Country music star Amber Lawrence is thrilled to return to the stage after live streaming concerts during Covid
By Jimmy Briggs For Daily Mail Australia
Published: | Updated:
Australian country music star Amber Lawrence couldn’t perform on stage for two years due to Covid restrictions.
But she is now determined to make up for lost time, with the 44-year-old ARIA Award nominee recently scoring a regular gig performing on cruise ships.
‘Every weekend of this year I have done shows in closed environments. The protocols are more than you could hope,’ she told The Daily Telegraph.
Australian country music star Amber Lawrence (pictured) couldn’t perform on stage for two years due to Covid restrictions and is now determined to make up for lost time
‘We are always in crowds as musicians now, and we want the crowds back and that’s the risk we take,’ she added.
Amber said she loved performing on cruise ships because it had a unique vibe compared to other music concerts.
‘It’s magic. It’s seven days of music fans and pure music lovers … If you’ve been to Tamworth Music Festival that’s what is happening here but on a cruise ship.’
The 44-year-old ARIA Award nominee has scored a regular gig performing on cruise ships and is thrilled to be getting back to doing what she does best
While Amber may not have been able to perform to packed crowds during Covid that didn’t stop her from reaching out to fans.
The country music star broadcast a live concert straight from a picnic bench at Grant Reserve in Coogee, NSW in 2020.
She was set up with an acoustic guitar, computer and a microphone as she belted out tunes for fans watching at home.
‘Every weekend of this year I have done shows in closed environments. The protocols are more than you could hope,’ she said
The Sydney-born singer looked delighted with the outcome and appeared to be genuinely enjoying the performance on what was a sunny Sydney day.
Amber and her husband Martin Newman, whom she met on Tinder in 2016, wed in a stunning ceremony in Port Douglas, in tropical far north Queensland, in May 2018.
The couple are proud parents to four-year-old son Ike.
Amber said it was a ‘magic’ moment when her music touched fans
John Ignatowski poses at a familiar post behind a church organ in a recent photo. Ignatowski was selected by the Marquette Choral Society to recieve the 2022 Upper Peninsula Choral Leadership Award for his work across the U.P. and Canada. (Courtesy photo)
By Journal Staff
MARQUETTE — The Marquette Choral Society has honored John Ignatowski with the 2022 Upper Peninsula Choral Leadership Award.
Ignatowski received the honor for his musical talent along with his long-time contributions to choral groups throughout the Upper Peninsula and regions of Canada.
He has a long list of accomplishments working in both religious and secular capacities.
Ignatowski is currently the director of sacred music and liturgy at the St. Jospeh & St. Patrick Parish in Escanaba.
His other experience includes service at the St. Peter Cathedral in Marquette and Holy Name of Mary Proto-Cathedral in Sault Ste. Marie.
Ignatowski has also worked across the border as the music director of the Algoma Fall Festival Choir in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada.
Ignatowski has also played a prominent role with Catholic Diocese of Marquette liturgies with his service as the music director and conductor of the choir for the episcopal ordination of Bishop Alexander Sample in 2006 and also performed the same role during the Sesquicentennial Mass at the Superior Dome in 2007.
He is also an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, mainly playing the piano, organ and harpsichord, while he also plays the violoncello, bass viola and traditional fiddle.
Ignatowski has published multiple compositions, including “Shepherds Toiling in the Soil”, a song featured in the Hymnal of the Diocese of Marquette.
The enduring appeal of former X Factor contestant Olly Murs (in 2009, he was runner-up to Joe McElderry) is no surprise.
Albeit not as abrasive or divisive, he is cut from the same cloth as Robbie Williams: outwardly a cheeky, cheery chappie, full of charm and chatter. It’s no wonder that over the past 13 years he has successfully juggled a pop star calling (Marry Me is his seventh album) with a string of lucrative presenting jobs on television.
In fairness, Murs is one of those rare X Factor alumni who, from the very start of his recording career, ensured his name was included in the songwriting credits.
However, if there’s a trick to his continued success it is staying true to not just formulaic pop songs but also adhering to the public view of him as one of life’s nice guys.
Marry Me is full of such clichés and perceptions, but Murs (and/or his management) has been canny enough to team up with the songwriting duo of Jessica Agombar and David Stewart (not the Eurythmics guy), who in 2020 wrote Dynamite, the immensely successful song for K-pop stars BTS.
The timing, you might say, is perfect, as due to South Korea’s compulsory military service, BTS are now on hiatus until 2025. Expect, then, generic pop music with one eye closed with a cheesy wink, and the other eye wide open, seeking out, laser-style, chart positions.
How important is fan service for composers when coming into established worlds created by other composers? This was just one topic leading composers in the field of the fantasy genre discussed in the Fantasy Music Roundtable conversation, presented by ASCAP, during Variety’s Virtual Music for Screens Summit.
Ramin Djawadi (“House of the Dragon”), Simon Franglen (“Avatar: The Way of Water”), Natalie Holt (“Loki,” “Obi-wan Kenobi”), Anne Nikitin (“Fate: The Winx Saga”) and Bear McCreary (“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”) came together to share why they love the genre and the first films that caught their interest growing up — “E.T: the Extra Terrestrial” proved to be very influential.
Composing music for an already established world — one that audiences know very well — presents unique challenges. Franglen led a discussion on the veil of secrecy he has had to deal with working on the “Avatar” sequel while on lockdown in New Zealand, and honoring late composer James Horner’s “Avatar” score.
The composers also wrestled with the question of fan service — they all worked on projects with deeply committed fandoms. When building scores, how much does what fans want factor in for the composers when putting together cues? How do they create new identities and put their stamp on scores when the world is recognized and fans have expectations?
For Djawadi, he came into “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon” with six seasons of the original series on his resume. So for “Dragon,” he conceptualized new themes and built on the world he had already established.
It’s a good time to be a fan of survival horror games. The genre has seen a resurgence in popularity for the last few years but with a slew of hotly anticipated titles just around the corner, a gory renaissance of terror is upon us. Leading that charge is The Callisto Protocol, a third-person survival horror game set hundreds of years in the future on Jupiter’s moon, Callisto. Although technically a brand-new IP, the game’s pedigree has built layers of hype since its reveal. Developed by Striking Distance Studios and directed by industry veteran Glen Schofield, the game is a spiritual successor to the Dead Space series – a franchise co-created by Schofield himself and due for its own revival with a remake of the first game coming out in January of 2023.
Ahead of the game’s imminent release, composing duo Finishing Move appeared on our Twitch daily show to break down their approach to creating the skin crawling score and ambient sounds that imbue the game’s world with looming dread. The team, Brian Trifon and Brian Lee White, spoke with host Jon Weigell about the innovative methodology behind the compositions, which utilized aleatoric effects and custom sounds created by the Apprehension Engine, an increasingly popular tool for musicians working in the horror space. As part of the discussion, the duo unveiled two exclusive tracks from the game’s OST. Listen to both below.
The first track is titled “Europa,” and in a note provided to Rolling Stone is described by Finishing Move as, “representative of the game because it explores interplay between horror and humanity. It opens with an extremely dissonant, near cacophony of sound, and transitions into something with lush harmony consonance — thematic even — while maintaining an undercurrent of tension and anxiety.”
The second track is “Infection,” and it utilizes multiple layers of unique instrumentation to create its sound. “This piece is an excellent example of our explorations in using organic textures and ‘infecting’ them. Metal sculpture performance, wooden instruments, a blade of grass being blown, wind, dry ice, field recordings of frozen lakes shifting, the fame apprehension engine, et cetera. Ripping the sounds apart and rebuilding with granular synthesis, degrading with distortion, mangling and manipulation with Eurorack modules, stretching and slowing down into vast reverbs and FX chains until only a fragment of the original sound remains.”
For the full interview with Finishing Duo, check out the video below.
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The Callisto Protocol releases on Dec. 2 for PS5/PS4, Xbox One & Series X|S, and PC.
This year’s composer in residence at HCMF, Lisa Streich, was represented by an appropriately large number of performances, allowing for a pretty deep dive into her musical thinking. If i say that a lot of what i heard of Streich’s music was more intriguing than immediately enjoyable, i need to qualify that straight away by pointing out that many of my now greatest musical passions began in exactly the same way: intrigue, being pulled into its orbit, compelled to consider, listen again, and go deeper. All the same, while she was never exactly boring, the occasions when it seemed as if Streich transcended the increasingly familiar boundaries of her language – typified by a predilection for stark polarities – were relatively few, though strikingly impressive.
Among the most interesting of them was FRANCESCA, given its UK première by Riot Ensemble, though one of the primary reasons for its interest was they way it seemingly deliberately went in the opposite direction of what one expected, if Streich’s programme note is to be taken at face value. Supposedly, it was concerned with Francesca Romana, the patron saint of Rome, attempting to imagine the “choir of cherubs” she heard on her deathbed. Yet everything about the piece suggested not only a different Francesca but a completely opposite context: Francesca da Rimini, lurking in the rings of Dante’s Inferno. However, this apparent inversion of expectation and meaning wasn’t in any way problematic; as it was, its diabolical soundworld filled with blank repetitions, fragile chords, harsh, shrill impacts and dull monotony suggested something a lot more true to the drudgery of religion than the kind of “idealised, heavenly, beautiful conception” Streich also mentioned in her note. In that respect, FRANCESCA was a work of raw honesty, like an extended moment of horrifying realisation at the literal moment of death. Though somewhat overlong, the work was nonetheless superbly engaging in its coalescing of fantastical and unhinged elements, playing out in a world characterised by continual close proximity extremes.
The same concert featured two excellent works from Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun. The first, Plexus, contained a musical texture not merely busy but positively frantic, continually shifting so rapidly as if life depended on it. Over time my attention felt more and more drawn away from this ear-catching activity to question what might lie below this delirious surface, what it was that was impelling this behaviour. i was still mulling over the possibilities and implications of this when the music passed through a series of curious rising scales, and ended.
Riot Ensemble, Aaron Holloway-Nahum: St Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield, 20 November 2022 (photo: Brian Slater)
Just as captivating was Spleen, a work of total contrast comprising a single, extremely slow line with some sounds falling away from it, others buzzing around, as if drawn to it like a magnet. This swarm activity subsequently took on a darker hue, becoming vague and harder to read, the pitch focus all but gone. As with Plexus, the piece presented fascinating outcomes that left one deeply curious about their origins; at just 11 minutes it was over far too soon, i could have happily listened to a lot more of this.
Lisa Streich’s music was heard at its best in Riot Ensemble’s second concert on Tuesday evening, which was surprisingly small-scale and intimate despite being held in the incongruously huge space of Huddersfield Town Hall (there had evidently been a plan for us to move around the hall according to a number of planned pathways, but this was abandoned). Of the five works performed, Sai Ballare? (Can you dance?) was especially effective, bringing together a motorised cello (unplayed but with a small motor attached to it, rotating pieces of paper over its strings – a device Streich used in many of her pieces), violin and piano. It demonstrated a low-key version of Streich’s fondness for polarisation, setting up gentleness and delicacy from the violin that was repeatedly undermined by loud pedal thumps from the piano. Over time it gave this combination gave the work a sombre fragility, those thumps resembling a muffled drum, which made the violin’s eventual, completely unexpected, frenzied outburst all the more shocking and traumatic.
Aaron Holloway-Nahum, Adam Swayne, Marie Schreer: Huddersfield Town Hall, 22 November 2022 (photo: Brian Slater)
In some respects, Streich’s shorter solo work Cadenza for motorised piano made an even stronger impact. Though ostensibly emotionally blank, it was weirdly moving, Adam Swayne’s actions enhanced by the odd little machine mechanics, whirring and clinking like a wound up music box teetering at the point of coming to a stop. It was achingly poignant.
Cellist Séverine Ballon gave an equally intimate recital in the much smaller Phipps Hall on Wednesday afternoon. She took the title of Sam Hayden’s instabilités literally, unleashing an interesting kind of energy – evidently in large amounts but initially emerging in fits and starts. Its gestural shapes formed not so much a continuity as a consistency of attitude and behaviour, which gradually gave the impression of a volatile equilibrium. Overall it came across primarily as surface music, an essay in caprice that didn’t seem to offer much deeper, though its energy was always engaging and the work’s conclusion offered something new, a lovely sequence of distorted lyricism that Hayden, having finally switched off the volatility setting, allowed time to ruminate.
Séverine Ballon: Phipps Hall, Huddersfield, 23 November 2022 (photo: Brian Slater)
The highlight of the recital was another piece rooted in instability, Shades of Light by Annelies Van Parys, in which cello and electronics were pitted against each other. Or were they? – there was at times a sense that the electronics were not so much in competition as simply responding with overwhelming enthusiasm to the cello’s progression from precarious to florid music, resulting in a wall of noise. Furthermore, the electronics were held in check and, apparently, systematically reduced by the cello via a foot pedal, leading to a more sympathetic relationship with Ballon’s grinding creaks (having essentially come to a halt) being transformed into a three-dimensional texture. The end was exquisite, the cello’s tremulous lyricism accompanied by a soft hint of bells.
A different kind of drama occurred in Chiyoko Szlavnics‘ Whorl Whirling Wings, receiving its first UK performance by EXAUDI. Just as we were getting used to its nocturnal, love-infused soundworld, the piece literally broke apart, directly addressing the effect of the Ukraine conflict on Szlavnics’ creativity, and her inability to continue the work to its otherwise natural conclusion. Whether or not it ultimately ‘worked’ as a composition is both beside and precisely the point: it was a startling demonstration of the disruption and damage that atrocity can inflict on any one of us.
EXAUDI: St Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield, 19 November 2022 (photo: Brian Slater)
In the same concert, Lorenzo Pagliei’s stunning new work Marea flusso deriva set up six parallel streams of expression, coalescing at times, in a communal flurry of activity before each singer figuratively fell asleep. Small ripples perturbed the calm music that followed, purr-like snores, mild agitation, undulating phrases, all resettling until Pagliei woke everyone up, returning to the wild cavalcade of moods. The piece would have benefitted from being shorter than its 17-minute duration, but it was nonetheless highly entertaining.
Everything i’ve mentioned was a bright highlight of this year’s HCMF, but the brightest of them all were the two performances of music by Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė. i’ve been a passionate admirer of Janulytė’s work for many years, but until now haven’t had the chance to experience her unique soundworlds in the concert hall. Both times it was literally incredible. The first was given by Marco Blaauw’s multi-trumpet Monochrome Project, in the UK première of Unanime. (The piece exists in two versions, 15 and 27 minutes respectively; this was the extended version.) It’s often hard to know what you’re actually hearing and what’s an illusion in Janulytė’s music. Here, the homogeneous texture gave the impression of falling arpeggios, and also seemed to be sagging while simultaneously remaining completely unaffected. Stasis or progression? Changes in the extents of the mutes, and their later removal and reinsertion, were obvious indicators of progress, yet the illusions continued: the sense of the make-up of the hovering chord diversifying yet impossible to pinpoint where it was altering; the suggestion of a cadence teetering on the edge of resolution, a beautifully inscrutable suspension somehow minor, major and diminished all at once. Even something as basic as its dynamic nature was hard to fathom. It was all a gorgeous, glorious mystery in sound.
Rike Huy, Laura Vukobratovič, Marco Blaauw: St Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield, 19 November 2022 (photo: Brian Slater)
A similarly paradoxical mix of impenetrability and immersion permeated the London Sinfonietta’s performance of Janulytė’s Sleeping Patterns. Now we were in the midst of a gentle, breathing pulsation, dissonant and consonant at the same time. Though rapturously beautiful, it too was hard to fathom: neither static nor moving, a shining, shimmering cloud radiating colour and warmth in all directions. It’s ironic that Janulytė describes herself as a ‘monochrome’ composer; the palette may be enigmatic, but i’ve rarely heard music more suffused with such a vivid panoply of colour.
Big events in Charlotte coming up the weekend of Dec. 2 include Tommy Davidson of “In Living Color” at the Comedy Zone, “Alanis Morisette’s “Jagged Little Pill: the Musical” at Belk Theater and Kannapolis’s own Kameron Marlowe. Queen City Nerve’s Ryan Pitkin joined WFAE’s Gendolyn Glenn for this week’s “Weekend in Entertainment.”
“[Jagged Little Pill] pretty much changed my life, as much as any 10-year-old boy can relate to a 20-something woman talking about heartbreak,” said Pitkin. “And the musical is now touring. It’s depicting a dysfunctional family in the social media age, so they’re definitely bringing it up past where you might expect it just to be based on the ‘95 album. But it uses all those songs like ‘You Oughta Know,’ which is one that pretty much anyone still recognizes about almost 30 years later.”
You can listen to the full conversation above. Here’s a quick look at what else Glenn and Pitkin covered this week.
High on a terrifyingly steep and narrow street in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, inside an unassuming house that turns out to be much larger than it looks from the street, lies a hit factory.
Vintage keyboards, guitars and exotic percussion instruments festoon the walls and lie in corners; microphones, amplifiers, wires and other pieces of daunting equipment are in nearly every room, but it’s a surprisingly homey and comfortable house.
“It’s kind of a metaphor for our whole operation: It looks small at first,” says the proprietor of this hit factory — Ricky Reed, Grammy-winning songwriter and producer of songs by Lizzo, Camila Cabello, Halsey, Jon Batiste, Twenty One Pilots, Maren Morris and Bomba Estereo; head of the Nice Life label and Variety’s Hitmakers Producer of the Year. “But then you realize that a big community of people have run in and out of here.”
Downstairs, the main studio is centered around a giant Harrison 4032 solid-state recording console (the same brand, although not the same one, used to record Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” and “Thriller”), while off in a different room is the battered black Steinway grand piano that Reed purchased from the legendary L.A. studio Sound City. “All kinds of people supposedly played this piano — Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,” he says. “I think there was a Heartbreakers sticker on the bottom side, but I’m not sure it’s still there.” (Journalistic duty compels us to get down on all fours and look — yep, it’s there.)
The underside of the historic Sound City grand piano, with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers sticker intact.
Yet the album and song that have brought us here are Lizzo’s “Special” and “About Damn Time,” which racked up five 2023 Grammy nominations — including three of the top awards, Album, Song and Record of the Year — and was released on Reed’s Nice Life label through Atlantic Records.
Reed (real name: Eric Frederic) began working with Lizzo (real name: Melissa Jefferson) in 2016. His touch was immediately evident on her debut EP “Coconut Oil,” several songs from which appeared on her Grammy-winning “Cuz I Love You” full-length three years later. He brought an effervescent pop touch that was not in evidence on her earlier releases, and although many songs on the album sound positive and empowering, there’s a lot more to conveying that than first meets the ear. (For more on Reed’s career, listen to the podcast below or see Variety‘s interview from earlier this year.) Reed sits behind the console and cues up some tracks.
This is such a cozy and livable environment — do you find it’s better to be comfortable, or somewhere grittier to kind of keep you on edge?
I like newness. If I can both be comfortable and feel some sense of newness, then that’s it for me — I’ve been here since 2015, so the newness is wearing off. But when we go to other spaces, I have my engineers set us up in what I call the “living room setup.” If I’m going to be writing songs or playing with people, we’ll kind of get into this kumbaya circle, as opposed to someone playing bass over here and the songwriter is 15 feet away. Some artists like to go in the booth to sing, but others, like Leon Bridges, whose record we did here, sits right in that chair [he gestures to a seat near the mixing desk] and cut all of his vocals here. A lot of times he wouldn’t even wear headphones. We do a lot of recording in this room.
How did “About Damn Time” came together?
We had been working on this album for a couple of years, and we knew we needed one more record that could be sort of a thesis statement for the album. Lizzo wanted a declaration, so to speak — she wanted to give everybody a warm hug, and say that things are maybe not as easy as they felt a couple of years ago, but to still give people some joy and hope. So in the first or second week of January of this year, I went in with [cowriter] Blake Slatkin and jammed on a couple of ideas. I believe it started with him playing the piano chords that would end up being our pre-chorus. [He plays the song’s isolated piano track, which you can hear on the podcast below.]
And as soon as he did that, I then heard this chord — an E flat minor ninth. What’s really interesting about that chord, for the music-theory nerds out there, is it doesn’t have a third in it. Now, usually the third in a chord is what determines if it sounds major or it sounds minor. If you omit that third entirely, you get a chord that you’re not quite sure how to feel about — “Is this a happy feeling or a sad feeling?” It doesn’t spell that out for you. And building the song around a chord like that, to me, was gonna be the vehicle for Lizzo to give us this kind of message.
Why would an ambiguous chord like that result in such a happy and positive and confident song?
Great question. I think the song is happy and positive and confident, but it also says, “Look, we’ve been going through it, and we’re still going through it, there’s a lot of challenges out here right now.” And having the song based around an instrumental that just felt happy or just felt dark wouldn’t be doing it justice. So once we got that chord, that’s when I sat down and laid in the bass groove, and as soon as it hit, Blake and I yelled — we knew we had a record. Lizzo came into the studio and brought her magic and made the song what it is today.
Did you already have the chorus and the bridge?
We had a pretty good idea of what this would sound like — we didn’t have the bridge, but had that verse groove, we had the pre-chorus, and [another bit]. But as always, Lizzo is the only one who can write Lizzo-isms, and to be honest, getting the lyric and melody right was the longest part. It was probably a couple months of day-in, day-out, talking about the message that she wanted to convey and getting it just right.
It seems like a simple message, but simplicity can sometimes be the hardest and most laborious thing to get across.
Exactly. But in the end, after all the hard work, we’re really proud that we landed it right where we wanted it to be without getting overcomplicated, considering everything that went into it. There are so many alternate versions — I tried countless things, there’s at least a handful of different, fully produced bridges that I made. “Cut it, it’s not good enough.” I worked on a bridge for five full days in the studio, with a whole different chord progression and melody, and something with a vocoder solo on it, or a little bass lick. Blake and Lizzo were like, “Not good enough.”
How do you keep perspective when you’re working on something for that long with that many different possibilities?
That’s probably the greatest unspoken challenge of all this, how to keep track of what’s fundamentally good and exciting when you’re so close to it. I think the way you know is to really, really to stay in touch with your body and what feels genuinely good. I have to do a lot of stepping back and listening to it from the top — does this feel good? Does it make me want to move? That feeling is the ultimate decider. You can cook up a lot of things with your brain and your intentions, but it has to go through the body.
How do you get distance? Do you just listen to something else?
There was a point where I was waking up in the middle of the night and the song was playing in my head — like a verse or lyric we had been working on was literally looping. And I was laying in bed one night like, “What’s a kind of a palate cleanser I could do just to get this out of my head?” And the most far-off thing that I could imagine was the opening guitar riff to “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit. (Laughter) “Not-not-not-not-not-not, ba-ba…” That did it.
You’ve said that Lizzo recorded a hundred or 120 songs for this album? What’s going to happen to them?
I didn’t produce the entire album, but she and I probably did 20 or 30, all total. And when I think a song has potential, I’m going to take it as far as I can towards completion, even if nobody’s heard it yet. But she is the hardest-working musician I’ve ever seen in the studio, the countless days and hours of experimentation, going back in and being like, “Let me see if I can beat that verse, let me see if we can beat that melody in the chorus.” It’s just so admirable and so impressive to watch. So yes, there are many, many more songs that didn’t make the album. Will they be heard someday? I don’t know. Maybe she’ll put out some kind of “Lizzo From the Vault” or something. But for right now, this was the statement that made sense to her.
The messages in all of the songs on the album are very positive and self-helpful in a lot of ways — was that something she was going for?
Oh, 100%. She’s very aware of the impact the power that her words have, even before she had a massive podium like she does now. I think she thinks of her music in large part like a service to fans, especially on this album with so many people listening. We’d have a great song and she would say, “Yeah, this is great, but the negativity in this is not something I think the world needs right now. It’s off.” Simple as that. Those kinds of small decisions, day by day, lead up to an album, and that’s why it feels cohesive and why the messaging feels so strong.
How did you end up working with her?
I’d had some success with Twenty One Pilots and Icona Pop — Atlantic artists — and first Brandon Davis [now Atlantic EVP] introduced me to [president of A&R] Pete Ganbarg and then both of them introduced me to [co-chairman/CEO] Craig Kallman and they essentially said, “Have you ever thought about doing a joint venture deal with a label?” I had seen producers take label jobs and they didn’t seem as happy in the office as they were in the studio, so I was pretty hesitant. And as he had many times before, my great manager, Larry Wade, said, “Give it a shot. All this means is that if we find something great, we have to bring it to them and no other major label. It’s going to last a couple of years, and if we don’t find anything, no big deal.” Okay, fine.
Probably four or five months after we signed the deal, my booking agent, Matt Morgan, who’s now at UTA, told Larry, “You guys should check out this artist that I’m booking, she’s selling out small clubs and she’s amazing live — her name’s Lizzo.” Larry flew out to see her at Terminal Five in New York, opening for Sleater-Kinney, and was blown away: “You gotta meet this girl.” So she flew from Minneapolis out here for a couple days, she sat where you’re sitting right now, we got familiar and our first day, we made a song called “Worship.” I took the song home to my now-wife and one of my best friends, Bradley Heron, who’s now the president of Nice Life, and I played it for them and said, “We can’t not sign this artist, right?”
What’s happening with the other artists on the label?
Along with Lizzo, we have another partnership with Atlantic Records for an amazing band from L.A. called the Marias. You could call them an indie band, but they play more akin to an R&B group, and their singer, María Zardoya, sings in English and Spanish.
We also have a partnership with Warner Records for an incredible young artist named John Robert. I met him when he was 16 and the first time he played and sang for me, I was blown away. My first question for him was, “Who introduced you to Jeff Buckley? It’s just uncanny.” And he was like, “I don’t know who that is.” I said, “I’m in!”
We also have artists that were signed to us independently, with no major label involved. Junior Mesa, another sort-of-indie act that blurs the lines between psychedelia and soul, based out of Bakersfield. We have an artist from Orange County named Saint Panther, who is a songwriter-producer-singer — I don’t even know had to describe her, she touches on hip-hop, soul R&B, even dabbles in reggaeton. We also have our latest signing to the label, an artist named Stevie. She is from East L.A. County, she plays cumbia woven in with bits of Mexican regional reggaeton. She’s one of the most creative and strange kids I’ve ever met.
And now we are full speed ahead: It’s my job to give them as much time and energy as a superstar, because that’s the promise I make to them when we sign a deal together. We’re all ready for a big, bright, exciting 2023.
1st.One’s “Shout Out” debuted in the Hot Trending Songs Chart nearly a year after its original release last January.
Composed of Ace, Max, Alpha, J, Joker, and Jayson, 1st.One officially debuted in 2020 after years of training under the talent agency of the same name.
According to a handwritten note Stevie Nicks posted on social media on Wednesday, Christine McVie’s bandmates in Fleetwood Mac hadn’t even known she was ill until a few days before her death. “I wanted to be in London; I wanted to get to London,” Nicks lamented. “But I was told to wait.”
It’s a sad story, but it somehow seems very Christine McVie. She gave every impression of being unfailingly modest and understated while playing a vital role in one of the most successful rock bands in history, maintaining a remarkably clear-eyed view of their strengths and failings: she bluntly dismissed the last two albums she made with the band, 1990’s Behind the Mask and 1995’s Time, as “terrible”. She appeared to sail through the soap opera that was Fleetwood Mac in the mid- to late 70s – a broiling mass of failed personal relationships, cocaine-fulled egotism and excess – with such a degree of equanimity that Nicks took to calling her Mother Earth. Somehow, she pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of seeming to be at one remove from the band’s madness while in reality being in the thick of it.
On 1977’s 45m-selling Rumours, while Nicks and her former partner Lindsey Buckingham wrote one entertainingly bitter song after another about their collapsed partnership, each heaping blame on the other, McVie came up with Don’t Stop, exhorting her ex-husband, bassist John McVie, to look on the bright side of their recent divorce. You could argue that was easy for her to say, given that she wasn’t the one who had to stand on stage every night listening to their ex sing a paean to their new partner (McVie’s You Make Loving Fun). But still, the song suggested its author was possessed of a noticeably different temperament to the people who wrote Dreams or Go Your Own Way. “It was never as melodramatic as Stevie and Lindsey,” she later reflected.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that McVie remained an oddly enigmatic character, even after decades in the spotlight. Behind the self-deprecation and the gorgeous tenderness of her vocals, she must have been quite steely. It must have taken some determination to establish yourself as a woman in the testosterone-heavy world of Britain’s late-60s blues revival, but Christine Perfect, as she was then, managed it. When she won Melody Maker magazine’s female singer of the year award in 1969, she pointed out that she wasn’t exactly overburdened with competition: “There was really only Julie Driscoll, Sandy Denny and me at that point – there were no other women.”
Christine Perfect (as she then was) in 1968 with Chicken Shack. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
It was a typically self-effacing comment that nevertheless told you a lot about the environment in which she first made her mark. Her head turned by the music of Fats Domino, she had already played in a blues band at art college when one of its ex-members invited her to jack in her career as a window-dresser and join his new band, Chicken Shack, in 1967. Although she later said she didn’t know what she was doing – “it didn’t come naturally and I didn’t have any belief in myself” – she contributed a handful of songs to their first two albums, 1968’s 40 Blue Fingers Freshly Packed and Ready to Serve and 1969’s OK Ken?, and sang lead vocals on their biggest hit, a lambent cover of Etta James’s I’d Rather Go Blind, on which she boldly declined to disguise her English accent.
Moreover, she seemed to have her own unique songwriting style in place from the start. Listen to 1968’s When the Train Comes Back, the first released song for which she received a solo writing credit. It’s very much written in the blues idiom – “you got 20 other women and you know another wouldn’t do” – but anyone familiar with Rumours or Tusk would find something oddly familiar about it: there’s a bittersweet melancholy to its melody that feels distinctly McVie. It’s the same with Wait and See, from her 1970 solo album Christine Perfect, which she subsequently dismissed as “pretty rum”. It’s not too much of a mental leap to imagine it slotting on to a mid-70s Fleetwood Mac album, differently arranged and produced: if it wouldn’t be a highlight, nor would it be wildly out of place.
The sense that, contrary to her protestations, McVie knew what she was doing was heightened when she became a member of Fleetwood Mac. The band seem to have asked her to join purely out of necessity. She attended the sessions for 1970’s Kiln House in her capacity as John McVie’s new wife, fulfilling the role that rock stars’ wives tended to fulfil in the era – “doodling, cooking and smoking a lot of pot,” as she put it – but Fleetwood Mac were clearly struggling without their former leader, Peter Green, and McVie happened to be on hand. She made an immediate impact, not least because she appeared to have worked out where their musical future would lie long before anyone else did.
McVie’s When the Train Comes Back, recorded by Chicken Shack
Fleetwood Mac’s early-70s albums were a mixed bag – the sound of a band who aren’t entirely certain what to do next. But whenever McVie takes over the songwriting, you can make out Rumours in embryo form. Tellingly, 1972’s Spare Me a Little of Your Love remained in their live set long after Nicks and Buckingham had joined the band. And it speaks to McVie’s determination that she remained with Fleetwood Mac through these years of meagre sales, lineup changes and widespread lack of interest (a kind of nadir was reached on the 1974 release of Heroes Are Hard to Find, when their manager sent a fake version of the band to tour the US, claiming he owned their name). But perhaps she stuck it out because she could make out a potential destination.
Long before Fleetwood Mac decamped from the UK to Los Angeles, McVie’s songs were touched by west coast sunlight. Popular wisdom and record sales might suggest that Buckingham and Nicks’s recruitment drastically revitalised the band, but it’s worth noting that the song that announced the arrival of Fleetwood Mac 2.0 was, depending on what country you lived in, Warm Ways or Over My Head – both examples of McVie doing what she had already been doing for years: better produced, certainly, and benefiting from the gorgeous blend of voices that was McVie, Buckingham and Nicks singing in harmony, but still immediately identifiable as the work of the woman who had written Spare Me a Little of Your Love.
Christine McVie: a look back at the Fleetwood Mac star’s greatest hits – video obituary
Just as McVie had been steadfast during the chaos of Fleetwood Mac’s lean early 70s, so she was steadfast amid the personal turmoil that enveloped the group once sales took off. There was the bitter and seemingly unending fallout from Nicks and Buckingham’s split; wild musical experimentation fuelled by a desire to keep up with the late-70s new wave movement; drug addiction so crippling that Nicks later claimed not to remember an entire four-month tour; moments where everyone else in the band seemed lost or uninspired. But McVie reliably turned up to album sessions with a clutch of fantastic songs.
Her contributions to 1979’s Tusk balance and anchor its more outre moments, whether they were implausibly soft and cosseting – Over and Over and Brown Eyes – or gently tethered to her blues roots, as on Think About Me. From 1982, Mirage is the least well-regarded album by the blockbuster iteration of Fleetwood Mac, but there’s very little quibbling about the quality of McVie’s Only Over You – a beautiful, careworn tribute to her ex-boyfriend, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson – or her stately album closer Wish You Were Here (written with Colin Allen). The sessions for 1987’s Tango in the Night were, by all accounts, horrendous – Buckingham banished Nicks and Mick Fleetwood to a Winnebago parked outside the studio, horrified at the state they were in; John’s drinking was so out of control he subsequently began suffering alcohol-related seizures – and yet McVie came up with the peerless Everywhere and Little Lies (co-written with Eddy Quintela), both multi-platinum singles.
L-R: Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie and John McVie, in about 1975. Photograph: GAB Archive/Redferns
The lineup of Fleetwood Mac that recorded Tango in the Night never made another album. Understandably dispirited by the subsequent Behind the Mask and Time, gripped by a fear of flying and keen to return to the UK, McVie left the band in 1998. She released a solo album, In the Meantime, in 2004, her first in 20 years, but she had never seemed terribly invested in a solo career. It was, she said, “not my bag at all, I like to be part of a group”, although her writing never dipped below a certain standard.
Far better was her eponymous 2017 collaborative album with Lindsey Buckingham, home to her beautifully atmospheric Carnival Begin. Now that McVie was touring with Fleetwood Mac again – she rejoined in 2014 – the general belief was that the quality of the Buckingham-McVie album boded well for a full-scale reunion. But no: Buckingham was fired from the band and they continued touring with replacement members.
Earlier this year, McVie gave a handful of interviews to promote a collection of her solo work. She was as humble and understated as ever, doing her best to debunk at least some of the mythology around the band. “We laughed a lot,” she offered drily, “in between the bouts of melancholy and suicide.” She also flatly told anyone who asked that she didn’t miss being in Fleetwood Mac, or making music. Reading between the lines, you got the feeling that McVie was abundantly aware the music she had made was both impervious to changing fashion and vastly influential – in the tribute note she posted on Instagram, Nicks quoted some lyrics by Haim, just one of an array of younger artists audibly under their spell – and that she quite understandably thought she had achieved more than enough in that field. But, characteristically, she was too modest to say it out loud.
