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.

Running

“Sylvan Hour” nears this Spring. Simply gorgeous. Gorgeously simple. It's an album of Allison Crowe music simultaneously familiar and revelatory.

“Running” is one of 13 coming attractions in this traveling fair of song. Drawing us into the Big Top is “Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions” – calliope and all - helping get the point across. 

Do Look Back

Who Will Save Your Soul (Jewel)

As the release of “Spiral”, a new album from Allison Crowe, approaches, it’s fun to revisit where things began, with a pair of songs from among the earliest popular (i.e. not jazz or classical) songs and inspirations in Crowe’s repertoire.

Here’s Allison Crowe covering, live, a song that was a hit when she was 15 – "Who Will Save Your Soul”.

WWSYS is the lead off track on “Pieces of You”, the debut album of Utah-born, Alaska-raised, singer-songwriter Jewel (Kilcher). The POY album, (for which Jewel wrote songs alone, and together with wild-and-crazy Haligonian-at-birth Steve Poltz), has sold over 13 million copies worldwide. It’s an organic blend of songs recorded, (in the mid-’90s), live at the Innerchange coffeehouse in San Diego, and at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch studio in Woodside, California, sensitively produced by Ben Keith.

Jewel, via her “J-team”, has been kind to Allison Crowe, and especially supportive when Allison was first venturing out from her Canadian island to greet a larger world with her music.



Fade Away

Allison Crowe’s first public performance, at age 5 or 6, was singing the jazz-era hit “Ja-Da Ja-Da (Jing Jing Jing)”.
 

For the next decade, Crowe’s musical training hewed to jazz and classical, with Beethoven being a natural favourite. By her teenage years, this foundation enabled creative flight, further fuelled by such diverse influences as “The Little Mermaid”, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Chet Baker joining a new generation of bands, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Counting Crows, among them, and women in the spotlight – from Ani DiFranco, and Tori Amos, to Joan Osborne, Jewel, Sarah McLachlan and plenty more inspirations.

“Fade Away”, penned when she was 15, is the first song Allison Crowe wrote as a singer-songwriter.

On this recording, she’s accompanied by Larry Anschell, on electric guitar, Dave Baird on bass, and Kevin Clevette on drums. Recorded and produced by Anschell (Bif Naked, Sarah McLachlan, Pearl Jam), at his Turtle Recording studios in White Rock, B.C., Canada.



The photos of Allison accompanying these music vids are by the fabulous Billie Rocha-Woods

Phoenix

Allison Crowe (vocals, piano) here performs "Phoenix", a song on her album "This Little Bird" with musical accompaniment from Dave Baird (bass) and Laurent Boucher (percussion).



The accompanying image is by Russian-born American Val Telberg, a pioneer in photo-montage, and popularly known for his collaborative work with the French writer Anaïs Nin.

This photo from "the surrealist poet of the mind" was used for the cover of the Louise Varèse, New Directions Paperback, translation of poet Arthur Rimbaud's "En Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell)".

"...et il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité dans une âme et un corps/...and I shall be free to possess truth in one soul and one body."