Shawn Phillips’ latest album offers a series of compelling stories and profound ideas by means of a musically masterful array of soundscapes. Phillips’ presents some brilliant melodies and an overall warm and full aura as this playlist pours through.
Songwriter
My approach to creativity? I often go for a walk through Heidelberg, open my eyes, open my ears and just let my thoughts flow. At some point creativity kicks in. That gives me an idea. But then I need to play around with it – I prefer to do that on my own.
A stunning project, his best yet without a doubt, and as always – a total joy to write about. There’s a classic or timeless feel to the entire playlist and it’s well worth losing yourself within for a while.
Even with the eclectic and unpredictable nature of the music on this project, the lyrics are by far the most compelling and fascinating thread throughout it. Prepare, if you can, to feel heart broken, enlightened, uplifted, calmed, and concerned – all within the hour.
Shreya Preeti leads with a smooth and soulful vocal on this alternative pop-RnB fusion single Junkyard. The track, or at least the live version, offers an organic musicality that’s refreshing to witness – the performance in full is of a supremely high quality, and there’s plenty of passion connected to the moment throughout.
Breaking Away is an immense joy to escape within. The sort of song that begs for you to turn up the volume, and quickly becomes addictive and close to impossible to forget about.
By the Way of the Devil is flat out weird, but it’s also genius. Pete Murphy has proven once again that his experimental and unapologetic artistry is truly one of a kind.
The Live Sessions is music for music’s sake, and if mainstream culture has made you forget what that sounds like, Torelli and the Fuse are here to remind you.
I try to stay a bit away from the realism of life, that’s not what music should be, it’s should be about the beauty and magic of it.
The soundscape itself loops out & around you as a soothing constant – that riff, that subtle sense of rhythm, that voice; all of it connects in a masterful yet natural way. Fusing poetry with personal reflections on life, the lyrics captivate & offer a fine balance between individual truth and a more widely accessible feeling of isolation or being lost.
A stunning song – musically brilliant, gorgeously performed, and recorded so as to genuinely present a particularly poignant moment of realness; captured at its most compelling. I sincerely look forward to the new album.
The song’s very concept, its central idea, is one that promotes calmness and well being – a sense of living in the present and being at piece is highlighted in everything from the lyrics to the music to the performances.