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[Nearly] every month, Valcour features a different Louisiana artist or group with pictures, bios, links, and tracks for streaming. They may be Valcour artists, on other labels, or independent. Regardless, they will all be artists we think you will enjoy learning about and hearing. Occasionally, they won’t even be musicians…
View our Artist of the Month archives for:
2007
2008
2009
July 2010 ————————————————————————————–
Yvette Landry
Tracks (click to stream)
Should Have Known
Friday Night Special
Jack
One More Broken Heart
Since her appearance on the local music scene several years ago, Yvette has had such an enchanted musical career that the announcement of her debut CD comprised of sixteen original songs is not surprising. From touring the world as a multi-instrumentalist, to performing with the likes of Balfa Toujours, Dirk Powell, Geraldine Gay and Darrell Scott, and being a founding member of the all-woman super-group Bonsoir Catin, Yvette has made a name for herself as a powerful accompanist. Now taking center stage, be prepared to be blown away yet again by this beautiful songsmith. Her brand new CD, Should Have Known, is comprised of homemade honky-tonk that’ll knock you off your boots!
The Album is available at CD Baby and iTunes.
June 2010 ————————————————————————————–
Tipitina’s Song Contest Winners: Tom Krueger featuring Emily Neustrom
Tracks (click to stream)
The contest winning track: Won’t Have To Say
Drive By
Come With Us
Tom Krueger and Emily Neustrom showed up at the Lafayette Tipitina’s co-op and recorded and mixed the fantastic Won’t Have to Say track above in a three hour session as part of our annual Tipitina’s Song Contest. As a salute to their creativity and skill, we are featuring them with their contest winning track as our June Artist of the Month. Congratulations to Tom and Emily for making magic happen in just three hours!
Bio
Tom Krueger makes his home in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he has his finger in all sorts of pies. If he’s not shooting and directing movies or music videos, then you’ll find him jamming away on the fiddle or the Guitar, or maybe shaking it up on the dance floor. Born and raised in Berkeley California, Tom got his first taste of making movies working as a camera assistant for 60 Minutes, but quickly moved to New York where he was able to hone his filmmaking craft. He went on to shoot countless commercials, documentaries, movies and whole lot of music videos for a wide range of artists, from Bob Dylan, David Bowie, U2, and Bruce Springsteen, to Ice Cube, Ice Tea, Cypress Hill, and NWA, and many, many more. …But it was his friendship with The Red Stick Ramblers that brought him to Lafayette. He only came down to make a video for the band’s, Made in the Shade, but he says he had such a good time, he never left and now calls Lafayette his home.
Tom originally began writing and recording soundtrack music for film and television, not only for his own films, like Fuzzy Logic and The Folklorist, but for others as well, including the PBS series, The United States of Poetry, but his real passion lies in his latest music project, Local 49, which he formed with Lafayette’s Emily Neustrom. The duo are currently working on an upcoming CD and getting ready to take it on the road. They most recently won the Valcour/Tipitina’s songwriting contest with their song, Won’t Have to Say, which is included here. Also included is Drive By which was created for his film, Fuzzy Logic, and Come with Us which was commissioned for a compilation CD by Esopus Magazine.
April 2010 ————————————————————————————–
Calvin Hairstyle (AKA Kevin Hurstell)
On the Web
Calvin Hairstyle’s Blog
frozenbears.org
myscpace.com/slobot
myspace.com/otasco
Tracks (click to stream)
Moonlit Paradise
One Spell
I am Barry Bonds
Glitter Spot
Baton Rouge native Kevin Hurstell first made waves frequenting the stage of LSU’s Greek Amphitheater as lead guitarist of Star Drag, a band that also contained Reception is Suspected’s Sam Anselmo, and future Frozen Bear-mate Adam Waller. From there he took on singing, songwriting, and occasional keyboarding duties in the long running indie boy/girl group Slobot, and then another stint as lead guitarist in Otasco, fronted by longtime scene contributor Luther Gooch.
His home studio recorded, sci-fi punk duo Frozen Bears was cited on ex-Village Voice music editor Chuck Eddy’s list of best albums of 2008. In July of 2009 they charted on the top 30 most played on WFMU, one of the most well known free-form stations in the country, serving the NYC/NJ area. To end the year, the band’s album “2000” earned the honor of Baton Rouge’s “most intriguing release of 2009” from 225’s Alex V Cook, and #3 on Static TV’s list of New Orleans related releases.
For his next band, he looked to Wordperfect’s spellcheck for what would be his new stage name. “Calvin Hairstyle” was the corrected suggestion to replace “Kevin Hurstell” that the computer offered up every time he prepped a paper for printing in high school. Along with former Otasco-mate Rusty Durio on bass, and Johnny McAndrew on drums, the band began by playing a handful of shows in 2009, including shows with Neon Indian and Shonen Knife. Their sets include a sampling of songs that Hurstell has had for years and plans to record this year. The songs are mostly straightforward, fuzzed out pop and warped riff-rock driven tunes. Their most recent show was in April 2010 opening for Austin’s Moonlight Towers at Red Star—clips can be seen above.
In late 2008, Sherie Slobot lent Hurstell her drum kit, and over the next year he taught himself to play basic drum parts by practicing along to sequenced loops that had he had saved on his computer over the years. He developed several of these drum parts and loops into finished songs, adding fuzzed out guitar, bass, vocals, and various sound effects milked from objects found around the house. For post-production, he consulted Tape Op and Google for a crash course in eq-ing, compression, and mixing. The finished product is Calvin Hairstyle’s first album, “Fried Ice”, recorded on his PC (running Windows 98) with mostly one mic. The album is posted for free download for a limited time at Calvin Hairstyle’s website.
March 2010 ————————————————————————————–
Picardy Birds
On the Web
Picardy Birds on Facebook
Picardy Birds on Twitter
Picardy Birds on Myspace
Tracks (click to stream)
All Over Town
Face Values
Pop Culture
Birds wake those in slumber. Like their namesake musical term picardy third,
The Picardy Birds take a sad song, end it happily, and make you wonder why. The Times of Acadiana calls them “musically adventurous… an impressive and unexpected blend” spun together by a quartet of musicians who are driven by their four years together, a collection of music degrees, southern rhythm, blues, and soul, and a genuine desire to create something completely different in both content and sound. Groovescapes New Orleans describes singer Emelie Guidry as “a talented songwriter with a captivating stage presence, and her mates (Brad Cradeur on drums, Mike Lahey on lead guitar, Hayden Talley on bass) share her vigor and match her dynamism. From sparkling grooves to winding, psychedelic stretches to syncopated jazz flourishes the band shows an uncanny ability to draw out the tension between Guidry’s lyrics and verses.” The Picardy Birds address the everyday concerns of humans, from mistakes we watch our friends make to those we watch ourselves make to those we watch our world make. But really, in the end, they decided, it’s all gonna be fine. And so, The Picardy Birds toil on, despite the economy, despite global warming, winning them a loyal and diverse fanbase which they continue to expand.
Their debut album, Play On, (itunes.com/thepicardybirds/playon) reflects their idealism and is a perfect sing-along to offset a gloomy morning. Look for a new feather-ruffling release in late 2010.
February 2010 ————————————————————————————–
Generationals
On the Web
Official Website
Profile at Park the Van Records
Tracks (click to stream)
Nobody Could Change Your Mind
Angry Charlie
Faces in the Dark
When They Fight, They Fight
Generationals is the collaboration of Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer. Following the breakup of their previous band the Eames Era, they returned home to New Orleans in 2008 to form Generationals and record their first record, Con Law.
They tapped the Oranges Band founder Daniel Black (the mind behind the Eames Era’s swan song Heroes and Sheroes) to engineer and produce the record at his D.C.-based home-studio. Black recorded Con Law in the style of his heroes—George Martin, Phil Spector, Jeff Lynn and Quincy Jones—with a meticulous attention to detail and a willingness to make the recordings sound old. The result is one of those classic “first record” moments that blissfully wills its listeners into repeat listens.
The sounds of Con Law were cobbled together from the far corners of the instrument room to form a cohesive group of songs written in straight-forward pop structures. Chiming 12-string electric guitars sit next to 8-bit sequencers, synth-bass and trumpet. Often the shakers, hand-claps and acoustic guitars sound like Paul Simon and Tom Petty, while another arrangement recalls Junior Walker and Booker T., all recorded to an old 24-track 2-inch tape machine that threatened to melt down several times.
In 2009, Generationals met drummer Tess Brunet formerly of Deadboy and the Elephantmen. She has been a key part in creating the live set and the band considers her an essential member of the touring apparatus. As Ted Joyner says, “Grant and I were actually fans of hers for years but once we worked up the courage to ask her to play with us, and she said yes, we knew that an important piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. She rocks.”
Live, the Generationals can include as many as seven pieces with background singers, a trumpet, guitars, keys, bass and drums. And when the whole band is singing en masse on songs like “Faces in the Dark” and “When They Fight, They Fight,” …shit sounds real good. You would want to be there when that happens.
January 2010 ————————————————————————————–
Zack Godshall and Emily Taylor: God’s Architects Filmmakers
On the Web
God’s Architects Website
God’s Architects is a documentary that tells the stories of five divinely inspired artist-architects and their enigmatic creations.The film details how and why these oft-marginalized creators, with neither funding nor blueprints, construct their self-made environments. The film was conceived of and created by Zack Godshall and Emilie Taylor.
Zack Godshall
After earning an MFA in Film Directing from UCLA in 2005, Zachary Godshall returned to his native south Louisiana, where he continues to live and work. With an ongoing interest in the stories and people of Louisiana, Godshall has combined his background in literature, photography, and film to produce a unique and sensitive view of his subject matter. His first feature film, LOW AND BEHOLD– an Official Selection of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival – weaves fiction with non-fiction to create an unflinching yet touching story of friendship and loss in post-Katrina New Orleans. Godshall recently completed GOD’S ARCHITECTS, a documentary film that tells the stories of several divinely inspired builders, and he currently teaches film and screen writing at LSU in Baton Rouge while he works to produce LORD BYRON, a fictional film about an aimless man in search of the good life.
Emilie Taylor
Also a native of South Louisiana, Emilie currently works at the Tulane School of Architecture as an instructor and as coordinator of design build projects for the Tulane City Center. Taylor’s education includes a technical building background at the University of Southern Mississippi followed by a Masters Degree in Architecture at Tulane. She is actively involved in university design|build and advocates for the engagement of such programs with the local community. Before the storm and the rebuilding efforts that followed, Emilie conducted a traveling fellowship across the south to meet, document, and study these divinely inspired self-taught builders. The lecture given at the end of that fellowship was a way of introducing these folk architects and their works to the design community. Between furniture making and screen printing experiments, Emilie is in the process of compiling a book on these makers and their inspired creations.
View our 2009 Artists of the Month >
