New Release: Baby Eagle – “Dog Weather”

New Release: Baby Eagle – “Dog Weather”

August 27, 2010 | Posted in: Baby Eagle, Steven Lambke 0


Dog Weather is the next great novel of my generation.”
– Paul Henderson, Chairman of the Board

Dog Weather is the new album from Baby Eagle and the latest release from You’ve Changed Records, a small Canadian label steadily building a reputation for the collaborative nature of it’s roster and the high quality of it’s product. YC co-owner and Baby Eagle songwriter Steven Lambke (Constantines) is back with a rock band featuring lablemate/co-owner Daniel Romano (Attack in Black), Shotgun Jimmie, and David Trenaman and Colleen Collins (Construction & Destruction).

The story of this record isn’t all that different from a thousand others out here. Songwriter forms a scrappy band of talented friends when their schedules allow. At the tail end of winter the aforementioned band heads to a big rural house overlooking a vast body of water. Wood is burned, dogs shit, wind howls. Meals are cooked and people sing, play instruments, and a record gets cut. Serendipity trumps bad luck.

What is different on this record, is the way its stories are told, what they describe, and the undeniable joy with which they’re played. It is a record full of natural imagery, domestic narratives and ragged characters trying to patch a wound of meaning on the world. This is a rock band shaking its wet fur dry, pulling its boot from the mud and driving another mile.

Dog Weather is the third record from Baby Eagle, and its very much of its time. Its characters standing on the other side of some fast and reckless youth, some shitty day jobs, a little scarred but settled, holding very little, outside enough love to matter. Guitars come and go like flyweights in a barnfight, the drummer is a steady, smiling underdog. “What the hell did you expect from us? What more do you want?”

Biography in the First Person:
Baby Eagle is the songs of Steven Lambke, that’s me. We discourage the term solo project and are happy in collaboration. This is something we have to do together! We, slippery devils and shadow lurkers, are not easily photographed or described. When pressed to settle upon a description we say “garage folk”. One imagines both the dusty uncovered stage in a distant corner of the folk festival, listed somewhere down the bill, misspelled, and the beer can littered basement of the punk rock show where the words are lost but the spirit remains, encoded in the noise and the having been there. We say roots, and include the protest song, the beat, and the all-ages show. (We avoid all reference to the cultural toxic of classic rock radio but are sure it remains, somewhere. That’s okay, we like that Neil Young/Bob Dylan/John Lennon song).

Steve Lambke has been in Constantines, Daniel Romano has been in Attack in Black and Daniel, Fred, and Julie, Shotgun Jimmie is Shotgun Jimmie, David Trenaman and Colleen Collins are Construction and Destruction. Together, for 3 days in January, in a house in Port Greville, NS called the Quarantine, we were Baby Eagle, one and all.

Steven Lambke and Daniel Romano are the owner/operators of You’ve Changed Records.

Dog Weather is broken bones, the public radio, the long road, the grown tall and gone to seed, the wind whistling on the lip of a bottle, the monkey in your dreams, and the two between the sheets. Dog Weather is the here and now. There ain’t no road sign at the corner, kid. You just have to know the way.

New Release: Richard Laviolette – “All of Your Raw Materials”

New Release: Richard Laviolette – “All of Your Raw Materials”

July 7, 2010 | Posted in: Richard Laviolette 0

 

Richard Laviolette writes a hundred songs a year. Songs of clever, heartfelt, rolling lyrics, sung in a strong, full voice. Echo and melody. Laviolette’s voice is a deep well of water. His lyrics are brilliant scraps of paper. Letters written home. He sings about death, anti-colonial struggle and long distance relationships.

All Of Your Raw Materials is Laviolette’s 4th Album, and his first with The Oil Spills. Originally released independently on CD in September, 2009, the album was recorded live-off-the-floor at the legendary House of Miracles in London, ON the previous summer. We got a copy at a house show in Guelph, ON, and listened to it endlessly through the fall and winter. We loved it, and we wanted everyone to hear it. You’ve Changed Records is happy to make this album widely available and to offer it for the first time on LP.

The Oil Spills are Geordie Gordon (The Magic, Barmitzvah Brothers, the Islands), Meredith Grant, Greg Denton, Mike Brooks (Kae Sun), Lisa Bozikovic, Matt Reeves, Jenny Mitchell (Barmitzvah Brothers, The Burning Hell, Jenny Omnichord). This highly talented cast step up to the plate and deliver a darling country album inspired by a childhood full of waking up on weekends to country, gospel, and bluegrass records blasting from the living room, records such as George Jones, Tammy Wynette, The Judds, Dolly Parton, Roger Miller, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Bob Wills, Neil Young’s ‘Old Ways’, and The Nitty Gritty Dirtband’s ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’.

Richard Laviolette has previously released Aging Recycling Plant (with the Hollow Hooves, Independent 2009), Hands and Feat(s) (Burnt Oak 2007), and A Little Less Like a Rock, A Little More Like Home (Burnt Oak 2006).

Digital and CD versions contain the songs “Body Maps” and “Two Hinges” which had to be left off of the LP version due to time constraints.

New Release: Daniel Romano – “Workin’ For the Music Man”

New Release: Daniel Romano – “Workin’ For the Music Man”

May 24, 2010 | Posted in: Daniel Romano 0

“My folks gave me up shortly after I was born. An older couple, Dwayne and Clairey Talbot, adopted me when I was five. They said that in music years they were old but that their children had kept them young. They said that I was an old soul and that they intended to raise me backwards. Dwayne played the tenor guitar and Clairey played the autoharp. They had me play the six string guitar and told me my other job was to keep the wood box full. I thought I’d been raised on music rather than born into it but when I was thirteen, the Talbots got a call from my birth parents saying they wanted to meet me. The Talbots said that was alright, “in deference to the blood in your veins,” and when I met my birth folks I was surprised they were a musical family. I visited them more and more and we started playing together here and there. Mostly, I spent the next two years trying to get my pilot’s license but as I got close to the final test I found out I was colour blind. When that happened I started drinking and one day me and my brother (my real blood brother) were shooting BBs at a pop can hanging from a tree and one of the pellets refracted off the can and hit me in the eye. I lost 70% of the vision in my left eye and when that happened, I got really depressed. Mr. and Mrs. Talbot passed away and so I decided to go back to the old house. My brothers and sisters were looking after it but no one was actually living there and so I went there. I bought a tape player and started recoding music there. I started gigging around and selling the cassette tapes offstage. I played a show in Welland, Ontario where these guys asked me to start a band with them and so I did. They said they wanted a drummer and I told them my brother can play drums and we started a band and played together for seven years. I started missing what I was doing at the beginning, the simplicity of it, and it happened that we had a long break. I went back to the same house and wrote a whole bunch of songs and then recorded them. I went to play a show on the weekend and while I was away the house got demolished. Someone in the family who I hadn’t spoken with hired a demo team to tear the house down and in the process, all the tapes got destroyed. Instead of recording the same songs over again, I wrote a whole bunch of new songs. Really it was a blessing in disguise, as they say, because the twelve songs I’d written before were dark and depressing and something about the old house being torn down was sort of a relief. Certain memories and thoughts that I didn’t even know were lingering there seemed to finally come through the other side of my soul (like how dirty water without knowing it runs a long distance to get clean…) At the moment I realized the recordings were gone I also realized it was the same thing with the music I’d been writing the last 7 years. As soon as a song was completed it was forgotten – never the same as it was in the form it took up in completion. To this day, I wish every record I ever made could be buried somewhere (along with those songs, that old house and the wreckage of the plane I went and flew blind anyways…)” – Daniel Romano

New Release: Daniel, Fred and Julie – “Daniel, Fred and Julie”

New Release: Daniel, Fred and Julie – “Daniel, Fred and Julie”

November 30, 2009 | Posted in: Daniel Fred and Julie, Daniel Romano 0

Daniel, Fred and Julie is a very special collaboration between three much loved musicians. Daniel Romano sings and plays guitar in Attack in Black. Calm Down It’s Monday’s Fred Squire sang and played guitar in legendary indie-rock group Shotgun and Jaybird, and is a jack-of-all-trades and master of some in the Julie Doiron band. And Julie Doiron is the legendary songwriter, singer, guitar shredder, collaborator with Mount Eerie, Gord Downie, Herman Dune, Wooden Stars, and member of Eric’s Trip, who needs no introduction. But this is a record unlike any previously heard from these fine and versatile musicians.

Dan took the train to Sackville, NB in the summer of 2009, with a couple of acoustic guitars and a couple of song books of folk songs. The tape machine was set up in Fred’s garage. A microphone was placed on the floor in front of a semi circle of folding chairs. The weather was good that week, the garage door was open, cars would pass, and kids on bicycles. Arrangements were made up quickly, harmonies worked out, lyrics written on long scraps of paper, verses picked and chosen. Dan and Fred playing guitars, all three singing together. The songs were put down quickly, with no overdubs or edits, and the record was finished in a couple of days.

A record of Folk Music, three part harmonies, guitar picking and strumming. Songs of romance, justice, murder, loafing, and complaint, horses and gambling. Old songs, in the public domain. Public songs for singing together. Daniel, Fred and Julie also features two new compositions by Dan: “Runner,” about the eternal doomed rambling of a man, sung here spookily and powerfully by Fred, and the lamenting and beautiful “Your Love.”

Daniel, Fred and Julie is available on LP and CD and for Digital download. The record in all formats is proudly Mono.

New Release: Attack in Black Split and Baby Eagle Split 12″

New Release: Attack in Black Split and Baby Eagle Split 12″

May 18, 2009 | Posted in: Attack in Black, Baby Eagle 0

You’ve Changed Records 002, ‘SPLIT’ was born in the backseat of a Ford Econoline, somewhere near the Quebec – New Brunswick border. Some old tour van in summer. Some guys in bands. We were on our way home from the 3rd Annual Sappy Records Music Festival and we were inspired. The drive was long but the passions were high. We were full of fire and sunshine. We were hopped up on road snacks and ready. I’ll sing your songs if you sing mine. Let’s make a record, start a label. Why not?

The idea grew once the tape was rolling. We started with one song each, Attack in Black covering Baby Eagle, Baby Eagle covering and backed by Attack in Black. This became two, and finally a happy four. Eight tracks in total, two sides of a vinyl LP. Our favourite songs of each other’s, ruthlessly manhandled, reinvented, knocked around and abused, cut into new shapes. Baby Eagle’s rickety folk songs polished and tuned. Attack in Black’s youthful anthems busted into shards and aged. Sounds like a good idea.

‘Split’ was recorded in Welland ON, in the Romano household. It’s all a blur, making this record and ‘Still Jimmie’ (YC-001), like one memory of people coming and going, making songs, making dinner, pot roast and coffee. Sleeping on a couch by the mixing board, sitting around the kitchen table singing. The Fall of 2008, like any moment, a split between the past and the future. This is the record we made.

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