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viewing 1 To 8 of 8 items
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SPEAKEASY 011LP
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"With multiple songwriters, sinuous harmonies, and rock riffs born out of an intensely communal creative process, Galore -- bassist Ava Rosen, guitarist Griffin Jones, guitarist Ainsley Wagoner, and drummer Hannah Smith -- embodies the spirit of a true musical collective. The album's theme is in its name: Dirt. In ten songs, Galore takes listeners back to the sandbox of creativity on an exploration of what makes them human through layers of jangly, off-kilter guitars, interwoven harmonies, and incredible pop sensibilities. Three out of four members of Galore were born and raised in San Francisco and Oakland, and all of them cite the Bay's storied music scene as inspiration. Local favorite Grass Widow's influence looms large in lead-style bass lines and frequent harmonies on tracks like 'Solastalgia' and 'Dream Palace,' while tracks like 'Bastard' and 'Zinger' lean on the rowdy experimentation of early aughts femme punk band Hey Girl. Dirt was produced by Galore, Jason Kick (most recently producer of Marinero, Abracadabra, Healing Potpourri), and Simi Sohota (Healing Potpourri). The album was recorded and mixed by Kick at Santo Studios and Tunnel Vision in Oakland, California, over the course of 2024. The band took their time to write songs, craft sonic moments, and produce an album that mixes Galore's intensely catchy pop melodies with layers of Jones' and Wagoner's fuzzed and jangly guitars, warm wurlitzers, tongue-in-cheek sound effects and the steady rhythm section of Smith and Rosen. Dirt is an exquisitely crafted album and a step into new soundscapes for Galore. Their creative magic catches listeners on this powerful summer release, sure to be on repeat."
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SPEAKEASY 009LP
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"Noelle & The Deserters bring South-Western honky tonk and songs of heartbreak from the high deserts of New Mexico to the golden hills of California. Fronted by singer-songwriter Noelle Fiore, their music draws inspiration from the likes of Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn, Marty Robbins, J.J Cale, Gene Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and the great outlaw country players. The Deserters include seasoned players Graham Norwood (Bryan Scary, Graham Norwood) on guitar, Alicia Vanden Heuvel (The Aislers Set) on bass, David Cuetter (Tarnation) on pedal steel, and Jerry Fiore (Sonic Love Affair) on drums, all based in the Bay Area and Sacramento. Fiore was raised in Taos, New Mexico. As a guitar player and vocalist, she was a founding member of Sweet Chariot, singing and playing guitar/banjo. Later, she and Tim Cohen (The Fresh & Onlys) founded the band Magic Trick, recording four full length albums for labels Hardly Art and Captured Tracks. Fiore is also a current member of the Shannon Shaw Band, on guitar and vocals. High Desert Daydream is Noelle & The Deserters debut album, out on Speakeasy Studios SF. The songs on the album, written by Fiore, touch on life in the west, growing up in Taos, living in California, songs of love, memory, marriage, work, good times, and bad times. Like all classic country music, the songs are infused with a sense of real-life struggles and living life in the everyday. Fiore's incredible voice carries the album, and her songs are at once moving, powerful, tender, humorous, and intimately relatable. Produced by Noelle Fiore and Alicia Vanden Heuvel, High Desert Daydream feels country, yet of the west, of California and New Mexico, of experimental fronts in country music, and is truly a work of beauty."
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SPEAKEASY 007LP
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"Tired Girls is the third full-length studio album by Bay Area singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Anna Hillburg. Co-produced and recorded with Jason Quever of the Papercuts, the pair created an album for lovers of finely crafted and supremely catchy chamber pop. As always, Hillburg's voice takes center stage, but for Tired Girls she made a conscious choice to dig deeper into her trumpet skills and make more elaborate horn arrangements than her previous records. Lyrically, Hillburg dives into what it is to be a contemporary woman, and how one perseveres, finds inspiration, creates, loves, and lives. Recorded throughout 2022 at Quever's studio, the two built dreamy soundscapes with long-time collaborators Logan Kroeber on drums (The Dodos), Josh Miller on bass (Chime School, Extra Classic), and Yea Ming Chen on keys. The entire record has a real 'Ladies, trust your gut' feeling, unsurprisingly, as Hillburg says she tends to write songs about 'the reality of womanhood and feminism but ya know, why not make that a little 'dancey'?' As a collection, Tired Girls marks her arrival as an artist who has hit their stride. Each track shows her talent and progression as a songwriter and performer. As a multi-instrumentalist and classically trained trumpet player, Hillburg is a sought-after session and live musician in the vibrant Bay Area music scene, performing regularly with Shannon And The Clams, The Dodos, The Moore Brothers, The Once And Future Band, Will Sprott, Dream Date, Greg Ashley, Shannon Shaw and her All-Star Buddy Band, and more."
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SPEAKEASY 005LP
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"After meeting at a memorial for a mutual friend, Tony Molina (Ovens) and Sarah Rose Janko (Dawn Riding) started spending nights into mornings playing guitar and singing their hearts out to an audience of empty wine bottles in the East Oakland warehouse where Janko lived. Both fans of each other's respective musical projects, they bonded over a shared love of The Byrds and Bill Fox and leaned into their friendship as a much-needed support in a time of dizzying grief. The days were marked in trips to Jackson's Liquor store, the same spot Molina frequented while recording with his band Ovens a decade earlier, at a studio in the same neighborhood. The nights drifted by. The songs kept coming. They decided they wanted to record all they'd been pouring their hearts into and The Lost Days was born. The Lost Days recorded their first release, Lost Demos, with Kit Center at his home studio and mixed it at another friend Nick Bassett's house in West Oakland. In April 2021 the demo was released on cassette by Oakland label The Long Road Society, eventually making its way into the hands of Spanish label Mapache, who pressed the five-track release on vinyl with the addition of a previously unreleased song. Over the course of 2021, the two kept writing and sharing songs. With Janko moving to New Orleans and the pandemic keeping the two songwriters apart, they worked long distance, sending demos back and forth. Inspired by the solo work of Bill Fox, The Byrds, Dear Nora and Guided By Voices, The Lost Days started recording what was to be their first full-length album, In The Store, at friend Nick Bassett's basement studio on his Yamaha MT8X 8 track. The album is an exercise in true DIY lo-fi analog home recorded tradition. Molina would venture on BART from Concord to Bassett's house in Oakland to lay down basic tracks, and Janko would add vocals and tambourine when she was in town. The comfort and familiarity of friendship and the intimacy of home recording allowed the two to craft traditional and yet deeply personal pop and folk songs. Writing that addresses alcoholism, depression and complex relationships are lovingly brought to life on the ten tracks (in thirteen minutes) that make up the album."
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SPEAKEASY 004LP
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"In San Francisco's Mission District, there's a Victorian house with a garden full of towering tobacco flowers and rose vines so thick they're pulling down the fence. Every Sunday, for a great span of 2021, songwriter Sarah Rose Janko would join producer and engineer Alicia Vanden Heuvel (Aislers Set, Magic Trick) there, to play guitar, sing harmonies, and hum lines for other instruments, before retreating to Vanden Heuvel's basement recording studio (Speakeasy Studios SF), to roll tape on her Otari half-inch 8-track. This is how, week by week, Dawn Riding's new record You're Still Here, was chipped out of the ethereal and into an expansive album of meticulously crafted and deeply captivating songs. It's an album steeped in intimacy and warmth, each song built with a level of restraint that leaves room for Jankos's quietly fierce vocals and her powerful songwriting to sit front and center. Nothing is rushed and each song is presented almost as a vignette: some with so much stillness one can feel the relationships, some that build from the heart's interior solitude into swells of emotional catharsis. Above all, the album drives and breathes with storytelling. You're Still Here marks Dawn Riding's third full-length album, dropping this November as a co-release between The Long Road Society and Speakeasy Studios SF, two women-owned Bay Area record labels, a fitting arrangement considering that the album's creation was deeply collaborative. The credits reveal a wealth of Bay Area musicians lending their talents, with multi-instrumentalist Vanden Heuvel acting as producer and musical arranger. In addition to long-time Dawn Riding drummer Jasmyn Wong's familiar shuffle on 'All The Time,' Keenah Silver Fassett brings a rockier edge to two of the heavier numbers on the record. Hall McCann, Dawn Riding's long-time lead guitar player and backup vocalist pushes her harmonies to the apparitional on 'Scales Fall From My Eyes' while her guitar lines on 'The Difference' are dirty and raw, invoking CSNY's 'Ohio.' Vanden Heuvel steps away from the mixing desk to play bass, organ, and even drums (on 'Nine Lives'). Jacob Aranda (Tarnation) plays pedal steel and violin on a number of songs, including a haunting steel track on 'Scales Fall From My Eyes.' Anna Hillburg adds trumpet, and Jessie Leigh Smith, who often performs live with Dawn Riding, plays soulful harmonica, lending a comforting down-home vibe to the journey."
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SPEAKEASY 003LP
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"Bay Area singer-songwriter Sarah Bethe Nelson's multiple albums of balladry and pop chart an emotional wave of the multifarious and sometimes tumultuous changes of the area's landscape. Her latest is no exception. Enter Mental Picture, a collection of aftershock spectral tunes ghosting in the aura of the recent age, spinning out from the contradictions of Nelson's steely reserve and melancholy fragility. If past efforts highlighted a certain zeal for the times, Mental Picture, while no less resolute in its approbation of the charms of this particular wasteland, definitely adds the haunt of eyes that have seen a grimness and dared to wink back at it. Think later Townes Van Zandt self-deprecation jolted through the afterglow of Stoned And Dethroned horizon-watching. What began as a way to stay sane in the early days of the pandemic when studios remained shuttered, the album was recorded in Nelson's own Mission District living room with long-time creative partner Rusty Miller, as well as at the home of compatriot Doug Hilsinger -- who both not only play on the album, but also claim co-producing, engineering and mixing roles -- Mental Picture is an incredibly homegrown, early Smog-like affair. The vibes flit between tracks like opener 'Five Lovin' Days' and the later 'Night Birds,' whose bare-bones gated, archaic stripped-down electro-acoustic production prefigures a post-apocalyptic cosmic country akin to Emmylou Harris strumming in a bomb shelter. Fuller tracks like 'Better Off Dead' and ringer 'I Can Just Leave' never shrug off the radioactive buzz, but coalesce into soulful stretches akin to Spiritualized through a ham radio. There's a certain kismet to Nelson's latest album releasing on fledgling San Francisco label Speakeasy Studios SF. Label chief Alicia Vanden Heuvel (Aislers Set, Magic Trick) is part of the very fabric of Nelson's collective -- she even lends her vocals to aforementioned 'Night Birds,' birds of a feather, naturally. The feeling of homecoming here parallels the intimacy of Mental Picture and echoes the burnished survival instincts of the locals still standing and weaving tales together. But don't get this wrong, there's also a universality here that's unchained by any particularities to a certain time and place. Everyone is in the Zone, after all."
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7"
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SPEAKEASY 002EP
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"Andrés Miguel Cervantes is a Mexican- American singer songwriter based in San Francisco and San Diego, California. Known to fans and fellow musicians primarily for his live performances, The Crossing marks an exciting debut for an incredibly talented singer, songwriter and finger picking guitar player. The single was produced and recorded at Speakeasy Studios SF on Otari 8 track by Alicia Vanden Heuvel. 'A Coal for Caring' and 'The Barstow Street Blues (acoustic)', features Andrés alone, singing and playing his acoustic guitar. They were recorded live using only one microphone during the album's first 'demo' recording sessions. The instrumental, 'The Tales You Tell', features the album musicians Jacob Aranda (Tarnation -- pedal steel, mandolin, violin), Alicia Vanden Heuvel (bass, vocals, percussion), James Kim (Fresh & Onlys, The Court & Spark -- drums) and Ed Ivey (Rhythm Pigs -- tuba)."
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SPEAKEASY 002LP
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"Andrés Miguel Cervantes is releasing his debut album The Crossing on brand new label Speakeasy Studios SF, founded by musician, producer and engineer Alicia Vanden Heuvel (The Aislers Set, Still Flyin', Magic Trick, The Ladybug Transistor, Brigid Dawson & the Mothers Network, Dirty Ghosts). Andrés Miguel Cervantes is a Mexican-American singer songwriter based in San Francisco and San Diego, California. Known to fans and fellow musicians primarily for his live performances, The Crossing marks an exciting debut for an incredibly talented singer, songwriter and finger-picking guitar player. The album was produced and recorded at Speakeasy Studios SF on Otari 8 track by Alicia Vanden Heuvel, featuring musicians: Jacob Aranda (Tarnation - pedal steel, mandolin, violin), James Kim (Fresh & Onlys, The Court & Spark - drums), Noelle Fiore (Magic Trick, Shannon Shaw Band - vocals), Anna Hillburg (Shannon Shaw Band, Magic Trick - trumpet), Ed Ivey (Rhythm Pigs - tuba), Alicia Vanden Heuvel (bass, vocals, percussion), Nick Castro (The Young Elders - lead guitar), Raphi Gottesman (The Fresh & Onlys, China - drums) and Conor Riley (Astra, Birth - piano, bass). Influenced by songwriters Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Fred Neil, and Vicente Fernadez, Cervantes's lyrics are distinctly his own, with beautiful, haunting images of landscapes both internal and external -- stories of traveling, searching, rambling, and experiencing the impermanence of life and love. Suffused with a dreamlike, mysterious atmosphere, his complex songs are grounded in an honesty and simplicity that make them timeless and deeply relevant. The album is characterized by both a '60s classic country and folk sound (à la Fred Neil, Lee Hazelwood, Dylan's album Desire), and a western-noir sound (Mexican Ranchera and the film soundtracks of Ennio Morricone). The title track 'The Crossing' is dedicated to Cervantes's father, telling the story of his father's border crossing and life after. This release brings a new voice to the folk/Americana/country scene from this incredibly talented Mexican-American singer-songwriter."
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