A Girl Called Eddy Recent News

Porter Wagoner, 1927-2007

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:10:00 -0700

Country Star Porter Wagoner Dies

(NASHVILLE, Tenn.) — Porter Wagoner was known for a string of country hits in the '60s, perennial appearances at the Grand Ole Opry in his trademark rhinestone suits, and for launching the career of Dolly Parton.

Like many older performers, his star had faded in recent years. But his death from lung cancer Sunday, at 80, came only after a remarkable late-career revival that won him a new generation of fans.

The Missouri-born Wagoner signed with RCA Records in 1955 and joined the Opry in 1957, "the greatest place in the world to have a career in country music," he said in 1997. His showmanship, suits and pompadoured hair made him famous.

He had his own syndicated TV show, "The Porter Wagoner Show," for 21 years, beginning in 1960. It was one of the first syndicated shows to come out of Nashville and set a pattern for many others.

"Some shows are mechanical, but ours was not polished and slick," he said in 1982.

Among his hits, many of which he wrote or co-wrote, were "Carroll County Accident," "A Satisfied Mind," "Company's Comin'," "Skid Row Joe," "Misery Loves Company" and "Green Green Grass of Home."

The songs often told stories of tragedy or despair. In "Carroll County Accident," a married man having an affair is killed in a car crash; "Skid Row Joe" deals with a once-famous singer who's lost everything.

In 2002, he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

In May, after years without a recording contract, he signed with ANTI- records, an eclectic Los Angeles label best known for alt-rock acts like Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Neko Case.

Wagoner's final album, "Wagonmaster," was released in June and earned him some of the best reviews of his career. Over the summer, he was the opening act for the influential rock duo White Stripes at a sold-out show at New York's Madison Square Garden.

"The young people I met backstage, some of them were 20 years old. They wanted to get my autograph and tell me they really liked me," Porter said with tears in his eyes the day after the New York show. "If only they knew how that made me feel — like a new breath of fresh air."

To many music fans, Wagoner was best known as the man who boosted Parton's career. He had hired the 21-year-old singer as his duet partner in 1967, when she was just beginning to gain notice through songs such as "Dumb Blonde."

They were the Country Music Association's duo of the year in 1970 and 1971, recording hit duets including "The Last Thing on My Mind."

Parton's solo country records, such as her autobiographical "Coat of Many Colors," also began climbing the charts in the early 1970s. She wrote the pop standard "I Will Always Love You" in 1973 after Wagoner suggested she shift from story songs to focus on love songs.

The two quit singing duets in 1974 and she went on to wide stardom with pop hits and movies such as "9 to 5," whose theme song was also a hit for her.

Wagoner sued her for $3 million in assets, but they settled out of court in 1980. He said later they were always friendly, "but it's a fact that when you're involved with attorneys and companies that have them on retainer, it makes a different story."

At a charity roast for Wagoner in 1995, she explained the breakup this way: "We split over creative differences. I was creative, and Porter was different."

He said in a 1982 Associated Press interview that his show "was a training ground for her; she learned a great deal and I exposed her to very important people and the country music fans."

She was present at the ceremony in May 2007 honoring Wagoner on his silver anniversary with the Opry. At the time, he called Parton "one of my best friends today." She also visited him in the hospital as he battled cancer.
Wagoner, who had survived an abdominal aneurysm in 2006, was hospitalized again this month and his publicist disclosed he had lung cancer. He died at 8:25 p.m. CDT Sunday in a Nashville hospice, said Darlene Bieber, a spokeswoman for the Opry.

Country singer and Opry member Dierks Bentley visited Wagoner in the hospice over the weekend and said Wagoner led them in prayer, thanking God for his friends, his family and the Grand Ole Opry.

"The loss of Porter is a great loss for the Grand Ole Opry and for country music, and personally it is a great loss of a friend I was really just getting to know," Bentley said. "I feel blessed for the time I had with him."

Pete Fisher, vice president and general manager of the Opry, said the Opry family of musicians and performers was deeply saddened by the news. "His passion for the Opry and all of country music was truly immeasurable," Fisher said.

Wagoner was born in West Plains, Mo., and became known as "The Thin Man From West Plains" because of his lanky frame. He recalled that he spent hours as a child pretending to be an Opry performer, using a tree stump as a stage.

He started in radio, then became a regular on the "Ozark Jubilee," one of the first televised national country music shows. On the Opry since 1957, he joined Roy Acuff and other onetime idols.

At one point his wardrobe included more than 60 handmade rhinestone suits.

"Rhinestone suits are just beautiful under the lights," he said. "They've become a big part of my career. I get more compliments on my outfits than any other entertainer — except for Liberace."

While he continued with the Opry, and even had a small part in the 1982 movie "Honky Tonk Man" starring Clint Eastwood, his recording career dried up in the 1980s — until his return this year.

"I stopped making records because I didn't like the way they were wanting me to record," he said. "When RCA dropped me from the label, I didn't really care about making records for another label because I didn't have any say in what they would release and how they would make the records and so forth."

By AP/John Gerome
www.time.com

A Girl Called Eddy cover story from Now Magazine Toronto!

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:03:00 -0800

A girl called Eddy

Jersey girl Erin Moran finds her inner blue-eyed soul siren and picks up the torch Dusty Springfield left behind

A girl called Eddy wasn't always called Eddy. Jersey kids knew her as a music-obsessed girl named Erin Moran (no, she didn't have the hots for Chachi).

Later, the likes of David Bowie and Lauryn Hill addressed her with, "Uh, excuse me, miss?" That's because she spent years behind a desk as a receptionist at a New York recording studio, working up the nerve to make her name as a rock star.

"I met all my heroes after working in the studio for so long," she says over the phone from England, where she's lived for the past two years. "It got me very wise to the business end of things. I saw all the shit, warts and all, and the ridiculous amounts of money that can be spent on recording. It was a fuckin' great motivator, sitting there observing people who were living the life I wanted to live."

If she wanted to, Moran could dish dirt on a bonanza of rock 'n' roll indiscretions that'd put Behind The Music to shame. Stuff like the puerile hiphop brats who filled the vocal booth with hookers, or the 80s R&B diva, now fallen from grace, who once demanded only three-ply toilet tissue to wipe her ass.

But like her music, A Girl Called Eddy is nothing if not a class act.

These days, Moran's breaking hearts as the most devastating blue-eyed soul diva since Dusty Springfield died. The songs on last year's self-titled full-length debut for Anti flash back to another era when bouffant-haired bombshells wore raccoon eyeliner and sobbed in their highballs over drifters who'd done them wrong. A Girl Called Eddy (the album and the artist) is all about a kind of sophisticated, nostalgic soul.

Moran's a woman who's lived � through a grim divorce, death, self-doubt � and that worldliness comes through in the tentative torchiness of her voice. She's got that paradoxical fragile-little-girl-with-a-spine-of-steel thing going on, the broken-but-unbowed quality that lands her so many comparisons to Springfield and Karen Carpenter, and sets her apart from most contemporary pop singers.

Capturing the particular retro feel of her album without veering into pastiche, Moran says, was a real bitch.

"At one point, I thought I'd have to be the female Oasis or the next Elastica. I tried all these different sounds on, with tons of talented musicians, but� zip," she laughs.

She recorded a demo version of slow-burner Heartache with phenomenally talented NYC soft-pop crew Hem, whose Eveningland disc was one of last year's best, but she just got bummed.

"It was lovely, don't get me wrong," Moran sighs in her cross-pollinated accent, part New Joisey, part Irish brogue and part influenced by the French guy she lived with for eight years.

"But it was too much like Hem, very front-porch countryish."

Even though Moran had already lined up a record deal based on the strength of her Tears All Over Town EP, which came out on wee U.S. indie Le Grand Magistery (the original home of Canada's own Stars, old pals of Moran's), she almost called it quits.

Then a rep at Setanta, then her label in the UK, passed on an album by a Richard Hawley, a former member of the Longpigs and Pulp, who styles himself a latter-day Roy Orbison crooning over cinematic arrangements of shimmering Rickenbackers and pedal steel.

A Girl Called Eddy knew she'd found her man.

"I flew over to England on a Saturday to meet Hawley and his right-hand man, Colin (Elliot). The first thing they did was take me to a pub, where they grabbed 15 huge cans of Foster's lager for the train back to Sheffield.

"There I am, this girl from Jersey, with two fuckin' northern alcoholics smokin' on the train and tellin' me how they're gonna take care of me. I just thought 'What have I gotten myself into?'

"But when Hawley first played that bit of a solo on Tears All Over Town, a song I'd struggled with for a very long time, I started cryin' like a baby. Oh my god, it was perfect."

Along with the creative challenges, Moran's had to negotiate the industry as a female artist who's too old to be packaged as a prefab pop tart (she's well out of her 20s) and lacks the mainstream exposure to wow the Starbucks set as the next Norah Jones.

She's caught in the same limbo as the pre-Magnolia (and, some would argue, post-Magnolia) Aimee Mann.

"The label guy actually admitted to me that he knew my record could sell a couple hundred thousand copies if we appealed to the same niche as Norah Jones, but they don't have that money. I don't necessarily want to sell a gazillion records, but when you know what you're doing isn't so massively left-of-centre that people won't get it, it's a big bummer."

And because her main squeeze is an industry hack, Moran gets an insider's look at the mercurial and totally fucked-up nature of the music biz.

"Take Keane," she begins. "A year and a half ago, they were getting 10 people to their gigs. For two years they tried to get a deal. And then the right people said the right words to their friends, and when they played again two weeks later, 11 labels were there.

"Now, I think Keane write good pop songs, and I have nothing against them personally, but I watched the machine that takes over, and what I've seen happen from point A to the point where we are now would completely blow your mind."

Still, Moran is ecstatic that after so long A Girl Called Eddy might finally become a household name � not on a Norah Jones level, of course, but in households with music fans who are actually informed.

"I think the MOJO-reading, amazon. com-buying High Fidelity guys who buy imports have a lot of power that the labels are hugely ignoring," she says.

And as she prepares for the follow-up to her well-received debut, the matter-of-fact singer/songwriter is trying to avoid being written off as a one-trick pony.

"I don't want to get painted into this retro chick box. In my mind, on one song I'm Chrissie Hynde and on the next I'm Karen Carpenter and on the next I'm, like, Liam Gallagher, but I'm very wary of how people have reviewed this record. It makes me think I should do something else."

That doesn't mean A Girl Called Eddy wasn't thrilled to receive the ultimate seal of approval from the man who basically made Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien into A Girl Called Dusty.

"Rufus Wainwright is singing vocals on Burt Bacharach's new album, and somehow a copy of my record got passed on through Rufus. So Burt e-mails my manager and says, 'Really liked the Eddy CD. She's very good. Send her my compliments.'

"Thumbs-up from Burt Bacharach? I can die happy now."

By Sarah Liss
nowtoronto.com

A Girl Called Eddy, The Frames US tours.

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:02:00 -0800

A Girl Called Eddy is currently on her first US tour! The tour goes through March 12th so check the tour dates section to see when she comes through your town.

The Frames are also touring the United States for the first time since 'Burn The Maps' was released! The tour continues through the 19th of March. Dont forget about your opportunity to see The Frames live on Last Call with Carson Daly. Check the news section for more info.

Anti-/Epitaph artists recieve 11 PLUG Independent Music Award nominations!

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:12:00 -0800

The PLUG Independent Music Awards began in 2001 and are dedicated to celebrating the artists that flourish independent of Major label support. PLUG is about the independent community � fans and biz � coming together to recognize its own.

Epitaph and Anti- have recieved 11 nominations for this year's awards including artist of the year and record label of the year. This year�s event will be held in New York City this February.

Here are the catagories and nominees:

Female Artist Of The Year:
A Girl Called Eddy
Jolie Holland

Male Artist Of The Year:
Tom Waits
Nick Cave

Artist Of The Year:
Tom Waits

Punk Rock Album Of The Year:
Bad Religion - The Empire Strikes First
Converge - You Fail Me

Live Act Of The Year:
Sage Francis

Label Act Of The Yea:r
Anti-

PLUG Album Art/Packaging Of The Year:
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus
Tom Waits - Real Gone

You can cast your vote for the PLUG awards online HERE!

See the latest press quotes about our ANTI- artists!

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:07:00 -0700

A Girl Called Eddy
�A Girl Called Eddy�
4 Stars

�Enjoyably depressing New Jersey songwriter�s debut.�
Considering how many songs are recorded about heartbreak and loss, it�s striking how few of them hit home with any genuine emotional connection. Luckily no one�s told Erin Moran, who materializes like some modest time-warped gene-splicing of Dusty Springfield and Chrissie Hynde with a Bacharach and David-style songbook full of sweetly painful, adult-sounding love songs, A luminously retro production by former Pulp collaborator Richard Hawley completes the picture. The kind of album that could quietly occupy space in your CD collection for years and still not give up all its secrets.

Ian Harrison

A Girl Called Eddy
�A Girl Called Eddy�
4 Stars

�Delicious debut album for rainy days and Mondays�
Eddy is Erin Moran, from Greenwich Village via New Jersey, who flew to Sheffield to record this with Richard Hawley producing (and his Lowedges band backing) because �the rain sited the mood of the songs�. Nor just another wordy nerd or feisty fronter, Moran exhibits gorgeously gauged soul and shrewdness on a record that � and we don�t say this lightly- sound like a new Karen Carpenter album. While the deft dolour of Cowboy Junkies or the archest alt. country filters through �Tears All over Town or �Somebody Hurt You�, her low voice and lyrical longing elevate �Girls Can Really Tear You Up Inside� and �People Used to Dream About The Future� into Hal David-writes-for-Orbison classics. Better yet, �Golden� is a �Goodbye To Love� for this millennium.

CHRIS ROBERTS
(UNCUT)

A Girl Called Eddy
�A Girl Called Eddy�
Why do some bands insist on eponymously-titled albums, is that lazy or what? Presumably the idea is to keep it simple, so that us dumb indie kids won�t get confused and buy the wrong record. But when the title�s as obscure as this one, it seems to undermine the point of the whole thing in the first place.

But rather misplaced gripes aside, this is a heart-wrenching debut from New-Jersey born singer/songwriter Erin Moran, otherwise known as (you guessed it) Eddy.

Written at home in her New York bed-sit, these are songs of passion and heartache culminating in an impressive, if tear-jerking entrance onto the musical stage.

Vocally she�s clearly taken note of some of the great female influences- Dusty Springfield, Karen Carpenter and Aimee Mann especially � while the mood is introspective, somber and understated. From opening track �Tears All Over Town� she had me hooked. A real grower, it sets the tone for the entire record before the acoustic folk melancholia builds and builds, reaching new heights with �Girls can Really Tear You Up Inside� and album closer �Golden�. Eddy is crying her way through her songs, but doing so with panache as well as heart. That said, when she wants to, Eddy knows how to rock out as well. �The Long Goodbye� is a simmering slab of lo-fi rock n�roll, guitars buzzing against her husky vocal.

There�s barely a dud track on �A Girl Called Eddy� and even those that you�re not sure about, when you least expect it hit you with a tug on the heart-stings that tear down your emotional defenses. Not since Portishead�s Beth Gibbons partnered Rustin Man on 2002�s standout album has a woman�s voice melted my heart quite so much. But if that hasn�t given you enough of a reason to go and buy it, maybe this will do the trick. Produced by one of Sheffield�s favourite musical sons � the highly-esteemed Richard Hawley � Eddy is backed by his band. And it was recorded in our own fair city. If that�s not enough, then dam, I give up.

Exposed rating � 4 �fingers� of 5
(Exposed)

A Girl Called Eddy
�A Girl Called Eddy�
4 Stars

ERIN MORAN, for she is the Girl whose record label likes to call her Eddy, writes and sings as if she has nothing to prove. Every track on this mouth-wateringly luscious CD whispers, �This is what I do, love it or leave it.� Her songs, steeped in �60s classicism, make almost no concessions to the intervening 40 years, aside from the tasteful inclusion of a few subtle electronic textures and ambiences here and there. When, in the debut single, Somebody Hurt You, she suffers exquisitely on behalf of every broken-hearted lover everywhere, it�s as if Britney, Whitney, Mariah, Shania and all the rest never existed, because Moran treats her melodies with respect rather than as launching pads from which to deviate on the flimsiest of whims. She knows that emotion doesn�t consist entirely of vocal calisthenics, and that sometimes resignation and understatement can be shatteringly powerful.

She also understands why the classics of the past became classics, and used that knowledge to devastating effect. It can�t be coincidence, for example, that the opening four seconds of Heartache deceive the listener into expecting Karen Carpenter to sing Close To You, before the song shifts into completely different, and much more melancholic, territory, it�s a neat manipulation, conjuring up one set of images, then allowing them to dissolve, thus intensifying the songs impact.

Similarly, with sympathetic production from Richard Hawley, she conjures fleeting echoes of Bacharach, Motown, and in the middle of the yearningly gorgeous People Who Used To Dream About The Future, briefly unleashes a huge voice that suggests she could have given Dusty Springfield a run for her money.

Fortunately, her songs are much more than mere homages. In Tears All Over Town she dips into areas that only a contemporary self-torturer like Lisa Germano would normally attempt, and the vibrant pulse of The Long Goodbye is a cunning disguise in which to hide a song as drenched in regret as anything by countrified innovator Shelby Lynne.

Inevitably, not every song hits the mark. Her lyric for Did You See The Moon Tonight, for example, feels somewhat contrived. Little Bird, despite those killer lines about, �searching for hope in places where hope just don�t exist�, can�t quite breathe new life into that terminally ailing avian clich�. But anyone who can take a rhythm as relentlessly jaunty as the keyboard pattern that propels Life Thru The Same Lens and make it sound unutterably sad should be forgiven the occasional lapse.

Moran boasts a voice as pure and resonant as Eva Cassidy, but being able to couple that voice with her remarkable songwriting skills makers her significantly more intriguing. These are not her interpretations of other people�s feelings. These are songs born of her own experience, the songs of her life. And yours.

(Mojo 4 June 2004)

Danny Cohen
�Dannyland�
3 Stars

Way ahead of the pack for the dubious honour of weirdest album of the year has to be this sophomore effort from Danny Cohen, a classic outsider primitive in the vein of Daniel Johnston or Wild Man Fischer, and by the sound of things, probably just as frequently recumbent on the analyst�s couch. I never heard Cohen�s debut Museum of Dannys, but the mere fact that it appeared on avant-guardian Hohn Zorn�s Tzadzik label, home of all manner of experimental Jewish music, is dome indication of its likely oddness. For Dannyland, Cohen has been given the run of a 40-track studio, and the results are densely-layered, claustrophobic arrangements heavy on horror-movie organ drones, lachrymose lap steel and spooky theremin whines, over which Cohen reflects upon the detritus of his own life and offers odd, discomfiting observations of the world he inhabits- a murky territory of self-medication, tattered hippie dreams, laments for dead heroes, memories of old Twilight Zone episodes, and recollections of a troubled childhood. Favouring shambling discordancy over tuneful order, it�s a tough listen until you start to hear things Cohen�s way, but there�s enough bluff humour and enigmatic poetry in his lyrics to reward those brave enough to embark on a journey to Dannyland.

Jolie Holland
Escondida

Texan Tanya goes solo

�Holland journeys from toy piano to self-taught songster�

BY THE age of six Jolie Holland was writing songs on her toy piano; now in her late 20s she is releasing her debut studio album.

The Texan-born singer-songwriter, who added fiddle and guitar to her skills by her early teens, has created the blues-folk-jazz and pop-tinged album Escondida.
While having been the founder of the international folk outfit Be Good Tanyas and releasing the solo record Catalpa. Which was never intended for public ears, this will be Holland�s first truly solo professional studio album.

�With Escondida I wrote a lot of those songs before I formed Be Good Tanyas,� Holland said.

�Sascha and Poor Girls Blues were written before Be Good Tanyas existed.

�I have a strong filter on�I�m very critical of my own work.

�But if I wrote a song 10 years ago and still like it, I will still play it.

�Poor Girls Blues I wrote nine years ago.

�So Escondida is a mix of stuff that is new and a few that are older.�

It�s not just the time it has taken to produce the album that created its diversity, but also the variety of genres Holland tends to listen to.

�I am sort of influenced by Blind Willy McTell, but mostly I hear something and it strikes me,� she said.
�I�ve always been interested in lot of different types of music, having been in hip hop projects, electric blues bands and jazz bands.

�I was a classical musician when I was a lid and all I wanted was music lessons, but I never got them.
�But I�m glad I didn�t at that point, because everything I�ve learnt I�ve figured out on my own.

I�m glad I spent all those years teaching myself stuff as a kid�

by Kelle White
(The Advocate 21 May 2004)

Jolie Holland
�Escondida�

It is the voice that first strikes you, that ethereal tone, the unusual ability to slide up and down notes with apparent ease, and an almost jazz-like phrasing within a folk songwriters framework. Born and raised in Texas with Creole New Orleans roots, Holland wandered the South with a gypsy-like loose collective of musos and artists before first coming to our attention with the new wave folk outfit the Be Good Tanyas. Her first album, Catalpa, although never originally intended for public release, became an underground success via internet sales. This first fully-fledged studio effort contains the same restrained arrangements � sometimes just a simple piano, or in the case of Mad Tom Of Bedlam, the less conventional voice and drums. While there is a seamless musical aesthetic to this album Goodbye California leaps from the speakers as an outstanding jaunty country driven romp in the vein of Me And Bobby McGee. Hail to the new folk jazz diva!

(4 �hats� (rating system)
(City Hur 8 May)

JOLIE HOLLAND
�Escondida�

As the World fawns and sweats over the likes of Britney, Holly, Christina and any number of other primping, surgically stacked, talent-deprived young starlets, a whole army of female performers is out there making music the way it should be made. Though a handful of truly talented female musicians have broken through the ranks in a big way, there are still many more deserving of acclaim. Jolie Holland is one of them. With a swooping, acrobatic voice, and a style that channels old-style bluegrass, folk and country but with a fresh approach, Holland is a true gem and her song �Old Fashioned Morphine� is an underground classic waiting to happen

Erin Free
Film Ink
June 2004

Jolie Holland

Jolie Holland recently released her debut studio release, Escondida. It follows the Texan singer-songwriter�s first effort, Catalpa, which was never intended for public ears but was given to a few friends and eventually pawned at shows. Word quickly spread and by the time it became available on her website orders came inform all over the shop including Europe and Japan! Paste Magazine describes Holland as, ��a songwriting talent of poetic grace�� and her voice as ��a remarkably supple instrument; and her phrasing and the way she sidles up to notes is nearly miraculous�. Escondida has continued the Jolie-praise fest � here�s a grab bag of critics drooling over the talented Jolie, who started writing songs on her toy piano aged six and once worked with the Be Good Tanyas: A magical hybrid. Holland will have two albums eying for space on December�s best of 2004� lists� (Sunday Times); �Elusive dreaminess� all hazy smoke and dusty cotton (4 out of 5)� (The Guardian); �Two great albums in one year? Gloriously immersed in her world of seductive Appalachian blues and wounded jazz� (The Mirror)�and on and on it goes. For a unique and beautiful spin on blues, folk, jazz, and pop, get into Escondida � out now on Anti through Shock. For more information check out www.jolieholland.com

(Forte 4 June 2004)

Show Some emotion

�Depression-ear blues are uplifting in the hands of Jolie Holland, writes Bernard Zuel.�

Jolie Holland writes and sings songs that sound as if a secret trove of 78s buried in the early 1930s has just been unearthed. With weeping trumpets, ukulele and musical saws (as well as more conventional guitars and draws from New Orleans jazz, southern gospel and the folk songs of tiny mountain towns.

These songs are delivered in a voice that has some of the airiness of a young Billie Holiday. But Holland is not a wizened veteran having one last gasp of fame, nor does she live in a Depression-era bubble. She�s not yet 30 and is encountering some very modern dilemmas.

�I�m going on a date tonight, it�s like our third date, and this morning he called me up.� Holland says. �I had told him I had a crush on him and we were arranging where we were going to meet tonight, and he said, �How can I put this, well, I�m an adult so I�ll just say it: I�m not feeling amorous. My feelings are kind of hurt but at the same time it�s a good thing for someone to be able to say, I guess.�

She sighs: �There are the problems that internet dating gets you into.�

You met him on the net? I asked, trying not to sound too incredulous.

�Yeah, it�s like you meet somebody too fast or whatever.�

How did you meet on the net?

�Oh, let�s not get into it,� she laughs with just an edge of hysteria.

Are you worried he may red about this?

�I don�t want anybody to read this.�

It�s not likely that Holland, who was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and now lives in San Francisco, would be too fazed by any repercussions of this revelation. When you spend a few years with a touring circus-like group, bumming your way around the US and Canada, being a street-performer, living out of skip bins, you get tough one way or the other. �Horrible�, she once said of that life. �Playing music on the street is really, really hard. I hurt my hands, I hurt my voice. So I won�t every do that again.�

�I�ve dealt with some really insane situations and kept my head,� Holland says. She didn�t always have that grip though, You get an idea of that on her first album, Catalpa, which was a collection of rough demos so rough there are cough and noises-of throughout) put out by a friend only to fall into the hands of soon-to-be fawning critics and fans.

Catalpa mused covers of almost forgotten blues songs, such as Hattie Hudson�s Black Hand Blues, with a song she had begun when briefly a member of Canadian folk/country group the Be Good Tanyas that incorporates lyrics from one of her heroes, the damaged �60s figure Syd Barrett plus eight of her own out-of-their time originals. One of those originals was I Wanna Die.

It could well be a character-based song but I Wanna Die feels too personal, too close to the truth that at one point Holland was at a dangerous place that could have ended in her hurting herself.

�Instead of doing that I wrote a song and changed my life,� she says. �Everything had to change. I was living on the road for a long time and it was completely wearing on me. My health was totally falling apart and I had a series of tragedies: my grandfather dies, I lost my hob, my savings were stolen. I had to make the decision to go away, start all over.

�It�s like they say with the Tarot cards, the death card means change.

�I Wanna Die is also a blues song and that�s what they say in the blues, that�s what they say in Cajun music just come out and say it not, �Oh, I feel depressed�,� she explains.

Is that what appeals to her about blues and the other roots music she draws on, that the emotions are closer to the surname than in refined pop music?

�Definitely. It�s a lot more punk rock, so straight [to the point].�

Musically, these near ancient � in popular culture terms � forms are not the sort of thing you�d expect a teenage to be drawn to, which is what happened to Holland.

She had begun playing piano at six (the first song she wrote Tiny Idyll, can he found on her new album, Escondida, played on a child�s toy piano) and later moved to fiddle and guitar. She had family connections with both Louisiana and East Texas but her home environment was not especially musical. So, how and why this music?

�It�s just how I say things. It�s just me, what I do. I really feel blues music, I really feel music from the south in a way other people don�t. I can understand what a blues player is saying and a lot of people can�t. My Canadian friends can�t understand what Blind Willie Johnson is singing but for me I can hear it because it�s the same voice as my grandparents; generation.�

(SMH 12-13 June 2004)

Jolie Holland
�Escondida�
4 Stars

Last year, many critics raved about Jolie Holland�s Catalpa, a collection of stark, singular demos (it cost $1500 to make). Now comes the �legitimate� solo debut by this young Texan singer-songwriter � previously known for her association with Canadian folk trio the Be Good Tanyas. Less confronting and more polished than its predecessor, Escondida shows great empathy for traditional American music in all its diversity from earthy folk to blues and jazz. Holland backs up her ripe, Texas-accented vocals on fiddle, guitars, piano and ukulele, aided by jazz drummer Dave Mihaly, guitarist Brian Miller and bassist Keith Casey, with trumpeter Ara Anderson guesting on tracks including the gently romantic Sasha. On Black Stars, another low-key gem with tremulous guitar and muted cymbals, Holland�s vocal has the rarefied quality of a flugelhorn. Old Fashion Morphine evokes the �20s � an era of great female blues singers � yet it is also a 21st century original. Impressive

Mike Daly
(Age Green Guide)

See an e-card for the self-titled album by A Girl Called Eddy!

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:07:00 -0700

Unfortunately, The new self-titled album by A Girl Called Eddy (Erin Moran) will not be released in North America until August 10th, 2004. To ease the wait we have a brand new e-card for you featuring four full streaming songs, pictures, various quotes about the album and more.

See the 'A Girl Called Eddy' e-card HERE!