Female Singer/Songwriter Thread

[daveT]

Tegan and Sara

Twin sisters born in Calgary, Canada. They started at a young age, performing in Garage Warz, a battle of the bands show. Both lesbian, their songs are playful, talking about the quirks of love and relationships, thus little of their audience is male.

From what I have heard of their older albums, they sound like they were produced in thier bed-room. Not quite true, as they produced their own records at school. Their current album is called "The Con," produced by Cris Walla (Death Cab for Cutie).

"The Con" sounds slick, well produced, with a punky edge. "The Con" is best listened to on endless repeat. Every song on this album is solid.

Tegan and Sara's songs defy conventional category. Some songs are sung solo, and other are sung duet style. Tegan delivers her lyrics in a militaristic banter, while Sara coos in the background. Their general agreement is that who ever writes the song gets to be the primary singer.

They are gaining noteriety and attention. Big magazines, from Spin to Rolling Stone, are writing a stream of shining articles on this duo, and their albums constantly end up at the top of the "best of the year" lists. For me, "The Con" is the best album of 2007.

myspace

They have some stuff on youtube, but I don't think any of it is good.

[TiK]

So I happen to have some free time and I haven't seen her mentioned in this thread yet, so here goes with one of my recent favorites, who I had the great fortune to watch perform last month at the Mercury Lounge here in NYC:

Nina Nastasia(link to her myspace page)

Nina Nastasia is the girl you want to spend an afternoon with on the grass in the park and hope that she loves you enough to want to sing to you for hours and never stop.

As I mentioned before, I was lucky enough to see her last month, and it was just awesome. She kept us standing there fixed on her voice, enthralled for over an hour. None of us there ever wanted it to end; when she finally finished, it was as if a spell had broken and we were all jarred back to reality wishing that that feeling would never end.

She's released five albums:

Dogs 2000
The Blackened Air 2002
Run to Ruin 2003
On Leaving 2006
You Follow Me 2007

They're all fantastic, though my favorites are probably Dogs and On Leaving

It seems that most of the songs of hers on youtube are live performances with [censored] audio, but I'll post a couple anyway:

Search results for Nina Nastasia on YouTube

Also, a couple of other youtube links I found that weren't from live shows. The first link is a video of some random person sketching the cover art to one of her albums to one of her songs, which also happens to be one of my favorite songs. The second link is a random song, I'm not sure exactly what the situation was where they recorded that.

Dogs(the vid is just some dude sketching her, so you can minimize it and just listen to the audio).
Odd Said the Doe - I think I like Jim White's drumming as much as the actual song in this vid.

[Kimbell175113]

- Dibs on Regina Spektor; I've started a monster post on her, so nobody ruin it with some dinky one before then, ldo.

- Ingrid Michaelson is just achingly cute. It's a good thing she can write and sing, because I'd be paying attention to her either way, and at least now I get some good music out of it.

[Stagger_Lee]

Little fish big fish swimming in the water, come back here man gimme my daughter

[Kimbell175113]

[ QUOTE ]
Little fish big fish swimming in the water, come back here man gimme my daughter

[/ QUOTE ]
you too, huh?

[olliejen]

[ QUOTE ]
Ingrid Michaelson is just achingly cute. It's a good thing she can write and sing, because I'd be paying attention to her either way, and at least now I get some good music out of it.

[/ QUOTE ]

kinda like Lisa Loeb's cute little sister, dontcha think? [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[hanimal]

can't wait for the Regina post

[daveT]

Who wants Dido and Jewel?

[Kimbell175113]

[ QUOTE ]
Who wants Dido and Jewel?

[/ QUOTE ]
I don't know exactly what you meant by that, but it did give me an idea. There are some artists I am interested in, but don't know much about, and I thought this thread would be a cool place where we could put in requests like that. For example, I think Laurie Anderson sounds really interesting, but I'd to like to hear from a fan of hers where I should start listening, what I should skip, what I should look for, etc.

[Kirg]

I'm in the process of listening to any songs of artists I don't know and must say I'm very happy so far.

I have to add one song Bjork though.

It was 1995 and I was 17. Me and my best friend are in our regular bar (drinking age is 16 for beer in Belgium) celebrating New Years. Now this was a somewhat weird bar in that even though it was what you would call a "brown bar" the clientele was mostly adult gamers. So a weird mix of 50+ yr old card and dice gamblers and then a ton of 25-35yr old computer and Magic the Gathering players. Needless to say me and my friend at 16 and 17 were there since we belonged to the 2nd group.

Music was usually a combination of trip hop like Massive Attack, Portishead and Moloko, and bands like PJ Harvey, The Pixies, Echo and the Bunnymen and The Smiths.

Yet at exactly midnight of New Year's Eve the song they chose to blast at 11 was...

Bjork - It's Oh So Quiet

Needless to say this was both one of the most surreal and memorable moments of my life. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]