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On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.
Martin's fourth full length album, Thank God We Left The Garden comes out on Portland's beloved Fluff and Gravy Records Nov __. He produced and engineered it himself, recalling, "There was a magic quality to the sounds I was getting in the shack with these two cheap microphones, some lucky recipe of time and place that allowed my voice and the way I play guitar and the shape of these new songs to come together with the kind of honesty I was craving."
So much has happened in the world since the release of his previous album One Go Around (heralded by No Depression as 'the poetry of America'), and Jeffrey has filled the time doggedly, but happily, touring the US and Europe, watching it all unfold in a stream of small town conversations and city sprawl. In a moment where depth is so often traded for the instantaneous, where tech billionaires are building rockets to escape the planet, where the dead-eyed stare of artificial intelligence is promising to existentially upend our world, and where divisiveness in our culture is breeding delusional levels of certainty, Jeffrey Martin's new record feels like a hopeful and fully human antidote.
Anna Tivel is a Portland, Oregon-based, internationally touring songwriter who is forever drawn to the quiet stories of ordinary life. The characters and imagery that populate her writing are full of breath and vivid color. With six full-length albums out and a seventh on the way, Anna has been likened to a short story writer and praised by NPR, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and others for her keen observations of the human condition. In fact, Ann Powers of NPR Music had this to say, "Anna Tivel is just one of my absolute favorite living songwriters. Her writing on [Outsiders] is at the same level as Paul Simon when he wrote 'The Boxer' and 'American Tune.'"
1977. The year that punk was born.With only hours left to spare it also produced a baby boy in the suburbs of Cork, Ireland, born with his ears piqued to the murmurs and clatter around him.As he grew the soundtrack changed. Nirvana on the Walkman. Leonard Cohen on his sister’s stereo. The surge of bands and songwriters emerging from the 1990’s Cork music scene. Later it became snippets of eavesdropped New York conversation. Tales of woe on the radio. The sights and sounds of tours across Europe.All of it gets woven into a tapestry of words. Then melody. Harmonies added in the studio. Electricity, sincerity, and humor on the stage. At the core of every Niall Connolly song is the story, one that unfolds a layer with each listen.