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Teairra Mari: "Make A Girl Feel"
The newly crowned "Princess Of the Roc," Teairra Mar, wasn't even born when Eric B. and Rakim unleashed ?My Melody,? the hip-hop classic who's sample is featured in her debut single, "Make Her Feel Good." But when the 17-year-old Detroit native heard the bass-heavy gem recycled she immediately knew she had found the cornerstone of her signature sound. Teairra Mar recalls, When I heard that track, I was like, "This is the one, because it's simple but also huge." The enthusiasm that "Make Her Feel Good" set off at The Island Def Jam Music Group marked a defining moment in Teairra Mari's young career, which began at age 12 when she started recording rough demos in her cousin's basement. Despite scoring a local radio hit with one of those early songs, four years passed before Teairra Mari's demo landed on the desk of Island Def Jam Group Chairman, Antonio ?LA? Reid, who signed the then 16-year-old singer on the spot at a brief meeting where she performed live. "I couldn't believe it," she says. "I was crying because I was so happy. I feel like everyone's behind me, which is a great feeling to have coming from a time when it seemed that nobody believed in me or wanted to hear me." In the first creative collaboration since Shawn ?Jay-Z? Carter became President of Def Jam Music Group, he and LA Reid recruited hit-making songwriter, Sean Garrett (?Lose My Breath,? ?Goodies,? ?Yeah!?), to help translate Teairra Mar??s innermost thoughts and emotions into lyrics. The two successfully completed "Make Her Feel Good," a defining first single from forthcoming album scheduled to be released June 7, 2005 on Roc-A-Fella Records. "Make Her Feel Good" is just a peek into her full-length album, which she describes as a girl's dictionary. "When Sean started writing the lyrics for "Make Her Feel Good," it was because of stories I was telling him about my guy friends," explains Teairra Mari, whose musical influences and inspirations include Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin (her grandmother sang back-up for the Queen of Soul), Prince, Sade, Patti LaBelle and Minnie Ripperton. This is just the beginning.
Jerry Hawkins: "Dancin' With This Ol' Cowboy"
A bright original tune written by Jerry Hawkins and performed "Live" on television for Urban Almanac and Money Talks niteclub...(now Club "Gravity") - I have spent alot of time in niteclubs over the years and I found that one basic challenge to quite a number of men is simply going up to a lady and asking if she would like to dance with him. This is after talking to many dudes who go through a certain "ritual" with women in niteclubs....this song came about as a result. Mr. Bob Long of Tulsa's Guitar House and Urban Almanc made all this possible for television viewing. Pat Richardson, a very funny dude, guest M.C.'d this show. This was aired on Cable channel 10 and channel 41 television. Late..at nite.
?I guess I knew from an early age that I could never do a job where I?d have to sit in an office all day long,? says Lily Allen. It seems unlikely Allen will be confined to a cubicle any time soon. The 21-year-old artist, pronounced by NME as ?the archetypal singer-songwriter for the iPod generation,? took Britain by storm this past summer with her debut album Alright, Still rocketing onto the U.K. Album chart at #2 and her first U.K. single, ?Smile,? topping the U.K. Airplay chart for six weeks in a row. Now she?s set her sights on America ? and early reports indicate she won?t exactly be flying under the radar here, either. ?She symbolizes a new blogging-age, middle-class girl: cockily ambitious, skeptical yet enthusiastic, technically savvy, musically open, obsessed with public expression and ready to fight back,? said The New York Times in a feature on Lily. Allen was born in Hammersmith, a borough in Greater London, and grew up all over London ? Shepherds Bush, Bloomsbury, Islington. ?I went to 13 different schools so I never had time to make enduring friendships. Music became a lifeline to me. I listened to punk, ska and reggae, courtesy of my parents? record collections,? she says, which explains why, in addition to numerous up-and-coming dance artists she counts The Specials, T. Rex, The Slits and Blondie as favorites.
As Kelly Willis planned to go into the studio last fall, she really didn't know what to expect. She had spent the four years since co-producing her 2002 album, the lovely, laid-back Easy, on family matters: her oldest son Deral, born in 2001, got three siblings -- twins Abby and Ben born in 2004 and baby Joseph, whose birth followed in early 2006. "This time around, I had absolutely no time or energy to be involved in the producer role at all," Willis recalls. So she called a guy "who lives and breathes music," whose instincts she loved and who she felt "really comfortable around": Chuck Prophet, the edgy singer-songwriter who contributed guitar to both Easy and 1999's acclaimed What I Deserve. Together, they would create the most sonically adventurous album of Kelly Willis' seventeen-plus-year recording career, "Translated From Love."
Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood at the height of the 1960s. The city was awash with the trappings of America's cultural revolution-the San Francisco State University campus flooded with cops in riot gear, the Haight filled with drifters and idealists, and, on the third floor of Arlyck's building, a come-one-come-all crashpad apartment. It was from this top floor commune that the precocious 4-year-old Sean would occasionally wander downstairs to visit and talk-and one day Arlyck turned on his camera. Sean's casual commentary on everything from smoking pot to living with speed freaks was delivered in simple sincerity throughout the soon-to-be famous 15-minute film. This First Child of the notorious decade may have shaken the audience with his simple sentence- "Sure, I smoke pot"-but it was his barefoot impishness which would encapsulate the hope that lay in front of the nation: a promise of infinite possibility. Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, Arlyck has returned to San Francisco in search of who the adult Sean might have become. And what he finds, to his surprise, tells him as much about his own east-coast migration as it does about the Californian life he left behind-that the choices we're handed and the choices we make are, very often, quite odd bedfellows.
Tour of Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Calabash tours was started to cater for tourists who wanted to experience true urban Africa where they would have the opportunity to visit previously inaccessible townships and meet the locals. The townships of Port Elizabeth played a pivotal role during the anti-apartheid struggle years and it was in recognition of this that out of 800 applications, this was the city chosen personally by Nelson Mandela and nominated to carry his name. It also has the honour of being the first city to appoint a black mayor. Calabash tours was started in 1997 and was created to cater for tourists who wanted to experience true urban Africa where they would have the opportunity to visit previously inaccessible townships and meet the locals.
Satellites that can measure by the micron
At the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, scientists discuss the satellite project GRACE (short for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experience), which estimates how the world's water depths have changed and will change over years to come. Hear from the scientists, and check out some of the satellite images.
In 1993, 5 adolescents in the small industrial town of Fagersta, Sweden each receive a letter with a time and place. A year later they, led by the genius of a Mr. Randy Fitzsimmons, begin to appear in various public places in and around Fagersta. The response is one of confusion, excitement and contempt. In the year 1995 word had spread throughout the middle part of Sweden. These kids with strange haircuts play really fast and short sets that sometimes just fall apart in arguments and sometimes are pure magic to witness. Record company exec. Peter Ahlqvist hears of this. He is intrigued but a bit uncertain, as he doesn't really know what to make of them. He decides however that he can release them on a side label to minimize damage to his own label Burning Heart, if these young men would enter the studio on one of their infamous bad days.
Said and done, in 1996 a mini-CD aptly
titled "Oh Lord! When?How?" Is released and the smell of talent happening is in the air. People all over the world are overwhelmed and startled by how fresh and exciting this sounds. Meanwhile, the Hives and Mr. Fitzsimmons are already looking for a new sound and find it. They begin to plan a debut album. Peter Ahlqvist, impressed with the Hives and everything around them decide to move them up a notch to Burning Heart.
Super Furry Animals: "The Gift That Keeps On Giving"
On the way to diversifying their sound, Super Furry Animals have found a new focus. After calling off the search for meaning, they stumbled upon it by intuition and the power of magic. Of course, when a band has played together for 10 years there is bound to be an unspoken shared aesthetic, and this time around they've communed over decadence. As you'll see, Love Kraft is the sound of SFA maturation, with not a monsteriffic yeti, tank, or inflatable bear in sight.
Change is unquestionably a constant in life. When Matchbook Romance began in 2001, the idea of playing music for a living felt like a dream, a romantic fantasy that dwelled in each member of the band?s imagination. And, for years, anyway, it seemed like it would remain that way. ?We never thought it was something that could actually come true for us,? says vocalist/guitarist Andrew Jordan who, at the time, was living at home and working as a waiter at a local restaurant. ?We had seen so many other bands try and reach for that place in the world only to fall short. We always thought, ?What are our chances??? Still, people believed in the band?their friends, families and peers?and they encouraged Matchbook Romance?s just-stepping-into-the-world rank and file to drop their impending classes at various community colleges in and around Poughkeepsie, NY that fall, in order to concentrate on the band. Which, they did. Thankfully, for us, they did. Matchbook Romance spent the next six months recording a group of demos that would attract the attention of Epitaph president Brett Gurewitz?a man who would later sign the relatively green band (literally the day before stepping on a plane to finalize contracts with the longstanding punk label, the band?s then-18-year-old drummer Aaron Stern graduated from high school). Gurewitz also produced their first real recording, the West For Wishing EP, in 2003, but it was Matchbook Romance?s debut, Stories And Alibis, that the world would really take to. The album?s list of successes now speaks for itself: following its late 2003 release came the video for ?My Eyes Burn,? a run on the cover of scene bible Alternative Press and a slot headlining the first-ever Epitaph Tour. In between, Stories And Alibis sold over 200,000 copies and the band absolutely lived on the road in support of it. As Matchbook Romance began writing the initial version of what would become their second album, VOICES, they began to take their musical ideas to a variety of new levels. The band was writing constantly. If you were to have walked into the back lounge during one of the many tours behind Stories And Alibis chances are the mirrored walls in their tour bus would have been covered with ideas for lyrics and ideas for new songs. Matchbook Romance knew their next record would have to stand apart and the material they had begun self-recording while out on the road behind Stories And Alibis?all of it decidedly more sparse, moody and meditative?was significantly removed from the sound they honed on their debut. One significant factor, as Jordan puts it poetically, is that they ?declared war on power chords.?
