Preview the New Single 'Shine' from Anna Nalick!

When Breathe (2AM) came out a couple years ago it was one of my favorite songs of the year and still remains high on my list, but I hadn't really heard of anything new by Anna Nalick after her 2006 album Wreck of the Day. (above are iTunes links)


Feed and email readers may need to come to the blog to see the video

Turns out she was transitioning between labels and taking her time to to it "smartly and safely" as she says in her blog. (08.02.07 entry under the journal section on her site, it's not set up to link directly to it.)

Anna's been writing a lot of material the past couple years and was waiting for the go-ahead to start recording. Now she has premiered a new song online and it's called Shine and has an album set to come out this summer!

So far you can hear Shine on PopEater, her MySpace and there's a very simple video on YouTube that uses the words from her journal when she wrote it, but I bet Shine will start getting a lot more exposure soon. Anna's notes on her site and MySpace describe how Shine has a very uplifting and positive message. It sympathizes with the Hollywood celebs for how public their lives are that all their mistakes are made under the glare of the camera. At the same time it encourages younger girls to look to the positive role models who are NOT doing crazy things for their success and realize that being a performer does not have to equal meltdowns and madness.

I'm sure I'll post a review of the new album when it comes out. :-)

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Highlights from Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown

I've been hearing about Anaïs Mitchell's folk opera Hadestown in bits and pieces for quite a while now - starting from the last time she came to Cafe Paradiso and then in subsequent email and website updates. Folk music, theatre AND a reworked myth (Orpheus) all in one? Sounds like my kind of heaven, and I've been wanting SO BADLY to see it. Since I live in the Midwest and she's been performing it in the New England area, well, chances are slim. So I was super excited when I noticed she updated her MySpace profile to include this little 10 minute highlight reel from the show:


Feed and email readers may need to come to the blog to see the video

Banjos? Steampunk costuming and sets? Ok, I think that only made me want to see it even more! I'm hoping this video means that the whole thing was taped and therefore viewable sometime in the future. I'd SO buy the DVD.

Here's a clip of "The Wall". She did this solo when she came through, and it has a very different feeling to it when the questions and answers are split:


Yeah, ok, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY want to see this. I realize I may be completely geeking out here and have lost all of you, but please don't let that stop you from listening to Anaïs' amazing music, because it truly is amazing.

Here's a link to a great article about Anais and her signing to Ani DiFranco's label Righteous Babe Records.

And here is a gorgeous little four and a half minute interview she did before a show in Ann Arbor, Michigan:


Anaïs is the kind of people we want more of in the world.

Personal, political and passionate, her album The Brightness was one of my favorite albums of 2007. I highly recommend it. Of course the best place to buy The Brightness is direct from the source, but here are the links to it on iTunes and Amazon if you are so inclined.



(Special thanks to Professor K for providing a link to the Steampunk resource last month so I had a name for it when I saw it in the videos.)

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There's 'No One' Like Alicia Keys - But People are Trying!

When a song is good, a song is good. While it's a little strange to me when people cover a song so soon after it comes out, it's still fascinating to hear the different takes on it. Along the same line as Umbrella being covered by everyone last summer, another song everyone loves to sing these days is No One by Alicia Keys(iTunes link).


Feed and email readers may need to come to the blog to see the videos

No one has that voice, but I did come across a pretty nice cover of No One by way of the blog Can't Hear You Over the Sound of How Awesome I Am.

It features French pop singer Tilly Key, who has an impressive, though different, set of pipes:


Find out more about Tilly:
- www.myspace.com/tillykey
- Tilly's Website has some samples from her album Child of the World. I recommend Never Saw the Sunrise as it has less instruments and shows off her voice better.

Anyone else have any other favorite covers of No One? There are plenty to be found on YouTube...


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Ingrid Michaelson Tries to Find Out if She is Famous

Too funny not to share!

Ingrid and Allie had some time to kill during their tour last month and found themselves in the Mall of America. Ingrid decides to do a little experiment to see just how famous she is:


Feed and email readers may need to come to the blog to see the video

(If you're just joining us, here's my original write up on Ingrid and the other entry on the time she got some big network TV exposure with the song she's asking people about in the video.)

In other news, I did a second radio show this morning! Check out my KRUU blog and playlist for more details there, and tune in to KRUU-LP 100.1 next Tuesday at 9 am Central to hear more Lyrical Venus-y goodness!

Finally, remember when I wrote about Kina Grannis a few posts back? She made it to the final round of the "Crash the Superbowl" contest, so she needs your daily votes for the next three weeks! She has a really cute blog where she records a song every day with her webcam and posts it as a thank you for voting for her. That girl is a master social networker, I tell you.

Speaking of social networking, if you like what I'm doing here on Lyrical Venus, I would be humbled and forever grateful to you if you took a moment to submit or favorite my site (or a blog entry from it) to someplace like digg, reddit, sk*rt, stumbleupon, del.icio.us or technorati. Thank you for reading!!

Lyrical Venus: Looking Back on 2007

So I'm a few days behind with the whole 2007 retrospective thing people are doing with their blogs, but considering that December was so crazy for me that I only decorated my Christmas tree 2 days AFTER Christmas, I think I'm doing pretty good with trying to catch up to life in general. *grin* So without further ado, here are some highlights of my first 9 months with this blog.



My Top 10 Listened to Artists, since May, according to Last.fm (not counting iPod and work listens). Pretty much all these folks either had new albums or were a new discovery for me in 2007. Links to the entries I wrote about them if applicable. And for the few I didn't write about yet, shame on me, but the real reason is I like them so much I want to make sure and do it right and I haven't had time quite yet.

1. Ingrid Michaelson
2. Rachel Ries
3. Dar Williams
4. Mandy Moore
5. Colbie Caillat
6. Lori McKenna
7. Jasmine Ash
8. Girlyman
9. Adrianne
10. Wendy Woo

I need to add Anais Mitchell in here, because her album came out in February before I started with Last.fm and she's one of my top played artists on iTunes.

(And yes, yes, if you go check out my Last.fm stats right now, that IS Enrique sitting at spot number 11. He makes me happy. And I listen to the Spanish versions to practice my Spanish, seriously...)


Top 9 Visited Posts of Dec 2007, according to Feedburner, which should be pretty indicative of the year:
1. Cuckoo for CoCo: Colbie Caillat's Debut Album
2. Looking for Mandy Moore Umbrella Chords? Quick Tip!
3. Umbrella Craze Continues... Marié Digby Has One Too!
4. Chords for Keep Breathing by Ingrid Michaelson
5. I Can't Stop Listening To: Mandy Moore's "Wild Hope"
6. Mandy Moore Borrows Rihanna's Umbrella
7. Ingrid Michaelson's "The Way I Am" On TV!
8. Feist's 1234 on the iPod Nano Commercial
9. Too Much Music? Keep Breathing! (or, Ingrid Michaelson Rocks!)


My top 8 personal favorite entries that didn't make the list above, in no particular order:
1. Absolutely Inspired By Ani DiFranco's Canon
2. Dar Williams: One of the Most Inspiring Singers I Know
3. 10 Questions with Leslie Berry
4. Wendy Waldman, Wonder Woman!
5. MoZella - You Won't Forget Her!
6. Broccoli and Beats: The Ditty Bops Farm Tour
7. Adrina Thorpe - A Whole Latte Musical Inspiration!
8. Traveling with Ember and Imogen

Last but not least, links to the blogs of people who left me comments, or who were kind enough to link to me on their blogs, in no particular order. Frank and Jana get the "most comments" prizes (Thanks ya'll!!). If I missed someone let me know and I'll link you up ASAP!

Braintracings
Living in Small Sizes
Jana Pochop
Almost Somewhat Positive
Piper of Love
Frank Gualtier
Bunch of Bettys
The Butterfly Blog
Moomin Light
Hugging the Midline
Compulsive Writer

Thanks everyone who has been reading! I hope you'll stick with me for more great music to come in 2008!

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New Year Off to a Good Start!

Hello lovely readers! You will never guess what I did this morning to kick off the New Year! (Well, unless I told you about it already in person...)

I DID A RADIO SHOW ON KRUU FM!!! One whole hour!



In case all the exclamation points and capital letters didn't clue you in already, I am very, very excited about this. :-)

KRUU is an awesome little local, low power, non-profit radio station here in town. This is the mission statement from their website:

"The mission of KRUU is to give Fairfield a voice and strengthen the community by encouraging creativity, dialogue and community involvement. KRUU is an open, inclusive, diverse forum for music, creative expression, information, and entertainment. It is a non-commercial, non-profit, community-supported low-power radio station with a strong emphasis on locally created and produced programming."

Yeah, it pretty much kicks butt big time. It's run on Open Source software, grassroots community support, enthusiasm, hard work and love. I think they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 DJ's? With that many different people, you can imagine the diversity of the shows, somewhere in that mix there's a little something for everyone. It's low power, so the range is only 10-20 miles out from the center of town, but you can listen to the stream online from anywhere in the world.

And now I'll tell you a little secret... When I came up with the name Lyrical Venus maybe a year ago, it was actually in anticipation of having a show on KRUU. But between them being super busy trying to learn how to build and run a 24 hour radio station from the ground up, and me being both busy and rather shy (especially when it comes to sharing music - bad run-ins with music snobs in the past), it's taken this long to get started. I think it's actually pretty good timing, because I've had this much time to discover more artists, build my music library and grow my confidence in my music tastes through this blog. So when James the station manager said to me at 6:30 last night, "You want to come in tomorrow morning at 9 AM? Do you have an hour's worth of music you can play?" I was able to say "um, YES!", tweak up a playlist, and still have a good time out at a friend's house for New Years Eve. My co-host was out of town, but she'll come back and it looks like we'll have the 9:00 AM Tuesday slot going forward, so you can tune in to 100.1 FM in Fairfield, or online to listen to the Lyrical Venus Radio Hour every week!

Never fear readers, I shan't abandon this blog now that have achieved my goal of a radio show. I quite like writing about my all-time favorite singers and new musical discoveries. I have so many artist posts sitting in little draft folders waiting for me to have time to flesh them out and put up for you.

Sometime soon I also want to do a "Lyrical Venus Best of 2007" post, as well as set some goals for 2008. But I was so excited about this I had to share it before going to bed!

Oh, one last thing! Big thanks to any and all of you who read this blog on any sort of regular basis. It really blows my mind that people from around the world are reading the words I sit here typing on my little laptop! Please don't be shy to comment or send me an email if you have any ideas or feedback, I really do love to hear from you.

Until next time, this is Heather, signing out!