Nick Hakim New Album, COMETA, Out Now

Nick Hakim’s new album COMETA is out now. COMETA is truly a collaborative effort and the highlight for Hakim is having so many special guests from his community that play supportive roles–this talented roster of peers includes Alex G, Isaiah Barr, and DJ Dahi. Hakim refers to the bassist Kyle Myles as the glue that has held his musical life together for the past decade along with the pianist Jake Sherman, drummer Vishal Nayak, and guitarists Joe Harrison and Dylan Day. “Happen” includes Abe Rounds on drums and Alex G on piano, and “Slid Under” features Helado Negro on synths. Hakim’s younger brother, Danny Hakim, wrote the chords for “Perfume,” a sweet song about falling in love with someone’s scent, which he also plays acoustic guitar on.

The album title is the Spanish translation of “kite,” which is a symbol for elevation in Hakim’s personal life. He sees this as a really beautiful way to speak about feeling uplifted and gravitating toward the idea of being in your own orbit while everything else floats around you like comets in space. Hakim points to a specific lyric from “Happen” that fully encapsulates this concept: “A supernova/ Exploded and changed my world.” 

COMETA is a collection of romantic songs that explore various iterations of love that are guided by the full scope of Hakim’s own personal experiences from the mutual love he shares with his community to embracing self-love and falling in love with someone in a way that made him feel like he was floating. “The common thread is I’m lucky to have a support system and love not just in a romantic way, but in friendship with the people that I have around me,” he explains. “It’s really about different lenses looking at moments where I felt captivated and then in moments where I was trying to tap into how someone else might have felt or how I wish I felt sometimes.”

This dizzying outer body sensation is another theme that anchors the album as Hakim uses the extreme distance between a kite and a comet as a metaphor for the depth of one’s love for someone else and being so humbled by it. After spending time reflecting on the misguided path of seeking validation from others, what he’s ultimately learned is that you lose parts of yourself in the process. “The key is to find that extremity of love for yourself,” Hakim says. “It’s about growing into someone you want to be; it’s about finding pure love within yourself when the world around us seems to be crumbling.”

Of all the instruments that he has mastered over the years, Hakim believes that singing is his strongest. When you listen to COMETA, it’s very clear that Hakim challenged himself as a vocalist as he seamlessly guides the listener through every song. While the presentation of his work is important, more than anything, Hakim wants the music to speak for itself. Without a doubt, it most certainly does. “I’m not making conceptual records, I’m reflecting in the moment,” he says. “Every single record that I’ve made is just a reflection of feeling into a certain space and dealing with beautiful and really difficult things that we all deal with. I’m just trying to observe things, create them, and make them into songs. I also just really love instruments, they have their own language, and I feel like it’s so fucking interesting… I would not know what I would be doing if it wasn’t for this.”

My Morning Jacket Release MMJ Live: Vol. 2: Chicago 2021

My Morning Jacket have released the second installment in their MMJ LIVE vinyl series, MMJ LIVE VOL. 2: CHICAGO 2021 both digitally and on 3LP translucent orange vinyl (with triple gatefold jacket and digital download card). Recorded live at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, IL on November 11, 2021, MMJ LIVE VOL. 2: CHICAGO 2021 features a six-sided, 20-song setlist of career highlights, spanning such new tracks as “Love Love Love” and “Complex” (both originally found on last year’s acclaimed MY MORNING JACKET) to classic cuts and fan favorites like “Dondante,” “Mahgeetah,” and “Phone Went West.”

STREAM/PURCHASE MMJ LIVE VOL. 2: CHICAGO 2021

The band will make their eagerly awaited hometown live return with a very special Halloween Costume Ball and Celebration at Louisville, KY’s KFC Yum! Center, set for Saturday, October 29. The band’s first hometown live date in six long years, the much-anticipated concert event will see MMJ spotlighting diverse local talent with support from Louisville Leopard Percussionists and Producing a Kind Generation. $1 from each ticket to the Louisville show will benefit Change Today, Change Tomorrow (CTCT), a Louisville-based non-profit working to fight racial injustice in education, access to healthy food, and proper health care.

MY MORNING JACKET

TOUR 2022

OCTOBER

29 – Louisville, KY – KFC Yum! Center *

* w/Special Guests Louisville Leopard Percussionists and Producing a Kind Generation

Rayland Baxter Releases New Song And Video, ‘Rubberband Man’

Rayland Baxter has released his new single “Rubberband Man,” which will be featured on his forthcoming album, If I Were A Butterfly, out November 4.

The track is an ode to Thunder Sound, where Baxter recorded the majority of his new album. Originally a rubber band factory, the Kentucky recording studio still has remnants of its former life. “There’s rubber bands all over the property at Thunder Sound,” says Baxter. “…in the earth, in the concrete, used as insulation for the studio. I took a mishmash of images in my head, these flash scenarios, and wrote a short, fun song that’s really about staying flexible and rolling with the punches.”

The single comes with a wild romp of a music video shot in Miami and featuring Baxter and a lady love wilding out in seedy hotel rooms, dancing in sunflower fields and generally being as free as the song’s subject matter. The video was directed by Quincy Perkins.

Check out the video for “Rubberband Man” here.

Last month, the Tennessee-bred Baxter, released the first taste of the new album with If I Were A Butterfly’s title track and its companion video directed by Citizen Kane Wayne. The album was produced by Baxter, Tim O’Sullivan, and Kai Welch and is available for pre-order and pre-save now.

If I Were A Butterfly is the fourth studio album from Rayland Baxter. The album examines loss and existential ruminations on happiness and freedom and was completed in the wake of his father, the legendary Bucky Baxter’s (Bob Dylan’s longtime pedal steel player and member of Steve Earle’s Dukes) passing.

His late father appears on the album along with a host of collaborators including Shakey Graves, Zac Cockrell of Alabama Shakes, members of Cage the Elephant, Stella, Rose, Morning Teleportation’s Travis Goodwin, and legendary Motown drummer Miss Bobbye Hall, among many others.

If I Were A Butterfly was in large part recorded while Baxter was living alone at Thunder Sound, an abandoned rubber-band factory turned studio in Kentucky with later sessions taking place in California, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Pre-order If I Were A Butterfly.

Adrian Quesada Announces New Album, Jaguar Sound, Out November 18th

On the heels of his acclaimed Boleros Psicodélicos LP, Adrian Quesada announces the release of Jaguar Sound. Out November 18th, the twelve-track collection marks the second new album of the year from the Grammy-winning guitarist, producer and Black Pumas co-founder, further showcasing his singular and signature ability to build a bridge between seemingly disparate worlds of music. Steeped in a heady fusion of hip-hop, psychedelic soul and the opulent orchestration of Italian film scores from the 1970s, the LP draws inspiration from life during the first few isolated months of the pandemic, as well as his experience growing up on the border of multiple countries, cultures and languages. Featuring a special appearance from Ikebe Shakedown, as well as harp by Mary Lattimore, Neal Francis on piano, keys from David Garza and an array of strings, horns and percussion, Jaguar Sound was produced, written, engineered, mixed and largely performed by Adrian Quesada at his own Electric Deluxe studio in Austin, TX.

Pre-order Jaguar Sound and listen to lead single “Noble Metals,” out now:

https://atorecords-ffm.com/noblemetals 

Originally conceived during the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown, Jaguar Sound is an instrumental opus filled with musical themes, motifs and an amalgamation of genres that reflect a particular time, emotion and personal set of obsessions in Adrian Quesada’s life. “I just rode my bike every single day and listened to The Alchemist,” he says. “I’d come back home and crank out beats. Film scores and 1970s library music have always played a big part in my musical language as they paint a cinematic picture without words and that is very much something I draw influence from. It eventually got to the point where I wanted to bring them to life in my own way and turn them into songs. I started setting some aside that matched thematically, and I began recording live instrumentation. I find as I get older that sometimes I feel a responsibility to show the possibility to build bridges and coexist between different worlds. I want someone to discover something they normally wouldn’t entertain.”

Jaguar Sound Tracklist

Reflection with Two Children

Noble Metals

Rise of the Have Nots

Spirits feat. Ikebe Shakedown

Starry Nights

Alberto’s Loop

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

Fireflies

Turk’s Cap

The Inquisitor

DG on the Keys

Final Portrait

Will Sheff Releases Debut Solo Album, Nothing Special, Out Now

Will Sheff  has released his debut solo album, Nothing Special. Produced by Sheff and recorded over three different sessions with John Congleton (St. Vincent, The War On Drugs), Matt Linesch (Edward Sharpe, Gil Landry), andMarshall Vore (Phoebe Bridgers, Conor Oberst), Nothing Special finds Sheff reprocessing his sense of self, reflecting on misguided past ambitions, and reclaiming his sense of purpose. It’s an album that consolidates Sheff’s considerable strengths as a songwriter — deft poeticism, earnest and earned emotionality, a knack for melodic catharsis — and casts them onto a broad and unhurried sonic architecture. Like the album’s artwork, it finds Sheff gazing out into the expanse and witnessing the possibilities that await.

Listen to Nothing Special here.

Watch the video for album opener “The Spiral Season” — a triumphant piece of music that depicts Sheff’s personal journey with fantastical metaphors, before culminating in an ecstatic guitar solo — here.

Says Sheff about “The Spiral Season”:

“The Spiral Season” went through many incarnations. It was a fantasy narrative, and then an autobiography of myself, and then it turned into an autobiography of a 16th century magician, and then I opened the window and all of those ideas flew out and the California landscape came crashing in with all its grandeur and its vulnerability, and fireworks went off and the moon rose overhead and Benjamin Lazar Davis and I wrote a big shouty chorus and everything finally started to make sense. And then we went into the studio and everybody played it wonderfully, and Will Graefe jumped in with that soaring guitar solo that we just let run out as long as it needed to be because it felt so good.”

Recording with some old friends (guitarist Will Graefe and bassist Benjamin Lazar Davis) as well as new collaborators (singer/songwriter Christian Lee Hutson, Dawes drummer Griffin Goldsmith, and Death Cab For Cutie pianist Zac Rae, as well as guest vocals from Cassandra Jenkins and Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman), Sheff took a less participatory and more painterly approach than his production on Okkervil River records. The result is a gorgeously orchestrated record that eschews pop orthodoxy in favor of letting its knotty narratives play out and allowing the musicians to explore the more daring passages just a little longer.

Will Sheff has also announced national headlining tour dates in support of Nothing Special. See full dates below.

Tour Dates

10/07 — Los Angeles, CA @ Masonic Lodge @ Hollywood Forever

11/03 — Iowa City, IA    @ Englert Theatre

11/04 — Minneapolis, MN @ Cedar Cultural Center

11/05 — Chicago, IL @ Old Town School of Folk Music

11/06 — Milwaukee, WI @ Collectivo

11/08 — Bloomington, IN @ Buskirk-Chumley Theater

11/09 — Grand Rapids @ Pyramid Scheme

11/10 — Toronto, ON @ Great Hall

11/11 — Ferndale, MI @ Otus Supply

11/13 — Atlanta, GA @ The Earl

11/14 — Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle

11/15 — Washington DC @ Black Cat

11/17 — Philadelphia, PA @ World Cafe Live

11/18 — New York, NY @ Le Poisson Rouge

11/19 — Woodstock, NY @ Colony

11/20 — Somerville, MA @ Crystal Ballroom

11/21 — Portland, ME    @ SPACE

1/18 — Vancouver, BC @ Wise Hall

1/19 — Seattle, WA @ Madame Lou’s

1/20 — Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios

1/21 — Arcata, CA @ Arcata Theatre Lounge

1/22 — San Francisco, CA @ The Independent

1/25 — San Diego, CA @ Casbah

1/26 — Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar

1/27 — Tucson, AZ @ 191 Toole

1/28 — Sante Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf

1/29 — Boulder, CO @ eTown Hall

1/31 — Denver, CO @ Bluebird

2/1 — Ft Collins, CO @ Bohemian (The Armory)

2/3 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge

2/4 — Flagstaff, AZ @ Yucca North

3/2 — Liverpool, UK @ Futureyard

3/3 — Manchester, UK @ Deaf Institute

3/4 — Glasgow, UK @ Stereo

3/5 — Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club

3/7 — Bristol, UK @ Rough Trade

3/8 — London, UK @ Omeara

3/10 — Brussels, BE @ Botanique Rotonde

3/11 — Paris, FR @ La Boule Noire

3/12 — Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso

3/14 — Hamburg, DE @ Molotow

3/15 — Berlin, DE @ Urban Spree

3/16 — Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen

The Murlocs New Album, ‘Rapscallion’, Out Now

The sixth full-length from The Murlocs, Rapscallion, is a coming-of-age novel in an album form, populated by an outrageous cast of misfit characters: teenage vagabonds and small-time criminals, junkyard dwellers and truck-stop transients. Over the course of 12 hypnotic and volatile rock-and-roll songs, the Melbourne-based five-piece dream up a wildly squalid odyssey partly inspired by frontman Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s own adolescence as a nomadic skate kid. The most magnificently heavy work yet from The Murlocs, the result is an endlessly enthralling album equally steeped in danger and delirium and the wide-eyed romanticism of youth.

North American Tour

10/29: Austin, TX @ LEVITATION ^

Stubb’s Outdoor – Waller Creek Amphitheater

10/31: Oklahoma City, OK @ The Criterion #

11/2: Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre #

11/7: Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts *

11/9: New York, NY @ Webster Hall *

11/10: Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair *

11/11: Montreal, QC – Fairmount Theatre *

11/12: Toronto, ON @ The Axis Club *

11/14: Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom *

11/15: Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall *

11/16: St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club *

11/17: Omaha, NE @ Reverb Lounge *

11/18: Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater *

11/20: Boise, ID @ Neurolux *

11/22: Seattle, WA @ Neumos @

11/23: Vancouver, BC @ Rickshaw Theatre @

11/25: Portland, OR @ Star Theater @

11/27: San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall @

11/28: Sacramento, CA @ Harlow’s @

11/29: Santa Cruz, CA @ Moe’s @

12/2: Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram Ballroom @

^ w/ King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

# w/ King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Leah Senior

* w/ Paul Jacobs

@ w/ Shannon Lay

New Rhett Miller Solo Album, ‘The Misfit’, Out Now

Rhett Miller has released The Misfit, his first solo album in four years. The 11-song project was co-written and produced by Miller’s Hudson Valley neighbor Sam Cohen, (Kevin Morby, Sharon Van Etten, Danger Mouse) continuing their musical partnership that began on 2018’s The Messenger. The 11 songs that comprise The Misfit are an elegant blurring of psychedelia, dream pop, and electronic-leaning indie rock, grounded by the vulnerable songwriting and unaffected vocal presence Miller has perfected as the frontman for legendary alt-country band Old 97’s for the last three decades.

Rhett Miller Tour Dates:

10/20 – Austin, TX – Stateside at the Paramount

10/21 – Spring, TX – Dosey Doe The Big Barn

10/22 – Denton, TX – Dan’s SilverLeaf

10/27 – Dallas TX – Community Beer Co – Breathe Easy Concert (a benefit for the Cystic

Fibrosis Foundation)

10/28 – Fort Worth, TX – The Post at River East

11/4 – New Haven, CT – Cafe Nine

11/6 – Hopewell, NJ – Hopewell Theater

11/5 – Beacon, NY – Towne Crier

11/12 – Albany, NY – The Swyer Theatre at The Egg

Old 97’s Tour Dates:

9/16 – Ardmore, PA – Ardmore Music Hall

9/17 – Hummelstown, PA – The Englewood Barn

9/18 – Baltimore, MD – Baltimore Soundstage

9/20 – Newport, KY – The Southgate House

9/21 – Columbus, OH – The Bluestone

9/22 – Cleveland, OH – House of Blues

9/23 – Detroit, MI – St. Andrew’s Hall

9/24 – Grand Rapids, MI – Elevation at The Intersection

9/25 – Milwaukee, WI – The Rave II

9/27 – Madison, WI – Majestic Theatre

9/28 – LaCrosse, WI – Cavalier Theater

9/29 – Des Moines, IA – Wooly’s

9/30 – La Cygne, KS – Firewater Music Festival

10/1 – Indianapolis, IN – The Hi-Fi

Rayland Baxter “If I Were A Butterfly” Out November 4th

Nick Hakim “COMETA” Out October 21st

Nick Hakim’s new album COMETA will be released on October 21st. COMETA is truly a collaborative effort and the highlight for Hakim is having so many special guests from his community that play supportive roles–this talented roster of peers includes Alex G, Isaiah Barr, and DJ Dahi. Hakim refers to the bassist Kyle Myles as the glue that has held his musical life together for the past decade along with the pianist Jake Sherman, drummer Vishal Nayak, and guitarists Joe Harrison and Dylan Day. “Happen” includes Abe Rounds on drums and Alex G on piano, and “Slid Under” features Helado Negro on synths. Hakim’s younger brother, Danny Hakim, wrote the chords for “Perfume,” a sweet song about falling in love with someone’s scent, which he also plays acoustic guitar on.

The album title is the Spanish translation of “kite,” which is a symbol for elevation in Hakim’s personal life. He sees this as a really beautiful way to speak about feeling uplifted and gravitating toward the idea of being in your own orbit while everything else floats around you like comets in space. Hakim points to a specific lyric from “Happen” that fully encapsulates this concept: “A supernova/ Exploded and changed my world.” 

COMETA is a collection of romantic songs that explore various iterations of love that are guided by the full scope of Hakim’s own personal experiences from the mutual love he shares with his community to embracing self-love and falling in love with someone in a way that made him feel like he was floating. “The common thread is I’m lucky to have a support system and love not just in a romantic way, but in friendship with the people that I have around me,” he explains. “It’s really about different lenses looking at moments where I felt captivated and then in moments where I was trying to tap into how someone else might have felt or how I wish I felt sometimes.”

This dizzying outer body sensation is another theme that anchors the album as Hakim uses the extreme distance between a kite and a comet as a metaphor for the depth of one’s love for someone else and being so humbled by it. After spending time reflecting on the misguided path of seeking validation from others, what he’s ultimately learned is that you lose parts of yourself in the process. “The key is to find that extremity of love for yourself,” Hakim says. “It’s about growing into someone you want to be; it’s about finding pure love within yourself when the world around us seems to be crumbling.”

Of all the instruments that he has mastered over the years, Hakim believes that singing is his strongest. When you listen to COMETA, it’s very clear that Hakim challenged himself as a vocalist as he seamlessly guides the listener through every song. While the presentation of his work is important, more than anything, Hakim wants the music to speak for itself. Without a doubt, it most certainly does. “I’m not making conceptual records, I’m reflecting in the moment,” he says. “Every single record that I’ve made is just a reflection of feeling into a certain space and dealing with beautiful and really difficult things that we all deal with. I’m just trying to observe things, create them, and make them into songs. I also just really love instruments, they have their own language, and I feel like it’s so fucking interesting… I would not know what I would be doing if it wasn’t for this.”

New Honey Harper Album, ‘Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky’ Out October 28th

Honey Harper’s sophomore album, Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky will be released on October 28. The follow-up to their 2020 full-length debut Starmaker, Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky emerged from a deliberate revamping of the band’s creative approach with Honey Harper co-founder and keyboardist Alana Pagnutti taking on a far greater role in the songwriting process alongside frontman William Fussell, adding a palpable new depth to their lyrical output. Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky is now available for pre-order.

The 12 song collection also marks their first time recording with their stacked band, The Infinite Sky, featuring their longtime bassist and contributing writer Mick Mayer, pianist John Carroll Kirby (Solange, Steve Lacy), Spoon keyboardist Alex Fischel, guitarist Jackson MacIntosh (Drugdealer, Jessica Pratt), pedal-steel player Connor Gallaher (Black Lips, Calexico), and TOPS drummer Riley Fleck. The album was mixed at Wowcat Studios in Los Angeles by Joel Ford (yes/and, Ford & Lopatin).

The band released the album’s debut single “Broken Token” along with a live performance video filmed at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles, CA.

““Broken Token” is our take on a new kind of southern rock anthem, whether you were home in 1973 or 2073, we wanted to take you all the way there,” explains Fussell. “We wrote and recorded the song in just 30 minutes taking cues from the Allman Brothers Band’s bluesy breed of Southern Rock & The Grateful Dead’s pastoral lyrics, unfolding in soulful harmonies and free-flowing rhythms.”

Informed by a vast range of influences from George Jones to the Bee Gees, Greek mythology to sci-fi futurism, Bowie to Baudrillard, Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky mines decades of musical history and places the most time-worn touchstones in unexpected new contexts. A postmodernist pastiche befitting of a band praised by Pitchfork for a “celestial twang that owes as much to Spiritualized as it does to Merle Haggard,” the album represents a seamless merging of Fussell and Pagnutti’s distinct artistic paths.

“Baudrillard talks about how the world we live in is so far removed from the original source, it’s impossible to distinguish between what’s authentic and inauthentic,” explains Fussell. “But with country music, every former generation questions the authenticity of the new guard: in the ’60s all the players from the ’50s said, ‘That’s not real country music,’ and that way of thinking has kept repeating itself to this day. With this record we wanted to question and play with the idea of authenticity, to push against the limits of country and hopefully create something that’s never been done before.”

Despite the high level of conceptualization that went into its creation, the record embodies an irresistibly loose and groove-heavy sound that hits with an immediate impact. While Starmaker was touted as “country music for people who don’t like country music,” Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky is “country music for everyone.”

Honey Harper will kick off a tour supporting Amanda Shires on September 6 in Asheville, NC. Find a full list of tour dates below.

Tour Dates supporting Amanda Shires:

9/6 – Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle

9/7 – Athens, GA @ Georgia Theatre

9/9 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club

9/10 – Charlottesville, VA @ Jefferson Theatre

9/11 – Knoxville, TN @ Bijou

9/13 – Charlotte, NC @ Neighborhood Theatre

9/14 – Philadelphia, PA @ World Café Live

9/17 – Nashville, TN @ AmericanaFest – The 5 Spot

9/19 – Homer, NY @ Center for The Arts

9/21 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle

9/22 – Atlanta, GA @ Variety Playhouse

9/23 – Charleston, SC @ Music Farm

9/24 – Chattanooga, TN @ Songbirds

10/6 – Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theatre

10/7 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Commonwealth Room

10/9 – Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet’s

10/10 – Los Angeles, CA @ Troubadour

10/11 – San Diego, CA @ Belly Up

10/12 – San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall

10/15 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios

10/16 – Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern

10/22 – Grand Rapids, MI @ Pyramid Scheme

10/24 – Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe

10/25 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

10/27 – Columbus, OH @ A&R Music Bar

10/28 – Indianapolis, IN @ Hi-Fi

11/3 – Louisville, KY @ Headliners

11/4 – Ann Arbor, MI @ The Ark

11/5 – Evanston, IL @ The Space

11/7 – Minneapolis, MN @ Amsterdam

11/8 – Kansas City, MO @ Madrid Theater

11/9 – Oklahoma City, Ok @ Beer City Gardens

11/11 – Dallas, TX @ The Kessler

11/12 – Houston, TX @ Heights Theater

11/13 – Austin, TX @ Antone’s

11/15 – Little Rock, AR @ Rev! Room

11/16 – St. Louis, MO @ Old Rock House

11/18 – Madison, WI @ Majestic Theatre

11/19 – Des Moines, IA @ Wooly’s

11/20 – Omaha, NE @ Barnato