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Sylvia Hutton
The opening song for the album “Avalon,” transports the listener to
Camelot and the days of King Arthur. Sylvia and Verlon Thompson wrote
“Avalon,” a beautifully orchestrated song with lush vocals by Sylvia.
For any child, any teenager, any adult whoever wished you could close
your eyes and open them to find yourself in a magical place, Sylvia
invites you to take her hand to travel to a place where the walls are
made of freedom and every tear becomes a shining star.
Normally, we would not credit so many musicians, but they earned their due on “Avalon,” guitars, both electric and acoustic by John Mock, as well as mandolin and percussion. Matt McGee played bass, Skip Cleavinger played the Uilleann pipes, oboe by Somerlie Pasquale, Emily Bowland on clarinet, trumpet (Jeff Bailey), French horn (Jennifer Kummer), violins by Conni Ellisor and Mary Kathryn Van Osdale, viola (Betsy Lamb) and cellist Nicholas Gold.
About the musicians, |
Madeleine Davis - One of a Kind!
Madeleine Davis had a lengthy career with Boney M (By the Rivers of Babylon, Rasputin) and a small sample of her work in the studio and / or live performances includes artists such as Precious Wilson, Hoyt Axton, Peggy March, Terence Trent D'Arby, Rick Astley, Klaus Doldinger, La Bionda and Amanda Lear. She was in demand by producers such as, Ralph Siegel, Tony Monn, Michael Kunze, Sylvester Levay, Giorgio Moroder and Frank Farian. She sang in church as a young child, acted on stage as a teenager (there is a motorcycle story we will get to in a minute) and she was a soloist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, while still in university.
“My father was a lot older than my mother. He was fifty-nine when I was
born and he was seventy-five when I was eighteen.
I grew up with a father who was in World War I. He had so much
information for me when I went to school. When he was a paperboy the
Titanic sank, so he knew the information from the newspapers of that
time. He told me information about the Titanic and I went to school with
this information. In my day we only had encyclopedias and my teachers
said to me, this information is not in encyclopedias where did you get
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Woman On The Moon
She explains, “It is part of my natural cycle. I release a record and
then I take a little bit of time to promote and play shows and regroup.
I then start writing again. I never write for a record, I just write.
Once I have thirty or forty songs, I start looking at them and choose
what to record. I had a few songs that I wrote early in 2021 or maybe
the end of 2020. I write often, but not every day, there are people who
are way better than me at that. I write fairly consistently, probably
every week. If you think about the fact there are fifty-two weeks in a
year and I write every week, by the end of the year I have forty to
fifty songs. Probably half of them nobody should ever hear and half of
them are decent.
This
one was different than my previous records, because I didn’t record it
all at once and normally, I do. I (usually) sit down with all of my
songs and decide which ones I want to record. I then go ahead and book
my session and record everything in three days. This time I did it
differently. In June of last year, I approached Gabe and I said, hey I
have a few songs. Can we record them, because I think I want to release
some singles? I wasn’t planning on a record. (She starts to laugh) We
started recording and then one thing led to another. I ended up with
twelve songs in the summer. Then in the fall I got back from Italy and I
was making plans to release a record, but I wasn’t sure about some of
the songs and I went back to Gabe and I said I have two other songs I
want to record to replace the other two that I wasn’t sure about.
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Evie Sands
“I trust in the music and then I let it go. I think it is probably a
combination of things. It is my ongoing and will be forever, my insane
passion for music, about making it, listening to it and breaking it
down. I enjoy it, but I like to figure out what is that stuff sonically,
what is going on and it is the enjoyment part of it. It is just ongoing.
It is just like I was born, and I started listening. I just get excited.
Then there is the striving to continually get better and all the skills
that are involved, whether it is continuing to be a better singer, a
better songwriter, better composer, a better musician, a better producer
and engineer. It drives who I am. |
Amelie Blake - U.K. Interview
She recalls that moment, “My husband, Mike and I created some demos and
we sent them to a lot of production companies, trailer houses and
publishers and eventually after hundreds of emails one got back to us.
They asked if we could do music for this brief and so we did. (Next) we
were introduced to several publishers. We then wrote the album Songs for
the Soul, which was a collection of a few songs we had written over the
years and we also wrote some new ones for the album. It was put out
there for the music supervisors to pick from. It is not written for a
(specific) trailer. We write them and then we do not know what is going
to get chosen.
I
was driving to a job interview for a teaching job, but I had wanted to
get out of teaching for a few years, because I really wanted to pursue
my music. The phone call came (when I was driving) and I could not
answer it, so my husband answered the phone and put it on the
loudspeaker. My dad said, do you know that you are on this trailer? He
started playing it over the phone and that is when I started to scream
(as I was driving) down the motorway, because I was so excited. I didn’t
care about my job
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Maia Sharp - Mercury Rising
The person in “Things to Fix,” stands in contrast to “John Q Lonely,”
from Maia Sharp’s 2008 album Echo, and he was also dealing with a
relationship that had come to an end.
She explains, “It shows that I
have been doing it long enough that we can compare the end of a
relationship thirteen years ago compared to the end of a relationship
now.
“John Q Lonely,”
is just a crab and his reaction to being hurt is just takes his football
and he is going home. He is not going to play this game anymore. He
closes himself off. His reaction is to pout. If love didn’t like me then
I’m not going to like love.
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