Stray Birds - Magic Fire - VINYL LP

The Stray Birds new Best Medicine out on Yep Roc Records. Chock full of story-filled lyrics and smart harmonies, interwoven with wonderfully separated string lines and strums, this album offers some heartfelt creativity. The musical prowess of The Stray Birds is apparent here, as the instrumentation is artfully arranged and vocals never trip over each other. Complemented by thoughtful dynamics and masterful storytelling, Best Medicine should be your next favorite album of 2015. Co-produced by the band and Stuart Martin, the album features 12 tracks, including 10 original compositions and two traditional songs, InchPalletInch and InchWho's Gonna Shoe.Inch The band - multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Maya de Vitry, Oliver Craven, and Charlie Muench - hails from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. All three are classically trained musicians who've been making music of all kinds since childhood. However, they were also all raised with a steady diet of music ranging from pioneers like The Carter Family and Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys to the joyous invention of The Beatles and The Band, to the groundbreaking artistry of Jimi Hendrix.

One of the year's most daring and true pop records, private LIFE comes as the result of Virginia Wing living through, and with, huge personal emotional and mental traumas. It is a document of how the very process of music creation in a group can be of huge therapeutic benefit to people. The three members of Virginia Wing have explored the depths of their creative and artistic inspirations within performance, production and composition, and have made a candid and brash pop record that speaks clearly about hope, desperation, impulse, addiction, urge and shame. More tumultuous than it's predecessor, private LIFE knocks hard. The evolution of Virginia Wing's sound continues to build on the broad creative flow of the last album whilst being another audacious contribution to contemporary pop. The drums are huge and playfully unquantized. Edits are both assured and heavy handed, the instrumentation lightly mediates the two and findsSide AA1 I'm Holding Out For SomethingA2 Moon Turn TidesA3 Soft FruitA4 Michael Returns To The GardenA5 99 NorthA6 Return To ViewSide BB1 St. Francis FountainB2 Private LifeB3 Half MourningB4 Lucky CoinB5 OBW SaintsB6 I Know About These Things

Andy Jenkins new album Since Always came from letting go-ofself-perceptions, of expectations, of assumptions. Jenkins found spaceto trust himself as the guitarist for his own songs, and producer NickSanborn stepped into a new kind of production role, dreaming up ideasand filtering through them together. There was, in short, a very adulttrust to it all, two fans working in tandem to make something; a recordwhere the loss and love, compromise and gain of adulthood come intofull view.Both busy pieces of their respective but intertwined music scenes inRichmond and Durham, Jenkins and Sanborn had been fans of oneanother for years but had never formally collaborated. Jenkins had spenta few years gathering songs for the follow-up to his 2018 debut, SweetBunch; the new ones were intricately rendered odes to the assortedassurances and anxieties that can come with finding some measure ofcontentment as you cross into yours 30s. Don't send demos, Sanbornsuggested; simply drive the two hours down, and live in the studio fortwo weeks while spring drifted into the South.As Jenkins rolled through his tracks, Sanborn listened and allowed hisimagination to run wild and flooded Jenkins with ideas-rhythmic shifts,keyboard flourishes, vocal effects. There was double-time piano, amistake dropped into InchToo LateInch they both loved. There was theVocoder selection during InchEmptiness Is,Inch a choice that allowed the pairto hang so much of the song on bass and drums alone. There was thesequence that bubbles beneath InchLeaving Before,Inch a mirror of the lyricalnervous heart.When Amelia Meath and Flock of Dimes' Jenn Wasner were pallingaround the studio, Sanborn asked if they would mind singing on a fewtracks. That's Meath on InchBlue Mind,Inch sweetly trailing Jenkins' linesabout being under love's spell like she's offering an incantation, andWasner rising through the static dawn of Inch