s Primary Perception on  deluxe LP and receive an exclusive 7″ with 2 unreleased tracks (Sea of Japan b/w Delta of of Venus). To order the record on Deluxe LP/LP/CD/FLAC/mp3, click here

 

“Nick Jaina is probably best known to Portlanders as a prolific singer-songwriter, but he’s taken some interesting creative side roads in the three years since his last record: He’s written three ballets, worked on a film soundtrack and composed music for a play in New Orleans. Primary Perception marks Jaina’s return to pop songwriting, and “Don’t Come to Me” is among its standouts. The track began as an unlikely attempt to write a song from the perspective of Mitt Romney, and later came to life when Jaina took what he had to band members during the sessions that ended up on the record. This isn’t quite the version we play on air — that one includes FCC edits — but it’s an earworm either way, the latest of many from one of Portland’s most consistent musicians”. —Jeremy Petersen

Read the full article and listen to the song here.