BETTYE LaVETTE: PERFORMING ON THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO TONIGHT
BETTYE LaVETTE:
PERFORMING ON THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO TONIGHT;
NEW CD—THANKFUL N’ THOUGHTFUL—OUT TODAY;
AUTOBIOGRAPHY—A WOMAN LIKE ME—OUT THURSDAY;
PLUS BOOK SIGNINGS AND SHOWS
BETTYE LaVETTE will hit the streets today (9/25) with her new CD—Thankful N’ Thoughtful—in stores and online, while the woman herself will be performing “Everything is Broken” live for the first time on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. On Thursday (9/27), Bettye releases her rollercoaster of an autobiography (co-written with David Ritz) and appears “Upstairs at the Square” at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan (Union Square), singing a few songs and joining author Katherine Lanpher in a discussion of her life and work. Bettye then caps off the month with shows at the Highline in NYC (9/28) and World Café Live in Philadelphia (9/30), before resuming her “50th Anniversary Tour” on 10/7 in Phoenix.
According to Jon Pareles in The New York Times, “The magnificent soul singer Bettye LaVette’s latest album, ‘Thankful N’ Thoughtful,’ is an anatomy of bitter desolation, plunging deep to transform songs like Bob Dylan’s ‘Everything Is Broken,’ the Black Keys’ ‘I’m Not the One,’ Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ and the title song, from Sly and the Family Stone, Sept. 25, Anti-. The album arrives alongside her rip-roaring, hard-drinking autobiography, ‘A Woman Like Me’; Sept. 27, Blue Rider Press.”
In a special Sunday feature, The Detroit Free Press, noted of her book: “This ranks among the greatest feel-good stories in recent memory, but the feel-good part accounts for a small fraction of the story LaVette has to tell. Her book, co-authored with David Ritz (celebrated biographer of Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye and many others) is an unflinching and uncompromising look at a life lived across the tracks from fame, where the brass ring was always within view but never within her grasp…What you get in A Woman Like Me is LaVette raw and unfiltered.”