MATT LOVELL RELEASES TIMELY NEW SINGLE "BE FREE"

MATT LOVELL’S NEW SINGLE "BE FREE" PREMIERES

VIA GLIDE MAGAZINE 

DEBUT LP NOBODY CRIES TODAY OUT JUNE 5TH

PHOTO: JASON LEE DENTON

Nashville-based artist Matt Lovell has unveiled “Be Free,” a timely new single from his debut album, Nobody Cries Today, out on June 5th. “Lovell grew up learning to sing three-part harmonies in a household steeped in soul...Those roots anchor the tracks on his forthcoming LP,” says Glide Magazine in its premiere. “Be Free,” which Lovell says reminds him of his upbringing, was inspired by the Aretha Franklin-style gospel heard in his youth, music he revisited during the writing and recording process. “Subdued organ and a laid-back rhythm section provide a dreamy, vintage-washed landscape for Lovell’s soulful, velvety vocals,” Glide Magazine adds. “Spendin’ all our days/Trying to make it to the sun/But I don’t wanna go/Unless there’s room for everyone…Somebody tell me when we gon’ be free,” he implores, a question the entire world seems to be asking today – when will we be free of bigotry, free of racism, free of classism, and even free from the sickness currently ravaging our planet?” 

LISTEN: “BE FREE” 

“Be Free,” the third selection from Lovell’s album, follows the release of “Alligator Lilly,” a playful allegory of lost innocence accompanied by a quirky, Wes Anderson-style video filmed at the Gulf Of Mexico. PopDust said “Alligator Lilly” was “full of eye-candy visuals and striking, hypnotic imagery.” Lead single “90 Proof” was written during attempts to let go of a relationship that had ended. “Lovell knows how to tap into a part of himself that can bring the emotions of ’90 Proof’ to the surface and doing so is all the more honorable, knowing the story he’s trying to tell, isn’t a made up screenplay,” said American Songwriter. “It’s one man being willing to revisit challenging parts of his life and do so with performative solemnity and grace.”

WATCH: “ALLIGATOR LILLY” 

WATCH: “90 PROOF” 

All but one of the album’s songs were recorded in 2016 - just months before  Lovell nearly lost his life. On January 20, 2017, he was shot in the chest by a sixteen-year-old who attempted to steal his car. Miraculously, he lived. “This moment created a new center of gravity and re-ordered my understanding of everything I’ve experienced in this lifetime,” he explains. “Many people who experience acute trauma go through somewhat of a euphoric period immediately after the incident occurs, and this was definitely my experience. The level of peace I felt was something I had never touched before. I wrote profusely, I gardened, I brought new life and vigor to my musical ventures, and I made peace with complicated friendships. More than anything, I found a level of great self-acceptance and this created space for me to begin to learn how to live this life.”   

This era ended with the abrupt onset of PTSD, causing the most difficult time Lovell had ever faced. He began to question everything and struggled to find a way to articulate the horrors he was experiencing.  Now, on the other side of recovery, Lovell is excited to sing these songs again for anyone who will listen. “In these years of writing and recording, I have gathered quite a wild palette of paints,” he says. “In a way, Nobody Cries Today has actually been my teacher.  As I have written these songs, each of them has been like a tiny rowboat to get me from one day to the next. They have witnessed me in the years that I was in the throes of trying to find acceptance for myself and for the world I’m living in.  As a gay man of Southern origin, this proved to be a tall order. These songs have also helped me to explore things like zest for life, discontent, hunger, truth, and hope,” he continues. “Nobody Cries Today contains every bit of earnestness, desire, and love that I have to give.” 

CONNECT WITH MATT LOVELL:

Website || Facebook || Instagram || Spotify || YouTube

NATALIE SCHLABS PREMIERES NEW SINGLE “HOME IS YOU” & ANNOUNCES NEW LP "DON’T LOOK TOO CLOSE" SET FOR RELEASE ON OCTOBER 16TH

PHOTO: FAIRLIGHT HUBBARD

Singer/songwriter Natalie Schlabs has announced her forthcoming album Don’t Look Too Close,  due out October 16th, with the release of lead single “Home Is You.” The song was co-written with Bekah Ham and features backing vocals from Katie Herzig. “Romantic, timeless love songs are great, but what about other kinds of love? Best friends, childhood neighbors, brothers and sisters, a mentor and mentee, family. This is just the kind of angle singer-songwriter Natalie Schlabs poses in many of her songs, including her latest, “Home Is You,” said American Songwriter in its premiere of the track, inspired by that person who is your “person.” “Schlabs’ voice possesses an audible kindness to it, that allows her to carry her performance with the calmness and sincerity necessary to portray a song crafted on the kind of love that overreaches any one type of relationship.” “Home Is You”

LISTEN: “HOME IS YOU”

The nine tracks that comprise Don’t Look Too Close, the second full-length effort from the Texas-bred Nashville-based artist, live in the tension between the beauty and heartbreak surrounding our closest relationships. The songs were written when Schlabs was pregnant with her first child, which caused a lot of reflection on her own upbringing and how she wanted to raise him. The album’s title came from the idea that "he’s going to see all the worst of me, be hurt by the worst of me, as much as I don’t want him to, and, as much as I want to be the best for him. I was thinking about how to raise a child, how to pass down values. There’s a dismantling of what I thought I knew,” she explains. “What do I value in my life and where did those things come from? What do I want to share with my children and what do I want to spare them from?” 

The tracks on Don’t Look Too Close traverse the spectrum of feelings that tend to coincide with love, from bittersweet consideration of “the wilderness caused by depression or illness” in “See What I See,” to the haunting gentleness of “Ophelia,” written for a friend who lost her daughter. The title track addresses the everyday aches and pains people tend to hide from loved ones, and reflects on love’s blindness, how “sometimes the ones you love will never know how much you love them.” The album as a whole represents a place, a time, and a pocket of feelings that are as distinctly human as they are beautiful. “Growing up surrounded by family in the flatlands, there’s not a whole lot going on outside of the people. The climate is extreme, and isolation binds you to the people around you. Everyone’s in each other’s business, and you learn that love can go in many directions. Sometimes it’s about solidarity and sacrifice, sometimes it’s obsessive or painful,” Schlabs says. “This record is about navigating those feelings within our closest relationships.”

Don’t Look Too Close steps into indie territory with a compelling mix of instrumentation laced with solo vocals that bloom into easy, delicate harmonies. Co-produced by Juan Solorzano and Zachary Dyke, with Caleb Hickman on saxophone and Joshua Rogers on bass, the album swells and ebbs with elegant, absorbing shapes. The songs are moody, candid, and tender, each featuring Schlabs’ characteristically sleek vocals front-and-center, backed by charming instrumental moments that add form and depth to the melodies.

CONNECT WITH NATALIE SCHLABS:

Website || Facebook || Twitter || Instagram || Spotify || YouTube || Bandcamp

OUT TODAY: KYSHONA RELEASES NEW LP "LISTEN"

“…she has that very real conviction that the act of listening and the feeling of being heard are fundamental human needs…there’s that sense of purpose in the language that she chooses, that sense of speaking in a collective way in the language that she chooses...It’s stately, noble language, and sometimes it’s optimistic, and sometimes it’s more confrontational…it’s always emphatic, but it’s also warm.” - NPR

"Listen highlights Kyshona’s descriptive songwriting and soulful vocals alongside a versatile blend of folk, rock and R&B influences. While Kyshona sings of fear, hope, community, love and understanding throughout the 10-track project, she also finds herself.” - Billboard

“…a soulful, Southern groove” - Rolling Stone

“This is protest music for a new generation, a musical treatment for social ills, a unique prescription that only works if you listen.” - No Depression

"Everyone is making political records. Everyone is making albums that speak to 'this moment.' Too few of them are making music that speaks to the people who inhabit this moment. Kyshona does." - The Bluegrass Situation

“With an ambition ‘to bring the light of music into places of darkness,’ it’s clear that ‘Fear’ and the other nine tracks from her upcoming LP unapologetically and convincingly do just that.” - American Songwriter

“Electrifying” - The Boot 

"Listen is refreshingly low-concept: a powerful, textured voice working its way through equally strong songs. But what's most striking about the album is how natural [Kyshona] sounds. The sincerity hits you hard…There’s a confidence, comfort, and catharsis in her vocals, effortless without sounding passive, warm without sounding too inviting. Listen feels therapeutic, not just providing enjoyable songs that range from soul to rhythm and blues to rock to pop, but maybe even providing a blueprint for how to be, as a human being.” - Albumism

"Kyshona...has a warm, rich voice that commands you to pay attention. On her new album Listen, however, she’s chosen to make a powerful statement about what we can learn when we close our mouths and truly take in what others have to say." - The Nashville Scene

"The melodies are catchy, but it’s the lyrics that really grab the attention on this album. [Kyshona] sings with the undeniable spirit and conviction that was more common in the tumultuous 60s. However, through all the turmoil of the times, the message is ultimately one of hope that leaves you believing things will get better." - Americana Highways

Today, Nashville-based singer/songwriter Kyshona has released her highly-acclaimed new album Listen. Co-produced with Andrija Tokic (St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Alabama Shakes, Hurray For The Riff Raff) and recorded mostly at his famed Nashville studio The Bomb Shelter, Kyshona’s album blends roots, rock, R&B, gospel, and folk with lyrical prowess to uplift the marginalized and bring awareness to the masses. 

STREAM: LISTEN

Kyshona, who has performed at Folk Alliance International, AmericanaFest-UK, 30A Songwriters Festival, and in an art installation at Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in the last two months, has made an indelible impression with her new LP. “The explorations on her brand new album, Listen — which are synopsized neatly on the title track — by many other artists could have easily and offhandedly devolved into a reactionary, ‘woke’ gasp into the void,” commented The Bluegrass Situation. “Kyshona (surname Armstrong), though, is a deft and empathetic songwriter, a storyteller with a penchant for shameless self expression and graceful introspection. Listen is not an admonishment. It’s not an imperative, or an oracle-given ultimatum. Kyshona does not implore her audience to hear her, but each other. Over ten original and co-written songs the album carries on this mission with empathy, connection, community, and spirituality (but not proselytizing.) It’s a remarkable feat that though society systemically attempts to render her and women like her invisible, assuming that they’ll stand aside or allow themselves to be tokenized, Kyshona compassionately defies those expectations and opts to design her selfhood — and thereby, her art — to interact with the world on her terms and not the world’s.” 

WATCH:  "LISTEN”

“Since completing this album, there has been a theme that keeps coming up: fear,” Kyshona told Billboard in their premiere of the album. “Fear of being ignored, fear of being seen. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of being abandoned and alone. But every night I have walked on a stage or into a space and stood in that fear, I’ve been shown that I can not only conquer them, but that those fears allow me to connect with people. That’s what I have wanted this album to be: a reflection that allows connection.” 

WATCH:  "FALLEN PEOPLE”

“People feel permission. This allows them to feel they can have control, they can build a community through music,” Kyshona told The News & Advance of the connection she forges with her audiences. “Her new LP, Listen, released this month, asks the audience ‘are we even listening to each other?” continues The News & Advance. “Even when she’s writing about others, she said, their stories are also hers — ‘This is the gospel of the people.’ In a crowd of people, all with differing beliefs, political stances or conflicting ideals, it’s music, [Kyshona] said, that offers unity.”

Kyshona has always lent her voice and music to those that feel silenced or forgotten. She began her career as a music therapist, writing her first songs with her patients – the students and inmates under her care. She soon found the need to write independently and find her own voice, an endeavor that led her to the fertile ground of the Nashville creative community and its collaborative songwriting culture. Kyshona has successfully melded her music career with her passion to heal the hurting; audiences will find a common thread of empowerment, overcoming adversity, and finding hope in her work. It's for every silent scream, every heavy load, every fearful thought, and a simmering sense of anger that the repressed, the lost, and the forgotten try to hide from the world. "I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose," she says. "When I write and when I perform I am often thinking of what my point is. What is my purpose? What is my mission? At this particular moment in these particular times, my mission is to be a voice and a vessel for those who feel silenced and forgotten." After her powerful performances, concertgoers often ask, "What can I do?" Her response? “Listen."

TOUR DATES:

3/5 - 20 Front Street - Lake Orion, MI

3/6 - The Robin Theatre - Lansing, MI

⅜ - Hines Hill Conference Center - Peninsula, OH

3/13 - WMOT Finally Friday @ 3rd & Lindsley - Nashville, TN

3/13 - Gray’s On Main - Franklin. TN

3/22  - The Frog Pond at Blue Moon Farm - Silver Hill, AL

3/24 - Tin Pan South 2020 - Nashville, TN

3/26 - Agnes Scott College - Decatur, GA

3/27 - Hendershot’s - Athens, GA

3/28 - Music On Malphrus - Bluffton, SC

4/3 - South Bay House Concert - Los Altos, CA

4/4 - Fog House Concerts - San Francisco, CA

~

4/9 - National Folk Festival 2020 - Canberra, ACT, Australia

4/17 - 4/19 - Fairbridge Folk Fest 2020 - Perth, WA, Australia

~

4/24 - Gray’s On Main - Franklin. TN

4/29 - White Gull Inn - Fish Creek, WI

5/1 - Severson Dells Nature Center - Rockford, IL

⅚ - Purple House Concerts -Tallahassee, FL

5/7 - WUWF Radio Live - Pensacola, FL

⅝ - The Rep Theater - Santa Rosa Beach, FL

5/22 - Kerrville Folk Fest 2020 - Kerrville, TX

6/7 - NPR Mountain Stage - Charleston, WV

6/21 - Chestnut House Concerts - Lancaster, PA

6/25 - Iredell Arts Council - Statesville, NC