Best known for co-founding soft rock hitmakers Bread, singer/songwriter James Griffin also won an Academy Award for co-authoring 1970's smash "For All We Know".
“I don’t really understand how I make music,” says Josie Boivin, who records and performs as MUNYA. “I feel like it’s coming from another world.” Other-worldly is an apt descriptor for MUNYA’s music. The songs are at turns playful and melancholy, as catchy as they are strange, light and airy but full of powerful emotion.
Judy Collins, along with Eric Andersen, Tom Rush and Arlo Guthrie, recorded this CD from a live performance of The Judy Collins Wildflower Festival on June 30, 2002. Of the fifteen cuts here, Ms. Collins sings six solos; Tom Rush does two as does Eric Andersen; and Arlo Guthrie sings one and does a poem that he has written. The last three cuts, "City of New Orleans", "Thirsty Boots", and "Will The Circle Be Unbroken" are sung by everyone with different singers doing the verses. Tom Rush's version of "The Remember Song" is a nice, light number about all the things he as a middle-aged man forgets. (Sounds eerily familiar.)
Expectations for a project featuring members of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, the Kills, and Queens of the Stone Age would almost have to run high. After all, these are all bands that find ways to draw on the classic tenets of rock without sounding completely indebted to the past. Yet the Dead Weather – which combines the talents of Jack White, Jack Lawrence, Alison Mosshart, and Dean Fertita – aren't so much concerned with living up to expectations as they are about defying them. There's a different kind of alchemy on Horehound than on any of the bandmembers' other projects. Not only does White returns to his first instrument, the drums, he also trades in the high-pitched yelp he uses with the Stripes and Raconteurs for a deeper, at-times unrecognizable, voice on "I Cut Like a Buffalo," the lone Horehound track he wrote by himself.
Carla Bozulich states in the liner notes that Boy is her "pop" album. She knows the term is subjective. In her definition, the word reflects the multiple locations she wrote and recorded in, the numerous people encountered in her nomadic state of travel, and the various musical genres that can be – and often are – used to create pop. Bozulich doesn't "deconstruct" here. She uses vernacular song forms in an organic process of elocution and expression that makes something else of them while never quite emptying them of form or function. Instead, she finds the cracks that open them, and makes them bleed into others, ordered by an instinctive sense of aesthetic transgression that becomes creation. Boy was primarily written, produced, and played by Bozulich and John Eichenseer.