The New Sound of Mix 94.7 was proud to present our inaugural Westbank by Westlake live music fest on Thursday and Friday, March 13th and 14th, 2008. Everyone had a blast!
The musical landscape is teeming with singer/songwriters, many of them quite capable, but only a handful have something truly distinctive to offer. Kate Voegele belongs in the latter category. Don’t Look Away, Voegele’s first full-length album (MySpace Records), is a revelation, as the 20-year-old writer/singer, belying her tender years, delivers songs of depth and insight with a powerfully seductive voice that maintains a fierce presence amid dynamic rock grooves and infectious pop hooks. You can also catch Kate on the hit TV show "One Tree Hill" where she not only shows here acting skills but gets to showcase her own songs as well. Video is "Kindly Unspoken."
Jeremy Fisher -
Fisher’s new album, Goodbye Blue Monday (released in the U.S. September 18 on Wind-up Records), is a timeless burst of acoustic rock & roll that’s brainy and hook-filled, playful and provocative, all at the same time. Take “Cigarette,” which employs the cancer stick as a metaphor for addictive relationships—the enticement, the yearning, the withdrawal and the damage. Or “Scar That Never Heals,” which examines the anatomy of heartbreak. At the same time, both are thoroughly infectious tracks with choruses that are, well, addictive. That’s Fisher’s M.O. Video is “Scar That Never Heals.”
Shawn Mullins-
Shawn just completed a new album for Vanguard this summer that will include the usual suspects from his live full band appearances: Gerry Hansen, Clay Cook, Patrick Blanchard and Peter Stroud. This record will be released on March 11 of the year 2008. Shawn's musical accomplishments include a dozen self-produced records, two number one charting songs, grammy nomination and thousands of live performances. One of his favorite accomplishments was the decision of the Austrailian Olympic Team to use his song Shimmer as their anthem. Video is "Lullaby."
Joshua Radin-
Joshua Radin's musical career began in the purest way possible. "I got a gig for an open mic night in the West Village and I wanted to write an original song for the show," says the Cleveland-born singer-songwriter. "So I wrote 'Winter.'" Radin was living in New York and trying to make his way as a painter and screenwriter when the opportunity for the open mic night came up. The delicate and heartbreaking "Winter" was a hit with the audience that night. With some friends' encouragement, it led to Radin following a career as a musician, releasing two independent albums. Check out his latest offering - Unclear Sky - a New 4 Song Collection exclusively at the iTunes Store.Video is "Closer."
I Nine -
One of the glories to be found in the long, rich history of American music is the emergence of artists and sounds from just about anywhere in this land. From the deep south to the far west, from small towns to rural communities, these crevices of the country have given birth to bands whose music somehow, someway, finds a way to be discovered by people at large. This is the story of I Nine, a quartet from Orangeburg, a sleepy southern town tucked away in central South Carolina, who remarkably are on the verge of authoring another chapter in this country's musical heritage with their stunning debut album, Heavy Weighs The King. It’s a testament to the idea that talent will find a way to be heard.Video is "Seven Days of Lonely."
Ingrid Michaelson -
Ingrid is a 28-year-old singer-songwriter whose self-produced album “Girls and Boys” reached No. 2 on the iTunes pop chart, is enjoying an enchanted transformation as a recording artist. Ms. Michaelson’s climb out of obscurity started, as is so often the case these days, on the Internet. Now she is known to many “Grey’s Anatomy” fans for her quirky, heartfelt songs that were featured over the past year on the ABC television series. Not bad for someone who, until May of '07, was teaching in an after-school theater program in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island, where she still lives with her parents, a dog and a pet rabbit in the house she has inhabited since she was born. Video is "The Way I Am."
Hanson -
On HANSON's fourth studio album, The Walk, the messages are more direct. “It's the first record in a decade that we made completely from scratch as an indie”, Taylor says. “We've stepped it up a notch creatively, writing songs that connect to really personal experiences and recording them live ‘from the floor’” (playing together in the studio as they would in front of an audience). It’s a further exploration of the sound that prompted New York's ‘Village Voice’ to proclaim Hanson as simply “the best straight-up rock band in America, now sowing sonic oats as independents”. And it’s the independence in the approach to both recording and releasing their music that fans and critics alike will appreciate about The Walk. Video is "Great Divide."
Augustana -
Mellow piano rockers Augustana are a heartland equivalent to Coldplay or Keane, with a little bit of mid-'90s adult alternative throwback (think Counting Crows or the Wallflowers) as well. The band formed in Greenville, IL, in 2002, while singer and keyboardist Dan Layus and guitarist Josiah Rosen were attending a small evangelical college there. Choosing music over academia, Layus and Rosen left Greenville for Los Angeles in 2004, jettisoning the rest of the band and re-forming with a new lineup that included keyboardist John Vincent, bassist Jared Palomar, and drummer Justin South. The reformulated Augustana signed with Epic Records in 2005 and released their major-label debut, All the Stars and Boulevards, in September of that year. A slow starter, the album eventually gained attention when the single "Boston" started receiving radio (and later VH1) airplay. Video is "Boston."
Johnette Napolitano -
It's taken a while for Johnette Napolitano, the powerful singer and songwriter from the defunct Concrete Blonde, to find her way, but she hasn't been in a hurry. She released a couple of records independently through CD Baby, collaborated with Talking Heads when they reformed without David Byrne, worked on film soundtracks, made a film herself, made her own clothes, and bought a cabin in the desert over 130 miles from her former home in Los Angeles. Her latest release, Scarred, is her first widely distributed solo project; it's so naked, emotionally intense, and honest that it's bound to make some people nervous, but it will lure in many others (if they get the chance to hear it). Scarred was written mostly in her cabin and recorded in Los Angeles and in London. She coproduced the set with Danny Lohner; it was engineered and mixed by her old CB mate, James Mankey. Lohner played electric guitar on the set, but Napolitano did everything else. Napolitano wrote or cowrote ten of the album's 12 cuts, and there are a pair of covers in Coldplay's "Scientist" and the Lou Reedpenned Velvet Underground nugget "All Tomorrow's Parties." Video is "Scarred."
