Laura Cantrell signs to Matador!

[frank]

http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000737867

That's very exciting, I like her stuff a lot.

[Paul]

Heard of her, but have never heard her. mp3s anyone?

[frank]

http://www.lauracantrell.com/downloads.asp

[TheSadDebaser]

My mother loves her show on WFMU. I'm afraid I can't sit through too much of it.

[bitterfruit]

I saw her open up for Elvis Costello a couple years ago. She's cute as a button.

Would this be Matador's first quasi country signing?

[Patrick]

Well, back in the day we had the countrified Shams and Schramms. And we released Neko Case's 'Blacklisted' in the UK and Europe.

More details on the Laura signing in the December news update, and in her new website section.

http://www.matadorrecords.com/news
http://www.matadorrecords.com/laura_cantrell

Patrick

[Salman]

I checked out some of those songs from the link posted and I like what I hear. It's not Neko Case alt-country but good nonetheless.

[Funk]

Originally posted by Salman
It's not Neko Case alt-country but good nonetheless.

Neko Case as a reference point may be a bad way to go into/use as judging criteria something labeled as "country" (not "alt-country").

[johnfoyle]

I saw Laura doing a lot of the new songs that will be on her first Matador release in concert last year - they are as good as anything she has done. These articles tell of her recent New York show -


http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/283781p-243134c.html


Family roots in Cantrell country



By DAVID HINCKLEY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Laura Cantrell, the singer-songwriter who hosts a
country/folk show on WFMU (91.1 FM), made an
interesting discovery last summer: She isn't the first
woman from her Tennessee family to do this sort of
thing on the airwaves of New York.
One Ethel Park Richardson, host of "Heart Throbs of
the Hills" on WJZ in the '30s, turns out to be her
grandfather's great-aunt.

"Heart Throbs" was structured as a story, says
Cantrell, who tracked down five surviving show tapes
at the Library of Congress. "The songs were woven into
the script and she had guests like Carson Robison."

This historic-song connection makes it all the more
appropriate that Cantrell will sing tonight in Lincoln
Center's "American Songbook" series, because both she
and Richardson also became song collectors.

Richardson compiled a book titled "American Mountain
Songs" in 1927, and Cantrell notes she knew about the
book before she knew Richardson was a relative.

"It's great that Lincoln Center is broadening the
'Songbook' series to include country and folk,"
Cantrell says. "They're just as much a part of it as
jazz or Broadway."

She'll be joined by several friends for tonight's
show, which starts at 8:30, and her own set will
include traditional ballads like "Poor Ellen Smith,"
as well as a taste of her next CD,Humming By The Flowered Vine

Meantime, she is thinking of ways to work the
Richardson angle into her WFMU show, "Radio Thrift
Shop," heard Saturdays at noon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/arts/music/26cant.html




Laura Cantrell in the American Songbook series on Thursday

Sad Guitar, Fronting a Curtain of Snow
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: February 26, 2005


As the country-folk singer Laura Cantrell performed "Khaki and Corduroy," her sleepy-sad reflection on being a Southerner transplanted to New York City, on Thursday evening, a light curtain of snow drifted behind the stage-to-ceiling rear window that makes the Allen Room at Frederick P. Rose Hall a drop-dead-gorgeous concert setting.

The cry of a steel guitar curled up and around her plain, lovely voice, and the auditorium was awash with the kind of cosmic wistfulness that the best country and folk music can conjure when it dreams of the past.

"Khaki and Corduroy" was the headiest moment in an evening in which Ms. Cantrell, joined by Richard Buckner and Laura Veirs, made up a triple bill in Lincoln Center's expanded American Songbook series. All three performers make the kind of rigorously personal, far-sighted music that the toxic pop mainstream keeps out of earshot.

One reason such nourishing sounds float below the radar is that magnification into an arena-size sound would destroy them. Another darker reason may be that acknowledgment of real quality in a culture of mediocrity threatens the security of audiences conditioned to believe that bigger and coarser are better.

Ms. Cantrell devoted more of her set to songs by her peers than to her own material. "When the Roses Bloom Again," an early Tin Pan Alley song handsomely outfitted with a new melody by Wilco and Billy Bragg, was offered as what she called "the folk process."

And Ms. Cantrell and Mr. Buckner elevated the Texan songwriter Terry Allen's fatalistic ballad "Dogwood Tree" to the same timeless plane.

Mr. Buckner's spellbinding set was an uninterrupted suite of five songs in which he used a guitar sequencer to connect them with subtle, shifting instrumental drones to create a brooding, volatile musical stream-of-consciousness. This kind of intense, reverberant minimalism is the sort of thing Nick Drake pursued three decades ago in his final album, "Pink Moon." Technology enabled Mr. Buckner to carry it farther, singing in a raw, husky voice inflected with hints of violence.

Ms. Veirs, a Seattle-based singer who recently released her debut album on Nonesuch, practices a sparer, plainer variation of the same purism, inspired by a punk-rock aesthetic. Her song "Rapture" refined complex emotional reflections into a compelling, bare-bones folk shorthand. Her singing matched her language in its concentrated search for the elemental and essential.