Focus Music Notes. "Out of the Blues". Popular music through the decades

Hozier releases his debut, eponymous album on 6th October 2014 through Rubyworks/Island Records. It is preceded by a new single, Take Me To Church, on the 15th September 2014. It is only when you stumble across a songwriter whose lyrics both sound and read like poetry that you realise just what you are missing out on the rest of the time. When those lyrics are set to music that balances burning indignation with lilting tenderness, and delivered in a voice imbued with the spiritual passion and yearning of gospel and the blues, you figure you’ve chanced upon something pretty special. And so it is with Andrew Hozier-Byrne, a County Wicklow singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who goes by the name of Hozier, and whose way with words is a blessing (for us) as much as his susceptibility to romance, and romantic dreaming, sounds like a curse (for him). The vividness of his imagery speaks of a soul in thrall to, and beset by, intense and sometimes ungovernable emotions. Well, Ame

Adam Cohen will release his new album ‘ We Go Home ’ on 15th Sept ’14 on the Cooking Vinyl label. ‘ We Go Home ’, Cohen's fifth album, is a homemade affair. Since the band was playing in Europe, Adam decided to set up shop in the little white house on the Greek island of Hydra where he had spent much of his childhood. They continued recording in Montreal, where Adam was born, in the house where he spent his earliest years. "I knew I was painting a target on my back, making my album in the so-called homes of Leonard Cohen, but they're my homes too. These are the walls that saw me grow up the most and that I needed to come back to. My muse is my home". Some of the themes on ‘ We Go Home ’ continue the conversation that his 2011 album ‘ Like A Man’ began. "I want the songs to speak for themselves", says Cohen, "but what I can say is that the songs on this record mostly chronicle conversations I’ve either had with my old man, or want to have with

Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes ( http://TheNewBasementTapes.com ), a collaborative album project from Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops), Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes), Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Marcus Mumford (Mumford & Sons) and producer T Bone Burnett, will be released 10th November on Electromagnetic Recordings/Island Records/Harvest Records . The album was recorded in March at Capitol Studios in Hollywood, where the artists and Burnett convened for two weeks to write and create music for a treasure trove of recently discovered lyrics handwritten by Bob Dylan in 1967 during the period that generated the recording of the legendary Basement Tapes. Check out the lyric video for “Nothing To It” on Vevo which features Dylan’s actual handwritten lyrics inhabiting a surreal animated cityscape Bob Dylan’s original Basement Tapes have fascinated and enticed successive generations of musicians, fans and cultural critics for nearly fi