RIGHT ARM RESOURCE UPDATE JESSE BARNETT [email protected] (508) 238-5654 www.rightarmresource.com www.facebook.com/rightarmresource 4/7/2021 Allison Russell “Nightflyer” The first single from her solo debut Outside Child, out 5/21 Early adds at WRLT, Music Choice, WCLZ, KJAC, WDST, WKZE, KSUT, WYCE, WDVX, KRVM, KVNF, KSLU, WFIT, WHRV, WUMB, WUNC and XM Loft Allison is also in Our Native Daughters and Birds of Chicago “Triumph glistens along poetic lyric lines as Russell uncovers unforeseen strength.” - American Songwriter Watch the video on my site Mustafa “Ali” The first single from When Smoke Rises, out 5/28 Early adds at KTBG, WYCE and WUNC Hailing from the inner city Regent Park area of Toronto, his music reflects the world he grew up in, and this song is about a close friend who was shot and killed four years ago “An impossibly personal collection of songs as heartbreaking as they are beautiful.” - GQ Watch the video on my site Judah & The Lion “Spirit” Their new single, out now Most Added, including: WXPK, KVNA, WZEW, KRSH, WCNR, KMMS, KKAL, WZLO, WEXT, WBJB, WCBE… Early: WXRT, WRLT, WPYA, WCLY, WUIN, WTYD “Most iconic stories and songs don’t start with everything being perfect, but rather the story comes from the pain and the tension between moving forward and allowing the pain to become your super power in life.” - Judah Akers Great syncs already Dumpstaphunk “United Nations Stomp” (feat. Marcus King) From Where Do We Go From Here, out 4/23 Most Added, including: KCSN, KRSH, KHUM, WJCU, WEXT, KSUT, WYCE, WCBE, WFHB… Early: KMTN, WBJB, KXCI, WHRV, KRVM “The epic jam invokes the vintage spirit of Jimi Hendrix and Cream coupled with a touch of urgent musical angst that could be easily playlist alongside modern contemporaries Rage Against The Machine or Red Hot Chili Peppers.” - Glide Magazine Major Spark “I’m Not Gonna Stand Around” The first single from their debut album Beautiful Noise, out 5/21 New at KVYN Early at KJAC and WBJB Major Spark is the brainchild of former Magnet singer-songwriter Mark Goodman and producer Brian Charles (who played nearly every instrument on the album) Watch the video on my site now Backing vocals by fellow producer Miranda Serra Julien Baker “Heatwave” The second single from Little Oblivions, following up the top 15 AAA hit “Faith Healer” Most Added, including: Music Choice, KTBG, KJAC, KPND, KVOQ, KVYN, WDST, WWCT, WZEW, WCLX, WAPS, KCLC… Early: WRLT, WXRV, KCMP, WNXP, WPYA, WCNR, WYMS, WNCS, KYMK, WCLY… “[On Heatwave] the Tennessee singer-songwriter mixes honest, banal observations with the painfully beautiful." - NME Amazing album press everywhere Bendigo Fletcher “Evergreen” The first single from their Elektra debut New: WPYA, WCLX, WTMD, KMTN, KROK, WBJB, WYCE… ON: WRLT, KRVB, KCSN, WFPK, WZEW, KRSH, WCLY, KMMS, WEHM, KCLC, KYSL… Produced by Ken Coomer of Wilco Toured w/Nathaniel Rateliff, Mt. Joy, CAAMP, Hiss Golden Messenger “‘Evergreen’ meanders through the madness of the world and the constant reconditioning required to survive it all.” - American Songwriter Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors “I Need To Go Somewhere” His new single, out now New at WMWV ON: WRLT, Music Choice, WCLY, WCNR, KTBG, WEXT, WJCU, WCLX, WYCE, KRML, KMTN, KNBA, WZLO… “A hopeful—and hilarious—ode to getting back out there.” - Garden & Gun Watch the funny video on my site now Drew and longtime collaborator Cason Cooley wrote the song together about the cabin fever we’ve all been experiencing and needing to just go Aaron Lee Tasjan “Don’t Overthink It” The new single from Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!, out now with fantastic reviews New at WTMD ON: WRLT, KCSN, WNRN, WCLX, WVMP, WUIN, WTYD, WBJB, WYCE, WCBE, KSMF, WJCU, WMVY, KROK… “A triumphant progression, merging all Tasjan’s varied strands of his musical DNA into a genuine tour-de-force” - Rolling Stone“His best album yet” - Associated Press WXPN Free At Noon confirmed for 5/14 Ten Kills The Pack “Body” From his EP Life, Death, and Afterwards, out now New at KMMS ON: WCLY, WVMP, KMTN, KROK, WYCE, WJCU, KCLC, WCBE, KLRR, WOCM, KRVM, KSLU… Hailing from Toronto, his real name is Sean Sroka The name ‘Ten Kills The Pack’ comes from a card game that he plays with friends “By weaving together universal themes, Sroka has established Ten Kills the Pack as a leading voice in modern folk music.” - Exclaim Cas Haley “All The Right People” The title track single from his new album, out now New at KAXE ON: WCLY, WDST, WUIN, WTYD, WNCW, WZLO, KSUT, KNBA, WCBE, WCLX, KSMF, WYCE… “A breezy, instantly memorable singalong that allows you to surround yourself with positivity and good people.” - American Songwriter “Cas’ songs are folk songs - ones that will still be sung 100 years from now - THAT is his gift.” - Jon Batiste Kaleo “Break My Baby” The new single from Surface Sounds, out 4/23 Mediabase 10*, BDS Monitored 11*, Indicator 6*! Played the JBE SummitFest last month New: WKLQ, WLKR, KSMF, WMOT ON: SiriusXM Spectrum, WXRT, KBCO, WXRV, WRLT, KRVB, KCMP, WRNR, Music Choice, WQKL, WFPK, WXPK, WPYA, WTMD, KTBG, KTHX, WCNR, WZEW, KVOQ... “The pounding beat and JJ’s breathless wail are practically hair-raising in their unquenchable desire...” - Atwood Mag Edie Brickell & New Bohemians “Sleeve” and “Stubborn Love” Two new singles for radio to choose from, take your pick From their new album Hunter And The Dog Star, out now ON: KCSN, WERS, WEHM, KYSL, WNCW, WCBE, WVMP, KNBA, KSMF, WMWV, KSUT, WYCE, KXCI, WUKY, KHUM, WDST, XM Loft… Played on Fallon last month! This is the band’s 5th studio album “A remarkably uplifting effort...” - American Songwriter (Rating: 4/5) William The Conqueror “Wake Up” From their new album Maverick Thinker, out now New: WTMD, KMMS, WUSM ON: KJAC, WDST, WCLY, WCLX, WZLO, KROK, WVMP, KRML, KSMF, WCBE, WBJB, WNCW, WYCE... American Songwriter feature ! “Whip-smart indie rock that harks back to Stateside influences - we’re hearing aspects of Speedy Ortiz and Pavement - alongside that scratchy, UK indie sound, the West Country group are moving in their own lane.” - Clash Magazine Tune-Yards “hold yourself.” From sketchy., out now Mediabase 31*, BDS Monitored 20*, Indicator 35*, JBE Albums 10*! New: KEXP, WMNF, KRCC, WHRV, KDNK ON: WXRV, WRNR, WRLT, WXPN, KRVB, WFUV, KCMP, KCSN, WFPK, WYEP, KTBG, KXT, Music Choice, WPYA, KUTX, WYMS, WTMD, KVOQ, KJAC, WCNR, WNRN... Played on Colbert and Kimmel “The gauzy, bass-heavy beat ballad delivers a potent message of self-empowerment” - Pitchfork LP “How Low Can You Go” Her new single, going for adds now BDS Monitored #35! New at WFPK ON: WTTS, KBCO, WXRT, WRLT, WRNR, Music Choice, WXPK, WPYA, KTBG, KXT, WYMS, WCNR, KVOQ, KUTX, WAPS, WTMD, WDST... Nearly 10 million streams since its November release Fall 2021 tour scheduled Over 5MM monthly listeners on Spotify Official video and livestream full-band performance online now Over 400K followers on TikTok Passenger “Sword From The Stone” From Songs For The Drunk And Broken Hearted, out now Played on Kimmel! Mediabase 18*, BDS Monitored 17*, Indicator 12*, Mediabase Hot AC 20*! New: KGSR, WKLQ, WERS ON: KBCO, WRLT, KINK, WMMM, WXRV, KRVB, WPYA, Music Choice, WXPK, WCLZ, KCSN, WAPS, WQKL, WCNR, KTHX... Streaming over 600K/week “…a hauntingly beautiful collection of Americana gold, and likely Passenger’s finest and most focused record yet.” - Glide Read Joe Henry’s words on Allison Russell’s solo debut Outside Child “Though deep and wide may be the world, it is within dim and narrow rooms ––airless and mundane–– that the true stories of our lives are enacted; are bartered and brokered –– enslaved and empowered; held in and sung out. And Song most surely began as a cry or a prayer ––though no need discerning between the two, for they are the same ––and both sacred: the prayer and the wail becoming Song as soon as shared. Some of us come, later in life, to find our knees; while others slip young into trauma like a quarry stone gone under, held down by the weight of their own world. Many of those, alas, never come back up. But those able are wont to be luminous, struggle having landed their hearts on the outside of their bodies: a swinging lantern within that aforementioned dim room ––where stories are unraveled, thus to be reconstructed... purposefully reanimated. It was also within such a room that Allison Russell ––singer, songwriter, poet, and activist–– bore witness to herself in descent. But the abused child she was played mother to the brave woman and fierce artist she would become ––surviving being one of only two options, and not the most likely. Blessed be. Allison’s new album, Outside Child ––that draws water from the dark well of a violent past–– is her first solo offering, she also being a pivotal voice in two bands: Birds of Chicago and Our Native Daughters. And telling her own story sounds now to have made her free –– not from it all, but free within it: to reframe and reclaim her identity and its singular authority. The songs themselves ––though iron-hard in their concerns–– are exultant: exercising haunted dream like clean bedsheets snapped and hung out into broad daylight, and with the romantic poet’s lust for living and audacity of endurance. Nina Simone comes to mind, as well Edith Piaf: two shamanistic practitioners who turned their faces into the blade of storm and roared back dig- nity and hope. This music, no less ––no less–– is a triumph: a courageous work ––burnished and bright; unspeakably beautiful as she sings the unspeakable. Above all, it is an act of remarkable generosity: a cathartic, soulful, buoyant and redeeming gift to us all and, one must believe, to herself as well.” -Joe Henry Bath, Maine Harper’s Bazaar looks at Julien Baker’sLittle Oblivions through the lens of faith “On the second track of Julien Baker’s third album, Little Oblivions, a car engine catches fire and doubt filters in through the smoke. “It's not like what I thought it'd be,” she sings to God about her relationship with her faith, “the gruesome beauty of your face in everyone I meet.” Victor Hugo wrote that “to love another person is to see the face of God,” but on "Heatwave," the Tennessee singer-songwriter asks what ex- actly it is she’s seeing when she witnesses the suffering of strangers. Is it “all part of the deal” of following God? Baker wrote the song thinking that a Christian willingness to accept suffering as inevitable “is a huge obstacle to [her] faith and [her] understanding, this insanity and unex- plainable hurt that we’re trying to heal with ideology instead of action." Baker’s latest album feels like the third and final act of her bildungsroman, after 2015’s Sprained Ankle and 2017’s Turn Out the Lights. It’s a work that quietly examines the collapse of faith and trust on a personal and institutional level. It builds to an understanding that we can make our own systems of belief and reason outside the power structure of organized religion—and that we may be better off for it. She also fuels this insight with a new sound. An organ blast on “Hardline” opens the record with a warning signal that she’s ripping up the rule book of what her music is supposed to sound like. From deceptively light moments of pop rock (“Relative Fiction”) and songs that col- lapse in a flurry of guitars (“Hardline”), Little Oblivions is gutting music written with a poet’s delicacy, flair, and scalpel, scored by a hardcore veteran who understands thrashing’s cathartic potential. At 25 years old, Baker writes with remarkable consistency—to the point where people can list all of the things she makes songs about like categories on Jeopardy: religion, addiction, depression, death, redemption, evil. Although her subjects remain similar, what she learns in ask- ing life’s big questions at 17, 19, and 23 is always evolving. The first time I saw Baker, touring with her sparse debut album, Sprained Ankle, I could feel the audience hold their collective breath when she reached a certain point in the song “Rejoice.” “I think there's a God and He hears either way,” she belted, disrupting the song’s sedate at- mosphere. Watching her painstakingly excavate the sort of dark parts of herself that we all have and like to pretend don’t exist, the muscles in her neck straining as she put her faith in God and herself to task at full volume, for a moment, it wasn’t too hard to begin to believe again. My faith, at the time, had been in doubt. At the same age that Baker was writing “Rejoice,” I was reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In the first chapter, “Heaven and Earth in Jest,” essayist Annie Dillard witnesses a giant water bug eat a frog from the inside out while on a walk. “I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall,” she describes. “Soon, part of his skin, formless as a prickled bal- loon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing.” Her moment of private, childish joy, traipsing down the creek, is interrupted with the banal evil of the animal kingdom, as it will be many times throughout the book. Seven years after reading it, the image of that frog—its body paralyzed, “reduced to a juice,” and sucked out in a single bite—still haunts me, and it prompts Dillard to ask, “If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?” That paradox—Why would a benevolent God create evil and permit suffering?—the question of theodicy, triggered my own crisis of faith. On Little Oblivions, Baker is at her most self-destructive when she assumes that her bad behavior, like the suffering she witnesses on “Heat- wave,” is inevitable. She sings, “Start asking for forgiveness in advance / For all the future things I will destroy,” on “Hardline,” and “I've got no business praying / I'm finished being good” on “Relative Fiction.” Crucially, though, she sees the path to her own freedom when she finishes the latter’s couplet with the lyric, “Now I can finally be okay / And not the way I thought I should.” It’s a startling evolution, even from her most recent work in 2018 with her Boygenius collaborators Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus on the song “Stay Down.” So would you teach me I'm the villain, aren't I? // Aren't I, aren't I the one? // Constantly repenting for a difficult mind? // Push me down into the water like a sinner // Hold me under and I'll never come up again As a once-Catholic, the Protestant emphasis on original sin baffles me. Baptism does the trick for the former, but the idea that we are simply born evil and that the sin was absolved only through the ultimate suffering and death of the son of God seems like more of a burden for the latter. A singular ritual cleansing isn’t enough for Baker; as she sings on “Stay Down,” she might as well stay submerged. “I find myself, often, wishing for punishment because that would make sense in my brain. That would even out the abacus of right and wrong- doing, and that would make everything feel okay,” she told Uproxx. She reiterates feeling undeserving of forgiveness and being saved on the album closer, “Ziptie,” when see sings, “Oh, good God / When you gonna call it off / Climb down off of the cross / And change your mind?” “Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain,” Dillard ultimately concludes in “Heaven and Earth in Jest.” The question of theodicy is unan- swerable; we create our own suffering if we let it consume us, so Dillard finds the silver lining elsewhere. “The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” I think Julien Baker would agree. We still have a responsibility to care for ourselves and others, and search for our own moments of divinity in the lives we do have. “I don’t doubt God,” she told the New Statesman in February. “I am, in fact, certain that there’s something out there, even if it’s just God manifested in the dignity of other human beings.” If God isn’t there, or simply doesn't care, we still have a responsibility to care for ourselves and others, and search for our own moments of divinity in the lives we do have. If there is a way for us to be saved, it is through our loved ones in the way Baker sings about on “Favor.” Dacus, who sings backup on the song with Bridgers, says the song “makes [her] think about how truth only ever breaks what should be broken, and how love is never one of those things.” I think the same impulses that drive addiction, power, and control can steer a person’s journey with faith, and that there's a hair's breadth between oblivion and enlightenment. If we get to choose, and I think we do, then maybe to seek little oblivions is to search for God in everything.” - Harper Bazaar, 3/28/21 Coming up... 4/19: Anderson East “Madelyn,” Moon vs. Sun “I’m Going To Break Your Heart,” Paula Fuga “If Ever,” Lucy Dacus RIGHT ARM RESOURCE WEEKLY UPDATE - 4/7/2021