More shows celebrating the 2002 album are coming this fall

[Consequence of Sound]

By Carys Anderson

If you missed Broken Social Scene on last year’s You Forgot It in People 20th anniversary tour, you’re in luck. The band is heading out on the road later this year to continue the celebration with 16 more shows.

This new run of tour dates begins September 18th in Oklahoma City. From there, Broken Social Scene will perform in Houston, Austin, New Orleans, and more — including a two-night stand at the Royale in Boston — before wrapping up at the Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville on October 6th.

A Spotify pre-sale begins Wednesday, June 14th at 10:00 a.m. local time (use code PACIFIC), while tickets open to the public on Friday, June 16th. Grab seats via Ticketmaster, or find deals over at StubHub, where orders are 100% guaranteed via StubHub’s FanProtect Program.

“We had such an incredible time celebrating the start of the 20th anniversary of You Forgot It in People last fall that we’ve decided to cap off the end of the anniversary by visiting some cities we weren’t able to make it to last year,” the band said in a statement. “We’ll be supported by the wonderful Hannah Georgas at each show.”

The expanded You Forgot It in People 20th anniversary tour is sure to be a good time; at a show last year, Broken Social Scene brought out Tracey Ullman and Meryl Streep (!) to perform “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.” They also recently released a bootleg of an old show called Live at the Phoenix Concert Theatre, 2003.

Broken Social Scene 2023 Tour Dates:
06/21 — Toronto, ON @ Budweiser Stage
07/01 — Surrey, BC @ Bill Reid Millennium Amphitheatre
07/14 — Whitehorse, YT @ Yukon Arts Centre
07/16 — Yellowknife, NT @ Folk On The Rocks Festival
09/16 — Fredericton, NB @ Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival
09/18 — Oklahoma City, OK @ Tower Theatre
09/19 — Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Waller Creek Amphitheater
09/21 — Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall
09/22 — New Orleans, LA @ Civic Theatre
09/23 — Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern
09/24 — Asheville, NC @ Orange Peel
09/26 — Harrisburg, PA /@Harrisburg University at XL Live!
09/27 — Boston, MA @ Royale
09/28 — Boston, MA @ Royale
09/29 — Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel
09/30 — Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom
10/02 — Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre
10/03 — Indianapolis, IN @ HI-FI Annex
10/04 — Louisville, KY @ Headiners Music Hall
10/05 — St. Louis, MO @ The Pageant
10/06 — Nashville, TN @ Brooklyn Bowl

[Brooklyn Vegan]

Not many songwriters can boldly quote The Simpsons with a straight face, but Kate Stables is one of them. It’s right there in the chorus of “Inside Outside,” a song about longing, change and choice: “bite off as much as you can chew,” she sings before opening up Ralph Wiggum’s Valentine’s Day card. “I chew chew choose you.” Mastication is a key metaphor on Careful of Your Keepers, Stables’ sixth album as This is the Kit that examines relationships, who we choose to be with, how that all changes over time, and how big of a bite we allow ourselves to take. Stables’ always empathetic lyricism is at the center of This is The Kit, which she surrounds with sinewy, proggy folk. Her bandmates, including bassist Rozi Plain, guitarist Neil Smith, and drummer Jamie Whitby-Coles, are all highly skilled musicians capable of pulling off off these parts that, like Stables’ words, are complex but easily digestible. Careful feels just a bit bigger that previous albums, perhaps due to Gruff Rhys, who was tapped as producer and helps them add horns (flugelhorn, bassoon) and other elements to the mix. Arrangements on the gorgeous title track, “Scabby Head and Legs” (which references another cartoon, Bluey), and “Doomed Or More Doomed” are windswept and subtly spectacular, but lines like “this is your ‘how shit is it’ measuring stick” will stay with you long after the music fades.

Kate was nice enough to walk us through Careful Of Your Keepers track-by-track, and she brings her poetic style here, too. Read that, and listen to the album, below.

Listen here

THIS IS THE KIT – ‘CAREFUL OF YOUR KEEPERS’ TRACK-BY-TRACK

01 GOODBYE BITE
a presence you feel that is with you wherever you go.
Putting things in your mouth. Biting someone on the shins.
Deciding things are ok.
Deciding you’ll be ok whilst acknowledging that things are pretty bad.
Superstitions. Social norms. Other people’s expectations.
Dying and death.
It is a choice.
Choosing to see.
And to be honest about what you see and how you feel.
What is our frame of reference for when things aren’t ok?
What do we compare them to?
What do we use to gauge how unbearable a situation is?
How can we tell?
Raising an arm in solidarity with everyone else who is struggling.
Giving people a break because you never know what hard stuff they’re going through.
People are good at hiding it. we spend lifetimes learning how to hide how hard it is.

This song was at one point going to be called measuring stick. One of the recurring themes in this record is our tendency to measure and compare and quantify. When I started writing this song it was about more external topics. Politics, global torment. But then slowly it shrunk in to think more about more personal politics and internal climate change. Emotional change. As well as planetary/global worldwide human species induced political turmoil and change.
What do we use as the control test?
What tools do we have to measure how bad something is? A situation? Someone’s behaviour? A year?
But it’s also about living through the difficulties and letting go of the sharp edges.
The teeth. The painful bite.
Also, I liked the idea or a goodbye bite as in a goodbye kiss. Maybe how vampires say goodbye?

02 INSIDE OUTSIDE
what makes things happen? How much choice do we have?
Electricity and chemistry that is out of our control?
Chewing.
Choosing.
Internal forces or external ones?
Do we just behave the way people expect us to behave?
Or do they pre-empt what’s happening? Before it’s happened? Because they can see it in us before we know it ourselves?
Big change that has been brewing for longer than we realise.
Were we just ignoring it?
Was it so deeply buried? Or did we see it all along but chose to ignore it?
How much does anything change? Or is it just the way we see it that changes?
Oops more questions than answers there. But that’s pretty normal for my songs I think.

03 TAKE YOU TO SLEEP
when you know that someone just needs to sleep to rest to be in a safe place. and there’s nothing anyone can do to help them get there.
The feeling of just wanting to do whatever you can for someone for things to be better.
That it’s none of your business.
It’s none of their business.
None of the business of anyone except you and this one person.
Big letting go. Bigger than you’ve ever known.

04 MORE CHANGE
more it stays the same.
Sometimes it feels like everything has completely changed and then it just feels like it’s always been like that. And always will be like that.
the more things change the more they actually stay the same.
The one constant is change.
Change is the only thing we can be sure of.
Who is who.
The people that become important to us and the way they become important.
Phases that come and go? Or don’t go?
The friends we need. We need our friends. We need to remember to be in the world.
I love it when Gru says “lightbulb.”
Realising that things come and go and pass and are born and then die.
The good it does us to hold hands with someone.
The tearing in two of a person and a heart.

05 THIS IS WHEN THE SKY GETS BIG
there is a park near where I live that is one of my favourite places to go in Paris.
All sorts of people use the park for all sorts of things.
Human activity at its most beautiful and touching and sad and scary and heart-breaking.
And all under a really big amount of sky. Which is rare in Paris.
a rare place where the sky feels pretty big.
It’s right next to the train lines that go to and from the east.
One of the things I love about Paris is that you can get the train to so many places. No need to bother with airports or leaving the ground.
Looking at the sky from the ground.
Where people live and get on with their lives together and apart.

I originally wrote this song for a friend of mine called Aaron Sewards who does amazing watercolour paintings. He had asked me about the idea of a joint project where I would write some songs about some of my favourite places and then he would make an accompanying painting of the place. Still in the pipes!

I remember being in this park when Hollande was elected (replacing Sarkozy) and when it was announced the people living in the flats that overlooked the park all flung their windows open and started cheering and shouting. Then I walked home and everyone was high-fiving each other in the street.
It was an amazing moment of hope and optimism.

The people who use this park.
The big tables
The grass.
The fitness equipment.
The community snack hatch.

06 SCABBY HEAD AND LEGS
there was a pigeon last year who made its nest on one of the windows of our flat.
It laid two eggs but only one of them hatched.
The pigeon itself seemed actually to be in pretty good nick. Not very scabby at all.
I’m often pretty scabby though. And life gets scabby.
And pigeons in general are prone to be pretty scabby. Heads and legs.
I saw an episode of Bluey once where Bingo crawls under a bench after their dad had been playing a game that was a bit too rough and she’d got hurt. and it really struck a chord.
I’m prone to crawling under benches. There’s a really great Instagram account called ‘rate this bench’ by a guy who goes around sitting on and then rating benches in various different places.
I love it. I love benches. They’re a good symbol of socialism and public space and community but also solitude and time passing.
There’s a tree I think of when I sing this song that is on St. Catherine’s hill in Winchester., where I grew up. A good climber.
Usually everyone and no one is to blame. So there’s no point trying to work out who and what is to blame.
Things are how they are and they hurt and they break you and other people and what you shared.
You shouldn’t steal eggs from nests.
Ledges are dangerous places.
Carrying fragile things is dangerous.
Holding onto what you love is dangerous.
Letting go of what you love is dangerous. And hurts.
Choosing what to celebrate and remember.
Choosing to love and send people on with your blessings.
More Choices. More Choosing.
I also think of Scabby Head and Scabby Legs as being two different characters in this story.
Maybe one of them is the pigeon on a ledge in a very urban setting and the other one is in a next up a tree out in the country? Or maybe the tree leads up to the ledge. These are all things I think about when I sing this one.

07 CAREFUL OF YOUR KEEPERS
the things you keep. But also the people that keep you.
Careful as in look after but also careful as in be careful. Watch out for.
Stamina. How long you can put up with a struggle without any rest.
Treading water.
Rafts on water. The noises they make. They way they move.
Away from each other.
Or two the edges. If there are any edges?
The way a tree will envelop railings or a fence that was put up next to it. Long after it. And will be gobbled up eventually. Nature takes back.
Old age as a gift and also a burden.
The person that looks after you and holds you.
The roles that change. The carer becomes the cared for.
To keep swimming. To keep treading water.
The fragility of wooden structures that have been set loose on a huge body of water.
The “children of the open sea” chapter in ‘the farthest shore’ by ursula k leguin.
At the mercy of the elements.
The solidity of wooden structures that have been set loose on a huge body of water.
We do heal. And often it’s with the help of others.
We will heal.

08 DOOMED OR MORE DOOMED
this feels like the choice we’re all being faced with at the moment. Doomed? Or more doomed?
Trying to work out which is the lesser of two evils?
The least damaging method of destruction?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions?
What we take with us? What is travelling light? What is being prepared?
How much should/do we take on/take with us?
Before the buckeroo spring is triggered and everything gets lobbed all over the place and we have to start stacking it up to carry again, if we’re lucky enough to get another go.

09 STUCK IN A ROOM
we all get stuck. And it’s hard to get unstuck.
When I sing this song I often think of certain bits from ‘Masters of Atlantis’ by Charles Portis.
Behavioural patterns. Nervous ticks. Stuck in society’s expectations and social norm standards.
Those of us to have a room are lucky to even have a room. But we need to be careful how we use it and how it serves us. The need for a healthy relationship with the different rooms we inhabit.
It’s good for us to exists in different rooms, not just the one.
Getting out. Getting back into the world. Deciding to ignore what other people want you to do or ways they think you should behave.

10 DIBS
We don’t own people.
And we don’t know what’s going to happen.
But loving people means letting them grow and go with our blessing.
Getting a shock so shocking that it restarts your heart.
You can feel your extremities again.
But with the feeling coming back comes feeling pain.
How do you look after someone who is leaving and loosing. How do you help each other.
How do you do the honourable and right thing whilst hurting as few people as possible.
How many is as few as possible?
Looking back at what you’ve built and acknowledging that it is enormous and beautiful and bigger than the sum of its parts.
And that we don’t own each other’s hearts.
We just want the people we love to be ok. Better than ok.
To thrive and to fly.
We don’t own things or people.
An attempt at a peace offering.

—

This Is the Kit will be on tour this fall beginning in NYC at Le Poisson Rouge on 10/11.

[Brooklyn Vegan]

Becca Mancari has announced their new LP Left Hand, due August 25 via Captured Tracks. Becca produced the album alongside Juan Solorzano, with additional contributions by Brittany Howard, Julien Baker, and Paramore’s Zac Farro. The album’s title is derived from the Mancari family crest in Calabria, Italy (a left hand with a dagger), as well as Becca’s own journey to self acceptance, as they explain, “In many cultures children born with a dominant left hand were taught not to use that hand, and were told that using the right hand was ‘normal’ and ‘correct.’ Similarly, queer children are often times told that it’s not ‘normal’ for them to love who they love and that they need to ‘change.’” Check out the artwork and tracklist for Left Hand below.

The first single off the album is “Over And Over,” a guitar-heavy, sunwashed indie track featuring backing vocals by Julien Baker. It comes with an equally summer-ready music video directed by Min Soo Park. “I wanted to write a queer pop song that has meat on its bones,” Becca says. Listen to “Over And Over” below.

Becca will be on the road supporting Joy Oladokun throughout September. Tickets are available now, and all dates are listed below.

Tracklist
01. Don’t Even Worry (ft. Brittany Howard)
02. Homesick Honeybee
03. Over And Over
04. Don’t Close Your Eyes
05. Mexican Queen
06. Left Hand
07. It’s Too Late
08. Eternity
09. I Had A Dream
10. I Needed You
11. You Don’t Scare Me
12. To Love The Earth

Becca Mancari — 2023 Tour Dates
09/10 – Denver, CO – Summit Music Hall*
09/12 – Kansas City, MO – The Truman*
09/13 – St. Louis, MO – Delmar Hall*
09/19 – Asheville, NC – The Orange Peel*
09/20 – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle*
09/22 – Charlotte, NC – The Underground*
09/23 – Charlottesville, VA – Jefferson Theater*
09/24 – Washington, DC – The Howard*
*supporting Joy Oladokun

If we are fortunate, there are folks with whom we work, who we end up knowing well, that make the world a better place, and George is one of them. His music will last forever and always be a reminder to those who knew him…this was a fantastic human being who had a profoundly positive effect on all of us. We here at High Road are proud to have been a small part of his life and career. – Frank Riley

* * *

It was an honor and privilege to work with George Winston. His light will forever shine. – Dina Dusko

* * *

We are deeply saddened to share the news that George Winston has passed away after a 10-year battle with cancer. George quietly and painlessly left this world while asleep on Sunday, June 4, 2023. George courageously managed serious cancers, including having a successful bone marrow transplant for Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) in 2013 at City of Hope, in Duarte, California, that gratefully extended his life by 10 years. Throughout his cancer treatments, George continued to write and record new music, and he stayed true to his greatest passion: performing for live audiences while raising funds for Feeding America to help fight the national hunger crisis along with donating proceeds from each of his concerts to local food banks. Across an illustrious career spanning more than 50 years, George’s music first became known and loved by his fans with the release of his two most iconic albums, Autumn (1980) and December (1982). George’s recordings evolved with the times while garnering a GRAMMY Award for Forest (plus five GRAMMY nominations) and selling over 15 million albums. George touched the hearts of generations with his acclaimed solo acoustic piano compositions. From his early days in Montana, Mississippi and Florida, to his later life living in the San Francisco Bay Area and touring to cities worldwide, America’s beautiful landscapes and natural seasons shaped his singular instrumental folk piano. With 16 solo piano albums to his name, George recorded brilliant piano music, which includes tribute recordings for Vince Guaraldi, The Doors, a Hurricane Katrina relief benefit, Gulf Coast and Louisiana Wetlands benefits, September 11 benefit, a cancer research benefit for City of Hope, the Peanuts episode “This Is America Charlie Brown: The Birth Of The Constitution,” among others. George’s legacy includes his beloved catalog as well as an archive of his own acoustic guitar and harmonica recordings, and albums by an array of Hawaiian slack key artists on his own record label, Dancing Cat Records. George is pre-deceased by his parents, George and Mary Winston, and is survived by his sister, niece and nephew.

The family of George Winston will hold a private memorial service. For donations in memory of George Winston, please visit:

Feeding America:
https://tinyurl.com/GeorgeWinstonFeedingAmerica

City Of Hope Cancer Center:
https://tinyurl.com/GeorgeWinstonCityOfHope

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center:
https://tinyurl.com/GeorgeWinstonSloanKettering

[Rolling Stone]

After their acclaimed 2019 debut became a word-of-mouth hit among artists, the singer-songwriter had to take a hard look at the people they were relying on

BY JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

JOANNA STERNBERG can still remember the time they were almost beaten up over the band Maroon 5. It was a middle-school birthday party, and Sternberg’s classmates had found out that Sternberg didn’t share their taste for songs like “Moves Like Jagger.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, God, turn it off,’ and everyone else was like, ‘Yay, it’s my favorite music,’ ” says Sternberg, 31. “It was a legitimate reason to beat me up.”

Sternberg’s tastes have never been in line with their generation. By age 12, they were listening to gospel, a solitary pursuit until they discovered a group of fellow jazz snobs at their arts-oriented Manhattan high school. But those musical idiosyncrasies are exactly what made Sternberg’s 2019 debut, Then I Try Some More, a word-of-mouth cult favorite. That album’s distinctive mix of piano chops à la Scott Joplin with Elliott Smith-level emotional intimacy earned Sternberg fans in everyone from Jeff Tweedy to Phoebe Bridgers, who has called the singer an “emo Randy Newman.” (“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, she gets it,’ ” Sternberg says.) 

The songs on I’ve Got Me, which Sternberg recorded with veteran indie-rock producer-guitarist Matt Sweeney, are openhearted reflections on healing, heartbreak, and hope. Several of them are so honest about real people that Sternberg shudders at the thought of singing them in public. The piano ballad “Drifting on a Cloud” is about the short-lived elation the singer felt when first prescribed Zoloft; the decade-old album closer “The Song” is about a former best friend; on the title track, Sternberg proudly claims their own “faults and flaws” as part of who they are. “Between self-hatred and self-awareness is a very small, thin line,” they sing.

“Joanna’s songs are working out these struggles, but the really powerful ones feel like victories, in a strange way,” says Sweeney. “They flipped this horrible thing into something we can all relate to.”

Sternberg is a tough judge of their own work, sometimes intensely so. They had to be convinced by various loved ones (their mom, their friends) to include several songs on the new album, and they say that performing many of their songs live makes them “physically upset.” “I hope nobody’s a harsher critic than me,” they say. “Because that would meanthat somebody really hates me.”

“Artists like Joanna are a rare breed,” says the singer Mary Lou Lord, who became a mentor to Sternberg during the pandemic. “They’re sensitive, and they’re not built like everybody else, which is what makes their music so beautiful. Their brains don’t work like normal, regular, boring people.”

If Sternberg’s debut was a snapshot of a specific time and place in their life, I’ve Got Me is a musical mission statement Sternberg has been waiting their entire life to share, one where they play every single instrument (cello, violin, guitar, piano, double bass, to name a few). “I’ve been secretly saving these songs, hoping for something like this,” says Sternberg. “This is an album in the sense of, ‘I finally get to do this! This is my dream come true, and I’m doing it, this is me!’”

For Sweeney, the album’s premise was self-evident: Let Sternberg do exactly what they want. “I had it in mind right away … to leave them the fuck alone,” he says.

Sternberg’s classical musicianship did not come from nowhere. Raised by two bohemian parents (their father a visual artist and folk and Klezmer musician, their mother a local theater actress), the singer grew up in the artist-subsidized Manhattan Plaza apartments, where Alicia Keys’ former piano teacher offered lessons in the building. When Sternberg says their “building is Seinfeld,” they mean it literally: Larry David moved there in the Seventies, and the real-life inspiration for Kramer is still a resident.  

By the time Sternberg had graduated high school, they were gigging in far-flung Brooklyn bars with their the Band-inspired collective Squirrel Ship, whose name makes Sternberg cringe 10 years later. (Sternberg’s take on being a bandleader: “It’s like hosting a party, but you feel guilty you’re not paying people enough.”)

Before long, Sternberg moved into performing solo and writing copious amounts of songs. They estimate they’ve written several hundred, and share that they’ve already written the bulk of their next two or three albums. 

Some time after Then I Try Some More was released, Sternberg says, they received “the biggest, best opportunity I’ve ever been given” to make their follow-up LP. But without going into details, they say the experience went sour, one of several toxic industry encounters that they attribute to their propensity to be overly trusting of others.

“I’ve been taken advantage of and humiliated a lot, and I’m just sick of it, but I don’t know what to do,” says Sternberg. “I’m not going to stop being who I am.” At a certain point, they say, receiving some proper medical diagnoses helped them understand the pattern of their trust being violated. “Autism, ADHD, whatever I have — all the stuff that I have — the thing is: Now I know I have it, and I didn’t know until now. Ever since I got diagnosed, I was able to see what happened.”

Sternberg was still struggling in the months immediately following the recording of I’ve Got Me. During one period, they holed up in their apartment, drawing roughly 100 versions of the artwork for their album. (Sweeney eventually convinced Sternberg that the very first version they drew was the best.) 

These days, Sternberg is feeling healthier than ever, with a new team of trusted advisers that includes both Sweeney and Lord — and newly confident after a springtime solo residency in Brooklyn that left audiences rapt.

“I was able to quit substances and do all this stuff, but it really came from [my mentors] guiding me,” Sternberg says, “and being able to finish this record I’ve dreamed of making my whole life.” 

The pressure and opportunities that arose from such unexpected acclaim led to a difficult several years for Sternberg. But the end result of that trying time — their second album, I’ve Got Me, out June 30 — is a stunning showcase of Sternberg’s musicianship and songwriting, and it feels like a hard-won triumph. They describe the period leading up to its recording as a series of setbacks, both professional and personal, that left them feeling taken advantage of by the music industry right as they began to fully address their own longstanding mental-health challenges.

“I was hiding in my room for weeks, just being sick,” says Sternberg, who has been open about their past struggles with addiction. “This record just kind of symbolized me trying to get better.… It really cured my life.”

“Here in Tennessee, we care a little bit for humankind,” the Texas singer-songwriter said while wearing a red dress (before singing “Red Dress”)

[Pitchfork]

By Evan Minsker

James McMurtry, the seasoned Texas singer-songwriter whose last album, The Horses & the Hounds, was released in 2021, performed at 3rd and Lindsley in Nashville on Sunday night. During his encore performance, he walked out wearing a red dress and performed “Red Dress” alongside the musician BettySoo (who wore a suit). They were protesting Tennessee’s law banning drag performances on public property or anywhere children are present, which was temporarily blocked by a federal judge. “Here in Tennessee, we care a little bit for humankind,” he said. Watch it happen below.

Singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier was in attendance. “It was an incredible experience to watch James do this,” Gauthier said in a statement. “He was courageous, unselfish, and showed true leadership. I find him to be heroic. What a great artist!”

“I am so proud to tour supporting a songwriter I believe in deeply, both as an artist and as a person,” BettySoo added. “I am so grateful for the opportunity to speak with actions and clothing on behalf of those whom the bullies would deign to silence. For the record, had children been in attendance, I’m pretty dang sure none would have been harmed nor indoctrinated nor groomed. It was also not sexually oriented in the least.”

[Brooklyn Vegan]

This is the Kit have shared a second song from their upcoming Gruff Rhys-produced album Careful Of Your Keepers. “More Change” features Gruff on backing vocals — “I love it when Gruff says ‘light bulb,'” says the group’s Kate Stables — and comes with a playful animated video by Benjamin Jones.

“With this video I wanted to create something that felt homemade, organic and very much alive,” says Jones. “Using very simple puppetry with some old coat hangers and some basic stop motion (and some surprisingly willing neighbors who lent me their faces) I’ve tried to create a few characters and scenarios which are connected in some ways, but also reflect the themes I picked up from the music – sadness, compromise, exploring new ground, and finding new ways to help each other move forward.” Watch the video below.

Careful Of Your Keepers is out June 9 via Rough Trade, and Kate will take This is the Kit on tour this fall, kicking off dates in NYC at Le Poisson Rouge on 10/11 and wrapping things up in Pasadena on November 4. Tickets for those shows go on sale Friday, May 12 at 10 AM local time. All dates are listed below.

This Is The Kit – More Change (Official Video)

This Is The Kit 2023 Tour Dates:
05/19/23 – Portcurno, UK – Minack Theatre, Matinee Show
05/19/23 – Portcurno, UK – Minack Theatre, Evening Show (SOLD OUT)
06/16/23 – Kent, UK – Black Deer Festival
07/16/23 – Hertfordshire, UK – Folk By The Oak
07/27/23 – Warwick, UK – Warwick Folk Festival
07/29/23 – North Yorkshire, UK – Deer Shed Festival
09/20/23 – Antwerp, BE – De Roma
09/21/23 – Amsterdam, NL – THT/Tolhuistuin
09/22/23 – Nijmegen, NL – Doornroosje
09/23/23 – Hamburg, DE – Reeperbahn Festival
09/24/23 – Copenhagen, DK – Hotel Cecil
09/26/23 – Berlin, DE – Frannz Club
09/27/23 – Leipzig, DE – Connewitz
09/29/23 – Munich, DE – Milla
09/30/23 – Zürich, CH – Bogen F
10/01/23 – Lyon, FR – Epicerie Moderne
10/03/23 – Lille, FR – Aeronef
10/05/23 – Reims, FR – Cartonnerie
10/06/23 – Paris, FR – Trabendo
10/11/23 – New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge
10/12/23 – Boston, MA – Cafe 939 Berklee College of Music
10/13/23 – Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s
10/14/23 – Washington, DC – Songbyrd
10/17/23 – Toronto, Canada – The Drake Hotel
10/19/23 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
10/20/23 – Milwaukee, WI – The Back Room at Colectivo Coffee
10/21/23 – Minneapolis, MN – Turf Club
10/24/23 – Denver, CO – Globe Hall
10/26/23 – Boise, ID – Neurolux
10/27/23 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios
10/28/23 – Seattle, WA – Woodlawn Hall
10/29/2023 – Vancouver, WA – Wise Hall
11/01/23 – Grass Valley, CA – The Center for the Arts
11/02/23 – San Francisco, CA – The Chapel
11/04/23 – Pasadena, CA – South Pasadena Masonic
11/08/23 – Worthing, UK – Assembly Hall
11/09/23 – Cambridge, UK – Junction
11/10/23 – Reading, UK – St. Laurence Church
11/11/23 – Cardiff, UK – Tram Shed
11/12/23 – Birmingham, UK – Glee Club
11/14/23 – Bangor, UK – Neuadd Ogwen
11/16/23 – Cork, IRE – Cyprus Avenue
11/17/23 – Galway, IRE – Roisin Dubh
11/18/23 – Dublin, IRE – National Concert Hall
11/19/23 – Belfast, UK – Mandela Hall
11/21/23 – Edinburgh, UK – Summerhall
11/22/23 – Gateshead, UK – Sage
11/23/23 – Leeds, UK – Irish Centre
11/24/23 – Manchester, UK – Academy 2
11/25/23 – London, UK – Barbican
02/03/24 – Bristol UK – Bristol Beacon

New York-based artist Emily King showcases her innovative fusion of soul, R&B, and pop in a performance of ‘Special Occasion’, the title-track to her newly released album.

[PopMatters]

St. Paul & The Broken Bones’ Angels in Science Fiction confronts the idea of being a father and bringing a child into a world as frightening as ours.

By ​Peter Piatkowski

atherhood has inspired some of the most poignant songs in pop music. Whether inspired by love, hope, or tragedy, singers have turned to song to explore the relationship between fathers and their children. While many of the songs we readily remember about fathers speak to the longing and regret of fatherhood, the songs on St. Paul & The Broken Bones‘ new album are inspired by impending fatherhood. When he discovered he would be a father, lead singer Paul Janeway wrote letters to his future daughter, and these songs would eventually find their way onto the new record, Angels in Science Fiction. Like much of pop art in the last few years, the work on the album reflects Janeway’s powerful feelings of parenthood but also melancholy and angst that seems to have grown from social unease.         

Building on the sound of St. Paul & The Broken Bones’ 2022 album, The Alien Coast, the music on this record is lovely and lilting, moving, and melancholic. While the sounds on the 2022 record were far more divergent and varying, there’s far more unity in the aural aesthetic of Angels in Science Fiction. As much as The Alien Coast may have looked to the world’s anxiety in 2022, mirroring that angst with a jangly psychedelic soul, the mood on this record is reflective and contemplative. Janeway speaks to his then-future child directly through song, sharing his hopes, fears, and love.

The album’s first track, “Chelsea”, speaks to Janeway’s intense swirl of feelings about being a dad. “I hope you get your mother’s eyes,” he sings in an Al Green-esque soulful croon. “I hope you get your mother’s hair.” He then exposes his vulnerability and fear by admitting that he hopes “Daddy never dies / Know it comes someday,” he muses, “hope it’s not soon.” The fear of death is universal. But fatherhood adds another layer of urgency to that fear. In Michael Schur’s sitcom, The Good Place, the fear of death is poetically summed up by this pithy line: “Every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you’re gonna die. But that knowledge is what gives life meaning.” When Janeway expresses unease over death, that unease has become far more profound because being a father has given his life new meaning. 

Janeway’s daughter is named Marigold, and she’s the inspiration and namesake for Angels in Science Fiction‘s closer. It’s fitting that the record’s sequencing bookends these two tributes to fatherhood. “Marigold” is a stately piano ballad in which Janeway speaks to his daughter, professing his undying love even if his work creates distance between them. Just as “Chelsea” exposes Janeway’s worry, “Marigold” does similar work in admitting that he doesn’t have all the answers. Despite his promises that “I’ll be home, so don’t you cry,” he also brings up his mortality, vowing that Marigold would be the last thing on his mind if he died. Both “Chelsea” and “Marigold” depict a father who is assured of his love for his daughter but unsure of what reality holds for them. It’s bracing and extremely exposed; the instinct for most is to depict parenthood as a series of permanence, but on this pair of tunes, we see that parenthood is fraught with uncertainty.

These songs have tender themes, reflected in the overall gentle sound of the record. Produced by Matt Ross-Spang, who worked with St. Paul & The Broken Bones on their last album, Angels in Science Fiction moves steadily, gently swaying as if propelled by a soft breeze. The members – Janeway, Jesse Phillips, Browan Lollar, Kevin Leon, Al Gamble, Allen Branstetter, Amari Ansari, Chad Fisher – all worked in various permutations on penning these tunes. In a song like “Oporto-Madrid Blvd.”, named after a street in Janeway’s native Birmingham, Alabama, Phillips, Lollar, Gamble, and Leon join Janeway to craft the sinewy, funk track. The lyrics use the metaphor of a twisted tree, representing perpetuity and endurance. The pastoral imagery returns on “Magnolia Trees”, which also harkens to their Southern roots, though the sun-dappled revelry is a marked juxtaposition to the strutting “Oporto-Madrid Blvd”.

As with any confessional pop record of the past couple of years, there will be allegorical allusions to death and destruction. So much mainstream pop art during the pandemic tried to make sense of a world forever changed by a global event. In “Easter Bunny”, St. Paul & The Broken Bones bring in apocalyptic imagery with sobering lyrics of “church bells ringing through the tornado winds” and “sirens singing shelter was where you should go”. There is a series of rhetorical questions, including “Did you hear the doctors tell us the world is gonna die?”

In “Lonely Love Song”, Janeway and Phillips write of lockdown, finding poetry and beauty in the monotony of quarantine. Janeway repeatedly sings of being bored yet somehow content with his love, professing, “I don’t care as long as I am bored with you in my arms” and wishing “we could be bored all the time.” When he confesses to being scared of dying, he’s terrified of “missing all the love that I give you.” In the lean, sleek funk of “Wolf in Rabbit Clothes”, the tight lyrics reflect the past few years’ growing paranoia and social unrest.

Angels in Science Fiction will provide some comfort, succor, and inspiration. Janeway’s complicated feelings of his looming fatherhood, paired with the uncertainty of the global context of the record’s composition and recording, make for a satisfying response to all the swirling, contradictory feelings we’ve been experiencing. The idea of being a father, bringing a child into a world as frightening as ours, is a sobering and potentially overwhelming thought. This music beautifully scores these feelings.

[Fader]

Holy Waters is due out in September.

By DAVID RENSHAW

Puma Blue is the alias of Jacob Allen, a London-born artist who now lives in Atlanta. For the past half decade or so he has created a lane of jazz-inflected late night comfort music. Across early EPs Swum Baby and 2018’s Blood Loss, his music has been a nook to clamber into, shutting the rest of the world out as you enter.

Today Allen has announced details of a new Puma Blue album. Holy Waters will be released on September 1 via Blue Flowers. The first track from the album, “Pretty,” comes from a deeply vulnerable place as he sings about the unique anxiety that being accepted for who you are can bring. The feeling of distorted ideas about your own image running so deep that you begin to question anyone who finds you attractive is at the heart of the song, which warps between beautiful ambience and harsher textures to reflect that emotional journey.

Speaking via email, Allen told the FADER: “‘Pretty’ is about feeling ugly. So ugly that sometimes you can’t believe the person who loves you sees you how they do. We were playing with beauty and ugliness when producing it, the live studio performance already felt so sweet and delicate, it needed something uglier and haunting so I howled these notes in the bridge and we fed my voice through a synth that made me sound like a swarm of bees.”

On the subject of the video, which nods to Wim Wenders’ 1987 classic Wings of Desire, Allen adds: “I wanted to capture how it feels to look in a mirror and feel dissonance with what you see. I obscured myself for much of the video, shot on film and directed by Angela Ricciardi, I wanted to hide and sing from the shadows. But I walk around New York City with these angel wings because the lyrics are ‘You make me feel so pretty,’ this idea that I am perceived as beautiful by someone else despite how I see myself. At the end, I come home to this lifeless figure, a nothing. The idea that even though you can be loved by someone you can still be haunted by dysmorphia to some extent. This song is an attempt to challenge that, to honour that admiration from the one who sees me as beautiful.”

Holy Waters is the follow up to 2021 album In Praise Of Shadows. In between making the new record, Allen has worked with British rapper Loyle Carner on his latest album Hugo, as well as opening for Arlo Parks. In addition to the new album, today also brings news of a Puma Blue headline U.K. and European tour. See below for venue and date details.

Puma Blue 2023 tour dates

May 4 – Washington, DC – Union Stage
May 5 – Durham, NC – Motorco Music Hall
May 6 – Nashville, TN – The Basement East
May 7 – Atlanta, GA – Shaky Knees Festival
May 9 – New Orleans, LA – Toulouse Theatre
May 11 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
May 12 – Austin, TX – Parish
May 13 – Dallas, TX – Deep Ellum Arts Co

September 9 – Paris, La Maroquinerie
September 12 – Amsterdam, Bitterzoet
September 13 – Brussels, Botanique Orangerie
September 15 – Copenhagen, Vega
September 16 – Stockholm, Nalen
September 18 – Berlin, Silent Green
September 19 – Koln, Bumann & Sohn
September 20 – Hamburg, Reeperbahn
September 25 – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
September 26 – Manchester, Canvas
September 27 – Bristol, Thekla
September 28 – London, KOKO
September 30 – Dublin, The Button Factory
October 2 – Glasgow, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut
October 3 – Birmingham, Hare & Hounds

[Spin]

Get ready to press play on the soundtrack of your life: Leslie Feist is back with an incomparable new album. In this career-spanning interview, she discusses new music and shares some eternal words of wisdom we all need to hear

• By Liza Lentini

Prompted, Leslie Feist turns and looks up behind her at a large, bright, abstract painting, hanging on its own on an otherwise bare wall. “That’s my daughter’s finger painting,” she tells me, of her three year old’s masterpiece. “That says it all. She’s like Minnie Mouse in Fantasia.” 

Mere weeks before her new album release, she seems blissfully unaware that her fanbase has been holding their breath, waiting. For most, she had us at “Mushaboom” (2004), or perhaps it was the sight of her dancing to 2007’s “1234” in a blue sequin jumpsuit, forever oozing cool-girl gamine vibes. (Singing a version of “1234” to Muppet monsters on Sesame Street only added to her allure.)

April 14 marked the moment of exhale, and the release of Multitudes, her sixth full-length album and follow-up to 2017’s Pleasure. Like the world around us, Leslie’s music has evolved too. The album embodies the same layered “simplicity” (yes, in quotes) that has defined her. “Layered” in its ability to contain/reflect/embody the weight/exuberance/infatuation with and for life itself. This is why, when you speak of Feist’s music to her devotees, many refer to her as their therapist. They genuinely feel they know her. The songs reflect a deeper understanding.

So, even if it sounds simple, there’s nothing simple about it. It’s true artistry. 

What is it about Feist’s music that offers exactly what we all need to hear at the time, when the world is spinning out of control? 

“I work in a hermetically sealed box, and then it seems like it’s all in my computer, and I’m still making changes, and I’m still obsessing about mix nuances, and then it’s sort of like the next day, it’s in the world,” Leslie explains, of her process. “It’s just so strange. I’m still like, ‘Wait, I’m not done,’” she chuckles. “It’s fun too. It’s like you can never finish a work of art. You literally have to back away from it. What’s that expression? You just have to just back away and not do any more damage or something.”

On the adjacent wall, to her right, hangs a painting by her father, an abstract expressionist—another “simple,” layered, mesmerizing artist. “This is the Feist family gallery right here,” she says, smiling, and the two paintings—her father’s and her daughter’s — complement one another. “The joke is my dad said you can’t be an artist, and then I tricked him,” she says. “I was like, ‘Fine, I won’t paint.’” 

We talk about the production of Multitudes, how it was written and developed as a live theater piece, and the six years between album releases. “I was on tour for probably two years or something, and then I became a mom [in 2019] and the pandemic hit.” She also lost her father suddenly. 

Multitudes reflects all of this, the heart swells and the fiery lows of healing and being passionately human. It is a Peer Gynt-esque epic musical journey.

Her phone rings and she graciously apologizes, explaining that a dear 77-year-old friend—“my elder”—has called to let her know that he’s put a pie in the oven and when she’s finished, they’ll have warm pie to share. 

“We all need elders,” she says, wisely. She explains that this friend’s land is where they shot the video for “In Lightning,” one of the album’s more sonically riveting songs. 

“It’s a family affair, all of this stuff,” she says.

How was the process of creating Multitudes different from the others?

This record was written, essentially, for a live show that we toured through the pandemic. I made a theatrical socialist theater experiment that we staged with David Byrne’s production designer [Rob Sinclair]. It was in the round, and we built it in Germany and moved it through North America. You could have very limited capacities. It was a dream I’d had for years, this egalitarian theater experiment. It was the moment where the world had room for that. That would allow for such an un-commercially viable way to share space with audiences. The songs were written largely for that show… it was sonically in the round as well [for] the audience. Essentially pre-production for the record was on tour. The songs were continuing to change, and I was changing lyrics. I was changing arrangements because we did it two times a night as well. 

It was like a play in that sense. We just did it twice. It was getting refined and refined until we just went into the studio and in two weeks recorded it. It was relatively easy in the sense that the songs were well-vetted at that point. 

How did this process affect the sound?

Normally I record in a live-off-the-floor collective way. The way that this show was formed was it was half solo and then slowly it seemed like an audience member was getting up and grabbing things and plugging things in and everyone was sort of, “What is that guy doing?” Then he’d sit down and begin to play. 

It was a bunch of treated violins and organs and synthesizers and then acoustic guitar. I was playing mostly solo for the show. The idea that my co-producer Mocky had was, “Why don’t we record primarily you solo — instead of playing live off the floor with everybody. Like Metals was a live album essentially, and Pleasure was in large part a live album with just Mocky and I playing everything.

The way we approached, it was me alone, and then I identified the few players that I have always admired and said, “Let’s just call them wild cards. They don’t even know the songs. Let’s bring them in to listen to the solo performances and then we’ll find what the instrumentation might need to be.” 

It’s kind of, let’s get Gabe Noel in and whatever he brings with him. Then of course my two live players who are on the tour with me. 

How do you achieve so many emotional layers? 

I think I have been working to take my own lostness because I do feel on a daily basis challenged. I understand the mountainous mood shifts, the weather systems pouring in, and the quiet interior battle for just one optimistic thought a day. You know what I’m saying? Time having been reduced down to nothing because I have a toddler. There’s no time anymore. There’s no room for myself, it feels sometimes.

Songs are luckily my own medicine. I can understand and respect the role that music can play for people because I’ve medicated myself through many a dark moment, I’m trying to say, with Philip Glass Saxophone Quartet, or with Adrianne Lenker, who I wrote a soliloquy to when I was in the wee hours of my daughter having been… she was maybe four days old and I wrote Adrianne and said, “I understand now what music is for… I’ve been cracked and broken by exhaustion, to the degree that the only medicine, the only salve for my exhausted brain, is you playing guitar and singing because I don’t know how else I could make it through this hour.” Because it is true.

Sometimes there’s a life raft in the form of “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure, which will be the only thing that can completely snap me out of it and put me back on the bus to school with my Sony Sport Walkman.

Having done it on the other end of things, made songs for 20 years or longer, but 20 years’ worth of record-making. I think I’ve been quietly identifying what my vocabulary is and what the scaffolding and the structure of what I’m trying to do [is], and it is to get closer and closer to an uncomfortable [truth]. Imagine it in some fantasy novel where the protagonist finally finds the well and looks down into the water, and that’s where the truth is revealed.

I’m looking to songs to help me pose the question more accurately. I don’t want to live inside my own illusions. I don’t want to project onto the people around me to make myself more comfortable. I don’t want to live in a lie where I’m slightly more comfortable but way more constricted. There’s been a lot of just trying to reckon with my — I don’t know, with my responsibility to my path in life here.

Songs are luckily something that served that questioning. It’s not like I can provide a single answer. God knows I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing from moment to moment, but I think that I’m learning how to pose the question in a way that can maybe be in service of other people’s questions. That would make me feel that I am good. Maybe that’s what all of us want, to not cause harm.

There’s so much on this album that feels so provocative and so different—where did songs like “In Lightning” come from?

This morning I wrote something for the song and the video that just came out this morning. About the collective and how the song kept shape-shifting until — “Borrow Trouble” did, but also “In Lightning” very much did, and similarly. It was an acoustic song because of the live show, in which there had been no drums. Then my dear friend Mike Mills, who makes films, has become the guardian of these songs because he was hearing them from their earliest demos. He was my pen pal through the pandemic. While he was editing his film C’mon C’mon, I was writing what was going to become the show.

We were…talking about process and art and aspirations, and where we snag ourselves, and giving each other dares and taking each other out of our comfort zones in each of our work. It was a real gift. When I finally came back to Los Angeles and we were going to record, we brought the hard drive home from having captured everything. At that point, it became a major carving exercise. Because people had played a lot of beautiful stuff. Then I had to decide, carving it away, sculpting what the final thing was going to be. Then Mike came in and said, “I know that I’ve said I’m behind this solo record thing, but you need to play drums because you’re not a drummer and you need to play drums like a guitar player. You need to just do what you would do this way, but with sticks, and just be feral, and the song needs more feral.” 

He was the one that pushed me towards what became that syncopated glitch drum wildness.

Taking it from a solo acoustic song [laughs], where the “la la la la” and the verses were very unfettered by tons of production, to turn that in a way, take what the song is saying and make us hear that. It’s concrete poetry or something in the sense that you try to take the lyrics and have the production reflect what the lyrics are saying. It is about trying to be seen and see ourselves clearly.

Exactly what I was just telling you. The project of owning my time and place, not diminishing myself. Because, ironically, women tend to diminish, we diminish ourselves the more years we accumulate. My friend who’s my age, she has a great clothing brand called Local Woman. She said, “Why is it that the less of me there is the better? Less time, less space? My role as a woman is to diminish myself in time and space.” Then that somehow has a higher currency. Just naming it, calling it, and the song is essentially that idea as well. It’s trying to catch those glimpses of clarity and collect them. Collect those little intermittent blasts of eureka moments and just try to find some love of self in those moments.

Why do you think it’s important to get outside our comfort zones? 

Maybe just to really take a good look at those comforts and whether they’re serving us or not, whether they’re serving our growth. Because I think a lot of comforts can be to spin our wheels in place because it’s more comfortable right here than lifting our eyes to the horizon and really assessing where we’re at and who’s here with us and how we want to take our next step. Sometimes comfort can be a tractor beam just gluing you to a certain way of behaving that doesn’t require any real plumbing of the depths or unpacking of the tendencies towards this or that.

I don’t know that it’s about being uncomfortable. It’s just about maybe making a bigger container of comfort so there’s a little bit more wingspan inside that comfort so you can actually move. 

Some might be surprised to hear that you started off in punk…how do you feel that background correlates to the music you create now?

Maybe it’s a full circle or something because I think that I was first drawn to it, probably because it was a way to enact the velocity I felt inside of me. Being in a punk band, screaming into a microphone, sweating, and mosh pits, the whole thing was an accurate reflection of the scope of my feelings when I was 15, 16. I think that punk is innately supportive and community-driven. It’s positive. It’s anger with activism at its core. It’s calling it as you see it. I suppose a lot of that remains in me.

It just expresses itself as befits my time on Earth or something. I’m not as angry. I would say that I feel more grief and despair. I don’t get as angry about it, I suppose. If I look around at what’s happening in the world, I feel overwhelmed by the nuanced darkness. I think that the [closer] people can be in touch with their feelings, maybe not anger as the primary one, but compassion, and curiosity, then maybe it doesn’t need to be quite — we could shed a little light into the darkness or something. As I say that, I don’t know that I believe that because — we’re in a freaky time right now. But the punk, yes, I think you could agree that it was always labeled by the generation that came before as something negative, but we know from within it that it wasn’t. It isn’t.

Obviously people have fans, but community is something a little bit different and really, really special.

That show in the Round — I felt like we really exchanged something. There was a synergy — we were really on the same same moment. It was a really amazing way to see each other and to feel each other, and it really felt like a collective. Sure, I was playing songs, but I didn’t feel it was a concert in that binary give and receive.

It wasn’t a two-dimensional stage and performer thing, which is usually the case. Even emotionally, it didn’t feel transactional in that way. It felt like something else. There always are shows where you are at where a swelling collective kind of rarefied air can happen, but I felt maybe because everybody was quite porous.

Most people have gone through some loss, either of an illusion or a person, or a tendency or a habit, you know what I mean? That there was a lot of reassessment going on, and a lot of discomfort and pain had been endured by so many people, and in a way we were able to grieve it and laugh at it together in that context. It felt different.

The singer-songwriter reveals herself in a memoir that captures her adventures with charming rogues, puzzled music executives and her own demons.

By Penelope Green

[New York Times]

NASHVILLE — “Bless your heart!”

Lucinda Williams delivered the Southern benediction in her distinctive drawl. She has a memoir coming out soon, and Ms. Williams, the celebrated singer-songwriter who has been compared to Raymond Carver for the acuity of her work, was nonetheless not too sure about this particular literary endeavor. So when a visitor complimented the book, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” she beamed. Like many a writer, she said she had a hard time letting go. “I thought, ‘I’m going to write this book and turn it in when I’m done,’” she said. “Much to my dismay it doesn’t work that way.”

She wanted more time, and she missed the editorial eye and encouragement of her father, the poet and literary scholar Miller Williams, who died in 2015. Like his daughter, he was known for the gritty realism of his work, and they often performed together. For years he had looked over her lyrics — he was the king of grammar, she said — until she sent him “Essence,” the title song from her 2001 album, and he told her, as she recalled: “‘Honey, this is as close to pure poetry as you’ve come.’ And I said, ‘Does this mean I’ve graduated?’”

It has been 25 years since Ms. Williams’s breakthrough, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” That collection of anthems to love, loss and yearning made her an overnight success, as she said wryly, at age 45. Despite the stroke she suffered in 2020, she still looks vibrant and tough, with her smoky blue eyes and roughed up, rock ’n’ roll hair. Walking is a challenge (she takes it slow these days) and she can’t yet play guitar, but her voice is thrillingly unaffected.

About that voice. Emmylou Harris once said Ms. Williams could sing the chrome off a tailpipe. Bonnie Raitt, in a phone interview, called it “unique, truly American and drenched in raw grit and soul and vulnerability.”

Steve Earle, Ms. Williams’s occasional collaborator and old friend, described it this way over Zoom: “Have you ever been in New Orleans or Mobile or someplace really far South when the gardenias start to bloom? There’s a moment when the scent just permeates everything and there’s a viscosity to it and it’s substantial and that’s what her voice has always reminded me of. There’s an automatic atmosphere. Chet Baker was like that. Merle Haggard. The mood happens as soon as they open their mouths.”

Ms. Williams, 70, and her husband, Tom Overby, who is also her manager and collaborator, live in a white clapboard bungalow with a peaked roof, gingerbread trim and a neat square of lawn. They moved to East Nashville from Los Angeles in February 2020, after which came a series of blows: the tornadoes that tore through the city in early March, flattening neighborhoods and shearing off part of their roof; the coronavirus pandemic, which shut things down a week later; the Covid death of her dear friend John Prine; and the stroke, which bludgeoned her in November.

The house was sparsely furnished with a pair of velvety sofas; metal shelves and storage containers spilling over with books, CDs and vinyl albums; and lots of audio gear. On the kitchen island, a bright yellow vase was filled with yellow button flowers. The gray walls were bare, save for a white board that proclaimed, “Lu’s Schedule. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

“I have a bit of brain fog from the stroke,” Ms. Williams said, nodding at the board, “dates and days and such, but I think I always had that.”

Mr. Overby, a loquacious man with bushy gray hair, rolled his eyes in assent. He’s the memory in the marriage, she added.

In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” Ms. Williams writes of her decades playing for tips and spaghetti dinners and the perfidy of the record companies that didn’t know how to characterize her roots-inspired, renegade rocking style and her novelistic writing. “We don’t know what to do with this,” she said she was told over and over again. “It’s too country for rock and too rock for country.” It was somehow fitting that a British independent label, Rough Trade Records, signed her for her 1988 album, “Lucinda Williams.”

She writes of the Hollywood director hired to make a video for “Right in Time,” the languid ballad about a woman’s desire from the “Car Wheels” album. As she recounts, he arrived for dinner at a restaurant thoroughly drunk before propositioning her, sloppily, while her boyfriend was in the bathroom. When she found his idea for the video corny, she sent him packing. She goes on to tell the story of the six-year odyssey to get the album made — the setbacks caused by vacillating record company executives and her dogged commitment to her own high standards. For her troubles, Ms. Williams was labeled a perfectionist, which, for a woman in a male-dominated industry, was not a compliment.

“She just stood her ground and emerged a gleaming, burnished jewel,” Ms. Raitt said. “It doesn’t make you popular when you stand your ground, and that’s why she’s excellent.” A strong woman in the music industry is seen as “a control freak and a bitch,” she added, while a strong man is hailed as “an auteur and a genius.”

Ms. Williams turned to Mr. Earle to help her get the album finished. “He’d say, ‘It’s just a record, Lu,’” she said. “He was trying to help me get perspective. I was losing my perspective. He’d be like: ‘The vocal is great. You’re singing your Louisiana ass off. When are you going to trust somebody?’ I had hardly made any records before, compared to other artists, so the whole process of being in the studio was terrifying. It was my own neuroses. It’s not like I was brave or anything.”

She has often been bedeviled by jitters. In 1994, when she won a Grammy thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s hit version of her song “Passionate Kisses,” she was too nervous to attend the ceremony. Rosanne Cash had sent her to a Nashville boutique for an outfit, but she bailed at the last minute.

“The truth is I was not just self-conscious, but also scared,” she writes in the memoir. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life. It’s a riddle I believe many artists have been trying to solve for centuries. It takes enormous fortitude to create the work in the first place, but then once it’s time to put it out in the world, the confidence required to go public is unrelated to the audacity that created the work.”

“It was my fear of the unknown,” Ms. Williams said. “Of being around people with money and nice clothes and nice teeth or whatever.”

She managed to make it to the Grammy ceremony in 1999, when “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was honored as the year’s best folk album. But when her name was called, she found herself walking away from the stage. Mr. Earle, who was up for the same award, yelled out to her, as she told it: “‘Lulu! You’re going the wrong way!’ I was horrified. God. Thanks, Steve!”

“Lucinda is one of the great geniuses of popular music, so how could she have struggled?” Ann Powers, a music critic for NPR, said. “A lot of it is personal and a lot of it is structural. The dynamic of how to corral a bunch of guys was complicated, it still is, but even more so then when women were relatively sparse in rock ’n’ roll circles.”

It can be hard for bandleaders like Ms. Williams to be the only woman in the room. Ms. Raitt called it the problem of “women’s voices,” which “hits the mom button” for many men.

Ms. Powers added, “In her music, she’s often questioning herself, expressing her vulnerability in profound ways.”

“So it makes sense that she would have struggled to claim her authority,” she continued. “So often with artists the very thing we love about them is what poses a challenge for them in their life and work.”

In any case, in addition to earning a Grammy, “Car Wheels” hit the Billboard charts, a first for Ms. Williams, and went gold. Critics reviewed it in ecstatic terms, and the record producer Joe Boyd called it “the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ of the 1990s,” referring to Bob Dylan’s canonical record.

As Ms. Williams’s fame grew, so did the dedication of her fans. She writes of the woman who began masturbating at a show in New Orleans and kept at it even as she was removed by security. (When Ms. Williams and her band heard the story after their set, they were fascinated, as she recalled: “Was she wearing pants? How did it work?”) There was the couple that sent her lingerie. The woman who delivered a crate of Vidalia onions because she’d heard Ms. Williams liked them. One fan, a drug counselor who credited his sobriety to Ms. Williams, had one of her songs tattooed in its entirety on his back. Then there are those who have sent her letters saying how much they appreciate “Sweet Old World,” her mournful lament for someone who died by suicide.

Ms. Williams was born in Lake Charles, La., and grew up in New Orleans, Mexico and Chile, with stopovers in towns in Mississippi, Utah and Georgia. Her father, the son of a Methodist clergyman and early civil rights activist, sold encyclopedias and refrigerators before his mentor, Flannery O’Connor, recommended him for a poetry position at Loyola University in New Orleans. Hence the constant moving.

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Williams said when he first heard “Car Wheels,” which paints a picture of tense domesticity and a peripatetic family life. Her mother, Lucille, a thwarted pianist, was also the child of a minister — of the fire and brimstone variety — and she suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. Lucinda and her siblings were mostly raised by their father and stepmother, his former student and the family’s babysitter. (Awkward at first, as Ms. Williams notes in the book.)

Theirs was a Bohemian academic household, imprinted by the politics of the era. Mr. Williams was the host of a bibulous literary salon that included Charles Bukowski, the hard-living poet. As a teenager, Lucinda handed out “Boycott grapes” leaflets in front of a grocery store and played protest songs at demonstrations. When she refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her New Orleans high school, her father said, “Don’t worry honey, we’ll get you an A.C.L.U. lawyer.” And when she was finally thrown out, after joining a civil rights march, he was unfazed.

“To hell with it,” he told her. “You weren’t learning anything there anyway.” She spent a semester at the University of Arkansas, where her father was then teaching, but she dropped out to play music for tips at a club in New Orleans.

Ms. Williams took the title for her memoir from the chorus of “Metal Firecracker,” a song from the “Car Wheels” album, one of her many compositions about “the poets on motorcycles” who are her preferred type.

These men fill the pages of her memoir. There was the gentle crew member who turned violent after he moved in with her and made away with her third Grammy — for best female rock vocal performance in 2002 — and a good bit of her collection of folk art. And the erudite charmer who was her first long-term boyfriend and who died of cirrhosis of the liver in his 40s. The haunting “Lake Charles” is an elegy for him.

The man in “Metal Firecracker” was a charismatic bass player who doggedly pursued her while they were touring for her 1992 album, “Sweet Old World.” (“Metal firecracker” was his nickname for the tour bus.) Against the advice of bandmates, Ms. Williams succumbed, which meant breaking up with her boyfriend at the time, who reacted by busting up the furniture in their hotel room. The new suitor had a few irons in the fire, as she learned later, and when the tour was over, he vanished. He told her, in a wince-inducing phone call, “I love you but this relationship doesn’t fit my agenda right now.” At any rate, as she writes, she got a song out of it. Three, as it happens.

Ms. Williams and Mr. Overby, a former music executive who is not a rogue but a bit of a poet, married onstage in Minneapolis in 2009. (When they were dating, she writes, his male colleagues warned him off: “Be careful. Our reps on her label tell us she’s literally insane.” He ignored them.) Her father wrote their vows and performed the ceremony. When they both declared, “Loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know,” the audience roared with laughter.

There is some dispute about who proposed to whom. Ms. Williams claimed it was Mr. Overby. In her recollection, he turned to her during a tour and asked if she wanted to go shopping for diamonds.

Mr. Overby shook his head. “We were on the bus and out of nowhere you go, ‘So when are you taking me shopping for diamonds?’”

Ms. Williams: “I did?”

Mr. Overby: “You did!”

Ms. Williams: “But you liked it.”

Mr. Overby organized a trip to a jewelry store owned by friends in Omaha, lining it up with a performance, but Ms. Williams was so nervous she couldn’t get off the bus until just before the store closed. When she saw the array of rings, she panicked. Mission aborted. They tried again the following year, and again she was flummoxed. Years later, they bought a pair of rings in Los Angeles — and Ms. Williams promptly lost them, her husband said.

“Misplaced them,” she said, correcting him.

The couple may not be the best jewelry collaborators, but lately they have worked nicely in the studio on Ms. Williams’s new album, “Stories From a Rock ’n’ Roll Heart,” out in June. As they did in their homage to John Prine, which they wrote after he died of Covid. Ms. Williams performed it last year at a tribute to him. It tells the story of a night long ago when Ms. Williams and Mr. Prine thought they might write a song together. They spent many jolly hours careering from bar to studio but never quite got down to the task.

John and me were going to get together

And write a song one time

Got about as far as the midtown bar

And ordered up a bottle of wine

What could go wrong, working on a song?

Then we got to talking, not looking at the time

Telling stories about folks we know

Had another bottle of wine

We were having fun

What could go wrong?