News From Hemifran March 2015 edition 2

Hemifrån is an independent A&R, promotion and marketing company, based in the heart of Sweden, specializing in, what they call, “gut music” – The kind of music that you can feel in your gut, no matter what. Hemifran is promoting a lot of singer-songwriter, westcoast-pop, country, AOR and more. Here are featured some of their latest news – it is not all west coast, but dig into it!

All Day Sucker – Denim Days

Meet All Day Sucker, the band Hollywood grew up with. They are not famous but many of their fans are. Some of your favorite artists, celebrities and tastemakers have All Day Sucker on their iPods because, as BPM Magazine noted, “they are inextricably linked to all things Hollywood”. If you want to know the best a city has to offer, ask a local.

“Since high school we’ve always had a great following”, Jordan Summers (keyboards, songwriter) explains. “A lot of those same people found success and became famous. Our music was part of the soundtrack to their lives”. Morty Coyle (singer, songwriter) contends, “Hollywood is a hard place to be from because, for the most part, you’ve got nowhere to go. When you grow up here, you don’t have any preconceived notion of what it’s supposed to be like. It just is how it is”.

A little time traveling might be in order to fully grasp how fully entrenched Coyle and Summers have been in the musical culture of Los Angeles. Trends came and went, but the classic pop band the two formed in high school, which evolved into The iMposters, had a timeless quality that made them a fixture on Sunset Strip for over a decade. You name it, they played it, or had a residency there – Roxy, Whisky A Go Go, Roxbury, Peanuts, Sunset Social Club, Opium Den and The Viper Room, where they did a two year Sunday night residency in the mid 90’s. More information at Hemifran.

Andrew Maxwell Morris – Well Tread Roads

Meet Andrew Maxwell Morris, a singer-songwriter and composer, a full time criminal lawyer and a well travelled soul. Andrew has just released his debut album “Well Tread Roads”. It is a project that explores the highs and lows of creating music with the demands of a full time job, giving up evenings and weekends and being dedicated to the task. The album was written and arranged in Andrew’s bedroom. It was taken on, mixed and post produced by Jordan Critz, in Dallas, Texas.

Andrew was born in Melbourne, Australia. His love for music began age 5, placed at a piano and brought into the world of traditional folk music. He wrote his first song at 12, taught himself the drums and guitar when he was 13. Songwriting always came easy. He developed a love of 7O’s Laurel Canyon artists, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Eagles and later a fascination with Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.

“Well Tread Roads” explores depression, a longing for family and a desire to carve out his own path through the title song, “Well Tread Roads”. It is a rollercoaster of driving pop-folk and acoustic songs, each with its own identity. As well as his album and two EP’s, Andrew has had success with music placements in TV adverts for two major brands, ‘Thatcher’s Cider’ and ‘Vodafone’. He has written for production music companies and films around the world. More information at Hemifran.

Kyle Carey – North Star

The paths that the celts traveled from the old world to the new are not etched in stone or traced on maps. But they are recorded in songs, and if you know the songs well enough you can retrace these paths to discover what binds these cultures across the ocean. This is exactly the kind of voyage that American vocalist Kyle Carey undertakes in her new album, ”North Star”, which was produced by renowned Irish-American artist Séamus Egan (Solas). Her songs draw from Americana roots, Irish-American traditions, and Scots Gaelic poetry with the kind of effortless ease that only a lifetime traveler and a musical polyglot can pull off.

Once a full-time waitress as the famed Caffe Lena in New York, Carey traveled to Cape Breton, Canada, on a Fulbright Fellowship to study Scots Gaelic, before ending up on the Isle of Skye in Scotland studying Gaelic song intensively. She then traveled to Ireland to record her debut album. With so much travel and study under her belt, it’s no wonder that Kyle Carey’s new album, ”North Star”, masterfully blends the traditions of three nations into a sound that she calls “Gaelic Americana”. A look at the guest list shows Kyle Carey’s diverse vision, master American roots musicians like Dirk Powell, Katie McNally, and Natalie Haas rub shoulders with young leading lights of the British folk scene Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, and Irish and Scottish traditional artists like Pauline Scanlon, Catriona McKay, and Chris Stout. It’s quite the list of collaborators, something that Carey has always prided herself in cultivating, but the real stars here are the songs.

Each song was written by Carey, excepting two songs in Scots Gaelic and a truly lovely cover of Kate Wolf’s ‘Across The Great Divide’, and though she’s crafting new music, she’s clearly still tied to the tradition. In crafting her songs, Carey draws on long-standing traditional themes of immigration and longing. “Casey Jones Whistle Blues” uses tropes of American folk song to talk about a woman’s dreams for a better life. A song like “Nora O’Kane”, which Carey wrote about an outcast woman bent on revenge, rubs shoulders here with the sad Gaelic lament “Cairistiona” that sings of lost love. “Wind Through Casper” is a haunting lament on immigration and “North Star” speaks to love that comes and goes. More information at Hemifran.