Village Savant // your guide to a creative existence

09/20/2003 Entry: "Make A Living Tour"

SAVE THE DATE!
If you missed Devon Sproule here at A.D. a few months ago with Found Magazine, here's your chance to see her again. Brooklyn's City Salvage Records' owner (and artist in his own right) Andy Friedman, singer/songwriters Paul Curreri and Devon Sproule are touring the west coast as "The Make A Living Tour."

The three will be here on Monday, Oct. 6th at 7pm. $5 at the door.
Andy's book "Future Blues," will be available, as will CDs by both Paul and Devon.

For more info, click "details."

ANDY FRIEDMAN
Poised in music clubs and roadhouse bars before projections of his pencil drawings and polaroids, Brooklyn-based maverick visual artist Andy Friedman offers a "half-improvised, half-memorized introspective-type rant" to accompany his visual works. "Lots of people think of songs in terms of a series of colors or a filmic rush of images. Andy Friedman goes all the way, treating his stark pencil drawings and Polaroids as songs in and of themselves (Time Out New York)." The result is a refreshing, rewarding experience garnering increasing National and International critical acclaim. A recent BBC radio feature on the artist and "The Make A Living Tour" documents this new visual take on the blues. "That Friedman is wielding a slide remote instead of a guitar, and talking instead of singing, hardly matters at all (Oxford Town)."
A collection of Polaroid photographs and evocative, sporadic writing, Andy Friedman's latest book, "Future Blues," celebrates the artist's unique relationship with time-honored country blues and folk-song traditions. "I'd been listening to a lot of interpreters, musicians like Ry Cooder and Dave Van Ronk, who take old songs and present something new in their composition. This gave me the idea to do the same, and the result was a book of pictures."

PAUL CURRERI-
Produced and engineered by renowned singer/guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps and recorded in just two days, Songs For Devon Sproule captures the full spontaneity and power of Paul Curreri's incredible live performances. "I guess that's what happens when you record an entire album in four hours versus nine months," says Paul. The result is a freewheeling collection of stories, spirited wordplay and stunning finger-style guitar work.
The first time I saw him play I was just blown away," says producer Kelly Joe Phelps. "Paul's songs were incredible, the guitar playing was amazing. It's just undeniable stuff." Phelps soon set to work booking Curreri to open as many of his shows as possible, even flying the singer across the country for gigs. "I'll do anything to expose him to people and people to him, because I think the music is just so good."

DEVON SPROULE
With the release of her third CD, Upstate Songs, rising-star Devon Sproule joins the growing roster of artists on City Salvage Records. Upstate Songs features a collection of bright, sparsely arranged compositions and represents a new direction from the grittier, electric sounds that gained Sproule National notoriety with the release of her previous two albums.
Raised by Canadian folk music, "the dead, teenager pop-ballads of the 50's," and The Beatles on 465 acres of farm and forest land in rural Virginia, the twenty-one-year-old Sproule began touring nationally at the age of seventeen, sometimes performing with the accompaniment of a rock band. Although the rock-influenced sounds featured on Long Sleeve Story, released in 2001 and produced by Dave Matthews Band bassist Stefan Lessard (who also appears on the record) gained Sproule National notoriety, it is the music on Upstate Songs that will establish her as a considerable, mature songwriting talent.