Secrets – Allison Crowe and Linkers

Here is another one of my originals - Secrets: A song I wrote when I had a lot of stuff I wanted to talk about but didn’t know how, so I wrote this instead - and it’s definitely a longer song. These things aren’t unrelated. (Also FYI once I get set up with more gear one day I won’t have to sing the loud parts away haha but - for now - I’m loud and I apologize! ) (which is very Canadian of me) #singer #newfoundland #songwriter #piano #music #dachshund 

Arthur – Allison Crowe and Linkers

This is Arthur - a song I wrote several years ago - as performed by myself and Linkers on squeaker. (This is silly but a special vid to me because he’s my best bud and also throwing the toy while playing music is my daily reality, lol) #music #piano #singersongwriter #singer #dachshund #dog

NB for more such fun, you can enjoy Allison & band, Linkers+ vids on Alley's Vero, Vimeo, Twitter and other social sites – links to come!

Suite Moves: B2B + Shifts of Light

“We are in water, we are in shadow, we are in trouble right now.” The universal is manifest via the personal and particular, Allison Crowe and bandmates reveal through “Shifts of Light”:

Act 2 of “Welcome to Us” flows. Visual accompaniment is from the cinema masterpiece “Ménilmontant”. (The full suite – I Might / Back to Black / Shifts of Light / Tones in Transition / I Am the Air / Lisa's Song – is @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohKmHKTwpMI

Allison Crowe bridges movements in a suite of songs with this salute to Amy Winehouse:

Out on the Ocean

Practicing mandolin picking with a tune I know on fiddle - and I always go back to playing with my bass playing fingers :) lol this is a little trad tune called Out On The Ocean. Link much prefers this to the tin-whistle, by the way. #dachshund #music #mandolin (not the best angle I know but it’s what I have to work with! Haha)

A post shared by Allison Crowe (@allison_crowe) on May 9, 2018 at 10:56am PDT

Musical Heart Beat

Shadows and light - Adam took this while I was practicing...
#drum #irish #bodhran #shadows #light #newfoundland #music  @ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bic9rSeHNP5

p.s. it’s a silent film – intriguingly, Allison promises “Lots of sounds coming up in the next year ! :) xo”

"Whether I'm Wrong"

Allison Crowe with her first song and performance she posted online - "Whether I'm Wrong"

You All Haunt Me

Allison Crowe is writing this season. Poems, prose, thought pieces, stream of consciousness... words that may become songs, companions thereto, or something totally different.

Over 2017 she’s bringing together a bigger bi-coastal band, adding new members soon. While all this creativity unfurls we’ll share discoveries of recordings past.

Her music catalogue is already free of over-production – art without artifice. Still, even more unvarnished is this version of “You All Haunt Me” – a song most recently heard on Allison Crowe and Band’s debut, “Introducing / Heirs+Grievances” (http://music.allisoncrowe.com/track/you-all-haunt-me-3). This is the song first recorded simply to preserve the tune. As with the band version, the video features scenes from cinema classic “Ménilmontant”.

Journalist Erin Fletcher, describing Allison Crowe in concert, found words that fit this, and any, track of hers just as well: "The music is the woman. She communicates about love, death and life through her songs. Her voice is unmistakable, and in the same song she can be powerfully raw, yet hit a high note so delicately it slips through her lips and kisses your ear.”

You All Haunt Me from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

When I'm Gone - Day 20 on Musical Advent Calendar

Day 20, Allison Crowe’s Musical Advent Calendar opens on her cover of a song first released on the 1966 album “Phil Ochs in Concert”. Topical songwriter, humanitarian and activist Ochs penned “When I’m Gone” and its message rings true as ever today:

Each day through Christmas enjoy a new song on Allison’s Musical Advent Calendar @ http://allisoncrowe.com/MusicalAdventCalendar2016.html

Mary - Day 17 on Musical Advent Calendar

The Musical Advent Calendar’s Day 17 opens on this combination of a song from a writer of rare gifts, Patty Griffin, and an interpreter of rare grace, Allison Crowe – “Mary”. (After recently highlighting a live performance – here, now, is a downhome version.)

Each day through Christmas delivers a new song on Allison’s Musical Advent Calendar @ http://allisoncrowe.com/MusicalAdventCalendar2016.html

Simply Amazing

Amazing Radio, London, England-based international and independent radio, featured "You All Haunt Me" this weekend on the station's Amazing Rock Show. Thanks to show host/DJ Aaron Phillips and Producer Neil Reynolds for picking up on the debut from Allison Crowe and Band. Now on Amazing @ http://amazingtunes.com/allisoncrowe enjoy a playlist of 29 songs – the entire new studio album, “Heirs + Grievances”, plus a song from each of 16 earlier EP/album releases from Allison.

  

To hear the premiere broadcast of “You All Haunt Me”, it’s @ http://s3.amazonaws.com/first_plays/400101_amazingradio_28-05-2016_19-58.mp3

Between Two Trees - Allison Crowe Band - 30.06.2015 bootleg #2

Bootleg video of the Allison Crowe Band captured recently on Salt Spring Island, Canada by Leslie Colley - “Between Two Trees” flows three-part harmonies of Allison Crowe accompanied by Celine Greb (cellist) and Billie Woods (guitarist). The band’s Dave Baird lays down the bass for this song penned by Charlie McKinnon of New Brunswick, Canada.

 

 

The tune was a hit for one of Newfoundland’s favourite music-makers, Harry Hibbs, in the 1970s. As Musical Director of “Newfoundland Vinyl”, a perennial favourite at Theatre Newfoundland and Labrador’s Gros Morne Theatre Festival, Allison Crowe curates and arranges songs for TNL's wonderfully talented and spirited cast and crew.

 

The melodies are so rich and universal they’re loved across Canada and internationally – where e’er Allison and, now, her band tour. “She has renewed with stylish vigor traditional songs that deserve new life and interpretations,” says East Coast Kitchen Party.

          

Tonight Will Be Fine on Cohencentric

Cohencentric blogs “DrHGuy” and “1 Heck of a Guy” recently saw curtains drop on their years of entertaining and illuminating the world via their creator’s singular “pastiche of posts with song, dance, snappy chatter, and notes on prose, poesy, love, lust, life, & Leonard Cohen”.

Happily, the stage-lights are shining again on the fruits of love’s labour from Allan Showalter, “arguably the greatest living Cohen expert” – and we see these two websites have re-emerged in a union that promises to delight like 'tea and oranges that come all the way from China'.

Suited now as “Cohencentric: Leonard Cohen Considered” the blog is curating its more than 14,000 pieces previously posted, and adding new items. Here, Allison Crowe’s cover of “Tonight Will Be Fine” is re-framed:

I'm Alright

Musician Allison Crowe is home on the lovely isle of Newfoundland where it’s Winter-time on Canada’s Atlantic.

When not playing in one snow-pile or another, Allison’s immersed in arranging songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

On Canada’s Pacific coast, where the precipitation is in liquid form, the team at Rubenesque Records, Allison’s label, is amassing Abba-Zaba bars – should comedian Dave Chappelle happen to visit and, primarily, to sustain a wondrous period of music curation @ http://music.allisoncrowe.com

A sign of spring, cheering as an early-bird or crocus, is this first music motion-picture of our year – “I’m Alright”.

A rediscovered rarity – this song’s performed only once in concert by Allison Crowe – on her historic 2010 European tour on which she’s accompanied by musician-photographer Billie Woods and road manager Camille Schmah.


I'm Alright from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

In Paris’ Auditorium du conservatoire Gentilly – a spectacle coordinated by impresario Jacques Leforestier – Allison debuted “I’m Alright” – joined for this occasion by guest artist Emily B. Green (Em Verte), oft-MC Jessica Kuijer, photographer Frédéric Raquil, super-fan Ming Cheam – et plus. We look forward to visiting Europe again, reuiniting with our Parisian friends, plus amis old - Agnès Jourdain, Olivier Rohart, Karim Khenoune-Montanaro, Hélène, Céline – and, new - Michèle Marie Joubert, Boukary Magassa +

Maintenant, here’s the music – accompanied by vintage footage from Coney Island, New York, birth-place of the amusement park.

“Is it real?” people ask about the fun and frights in a carnival world of illusion and rides. Ward Hall, the “King of the Sideshow”, answers: “Oh, it’s all real. Some of it’s really real, some of it’s really fake, but it’s all really good.”

May it be so for life.

Time After Time

Enjoying time and opportunity this season to dig into music (rather than snow, on this coast so far, fingers crossed…) – and discovering beautiful audio and video treasures, including recordings I didn’t know exist.

Here’s a video that’s known, and with its Winterime scenes, remains an all-season joy in Allison Crowe’s video gallery. Allison, a child of the '80s, performs one of her favourites of that era in concert - a cover of Cyndi Lauper and Rob Hyman's – “Time After Time".

The Wild Rover

Like Edith Piaf, John Lennon, Luke Kelly, and other such vital, visceral, music-makers, Allison Crowe rocks.

Singing and playing everything, here's Allison's take on what's said to be the most widely-performed of Irish and/or Scottish tunes, "The Wild Rover". (The original author is unknown.) This be the newest recording of a song that's sailed forward from the 12th century lapping along the foggy shores of time.


The Wild Rover from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

The song is found on "Newfoundland Vinyl II", Allison Crowe's latest album, (and her third album globally released in 2014).

http;//music.allisoncrowe.com/album/newfoundland-vinyl-ii 

As the album title suggests, is another song collection inspired by, and arising from, Allison's involvement with the hit stage show, "Newfoundland Vinyl" - presented at Canada's Gros Morne Theatre Festival, and produced by Theatre Newfoundland and Labrador.

TNL's Artistic Director Jeff Pitcher conceived the musical production and Allison Crowe has served as the show's Musical Director for three Summers now at GMTF.

30 for 60

Dealing from the deck of "Newfoundland Vinyl II" - Allison Crowe lays down "30 for 60" - suiting the existential gambit of Ron Hynes and the late Al Pittman.

          

"Running for Home" - Live Series

Allison Crowe's bootleg series from Europe includes this video of her concert performance of a song by fellow Canadians, the Matthew Good Band.

"Running for Home", performed by Crowe, solo and with her band, at the start of this century, returns to her repertoire in this Spring 2014 concert tournee.

 

The song's originally penned by Matt Good and Dave Genn for their group's 1999 album, "Beautiful Midnight". 

"I want to live..."

Part of a series of bootleg videos - Allison Crowe live in Jazzhaus Freiburg.

The Canadian musician performs "Through These Heavy Graces" - the song which gives title to her most recent album: http://music.allisoncrowe.com/album/heavy-graces

Naming "Heavy Graces" one of the top albums of 2013, pioneering music blog Muruch says: "The original song lyrics on Heavy Graces seem to deal most often with regaining control of one's own life, venting anger at and breaking free from oppressive influences and starting fresh with integrity intact. Whether such fierce and independent themes were born from the death of a relationship or Allison's brief brush with Hollywood, it seems our favorite independent singer-songwriter is more determined than ever to forge her own path. I predict we'll be seeing Allison Crowe not once but twice on our best of the year list."

http://www.muruch.com/2013/10/allison-crowe-heavy-graces.html

Secrets Live

In this latest bootleg from her recent European concert tour, Allison Crowe, again, shows how and why she’s loved – and earns hearty plaudits - ‘round the globe.

"Canada's finest songwriter" says writer Stephen Thomas, co-founder of the UK’s Folkroom Records. "In a world of copycats and wannabes in the singer-songwriter field, Crowe is a true original and is playing in a league of her own," notes L.A.-based writer/producer and AMG journalist Tom Mureika.

Delivery of musical joy and genius today come via pathways distant from the corporate product and pop / rock ephemera of the establishment record industry.

Here at the storied Jazzhaus in Freiburg, Germany, Allison Crowe reveals her “Secrets”

Music Hath Charms

Allison Crowe rocks hard as any musician - and is just as moving when she gently delivers a reflective ballad such as "Hold Back" - first heard on her "Little Light" album - http://music.allisoncrowe.com/album/little-light

Here Crowe picks up her guitar and plays for a wonderful audience of music-lovers at Jazzhaus Freiburg - a Muttertag / Mother's Day show on the "Heavy Graces" 2014 European concert tour.