Zee Avi is just 23 but she’s an old soul. A huge talent in a petite frame bringing a universal message from the unlikely birthplace of Borneo, an ancient island east of Malaysia which remains an untouched, natural paradise, an apt description of her songs. 
How Avi came to record her debut album in L.A., the first joint release from Ian Montone’s Monotone Label and Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records, is a true 21st century tale of the way the Internet has transformed the music business and shrunk the globe in the process. 
Born in the tiny town of Miri in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, Zee grew up near the South China Sea in a liberal, encouraging household where her father owned an energy consultancy. “I was bred to be a lawyer,” she says, but music was in her blood. Her father’s father sang and played double-bass, accordion, violin and guitar in bands. 
At age 12, Zee moved from Borneo to Kuala Lumpur where she has been based since. At 17, Zee started locking herself in a room for hours on end to learn to play guitar. Guitar took a back seat for 4 years while she was studying fashion design in London. When she returned to Kuala Lumpur, she picked the instrument back up and began writing songs and performing with a band. 
Zee began recording her songs on a webcam and posting them on YouTube for a friend to hear. “I remember getting so excited when there was one new comment from some random person I didn’t know… One read ‘I’m lost for words - I shall favorite it and ponder if that’s OK,’ ” which was written by Kris Rowley, a U.K. singer-songwriter with a YouTube following under the name Zzzzzzzzap. He began posting her videos on his site, which began a viral snowball effect. 
The day before her 22nd birthday, Zee posted what she intended to be “my last video,” a holiday song, “No Christmas for Me.” By the time she checked her e-mail Avi had almost 3,000 messages including a slew of label offers. One email came from Ian Montone, who had been shown the YouTube clip by Raconteurs’ drummer, Patrick Keeler, prompting Montone to get in touch and offer to release her music on the Monotone Label. 
Before she knew it Zee was on a plane to L.A. to record her debut with producer Robert Carranza at Brushfire’s Solar Powered Plastic Plant. “No Christmas for Me” was then featured on the holiday charity album, This Warm December, A Brushfire Holiday, Vol. 1. 
With an eclectic pool of influences that range from such eccentrics as Cat Power, Regina Spektor, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Jolie Holland, Daniel Johnston and Chris Garneau, to jazz greats Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, to classics like Velvet Underground and Led Zeppelin, this self-described “rock lover at heart” captures the dark, bittersweet qualities of romance with a crack left open for hope and optimism.  Read the rest of Zee's story here.

Download Conya Doss' new single, What We Gon Do? for FREE!

With a refreshingly crisp and remarkable vocal range, as well as sparse yet beautiful instrumentation, Conya Doss has found success in simplicity.  Her unabashedly emotional fifth disc  “Blu Transition” continues  in  Doss’ brilliant  delivery  of  sweet,  supple  and  heartfelt lyrics but she plunges deep into a more bluesy-jazz vibe with spiritual undertones reminiscent of a 70’s  sound  in both harmony and mood.  The music carries a laid-back, earthy quality that features various moments; from truly moving and haunting to a rootsy reflection of where the singer has come from with messages steeped in love, risk-taking, rejection and heartbreak.  Doss’ buzz single  “What We Gon’ Do?” is heating up Urban Adult, college, and internet radio across the country, and is  the  “Choice Track” on Soultracks.com for the month of August. 
 
“Conya is great to work with, and knows how to capture and create a vibe with her music”
-Dwele/National Recording Artist

“Conya Doss in an enchanting voice engaging voice on the Soul Music scene, whose slight rasp adds to her organic vibe”.
-Billboard Magazine R&B/Soul Editor Gail Mitchell

“A whole lotta soul in a beautiful package!” 
-DJ Jazzy Jeff 

Born and raised on Stevie Wonder, Angela Winbush, Donnie Hathaway and Minnie Ripperton in the city described as the vanguard of soul, Cleveland, Ohio. She has been singing since the age of five and later attended the famed Cleveland School Of The Performing Arts, a school that produced fellow alumnus, Avant. Conya went to be a leading member of the Cleveland duo Lyrik comprised of childhood friend Stacy Richardson who currently sings back up forAnthony Hamilton. It was with Lyrik where she honed her writing skills contributing to such artists as pop group 3LW. She has also worked with the likes of R&B Soul musics heir apparent, Gerald Levert and super producers Tony Nicholas and Myron Davis along with Paul Allen of Pajam. The divergende of soul music that pulls from the influences of the past while establishing a nu is what Conya was born to do. Jill Scott, Lauryn Hill, Eric Roberson and now Conya Doss are the leaders of this Nu - Soul movement. In customary Doss form, she takes a giant inventive leap forward on each album, always landing on her feet. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Doss successfully pleases both longtime and new fans, warming them up for an intoxicating slow burn. 'When people hear the record, they're like 'that's not Conya', but that's because they're getting to know me with each project, bit by bit. That's also the reason why there is an ellipsis at the end of my title, it indicates there is still more to me, which I will share in due time.'

Led by singer-guitarist Matthew Milia, folk-rockers Frontier Ruckus hail from the sprawling, diverse landscape of metro Detroit. Beginning with their 2008 debut, The Orion Songbook, Milia and his cohorts have explored their hometown in an engaging and almost mythological fashion. This exploration is all over the new Deadmalls and Nightfalls, which comes out next month.

"It's my environment, it's where I've lived my entire life, and it's all I really know," says Milia. "I've lived in the same house my entire life, so that stasis has created this overwhelming obsession, this obsessive memorization with my locality. Writing about what I know very specifically has helped take some of the burden of all that memory off my shoulders. Writing songs about very specific things pertaining to that locality really comforts me."

Indeed, Deadmalls and Nightfalls presents a distinct perspective on things. There's no political stance in songs like "The Upper Room" or "Silverfishes." And there's no history-lesson diatribe to "Pontiac, the Nightbrink." Instead, Milia's songs inhabit a seemingly inhospitable clime between truth and fiction, splitting the difference between reality and mythology with a poet's attention to detail, befitting his creative-writing training at Michigan State.

The band's new album got part of its title and inspiration from the website deadmalls.com, a clearinghouse for memories of malls gone by. These are the sorts of ghosts that inhabit Frontier Ruckus' songs on Deadmalls: the sped-up nostalgia that only the failing economies of the once-great Midwest could imagine. This nostalgia gives way to some very personal feelings for Milia.

The band is on solid musical ground throughout Deadmalls and Nightfalls, repeating the indie-rock/alt-country vibe of its debut, but with a few rocking moments — "Does Me In" and "Ringbearer," most notably — thrown in. "Our sound came together so organically to the point of it being an accident," says Milia. "I was raised on the music of my father — Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell — and Dave [Jones] had been playing the banjo since he was about ten years old. That synthesis was embedded into the genesis of the band. Everyone that joined added a new, strange component to the concoction."

Still, what matters most to Milia are the various perceptions about his band. Yes, they're from metro Detroit, but they're not a political group that sings about the city's hardships. And yes, they play country-influenced music, but they're not rural poseurs. Frontier Ruckus are from and of the suburbs.

"I'm trying to emphasize that this is a suburban record and we're a suburban band," says Milia. "Suburban Detroit is so expansive, and it's an inextricable part of downtown Detroit. We don't live in downtown Detroit, and we don't try to sing about the current dilapidation in the sense of being at the heart of it. We do sing about Detroit, but through a suburban lens."

Excerpted From Scene

Ellis Paul is one of the leading voices in American songwriting. He was a principle leader in the wave of singer/songwriters that emerged from the Boston folk scene, creating a movement that revitalized the national acoustic circuit with an urban, literate, folk pop style that helped renew interest in the genre in the 1990's.
His charismatic, personally authentic performance style has influenced a generation of artists away from the artifice of pop, and closer towards the realness of folk. Though he remains among the most pop-friendly of today's singer-songwriters - his songs regularly appear in hit movie and TV soundtracks - he has bridged the gulf between the modern folk sound and the populist traditions of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger more successfully than perhaps any of his songwriting peers.
Yet to hear him at this crossroads moment in his career, you would think he was just getting started. For years, he has been among the folk circuit's most popular and dependable headliners, with a mailing list of over 20,000 fiercely loyal fans. He has released 14 CDs, and recently explored new media avenues with a documentary/concert DVD called "3,000 Miles," and "Notes from the Road," a critically acclaimed book of poems and stories.
Paul is today regarded as such a classic urban songwriter that it's hard to fathom what a small-town boy he was. He grew up in northern Maine, in a potato farming community so remote that his exposure to music came almost entirely from the one top-40 station he could get on his radio, and his school band, where he played trumpet well enough to earn a summer scholarship to the Berklee College of Music.
He toured the country competing in track, catching a hard case of wanderlust, and earning a track scholarship to Boston College.It was there that he discovered songwriting, completely out of boredom when a track-career-ending knee injury left him bedridden for months, and he began making up songs on a guitar a friend had given him. By 1989, he was haunting the open mic scene that would soon produce the most important generation of Boston folk stars since the early '60s, including Paul, Dar Williams, Vance Gilbert, Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball (then performing as The Story), Martin Sexton, Patty Griffin, and Catie Curtis.At the same time, Paul remains the most mainstream-friendly folk songwriter to emerge from Boston since Tom Rush. Between 1993 and 2004, he won an unprecedented 13 Boston Music Awards, and his songs were heard on hit TV shows Ed and MTV's Real World; and in the soundtracks of several Farrelly Brothers films, including "Me, Myself, & Irene," starring Jim Carrey, and "Shallow Hal," with Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow. Director Peter Farrelly has called Paul "a national treasure."

The Spampinato Brothers

“My two sons are the most beautiful creatures in the world!”
– Teresa Spampinato
Bronx, New York

Was she biased? Who’s to say. But one thing’s for sure - Teresa's boys are sharing their toys and playing nicely together.

Joey Spampinato is a founding member of the legendarily diverse, critically acclaimed and much-loved NRBQ, the only band to appear at the Berlin Jazz Festival, the New York Folk Festival and the Grand Ole Opry in the same year. Some twenty-five or so years after NRBQ's formation, Joey had the distinct pleasure of welcoming his brother Johnny into the band. During Johnny's tenure, NRBQ continued to make great music in the studio and in concert while also becoming the first band to appear on "The Simpsons" in both live and animated form.

Now, Joey and Johnny turn a page and do what they always knew was their destiny: to write, record and perform music together as The Spampinato Brothers. They are joined by Aaron Spade on guitar and Jay Cournoyer on drums.

"Pie in the Sky" is their first album.

Menomena are an experimental rock band from Portland, Oregon, made up of Brent Knopf on guitar, keyboards, and glockenspiel; Justin Harris on bass, guitar, baritone sax and alto sax; and Danny Seim on percussion. All members of the band share singing duties.

The band formed in late 2000, when Knopf graduated from Dartmouth College and returned to Portland to collaborate with Harris and Seim. They played their first show in July 2001, at The Meow Meow, a now-defunct all ages venue in Portland.

They self-released their debut album, I Am the Fun Blame Monster!, on May 20, 2003. The album was elaborately packaged in an 80-page flipbook that Seim designed and individually hand-assembled. It later received nationwide distribution through FILMguerrero in 2004. The title is an anagram for The First Menomena Album.

In 2005, Under an Hour was released as a three-track album of instrumental music written for and performed with Monster Squad, an experimental dance company based in Portland.

In August of 2006, Menomena signed with Barsuk Records although the band still maintains a relationship with their old label, FILMguerrero. It was stated that FILMguerrero would still be involved in their old catalog and future vinyl releases.

Menomena released their next album in 2007, titled Friend and Foe. It received relative critical acclaim — while some websites like Pitchfork Media praised the album for its effective modular pop, others like PopMatters criticized it for presenting a sense of feigned maturity.

Laura Veirs grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she often spent summers camping with her family, which gave her much of her songwriting inspiration. Veirs has said that she didn’t seriously listen to music until she was in her 20s; instead, she just heard what was in her environment. She listened to folk, country, classical and pop music around the house and on the radio during her youth.

Attending Carleton College in rural Minnesota, Veirs latched onto feminist punk rock from the Pacific Northwest, eventually starting an all-female punk band called “Rair Kx!”. Laura studied geology and Mandarin Chinese. After college, she embraced older country and folk music. Her first foray into songwriting started with a geological expedition in China, where she served as translator. She was miserable and immersed herself into writing lyrics as a way of coping.

She put out her own self-titled album Laura Veirs, recorded live and featuring just her and guitar, in 1999. She has since made five highly acclaimed records with producer Tucker Martine. 2003 saw the release of Troubled by the Fire, a full-band effort that found the artist sharing the studio with such luminaries as Bill Frisell and violist Eyvind Kang. She signed to Nonesuch Records the following year with the atmospheric follow-up Carbon Glacier. Year of Meteors followed in August 2005. She collaborated with The Decemberists on “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)”, from their 2006 album The Crane Wife. Her sixth record, Saltbreakers, was released worldwide on Nonesuch Records in April 2007.

Veirs’ seventh album, July Flame, will be released in January 2010 on her own record label, Raven Marching Band Records (in North America) and on Bella Union (in Europe and the rest of the world).

Basia Bulat
Biography

“I don’t think I realised the radio had more than one station til I was 11 or 12,” Basia Bulat says. At the family home in Toronto, the dial was always fixed to the local oldies station: Motown, Stax, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Sam Cooke. While her mother hunted for someone to do the dishes, Basia and her younger brother Bobby would hide with a radio or tape player, happily rattled by all that song.

Since the age of three, Basia has been sitting on piano stools and trying to hammer things out. It started with her piano-teacher mum, but along the way Basia’s picked up guitar, autoharp, banjo, ukulele, sax and flute. In high-school her instrument was the upright bass – a lone girl among “eight-foot-tall guys, goofing off with the tubas”. There’s a sense of play that still suffuses her music, jostling under the songs of regret and love, want and joy. When her brother began in his teens to play drums with punk bands, Basia would be there with her Demerara voice, joining happily in the jam. When she left for university in London, Ontario, musicians began to drop by her downtown apartment. Many nights were spent with these classically-trained friends, laughing and singing, and together they made a glad, bright noise.

Basia and her band have toured central Canada and Europe, sharing stages with the likes of the Great Lake Swimmers, Julie Doiron, Sondre Lerche, and The Veils, leaving a trail of new fans and happy critics along the way. In mid-2007 a Canadian deal was inked with Hayden’s Hardwood Records, preceding a Western Canada tour with Final Fantasy this fall. Oh, My Darling is a pet project no longer, but Basia’s ambitions are unchanged from those early days of that tiny apartment: “I love songs that I can sing along to,” Basia says, and then she corrects herself, balling her hand into a fist. “No, songs that you want to sing along to.”

"Blues is tough," Charlie Musselwhite explains. He could just as easily be talking about himself. Described by the San Jose Mercury News as, "the second coming of Led Zeppelin, with Tom Waits on vocals," Charlie and his band embody the direct and timeless power of the blues.

Charlie continues to deliver that hi-wattage intensity on stage, testifying to the truth of living in real America night in and night out. Whether it's the rough river town of Memphis of his childhood, the rough South Side Chicago juke joints where he cut his teeth as a performer or the disillusioned Twenty First Century New Orleans, Musselwhite's music still speaksÑloud and clear-- to the soul with passion and grace.

When Charlie released his first record, 1967's defiant Stand Back, the country was in the midst of an unpopular war and entering the slipstream of rapid cultural and political change. Fast forward four decades and not much has changed. Neither has Musselwhite's musical wanderlust nor his creative ambition.

His hunger to explore new sounds and possibilities resulted in an acclaimed 2007 collaboration with alt-rock institution Eddie Vedder on the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack to the film Into The Wild. Vedder's haunting vocals and Musselwhite's aching harp strains added to the movie's already powerful story. Charlie recalls the sessions as a mutual admiration society. "It was great. Sean Penn was there, too. They were fans and knew a lot of my records. We hit it off right away and had great rapport."

Charlie describes this give and take between himself and performers from other generations and different genres as, "a conversation." It is an ongoing one that has been a key reason why his music remains so vital. "Every situation has something to offer and can spark new ideas," he explains. "Something new comes out of it." Musselwhite sums up: "It's likeÉÉ I know what I know. What do you know that can make things even more interesting?"

Charlie also finds inspiration in diverse cultural experience. An avid traveler, Charlie loves to investigate all music "with feeling / music from the heart." He and his band go wherever the gigs are Ð including China, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Brazil. Even though Charlie has already racked up thousands of miles on tour buses and still spends a great deal of time away from his current Sonoma County, California home, he still books tour itineraries that would wear out performers half his age. Charlie finds that these journeys allow him, "to get beneath the surface of the place."

These treks reinforce Musselwhite's belief in music's universality. No matter that they were half a world away from the American stages that gave birth to the genre, Charlie remembers hearing, "people playing blues in their own way, their own version." Like some Jungian archetype, Musselwhite calls this a global "music of lament from the heart," with, "different takes," from country to country.