When I was first given the latest release from April Smith and The Great Picture show, it was like the skies opened up and light shown down directly on my face. I felt a warmth the likes of which I hadn’t felt in quite some time. Of course the light was merely hypothetical and the warmth was from the space heater I was sitting too close to, but I still think it was a sign. FreshScouts got a chance to catch up with this sexy, sultry artist from Toms River, New Jersey and honestly, we were completely blown away by the show.
She has a certain stage presence that makes you immediate think of some of the great performers of the 20′s and 30′s, and you realize very quickly that this little package packs a very large punch. She had my attention the entire show and left me wanting more. I guarantee we’ll be at the next show in Chicago and you would be cheating yourself if you weren’t there too.
Luckily, we were able to catch up with her after the show to talk about her upcoming plans for 2011 and find out just exactly how she got started in the music industry. Check out our exclusive interview with April Smith:
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There are four million people in New Zealand, but only one of them gets to be Brooke Fraser. Once named her country’s Best Female Solo Artist, Fraser is now gracing the entire world with her powerful, smoky tone and emotionally charged music.
“Flags” is her most recent project, released worldwide in October of last year, and it’s been a project of love and growth for Fraser, who says the album is a huge step forward for her and her career.
“I was very sober about releasing this album. I really didn’t know if I was about to have a massive gong show and ruin my career by putting this out, but I knew that I didn’t care,” Fraser said. “I believed in the songs and in the honest way we’d treated them, and I just crossed my fingers and hoped that people would get it.”
Turns out, people do get it. Not only that, but they love it, too.
“I’m very grateful for that,” Fraser added. “’Flags’ feels like a definite step forward for me as an artist, and not a tentative one, but a shoulders-back, chin-forward step. I know what the album is and what it isn’t. What is isn’t is perfect or completely cohesive. What it is, is a story.”
And that story is universal enough to be enjoyed by music fans from every walk of life. The beauty of Fraser’s music is that any lover of any genre of music can pop into onto an iPod and appreciate what she’s doing. Everybody relates to beautiful music, and thankfully, that’s exactly who Fraser has been able to reach.
“People everywhere are the same kaleidoscope of different tastes and wants and needs,” Fraser explained. “At my shows, we seem to have the same very vast cross section of people—everyone from 9 year old girls to senior citizens and everyone in between—college students, soccer moms, working professionals. It’s a great thrill to see so many different types of people connecting with the songs I’m writing.”
Fraser hopes those connections last for the rest of her life, as she feels her music career is only just now getting off the ground.
“I hope that I will have the opportunity to do this for a long time to come, but you never know what life could throw at you,” she said, adding, “Consequently, I try to retain a sense of wonder about this job and be grateful for every opportunity. There will definitely be more solo albums, but I also look forward to turning my attention to side projects and other collaborative fun stuff in the years to come. I do know, though, that I will always write songs, whether they are heard or not.”
We’re hoping that all of them get heard. So does everybody in New Zealand. And so should every other music-lover in the world.
After traveling via bus through weather that was promoted to be “Chicago’s worst storm in 70 years,” California-born Matt Costa made it to the Double Door in Chicago, IL unscathed and allowed us to take a seat and dig deeper into this former pro skateboarders unknown musical dream come true. Luckily for us (perhaps Matt too) his skateboarding career fell short at the age of 18, leading to the dawn of who is now, Matt Costa – singer/songwriter. Not to drop any names or anything, but Matt was founded by No Doubt guitarist, Tom Dumont, toured with Jack Johnson, and did some work with Phil Ek from Modest Mouse…but no big deal.
Recently releasing his third album, Mobile Chateau, Matt continues to woo the world with the single “Witchcraft” which takes a dash of pep and mixes it with a tablespoon of solid guitar riffs all the while sprinkling it with indie rock and folk. But why take it from me. Matt Costa is far better at explaining himself…himself. Check out the interview below.
It’s a small world, musically speaking. Here we are, loving Glass Pear’s “My Ghost,” without realizing that his sister, Jem, had already been featured here on FreshScouts, and that his other sister, Chloe, represents V.V. Brown, who has been featured here as well.
In our early email correspondences I joked with Yestyn Griffiths that he was the missing piece to our collecting the whole set. Now, of course, that collection is officially complete.
Griffiths, in the midst of recording his sophomore album, has seen plenty of success in the last couple of years with songs getting featured on popular television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Bones.” With a couple of good breaks, his debut indie release “Streets Of Love” has allowed Griffiths to strive as en emerging artist.
“I had a lot of luck getting songs off the record onto these big shows [in America],” he said. “That really blew up the whole thing and led to a lot of people buying the record, especially digitally. That was really the break that I needed being a completely independent artist.”
That exposure immediately led to more downloads of Glass Pear songs than Griffiths could’ve even hoped for.
“Off the back of TV, I sold about 10,000 downloads within a month because your exposure is to millions of people,” he said. “The difficulty is, how do they find out who’s singing the song? I think a lot of people struggled to find the name of the song.”
For some, just using the iPhone app Shazam can help identify a song from a TV show, but for others, tracking down “My Ghost” and/or “Wild Place” proved to be a little more difficult—not that that kept the serious music fans from tracking them down anyway.
“Some people go on a bit of a pilgrimage to find the song, so that when they do finally find it it’s that much more worth it.”
Now, Yestyn is back in the studio working on a follow-up to “Streets of Love,” and he says the new record will be considerably more rhythmic while still upholding the mellow, emotionally-charged vibe that’s made him so popular already.
“I’ve really been exploring because, as an artist, I really don’t want to stay in the same place. I suppose that’s both a virtue and a vice. I’ve always wanted to bring more rhythm into what I’m doing. I’m not doing the classic second I’m-going-disco indie record, but I’m bringing in a lot of other interests in music such as hip-hop rhythms. It’s actually very similar to what Jem did on her debut record.”
His sister’s record, “Finally Woken,” included several songs written by Yestyn himself, including “24,” which is the track that sort of put Jem on the map.
“’24,’ has some pretty wicked hip-hop beats and actually probably could have had a rapper on it. I write a lot of different stuff, and that’s why I’m just so excited to go out and do something a little different. It’s not radically different; I’m just trying to merge my love of bands like the Beach Boys with some of the rhythmic elements you hear in something like Radiohead.”
However the music sounds, and whatever changes Glass Pear may undergo stylistically for the sophomore go-round, Griffiths just wants to keep the songwriting process organic and try to reach as many fans as he possibly can with the music he works so hard to write.
“It sounds corny, but for an artist like me, there’s nothing more fulfilling than to write a song that started in a room, just me and a guitar, that came spontaneously out of nowhere,” he said.
“When, through hard work or luck, it finally gets out there to thousands of people—and on some of these TV shows, to millions of them—it somehow works its way into people’s lives. I’m not arrogant enough to think that it changes anyone’s lives, but it genuinely adds something to their lives. I get messages back from people that say, ‘This song has really affected me,’ or ‘This song has helped me with something I’m going through in my life.’ That whole process of songwriting—from the inception of the song to finding someone who loves it—is why I do music.”
Listen to “My Ghost” (free download available below) and try to ignore the emotion in Griffith’s vocals. Look at his relationship with musical siblings and his commitment to independent production and try to call him anything but an artist. You can’t, because he is.
Besides, we’ve been taught to like the things television tells us to like. Right now, it’s telling us to like Glass Pear. We really don’t have any choice.
Free Download : Glass Pear – “My Ghost.” Click the Downward Arrow in the widget to start your download.
Glass Pear – My Ghost by glasspear
Andrew Belle is the kind of musician that makes other musicians sick to their stomachs. For many aspiring artists, it’s a lifelong goal to hit the big time in the music business. They might spend their entire lives from childhood well beyond middle age trying to get a record deal. They fight and scratch and starve and suffer waiting for that big break.
Belle didn’t really have to go through all that.
Instead, he graduated with a business degree from a four-year university and, on a whim, decided he’d give songwriting a shot instead of pursuing a normal 9-to-5. One year later, he was touring the country, receiving accolades from all directions, and recording a successful album.
“It was kind of a serious thing to just jump out of college when all of your friends are getting jobs with insurance policies and retirement plans,” Belle says. “It’s a little scary to not have that, so I always kind of had a plan in the back of my head, a sort of What If thing.”
His way of viewing his music career wouldn’t stay so conservative, however.
“As I was getting into things a little bit more,” he adds, “I was chatting with one of my songwriter friends, and he told me to never have a plan B. If you have a plan B, you’re never going to make it. Might as well save your breath and don’t waste your time. That really influenced me, and from that moment on I decided not to have a plan B and that I was in it for the long haul.”
The long haul has only been a couple years, but in that time Belle has come quite a long way as an artist. Growing up in a religious family, he wasn’t even allowed to listen to secular music or, obviously, watch a lot of music videos. He hopped into the music thing, he found himself relatively unprepared and extremely inexperienced. Learning on the job, he says, wasn’t always easy.
“Learning how to perform was a lot like how I learned how to song write—I just watch the artists I admire and emulate them, at least to a degree because there’s a point where you have to make it your own,” Belle says.
“I’ve been doing it for a couple years now and I’ve played way more shows than I ever thought I would, and every show I learn something new—strategies and techniques of singing, stuff like that. It’s not something I think I’ve conquered by any stretch, but I’m learning things here and there and definitely enjoying the fact that I’m getting better as I tour more.”
To think that a young man as talented as Andrew Belle is still really only learning the trade is more than a little mind-boggling. Already he’s been added to the Ten Out of Tenn tour and named “Best New Artist, Chicago” by MTV, and he’s only been doing this for a few years.
Still, Belle is trying to keep his burgeoning career in perspective. “Typically, long-term and music business don’t go hand in hand,” Belle jokes, “But it is something that I think about. We’ve had a lot of success relatively early, and part of me just wants to continue that success.
“I just think about keeping it to the basics—do what I do best, which is songwriting, and try not to let the success that we’ve had intimidate me into thinking that now I have to do better or sell twice as many records. I just want to do what I do best—writing thoughtful, interesting music and keeping that the focal point. Hopefully if I do that, things will continue to happen for us.”
Considering the fact that he’s still so new at this and already is so good and so distinctive and so humble and so hard-working and so grounded, it seems inevitable that he’s at least got a few more albums in him. If he continues to grow the way he’s grown since leaving Taylor University for the music business just a few short years ago, more success is inevitable.
We’re looking forward to it, and if we had to venture guess, those spiteful, sick-to-their-stomach veteran musicians are likely looking forward to it, too. Listen to “The Ladder” and tell me I’m wrong.
“None of this was planned, really,” Belle admits incredulously. “It all just kind of happened, but I’m glad for the way that it happened.”
Grab “The Ladder” at Amazon or iTunes by clicking the links below!
