When Canadian keyboardist-percussionist Corin Roddick discovered Megan James, it wasn’t her soft, marshmallowy vocals that caught his attention. It was the underground designer label the fashion-school grad had quietly launched in their native Edmonton, Alberta.
“Long before I really knew Megan that well, I knew of the clothing she made, and I was very drawn to it,” says Roddick, who in 2010 recruited her to front his electronic duo Purity Ring, which plays The City Monday to promote its dazzling debut recording, “Shrines,” on 4AD.
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Rhett Miller has a lot going on these days. He just issued his fifth solo album, “The Dreamer,” and has two recent CDs with his alt-country combo The Old 97’s, “The Grand Theatre,” Volumes 1 and 2. He also is hard at work on his first novel, plus another new fascination — putting together his first regular podcast. There’s one other little thing: the “Too Far to Care” tour, in which his band is celebrating the definitive masterpiece’s 15th anniversary by playing it live, note for note.
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At only 28, multitalented Texan Savannah Welch already has a lifetime of incredible acting experience under her belt. One of her first gigs was a two-week nocturnal shoot with Quentin Tarantino as a bar-crowd extra in his “Grindhouse” bloodbath “Death Proof.” Her most recent? A coveted role in Terrence Malick’s visionary “Tree of Life.”
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When Fort Collins, Colo., folkie Andrew Holbrook was considering a more expansive sound 10 years ago, he didn’t have to look very far for new musicians. Cleverly, he put his four youngest, home-schooled daughters to work as each mastered her chosen instrument — Sarah on violin, Hannah on keyboards, Eva on mandolin and Liza on pedal harp, then percussion. “At his concerts, he’d invite us onstage to play with him, one song at a time, and then if we were good enough he’d invite us up for multiple songs,” recalls Eva Holbrook, who debuted alongside her dad at age 10.
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There was a time when London-based artist Alex Clare fielded mainly one uncomfortable question from the inquisitive media: What was it like dating Amy Winehouse for a year? “Now I’ve spoken about it so much, I just don’t see how it’s relevant anymore,” he says. He has much more to discuss these days, like his 2011 debut album, recently reanimated by the platinum-selling success of its soulful single “Too Close,” which was prominently featured in a Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 TV commercial. “It’s been quite a nice thing to have happen,” he says with understatement.
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Some women sit around waiting for Mr. Right to ring the doorbell. Not Eleni Mandell. “I wasn’t waiting — I was hunting,” says the honey-throated California folksinger. “But instead of going for pheasant, I was like ‘I’ll take the squirrel.’ But even the squirrels turned me down — they were like, ‘I want to party! I don’t want to have kids!’”
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For a full week, folk-rocker Brandi Carlile tried to conceptualize a video treatment for “That Wasn’t Me,” a gospel-toned piano ballad from her new album, “Bear Creek.”
She was being extra careful because the song is about a close family member, and about recovering from damage done through addiction. She says, “No matter how difficult the situation is, the inevitable outcome has to be forgiveness.”
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Steve Barton’s old 1980s outfit Translator might seem to be from San Francisco. Signed to Howie Klein’s classic local imprint 415 Records, the band resided in The City when the hit “Everywhere That I’m Not” broke. But the group originally hails from Los Angeles, and that’s where Barton returned in 1998, a move that proved good for business.
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As singer-guitarist Joe Keefe recalls, he and his singing-drumming brother Sebastian tried every last possible avenue to success with their last two hard-rock outfits, Unbusted and The Billionaires. They even moved from Boston to Hollywood, hoping to get noticed at in-spots like the Viper Room.
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It was the best advice Lisa Gerrard ever received. Back in 1999, when the dusky Dead Can Dance singer entered the film-scoring world via the soundtrack to “The Insider,” its director Michael Mann imparted some wisdom.
“He said, ‘Never, ever dictate in advance what people should feel — wait until they’ve felt and then pick up the thread beyond that point. Otherwise your work becomes very cynical,’” says Gerrard, who appears tonight in Berkeley with longtime Dead Can Dance bandmate Brendan Perry.
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They say breaking up is hard to do. But not if you get a couple of albums’ worth of material out of it, as chanteuse Norah Jones managed to do. Her 2009 CD, “The Fall,” was penned after she and her longtime beau Lee Alexander split, and the new “Little Broken Hearts” somberly documents the dissolution of her next relationship with a certain unnamed author.
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It’s odd, admits Jasmine van den Bogaerde of the moniker under which she records — Birdy. But it was bestowed upon her by her parents when she was just a toddler. “They gave it to me because when they’d feed me, I’d open my mouth really wide, like a baby chick,” says the 16-year-old British wunderkind, who started out doing soulful covers of Phoenix (“1901”), The xx (“Shelter”) and Bon Iver (“Skinny Love”), all of which are featured on her new EP, “Live in London,” a follow-up to her recent eponymous debut.
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Regina Spektor respectfully disagrees with writer Thomas Wolfe’s contention that you can’t go home again. After 23 years away, the quirky New York keyboardist returned last month to play triumphant concerts in both the city of her birth, Moscow, and an exotic metropolis she’d never seen, St. Petersburg. “Just being in Russia was amazing — it was completely bizarre, and everything still feels like a dream,” she says. “I was there for a week, and I’ve come home and I’m just sort of in borscht withdrawal.”
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Dave Pirner made a name for himself with Soul Asylum — the Minneapolis rock outfit he formed in 1983 with fellow vocalist-guitarist Dan Murphy — and won a Grammy for the 1992 single “Runaway Train.” But before that, he was banking on something else entirely: his proficiency as a trumpet player.
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Looking for the next big thing in British music? It’s already surfed in on “An Awesome Wave,” the dazzling debut from U.K. quartet Alt-J. The record — featuring percussive, caffeinated anomalies such as “Tessellate,” “Breezeblocks” and the sinister single “Fitzpleasure” — simply defies description, even by its own composers. “We really don’t have any idea what kind of sound we’re making.
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