There was a time, and it wasn’t all that long ago, when you would have to wait for stuff. No joke. For instance, musicians would spend years working on albums, release them, and then, it’d be years—sometimes decades—before fans could expect new music from them.

Not so in this digital age, where everyone’s free to binge virtually all forms entertainment. Today, music is released online in dribs and drabs, because appetites are never fully sated.

For three decades, lifelong musician Philip B. Price—who is perhaps best known for his enchanting work with Massachusetts indie rock outfit Winterpills—has written and recorded solo tunes he was just too busy to release. That is, until now.

Over the last year and a half, Price has been digging through his past, coming away with a dozen albums’ worth of material he has remixed, re-mastered, and in some cases, reinterpreted. “It’s been a little stressful because, well, it’s kind of a lot,” Price confides. “I’ve wanted to work on this project for years, and I really thought it would go quickly. For a while, I felt like maybe I bit off more than I could chew.”

But he got through it, and on Dec. 8, the 12 solo LPs—the result of Price’s “neurotic compulsion to write songs” in his downtime from 1980s art rock act Memorial Garage and 1990s power pop group The Maggies—will be released digitally. “I couldn’t help myself,” Price admits of the group of songs, which range from dance-noise to shoegaze. “And now, I’m quietly dumping a huge load of music on the world.”

Price understands 143 songs is a lot of music to unleash all at once, so he’s compiled a 39-track best of album he’s titled Without Your Love I’d Be Nowhere At All. “I’m glad this stuff is seeing the light of day and I can finally distribute it properly,” says Price, adding he’s working on new tracks for a solo album he’ll issue in 2018. “It feels good to get it all out there.”

Price, who plays guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards, has been a New Englander for most of his adult life, and lives in Northamption with his wife, Winterpills keyboardist Flora Reed. But he grew up outside of New York City before moving to Los Angeles, where his father, Eugene, worked as an established screenwriter.

He says he can’t imagine what his life would be like had he not moved to Massachusetts after graduating from Bennington College in Vermont. Price—a member of Fountains of Wayne frontman Chris Collingwood’s solo band, Look Park—says his songs are largely influenced by New England’s landscape, although he doesn’t discount the influence his peers have had on his style. “For an area of this size, it has a lot going on, and it has cycles of renewal,” Price says. “It’s like every eight years, it feels like it’s dying off and then, it surges back with all these new artists.”

A sampler from Price’s new collection is available here. To hear what’s on his playlist when he’s not combing through his musical archives, check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel. You can also hear the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured.

Philip B. Price, guitarist and vocalist, Winterpills
Northampton, Massachusetts
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Soundcloud

The post The Price is Right appeared first on Take Magazine.

After three years of writing, performing with other bands, producing and recording, jazz saxophonist Mtali Shaka Banda will release his first album Rites of Passage with with his group, The Oneness Project. The work is a winding concept album telling Banda’s coming of age story using the medium of jazz to promote oneness while still reckoning with all the political moments since Ferguson, Missouri.

Rites of Passage album art by Reed Sutherland

“I’m trying to represent who I am and the way I’m trying to be, making sure my art and my life are one,” says Banda. “I think a lot of artists preach a certain way but don’t live that way. Or attempt to live a certain way, but their music reflects something else. I want to make music that reflects everything I am and everything that I’m trying to be — no bullshit.”

As the son of a Milawian refugee father and an African American mother, Banda acknowledges that his artistic expression is inherently political, especially in the realm of jazz music, a genre like blues and rock ‘n roll that was founded by people of color, then co-opted by white musicians for profit. “Black music is always revolutionary and always on that tip because our existence is political. Whether we try to separate it or not separate it, it’s always going to be political,” says Banda. “You can’t hide from those things, so I let it come up organically and try to tell a good story instead of deciding ‘I want to make protest music.’ Just let me be who I am and the politics will come.”

Interwoven within the narrative themes of the album is Banda’s mastery of the tenor sax. His playing feels fluid, familiar, and expert. Though Banda certainly solos and takes control in the special way a saxophonist can, there are more moments on Rites of Passage where his playing makes space for the other musicians. Bass solos, vocal improvisations, and soft fills from the drums often converge around Banda rather than pushing his sax front and center.

People who listen to bands like The Robert Glasper Experiment will recognize a similarity in how Banda brings folks from outside the world of hip hop, rap, and R & B to play jazz with him. In this way, Banda’s music will satisfy contemporary jazz devotees and people who appreciate the more musically divergent parts of Kendrick Lamar‘s To Pimp a Butterfly or the jazz samples off J Cole’s Forest Hill Drive.

Not that Banda is committed to catering to a specific audience. His primary concern is telling a relatable story through jazz music about “a young black man finding his voice in this world and attempting to be true to himself.”

Listen to Rites of Passage here first before the album’s official release on December 8th, 2017.

Mtali Shaka Banda – saxaphonist, Mtali Oneness Project
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Top photo by Yasmina Mattison-Sudan

The post Shaka on the Rhythm appeared first on Take Magazine.

Jake Klar’s newest album, Until the Wildfire Becomes Paradise, will drop you into a desert and envelop you in the troubadour’s crooning narrative, and then carry you back to your living room, your ear pressed against a radio like a hit-hungry kid of the 1960s. This album longs to wander, just as it longs to come home.

That stands to reason. Klar found his voice in the desert of Texas at age 17 on a pilgrimage of sorts, where he returns every year to partake in The Crooked Crow Songwriter’s Retreat. He’s got wandering feet and a hot air balloon heart, steeped in the desert songwriting tradition, but those feet always carry him back home to his DIY community of hardworking artists in Western Massachusetts. Klar’s gathered moments congeal here as soul-feeding collaborations of all sorts. This album is its rock-n-roll manifestation. It’s for the heartbreaker and its subject, the wanderer and the homeward bound, and its release will be at The Parlor Room on November 4th, alongside collaborator Max Wareham.

This latest outpouring of Klar’s is two years in the making, its characters filled in and placed with care into each song. “Because I’m coming from a writing standpoint,” Klar says, “the songs are driven by words—those are the stronghold—words and emotion.” The poetry comes first. In “Counting Stars,” he sings, “leaving’s just the feeling of forgetting when you’ll be coming home.” And then there’s the album’s instrumentation, which wraps itself around Klar’s voice, echoing and feeding its fully bared and seriously beautiful howl.

Performed solo—just the crooner and his guitar—these songs hold a refreshing clarity. Klar’s voice, on and off the record, bellows from a seemingly deeper source than the belly, and while the worthiness of this record could rest on his voice alone, it doesn’t. Each song’s needs have been lovingly attended to—filled in with harmonies and quirky embellishments in spots, and pared down at crucial moments. “I’ve been thinking about space and silence as such a crucial part of music,” Klar says.

While his voice carries through the album, at its middle is a heartbeat, an instrumental interlude, called “Hot Air Balloon.” In this breathing pocket, the listener is granted a moment to reflect on Klar’s narratives and a moment to appreciate the album’s instrumentals. Max Wareham holds that heartbeat on the bass, while Joel Helander twinkles on the keys, a supernatural adornment throughout. Holding it down at the drums is Karl Helander, who also served as the album’s primary producer at Sleeper Cave Studio in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

These songs—a self-proclaimed bricolage of collected stories and emotions—find Klar nested in his artistic responsibility to make you feel something. “I want to work until I’m dead,” he says. “I want people to cry the way I have to songs, or, I don’t know, go fall in love with someone.” Klar is the storyteller and the trickster, sneaking around the country, plucking stories to gather and disperse beauty.

Want to hear what Klar listens to for inspiration? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel. While there you can listen to what other musicians we’ve profiled are listening to as well.

Jake Klar–musician
Pelham, Massachusetts
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Top image: Jake Karl. Photo by Alex Pines

The post Seeking Paradise Through Song appeared first on Take Magazine.

It’s an exciting time to be Elder. This summer, the three-man outfit—which faultlessly blends the best elements of progressive rock, stoner rock, and doom metal into an awe-inspiring, riff-rife amalgamation that, at varying times, recalls the likes of King Crimson, Yes, and Mastodon—released its fourth album, Reflections of a Floating World, and not long after, fans and critics alike were branding it 2017’s finest offering.

At the moment, the band that formed 12 years ago in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is on a coast-to-coast tour of the U.S., and plans to write more tunes for Elder’s fifth opus in the van, as they make their way from one city to the next. “The Elder train has been rolling so, to stop that now would be stupid,” explains Jack Donovan, who grew up in Marion and plays bass in the band. “We’ve been pretty established in Europe for years, but building our audience in the States,” he says, “and it shows because we’ve been playing bigger and bigger venues. It’s been insane.”

Donovan grew up with Elder’s singer and primary songwriter, Nick DiSalvo, who handles guitar and keyboards in the group. Throughout their high school years, the two took guitar lessons together. Eventually, they taught themselves to play the drums and the bass guitar, but starting a band wasn’t in the cards.

Photo by Constant Decay

“I was a year older, so I went away to college, and that’s when Nick and Matt (Couto) started the band,” Donovan explains. “The first band I was in was called Tchaikovsky, and we played hardcore music. That’s how I met Matt; he was guitarist of that band.”

He introduced Couto to DiSalvo, and while Donovan was away at school, the band took shape with another musician on bass. “At first, it was pretty sludgy; almost Bongzilla-worship kind of stuff,” Donovan says. “They recorded something, and during the summer holiday, I joined the band as second guitarist. When the original bass player went off to school in New York, it was like, ‘Jack, you need to play bass.’ Because we can all play all the stuff, but we’ve settled into the iteration that Elder is now and have just been sticking with that.”

Elder by Falk-Hagen Bernshausen

Donovan says that growing up in New England definitely had a positive influence on him as a musician. “If I’d have grown up in, say, Florida, I’d probably be in a power metal band right now,” he jokes.

Being a born and raised Bay Stater also prepared Donovan for the touring life. “I can tour wherever, because I’m used to everything, so I will never complain that it’s raining or it’s snowing or it’s too hot, because … it will change eventually,” he says. “I hear people complaining about the weather and it’s like, ‘Come on.’”

In the meantime Elder’s burgeoning notoriety in the rock world continues to astound Donovan. “We started out playing VFW halls in New Bedford, and graduated to places like O’Brien’s in Boston and Great Scott in Allston,” he says. “It’s really crazy how it has progressed. I grew up listening to bands like Sleep and Electric Wizard, and now I know those guys on a first name basis, and we end up playing right behind these guys. It’s surreal.”

Want to hear what’s on Donovan’s playlist? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel to hear his playlist and those of other musicians we’ve featured.

Jack Donovan-bassist for Elder
Marion, Massachusetts
Bandcamp
Facebook

Top image: Elder by Ben Stas

The post Listen to Your Elder appeared first on Take Magazine.

The world is often a funny place, and the strangest little influences can end up opening up possibilities you never even could have conceived. If Erin McKeown had attended a different high school in Virginia or the same school at a different time, the quirky song sculptress may never have planted roots in Massachusetts. Lucky for us, she admired a soccer star.

“Growing up in Virginia, I always imagined I would go to the University of Virginia or William & Mary,” says McKeown, who was featured in the first Take issue. “But then, the valedictorian a couple of years ahead of me in school, he went to Brown on a soccer scholarship. I thought that kid was awesome; he was a great mix of artistic and athletic. He wasn’t a great follower of the rules but somehow, made it all work.”

So when it came time to visit colleges, McKeown insisted on touring Brown’s campus, and “loved it.” She’s been in New England ever since, and believes the area absolutely shaped her eclectic, pop-sensible sound. “The winters here align with my psyche, sometimes,” McKeown says. “Three or four years ago, we had a really bad winter; it was like living in an ice palace for six months, with five feet of snow in the front yard. That winter aligned perfectly with how isolated and alone I was feeling. But I also think there’s nothing better than a western Massachusetts summer.

“I think if I had gone to school in the South and lived in North Carolina or went to college in West Virginia, I would be a very different kind of musician,” she continues. “I’d likely be in a band and we would have written much different music.”

McKeown, a close personal friend of onetime WRSI jock and current MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, has issued over 10 collections of songs, including her 2009’s Hundreds of Lions, which was released through Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. She’s been touring the United States extensively since the spring release of her latest EP, Mirrors Break Back, and has concerts planned this fall for Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

McKeown’s socially conscious, exoteric music reflects the musician’s formative years as a fixture of the New England coffeehouse scene. “I grew up taking piano classes, in an attempt to be a well-rounded student,” McKeown says. “But I started playing guitar at 12. From the moment I picked up that guitar, I started writing songs. It came so naturally, because I had always written stories as a kid. What I’m doing now is about trying to create something new and finding my voice as a writer.”

McKeown says she’s already started thinking about her next opus, but intends to spend much of 2018 focusing on Miss You Like Hell, a musical she’s written with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes. “It’s the story of an undocumented woman and her citizen daughter driving across the country together, trying to repair their relationship,” McKeown says. “We’ve been working on it for seven years. Of course, immigration has been an issue in this country for a long, long time, but we had no idea it would spark such a vitriolic political moment.”

Want to hear what McKeown’s listening to? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify channel. While you’re there, check out the playlists from other musicians we’ve featured.

Erin McKeown, singer-songwriter
Northampton, Massachusetts
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Bandcamp

All images courtesy of Erin McKeown

The post Erin McKeown: A Musical Work-in-Progress appeared first on Take Magazine.