Episode 1.12 Song: Timber
Much Ado About Nothing – Part 2
Written and Performed by Genevieve Birchman
available at genevievebirchman.com

About Genevieve Birch…..

Genevieve Birchman is a Californian singer-songwriter known for her heartfelt lyrics, haunting melodies and elegant orchestrations.

Brought up in a musical household, she studied classical piano from a young age and spent her teenage years soloing on trumpet to the soulful jazz of Chet Baker. Aged sixteen, she picked up the guitar and began writing her first compositions.

At college in Los Angeles, she became a regular on the open mike circuit and attracted a loyal following of enthusiastic fans. During this time, she also became the lead singer of rock band Trophy Room, before making the decision to study music in the historic city of York, England. It was an experience that had a significant influence on her approach to song-writing, as she began to incorporate the influences of leading contemporary classical composers.

After graduation, Genevieve turned her attention back to pop music and eventually launched debut album Holding Patterns. Celebrated for its meaningful lyrics and soulful vocals, the album confirms her reputation as a true innovator in the genre.

The soulful, piano pop-infused single Timber is available online today.

Episode 1.10 Song: Closer
Teacher Knows Best – Part 2
Written and Performed by Stacy*Clark
available at itunes.com

About Stacy*Clark…..

The 12 stellar songs on Connect the Dots, Stacy Clark’s debut album for Vanguard Records, announce the Buffalo born, Southern California-based singer, songwriter, and musician as an exciting new artist to watch on the indie-pop music scene. Clark’s charmingly idiosyncratic voice and heartfelt lyrics have already won over several of television’s top music supervisors, who have featured songs from Clark’s self-released 2007 album Apples and Oranges on such youth-oriented shows as The CW’s One Tree Hill, MTV’s The Hills, The Buried Life, My Super Sixteen, Exiled and Engaged & Underage, CBS’s Girlfriends, ABC’s Make It Or Break It and Samurai Girl, Bravo’s The Rachel Zoe Project, and VH-1’s The Price of Beauty.

That Clark’s songs would resonate with the folks who musically program TV’s dramatic moments is not surprising given the candid and emotionally uplifting quality of her writing, which she hones even further on Connect the Dots. “It’s the most honest piece of work I could possibly release,” Clark says. “As an artist, it’s a complete representation of me and where I’m at in my life now, including all the ups and downs. I’m a happy person, but I have struggles just like anyone else. Things don’t always come easy to me, and you can definitely hear that in the songs. I hope people can tell that the songs I write are honest and real – that I’ve truly lived everything I sing about.”

The album’s first single, “Touch & Go,” addresses Clark’s feeling that she never has enough time with the people she cares about. “We recorded Connect the Dots over a month and a half last year at a private home studio near Venice Beach and I was secluded from a lot of my friends,” Clark says. “They would come visit, but it was literally touch and go, like ‘Now I see you, then you’re gone.’” “White Lies” deals with being careful about who you trust and not changing your morals and values. “It’s partly about a relationship, but overall it’s about staying true to who you are,” Clark says. In the same vein are “Not Enough” and “Hold On,” both about staying positive and hanging on to your hopes and dreams. “‘Hold On’ is about my journey the past few years when I was literally sleeping on a closet floor, working all these jobs, and trying to figure it all out,” Clark says. “That’s why I called the album ‘Connect the Dots.’ It’s about making sense of everything and getting from Point A to Point B by moving forward and connecting the dots to music.”

The lyrics may be intensely personal, but the mood on Connect the Dots is buoyant. As a songwriter, Clark couches her struggles in freewheeling melodies brought to life by carefully layered textures of guitar, piano, organ, strings, and horns. To help her create what she calls “the sparkly bits,” Clark turned to producer Matt Appleton (Panic! At The Disco, The Veronicas, Saosin) who played many of the instruments (including accordion, trumpet, ukulele, and mandolin) on the album and composed the string arrangements. “He has great ideas,” Clark says. “If he thinks a song needs a stronger bridge or a change here or there, I’m open to it. He has a wonderful ear.”

Clark would know: She grew up in a musical family on Grand Island, New York, outside of Buffalo. Her grandfather played in a polka band and her mother was a prodigy on the accordion. Clark’s introduction to music was at age 3 through dance and she wound up studying tap and jazz for 15 years. “My first impression of music was when you hear it, you start moving,” she says. Her sister was an avid pop fan who exposed her to everything from Rage Against The Machine to David Bowie. When Clark was eight, her mother enrolled her in her school’s concert band where she excelled at the clarinet. Being a sports nut, Clark played soccer and snowboarded, but after being sidelined by various injuries, her focus turned toward expressing herself through melody and lyrics.

A Sarah McLachlan concert Clark saw when she was 15 convinced her to pick up a guitar. “I got on my bike, rode to the music store, bought a guitar, and rode home with it on my back,” she recalls. She taught herself to play and began performing at open mic nights, including a popular one at local club Nietzsche’s. The open mic was run by Michael Meldrum, a Buffalo folk artist who recorded for Ani DiFranco’s label Righteous Babe. Meldrum taught Clark how to book her own shows, which led to her embarking on a national tour at age 19 during which she traveled across the country alone for two months.

After Clark graduated from college, she decided to move to Orange County, California. A production deal led to the 2006 release of her first EP, Unusual (scoring her an award for Best Female Performer at the 2006 Southern California Music Awards), followed by the release of her 2007 full-length Apples and Oranges, which she funded herself with money she earned doing phone sales for an advertising company. Tirelessly performing around Southern California, Clark followed up a 2007 win for Best Female Performer at the Orange County Music Awards with a win this year for Best Pop Artist. Over the past few years, she has also raised money for various charities including Habitat For Humanity, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and the ASPCA (in the process becoming the owner of a rescue dog), and has performed at variety of benefit concerts for The American Red Cross, The American Cancer Society, The National Multiple Sclerosis Society and The Cystic Fibrosis Walk, to name a few.

After signing with Vanguard Records in March 2010, Clark is looking forward to the August release of Connect the Dots. “Having a career in music is everything I’ve ever wanted,” she says. “Nothing is more satisfying than writing a song and having someone listen and feel like they can relate,” Clark says. “My songs will outlive me and I hope they can make a difference in someone’s life in the same way music has done for me.”

“I’m Afraid Of Everything” is a glimpse into …music video?’s future, where the alluring voice of Paul Jenkins and a bangin’ backbeat relax on a bed of lush noise. “I’m Afraid Of Everything” hearkens back to a time when recorded music could only be heard with a needle on a record, where guitar chords wept, and where a slow jam could break someone’s heart. It’s an all-out groove, complete with harmonies and wah-wah that shimmers with the reflected light of a disco ball.

“I’m Afraid of Everything shows the way Jenkins, McCanse, and Miller transfer the desert heat into cool harmonies and rhythms. If I’m Afraid of Everything is any indication, …music video? is headed fast toward a prominent place on permanent playlists everywhere— both the one inside your head and the ones outside.

PREVIOUS PRESS ACOLADES FOR …music video?

“…music video? stands out in a crowded field of electro-pop groups with their strong sense of melody, flawless production and surprisingly fresh use of synths and samples” – Robin Hilton, NPR

“…music video?… sounds a bit like Sparklehorse doing a Bowie cover.” – Tucson Weekly

“The honesty and humor preserved on this recording are very human and very real.” — Nada Mucho

RIYL Air, The Flaming Lips, M83, Hot Chip, and The Postal Service

For a closer look into the world of Kelly and Kamille, check out their music videos on YouTube and become a fan on facebook! (www.facebook.com/karminamusic)

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. Their record release show was held in their home town of Port­land, Ore­gon. The pack­ag­ing was designed by Knopf and fea­tures art­work by graphic novelist/cartoonist Craig Thomp­son, con­sist­ing of die-cut shapes, decoder rings, and hid­den mes­sages. It was nom­i­nated for “Best Record­ing Pack­age” at The Grammy Awards.

The band’s name was cho­sen for “the way it rolls off the tongue, sex­u­ally, or some­thing” and has no spe­cific mean­ing, although it is often assumed to refer to the Piero Umil­iani song “Mah Nà Mah Nà”, a sta­ple of The Mup­pet Show. A recent audio­clip from SpotDJ had Brent stat­ing that the band name was a con­trac­tion of the words “Men” and “Phe­nom­ena”. This is most likely a joke.

The band uses a com­puter pro­gram called the Dig­i­tal Loop­ing Recorder, or Deeler for short, in the song writ­ing process — it was pro­grammed by band mem­ber Brent Knopf. Drum­mer Danny Seim explains the process, “First, we set the tempo of the click, which is played through a pair of head­phones. We then take turns pass­ing a sin­gle mic around the room. One of us will hold the mic in front of an instru­ment, while another one of us will lay down a short impro­vised riff over the click track. We usu­ally start with the drums. Once the drums begin loop­ing, we throw on some bass, piano, gui­tar, bells, sax, or what­ever other sort of noise­maker hap­pens to be in the room. Deeler keeps the process demo­c­ra­tic, which is the only way we can operate”.

Episode 1.6 Song: White Lips
Bring the House Down – Part 2
Written and Performed by Tweak Bird
available at tweakbird.com

About Tweak Bird…..

“Tweak Bird is a collaboration between brothers Caleb (guitar, vocals) and Ashton Bird (drums, vocals) — natives of Carbondale, IL (home to Southern Illinois University), who performed together, on and off through the years before relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-’00s. Once there, they began molding an intriguing sound consisting of both modern (alternative, stoner and post-rock, etc.) and classic influences (’60 and ’70s psych, prog and hard rock), which they previewed with a pair of 7″ singles before issuing 2008′s debut EP, Reservations, through Volcom Entertainment.”
-Eduardo Rivadavia, Rovi

Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC

Currently they are on tour with Mondo Generator, the brainchild of bassist Nick Oliveri from Queens of the Stone Age fame.

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. Their record release show was held in their home town of Port­land, Ore­gon. The pack­ag­ing was designed by Knopf and fea­tures art­work by graphic novelist/cartoonist Craig Thomp­son, con­sist­ing of die-cut shapes, decoder rings, and hid­den mes­sages. It was nom­i­nated for “Best Record­ing Pack­age” at The Grammy Awards.

The band’s name was cho­sen for “the way it rolls off the tongue, sex­u­ally, or some­thing” and has no spe­cific mean­ing, although it is often assumed to refer to the Piero Umil­iani song “Mah Nà Mah Nà”, a sta­ple of The Mup­pet Show. A recent audio­clip from SpotDJ had Brent stat­ing that the band name was a con­trac­tion of the words “Men” and “Phe­nom­ena”. This is most likely a joke.

The band uses a com­puter pro­gram called the Dig­i­tal Loop­ing Recorder, or Deeler for short, in the song writ­ing process — it was pro­grammed by band mem­ber Brent Knopf. Drum­mer Danny Seim explains the process, “First, we set the tempo of the click, which is played through a pair of head­phones. We then take turns pass­ing a sin­gle mic around the room. One of us will hold the mic in front of an instru­ment, while another one of us will lay down a short impro­vised riff over the click track. We usu­ally start with the drums. Once the drums begin loop­ing, we throw on some bass, piano, gui­tar, bells, sax, or what­ever other sort of noise­maker hap­pens to be in the room. Deeler keeps the process demo­c­ra­tic, which is the only way we can operate”.

Episode 1.4 Song: Unusual
All The World’s a Stage – Part 2
Written and Performed by Stacy*Clark
available at itunes.com

About Stacy*Clark…..

The 12 stellar songs on Connect the Dots, Stacy Clark’s debut album for Vanguard Records, announce the Buffalo born, Southern California-based singer, songwriter, and musician as an exciting new artist to watch on the indie-pop music scene. Clark’s charmingly idiosyncratic voice and heartfelt lyrics have already won over several of television’s top music supervisors, who have featured songs from Clark’s self-released 2007 album Apples and Oranges on such youth-oriented shows as The CW’s One Tree Hill, MTV’s The Hills, The Buried Life, My Super Sixteen, Exiled and Engaged & Underage, CBS’s Girlfriends, ABC’s Make It Or Break It and Samurai Girl, Bravo’s The Rachel Zoe Project, and VH-1’s The Price of Beauty.

That Clark’s songs would resonate with the folks who musically program TV’s dramatic moments is not surprising given the candid and emotionally uplifting quality of her writing, which she hones even further on Connect the Dots. “It’s the most honest piece of work I could possibly release,” Clark says. “As an artist, it’s a complete representation of me and where I’m at in my life now, including all the ups and downs. I’m a happy person, but I have struggles just like anyone else. Things don’t always come easy to me, and you can definitely hear that in the songs. I hope people can tell that the songs I write are honest and real – that I’ve truly lived everything I sing about.”

The album’s first single, “Touch & Go,” addresses Clark’s feeling that she never has enough time with the people she cares about. “We recorded Connect the Dots over a month and a half last year at a private home studio near Venice Beach and I was secluded from a lot of my friends,” Clark says. “They would come visit, but it was literally touch and go, like ‘Now I see you, then you’re gone.’” “White Lies” deals with being careful about who you trust and not changing your morals and values. “It’s partly about a relationship, but overall it’s about staying true to who you are,” Clark says. In the same vein are “Not Enough” and “Hold On,” both about staying positive and hanging on to your hopes and dreams. “‘Hold On’ is about my journey the past few years when I was literally sleeping on a closet floor, working all these jobs, and trying to figure it all out,” Clark says. “That’s why I called the album ‘Connect the Dots.’ It’s about making sense of everything and getting from Point A to Point B by moving forward and connecting the dots to music.”

The lyrics may be intensely personal, but the mood on Connect the Dots is buoyant. As a songwriter, Clark couches her struggles in freewheeling melodies brought to life by carefully layered textures of guitar, piano, organ, strings, and horns. To help her create what she calls “the sparkly bits,” Clark turned to producer Matt Appleton (Panic! At The Disco, The Veronicas, Saosin) who played many of the instruments (including accordion, trumpet, ukulele, and mandolin) on the album and composed the string arrangements. “He has great ideas,” Clark says. “If he thinks a song needs a stronger bridge or a change here or there, I’m open to it. He has a wonderful ear.”

Clark would know: She grew up in a musical family on Grand Island, New York, outside of Buffalo. Her grandfather played in a polka band and her mother was a prodigy on the accordion. Clark’s introduction to music was at age 3 through dance and she wound up studying tap and jazz for 15 years. “My first impression of music was when you hear it, you start moving,” she says. Her sister was an avid pop fan who exposed her to everything from Rage Against The Machine to David Bowie. When Clark was eight, her mother enrolled her in her school’s concert band where she excelled at the clarinet. Being a sports nut, Clark played soccer and snowboarded, but after being sidelined by various injuries, her focus turned toward expressing herself through melody and lyrics.

A Sarah McLachlan concert Clark saw when she was 15 convinced her to pick up a guitar. “I got on my bike, rode to the music store, bought a guitar, and rode home with it on my back,” she recalls. She taught herself to play and began performing at open mic nights, including a popular one at local club Nietzsche’s. The open mic was run by Michael Meldrum, a Buffalo folk artist who recorded for Ani DiFranco’s label Righteous Babe. Meldrum taught Clark how to book her own shows, which led to her embarking on a national tour at age 19 during which she traveled across the country alone for two months.

After Clark graduated from college, she decided to move to Orange County, California. A production deal led to the 2006 release of her first EP, Unusual (scoring her an award for Best Female Performer at the 2006 Southern California Music Awards), followed by the release of her 2007 full-length Apples and Oranges, which she funded herself with money she earned doing phone sales for an advertising company. Tirelessly performing around Southern California, Clark followed up a 2007 win for Best Female Performer at the Orange County Music Awards with a win this year for Best Pop Artist. Over the past few years, she has also raised money for various charities including Habitat For Humanity, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and the ASPCA (in the process becoming the owner of a rescue dog), and has performed at variety of benefit concerts for The American Red Cross, The American Cancer Society, The National Multiple Sclerosis Society and The Cystic Fibrosis Walk, to name a few.

After signing with Vanguard Records in March 2010, Clark is looking forward to the August release of Connect the Dots. “Having a career in music is everything I’ve ever wanted,” she says. “Nothing is more satisfying than writing a song and having someone listen and feel like they can relate,” Clark says. “My songs will outlive me and I hope they can make a difference in someone’s life in the same way music has done for me.”

Episode 1.3 Song: Ethanol
All The World’s a Stage – Part 1
Written and Performed by Windy City Gentleman
available at windycitygentleman.com

About Windy City Gentleman…..

When asked if he’s from Chicago, Christopher Mudgett is almost always hesitant to answer. However, it is not lack of certainty in his response which delays him, but more so, how you will react to it that does.

Although he was conceived in the early spring of 1982 in the windy city prior to his mother and father relocating to Texas where he was raised. The truth in the name can be found by excavating a bit of his ancestral history.

As a child, Christopher remembers sitting around a campfire hearing his grandparents tell stories of a shadowy figure in their family’s past, stories of a great uncle who did cruel and unimaginable things to others. Frightened as he was, he would always sit and listen attentively; I was such a curious kid. Even though I would have terrible nightmares as a result from listening to my grand folks tell these stories, I had to listen. I was intrigued; these stories were of a gentleman from Chicago by the name of Herman Webster Mudgett , aka H. H. Holmes, or more famously, America’s first serial Killer.

Although there are many strange parallels between these two (one being that Holmes’s homicides took place in a hotel dubbed Murder Castle. Oddly, prior to commencing recordings as Windy City Gentleman, Christopher worked at a hotel) there is one underline truth, and that is, that WCG has learned to accept and embrace all of his idiosyncrasies, all his ticks and tribulations and transposed them into what has become a unique voice, expressive through music. With his blatantly honest lyrics, raw recording style, and maniacal stage show, WCG encompasses pure untarnished emotion in a way that seems psychotic at times, a trait inherent in the late Holmes.

Fortunately for the population at large, Mudgett has used his genius for a more positive consequence. Yet, sometimes when watching him at the height of a performance, as his eyes roll to the back of his head and he screams in cold blood; as his guitar flails violently about him, you catch a glimpse of something else. Something that may or may not there. It will make you wonder. May even give you chills, because after all, it is in his blood.

About Kozmonaut…..

“Los Angeles has become a cesspool of redundant and boring music. No danger, no soul and definitely a conveyor belt of artists who all sound and look the same…not so with Kozmonaut. Kozmonaut plays loud, plays soft and keeps the mystique that is missing from music in this day and age. Combining a mix of Queens of the Stone Age, PJ Harvey & Nick Cave…Kozmonaut is a dirty mixture of distorted guitars, moody vocals, Pink Floyd bass lines and drumming that you can feel. Kozmonaut has recorded twice before and not until their 3rd recording we’re they happy enough to self -release an ep. They’re not messing around and if you can’t hang with unpolished, raw, loud music…then this band is not for you.”

About Kim DiVine…..

Kim DiVine is a singer/songwriter based in Los Angeles and is originally from Massachusetts. Before her move to Los Angeles she had a large presence in the San Diego music scene where she was named “Best Singer/Songwriter” and “Best Female Vocalist” in the San Diego H.A.T. Awards (Honoring Acoustic Talent). DiVine starred in “Kim & Seana,” a music-infused webisode series sponsored by Ford Motors and her video blog, “Bedroom Sessions,” has been featured on the front page of YouTube. DiVine’s voice can currently be heard singing J-E-L-L-O on the new nationwide JELL-O campaign and you can hear her perform the National Anthem at Dodger Stadium on August 22nd.