Magana is the haunted alternative pop project of Brooklyn resident Jeni Magana. She is soon to release her debut EP, Golden Tongue, with our pals at Audio Antihero, who describe the record as “brittle and erratic guitar pop… delivered with both anger and acceptance”. Our review will be posted closer to release, but in the meantime Magana kindly agreed to play our little game and make us a Mini Mystery Mix.

Life and Love and Growing Up

Song with a colour in the title

Lianne La Havas – Green & Gold

What a lovely young lady.  Everything about her is appealing.  This song is celebrating her unique heritage.  I feel like it’s about growing up and learning to love yourself and where you came from.  Green and gold are representing the Jamaican flag.  Neat.

Song with a name in the title

Dolly Parton – Jolene

Dolly Parton is the best and this song is such a classic.  Super simple and catchy but a unique perspective of a relationship that might fall apart.  It puts responsibility on the other woman, but not even in anger.  I feel like her husband is actually just her pet in this song and it makes me laugh.

Song from at least 50 years ago

Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire

I’ve been listening to this song constantly since my childhood.  I can’t believe it’s more than 50 years old.  Released in 1963.  Time moves too fast sometimes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6ViaGyzfAk

Song that reminds you of school

Ryan Adams – Why Do They Leave?

I listened to this record a ton when I was in college, but I chose this song specifically because one time my friend Luke drank too much and missed a flight the next day and so my friends made a cover of this song called “Luke, why do you drink?” and it was pretty amazing.  I’m sure it exists on the internet somewhere but I can’t find it anymore.

Song in a different language to your native tongue

Yael Naim – Selcha

I went to college in Boston and after college I moved to NYC, which is about a 4 hour drive.  For a while, I played bass for my friend Gina who also moved to NYC, but the rest of her band still lived in Boston.  This meant her and I took a lot of long drives and I got to know her CD collection way too well.  This was one of the CDs that we could agree on and so for a while this was one we played all the time.  Eventually I broke down and listened to Taylor Swift the whole time like she wanted to, but this song is still beautiful.  Yael Naim is Israeli-French and that is super cool.

Quietest song you know

Keaton Henson – You

I first heard this dude on Tiny Desk, and the description of the set was that he basically whispered the whole time and people had to crowd super close to him just to hear what he was saying.  The recording has a bit more instrumentation, but you can tell that he’s still basically whispering into a microphone.  I’m so into quiet music; I feel like it can be so emotional and it’s often overlooked because people think of loud wailing and yelling etc to be the emotional stuff.

Here’s the entire ‘EP’ as one thing, if you want to kick back and listen:

Magana is releasing Golden Tongue EP on the 28th of October on Audio Antihero. Pre-order it now via Bandcamp. And if you’re in New York, head to The Studio at Webster Hall on the 26th of October to catch the EP’s release show.

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“No One Knows That You’re Lost is an album inspired by the Norwegian coast and a human interior, by tight itching doubts and wide open spaces. Here, fragility, strength and beauty become one and the same, parts of a landscape in constant flux yet remaining fundamentally unchanged”

Tina very kindly agreed to write a guest post for our ‘Lit Links‘ series (part of the Quiet, Constant Friends project), where artists and writers create a playlist of songs based around a book of their choice. Arm yourself with headphones and have a read below.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
by Tina Refsnes

I’ve never felt comfortable with answering questions that ask for «the best» or «your all time favourite» as I just feel there’s too much good and different material in the world to hold them up against each other like that. So, I’ll say that one of my favourite books that I enjoyed immensely reading is one called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It’s set in an American College and with baseball as the back-drop, and it’s one of those slow books with great meaning but without the drama. It deals with the big hopes that young people usually have to life, with self doubt in performance, and with the social difficulties or shyness that young people sometimes struggle with. But, in a very down to earth way since, at least the main character, is so un-academic. I also imagined this suburban North-American setting for it: Long, wide streets with tall leaf trees on both sides of it. Really big and old campus buildings, and maybe since the characters were so alone in their minds I kept picturing everything as with never that many people around.

Tracklisting:

1. Jenny Come Home- Andy Shauf
   2. Gather, Form and Fly – Megafaun
   3. Own Side – Caitlin Rose
   4. Casimir Pulaski Day – Sufjan Stevens
   5. Easy – Laura Marling
   6. Blue Train – Emmy Lou Harris, Linds Ronstadt and Dolly Parton
   7. Out of the Woodwork – Courtney Barnett
   8. Big Black Road – Thousands
   9. That Knot Unties? – David Karsten Daniels
   10. Mr. Rodriguez – Rayland Baxter
   11. We Are Fine – Sharon Van Etten
   12. Horizons – The Staves
   13. Archie, Marry Me – Alvvays
   14. Friends – 22-20s
   15. Poison Oak – Bright Eyes

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Miracle Temple illustrates a band that is growing and maturing, and as a result the new record sounds more deliberate, more accomplished. It seems that the experience of writing, recording and touring the debut has allowed the band to make a more considered and exploratory record, one that can deal with more complex issues. This fact is best illustrated with Heather McEntire, Mount Moriah’s lead singer and chief songwriter; On Miracle Temple she performs with a confidence that, although not lacking on the debut, was certainly less apparent. This is true in both a technical sense and also in a deeply personal sense. Much of the writing in her earlier songs (particularly Reckoning – which you can hear here on a brilliant session from the folks at HearYa) dealt with her sexuality and her experience of coming out to her Southern Baptist family. You get the feeling that the empowerment that she has gained from the experience of sharing those songs has allowed her to expand her songwriting range, to be able to write songs that are not just personal in a confessional sense, but also draw on past vulnerability to speak out to others. If Mount Moriah was cathartic self-help, then Miracle Temple is for the listeners. 

McEntire’s voice is one which would sound good if she simply sang numbers from a telephone directory. A throwback to the classic country singers, she could stand proud among the big names (namely a young Dolly Parton, which gets mentioned in pretty much every review I’ve read). However Mount Moriah do not live upon her vocal strengths alone – the writing is equally developed. The lyrics have a literary quality which are rooted in McEntire’s passion for creative writing, indeed Mount Moriah’s first album originated as a way for McEntire to utilise her collection of excess poetry and prose pieces. It’s therefore no surprise that the quality of writing here is very high. The over-arching atmosphere is one of nostalgia, and there are still plenty of references to the feelings of loss and isolation that abound in small-town America. Despite this, I think it would be wrong to describe Miracle Temple as a downbeat record. Its evocation of difficulty and pain is restrained and understated and lends the album a warm sincerity which is very rare in songwriting.

Notice that I have so far managed to avoid trying to describe the music. It’s always very difficult to tag bands with genres and it always feels a little unfair to pigeon-hole them with cliched terms that don’t seem to mean all that much to begin with. That said, it’s also very difficult to describe music in words without  touching on such terms. For that reason I will try to keep it brief. There is a big country influence here (hence the Dolly Parton comparisons), and there are also elements that could be described as indie-rock (which is to be expected considering McEntire fronted punk rock band Bellafea and guitarist and songwriter Jenks Miller played in psych-metal outfit Horseback before forming Mount Moriah). It is very difficult to come up with similar bands (presumably due to the fusion of styles), although one record which I was reminded of was last year’s Field Report album, which had similar literary stylings and country influences.

Miracle Temple is out now on Merge Records. You can buy it here on any format you desire. I highly recommend you check it out. Also have a look at the video for Bright Light below:

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Tracklisting:

1. Lovecrimes (Frank Ocean Cover) – The Afghan Whigs
2. Little Dreamer (Future Islands Cover) – Doe Paoro
3. Bad Days (Flaming Lips Cover) – Siskiyou
4. Again (Janet Jackson Cover) – How To Dress Well
5. Dog Song (Mountain Man Cover) – Stupid Loser
6. Celebrated (Husker Du Cover) – Mark Kozelek
7. Say Say Say (Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney) – Woodpigeon
8. Zebra (Beach House Cover) – Yellow Ostrich
9. Atmosphere (Joy Division Cover) – Flowers Of Hell
10. Climbing Up The Walls (Radiohead Cover) – The Twilight Sad
11. Islands In The Stream (Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton) – Constantines & Feist
12. Louie Louie (Richard Berry/The Kingsmen Cover) – The Royal Iguana Fur
13. Harvest Moon (Neil Young Cover) – The Sour Notes
14. Into The Fire (Bruce Springsteen Cover) – Paul Baribeau
15. Forgiveness (Patty Griffin Cover) – The Local Strangers
16. Calling And Not Calling My Ex (Okkervil River Cover) – Ola Podrida
17. Please Please Please Let M Get What I Want (The Smiths Cover) – Pickering Pick
18. Jesus, Etc. (Wilco Cover) – Bill Fay
19. Look At Miss Ohio (Gillian Welch Cover) – Blind Pilot
20. The Party’s Over/No Children (Willie Nelson/Mountain Goats Cover) – Manchester Orchestra

Please support the artists by exploring their other releases and becoming huge and dedicated fans.

The Covers Mix: Volume #4 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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Her previous releases have received some rather impressive attention, with glowing reviews from The Times and Mojo, airtime on the BBC and use on HBO’s Treme. Look Out Mama, the new album out this week, looks to continue Segarra’s rise in the musical community. The main sense you get while hearing the music is one of timelessness. This may sound a tired cliché but with strong lyricism and a voice that wouldn’t be out of place alongside Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris, a real sense of history runs through these songs. Maybe prior knowledge of Segarra’s back-story influences thinking but you can’t help but feel that this is someone who has experienced all of the songs, lived through something and written it down, rather than made up based on old ideas.

The beauty of the album is how they manage to evoke so many different images in each song. Opener ‘Little Black Star’ has links to her time in New Orleans and wouldn’t be out of place in the French Quarter, whereas ‘Lake of Fire’ is much more of a rock song with a surfy Californian jangle. ‘Riley’ (a personal favourite) is again completely different, a dark and foreboding song that always threatens to explode but never quite does, a beauty underpinned with a desolation and violence that brings to mind a journey across a Western mountain range. Look Out Mama captures America. Not the country of Starbucks and SUVs but rather that old enchanting, welcoming and dangerous land that still perseveres in many minds today. A place that I truly hope still exists.

Country music has a bit of a bad reputation (at least here in the UK) so there is real reluctance on my part to use that word here. Maybe ‘Roots’ is more appropriate? Is there a better term to describe music that captures all of those small nameless American towns? Wind and dust and mountains? Hurray For The Riff Raff (along with other acts such as Mount Moriah) show that with good songwriting and a bit of emotion, ‘Country’ does not have to be a derogatory term.

Look Out Mama is released today (20^th August) on Loose Music. We were lucky enough to get the chance to ask Alynda few questions so keep an eye out for them very soon.

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Tracklisting:

1. From Stardust To Sentience (High Places cover) – Banjo or Freakout
2. So Prone (SLUTEVER cover) – Ghost/Light
3. I Will Always Love You (Dolly Parton cover) – Howth
4. Salvador Sanchez (Sun Kil Moon cover) – Little Silver
5. Brother (Annuals cover) – Manchester Orchestra
6. Darling (Magic Man cover) – And the Giraffe
7. When You Were Mine (Prince cover) – John Heart Jackie
8. I Wanna Be Adored (Stone Roses cover) – Coma Cinema
9. Crying (Roy Orbison cover) – Austra
10. Streets of Philadelphia (Bruce Springsteen cover) Casiotone For The Painfully Alone
11. Iron Man (Black Sabbath cover) – Four Tet
12. The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight (R.E.M. cover) – Oxford Collapse
13. My Proud Mountains (Townes van Zandt cover) – J. Tillman
14. Chelsea Hotel #2 (Leonard Cohen cover) – Sarah Jaffe
15. If I Handle You With Care (Trembling Blue Stars cover) – Evening Hymns
16. Left & Leaving (The Weakerthans cover) – Beat Radio
17. I Know What I Know (Paul Simon cover) – Graham Wright
18. Some Things Last A Long Time (Daniel Johnston cover) – The Twilight Sad
19. Unicorn (Gay Against You cover) – Dananananaykroyd
20. See U Again (Miley Cyrus cover) – The Mae Shi

Click on the band name in the tracklisting to be whizzed off to a specific page for each artist. Buy some music if you like what you hear. I didn’t bother with Dolly Parton, Springsteen etc. but if you need some pointers on where to find out more about them give us a shout.

Enjoy.

The Covers Mix: Volume #2 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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