Sights and Sounds: BeachLife Festival, Mary Chapin Carpenter, My Morning Jacket, Rufus Wainwright

Here is a roundup of timely music news that has landed in my inbox over the last day or so...Robert Kinsler

The Record Company rocking the Backporch stage at the 2016
Doheny Blues Festival in Dana Point, CA.
Photo: Bob Steshetz

The BeachLife Festival has been rescheduled until May 21-23, 2021, but the Redondo Beach, California event organizers has embraced the "new normal" of live streaming with a super cool lineup for July 23, 2020. Tune in at 7 p.m. Pacific Time for two hours of live performances and special guests, including Lukas Nelson, The Record Company, Roots of Creation, Anuhea and more. The stream will be free thanks to the generosity of Herradura Tequila.

Visit the official BeachLife Festival site for more details on the upcoming live stream and next year's event...

Mary Chapin Carpenter released her wonderful new single "Secret Keepers" yesterday and you can hear it here. The track is the latest gem unveiled from her highly-anticipated new album The Dirt And The Stars set for release on Aug. 7, 2020 on Lambent Light Records via Thirty Tigers (pre-order).

Of the single, Carpenter notes: "'Secret Keepers' is about holding onto things that feel too dangerous to let go of, too perilous to share, too complex to shine a light upon. The deeper you think you've buried something, the more power it seems to have over your life. The scars may be invisible but that doesn't mean the pain that caused them has disappeared. It's a constant reminder to be kind out in the world, because you never really know what someone is carrying around..."

Produced by Ethan Johns (Ray LaMontagne, Paul McCartney, Kings of Leon) and recorded entirely live at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, in southwest England, the album finds the 5-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer-songwriter pondering life’s intimate, personal moments and exploring its most universally challenging questions at an unprecedented time. Written at her rural Virginia farmhouse before stay-at-home orders became the “new normal,” the songs celebrate invaluable experiences and irreplaceable wisdom, while also advocating exploration of the best in all of us. In advance of the release, the album’s stirring title track, “Between The Dirt And The Stars,” premiered last month. Listen/share HERE.

Speaking of the gifted Carpenter, watch the 2016 episode of MUSIC WORTH BUYING where co-hosts TJR and yours truly celebrated her outstanding album The Things That We Are Made Of. Watch that episode HERE. 


This week saw the release of several notable albums, including new full-length efforts from My Morning Jacket and Rufus Wainwright.

Officially announced earlier in the week, My Morning Jacket have released their new record, The Waterfall II, an unforeseen and timely continuation of a psychic and sonic journey begun long ago. The album was massively inspired by the band’s idyllic surroundings in Stinson Beach, CA — and a sense of charmed isolation that frontman Jim James likened to “living on our own little moon.” There, the Kentucky-bred five-piece ended up creating over two dozen songs at the mountaintop studio known as Panoramic House. Though they flirted with the idea of putting out what would have been a triple album, the band ultimately decided that less would be more at the time and divided the project into two halves, releasing the first segment as The Waterfall: a 2015 full-length that earned the band their third consecutive Best Alternative Rock Album Grammy Award nomination in a row (Evil Urges, Circuital, The Waterfall). The Waterfall II will be released on CD and vinyl on August 28. Pre-orders, including both standard and deluxe versions featuring 180-gram vinyl with Zoetrope labels in a gatefold foil jacket, are available now.

PRE-ORDER THE WATERFALL II

As James reveals, the decision to unearth The Waterfall II was sparked from a bit of serendipity in the early days of self-quarantine. While out on a walk, he placed his music library on shuffle and soon stumbled upon “Spinning My Wheels,” a tender rumination on the struggle for presence, its lyrics confessing to feeling “hypnotized from doing the same old thing.” Struck by the song’s enduring relevance, James revisited the other tracks reserved from the Panoramic House sessions and found that they invited a welcome moment of self-reflection—an outcome perhaps even more perfectly suited to the chaos of the current day than the circumstances of their recording.

My Morning Jacket / Photo Credit: Danny Clinch

Like its predecessor, The Waterfall II mines its mood of dreamy contemplation from certain heartbreak James had recently experienced, including the demise of a monumental relationship. Unfolding in a loosely threaded narrative of loss and recovery, the album conjures an indelible pain but never drifts into despair, gracefully conveying James’s message that “there is hope beyond the pain and loss, if you learn to flow with life like water.”

Even in its most heavy-hearted moments, The Waterfall II radiates an undeniable sense of wonder, a testament to the wild-mindedness that’s long imbued the music of My Morning Jacket. With their unabashed curiosity infinitely stirred by their time at Stinson Beach, the band hopes that the album might lead others to look beyond what’s human-made in the search for solace and renewal. “As so many of us feel out of tune and long for the world to be a better place, we have to look to nature and the animals and learn from them: learn to love, accept, move on, and respect each other,” says James. “We gotta work for it and change our ways before it’s too late, and get in harmony with love and equality for all of humanity and for nature too.”

My Morning Jacket will perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday July 15.

Rufus Wainwright's new LP Unfollow The Rules. You can view the singer-songwriter's fiery new video for the song "Devils and Angels (Hatred)" HERE. The video was directed by Wainwright's husband/co-manager John Weisbrodt with costumes by renowned designer Zaldy.

Fans are also invited to attend an #UnfollowTheRules VIP Virtual Record Release Party on Saturday, July 11 at 11 AM PT/ 2 PM EDT/ 7 PM BST / 8 PM CDT. Attendees will have a first look at some exclusive one-of-a-kind Unfollow The Rules merchandise, and will get a private virtual concert, including meet and greet and a tour of Wainwright’s Laurel Canyon home. For tickets and special merch bundles, visit rufuswainwrightvip.com.

Wainwright’s ninth studio LP and first new pop album since 2012, UNFOLLOW THE RULES finds the artist at the peak of his powers, entering artistic maturity with passion, honesty, and a new-found fearlessness while remaining as creative, bold, and mischievous as ever. Produced by Mitchell Froom (Crowded House, Paul McCartney, Richard Thompson, Suzanne Vega, Randy Newman) at a variety of legendary Los Angeles studios – including Sound City Studios, United Recording, and EastWest Studios – the album serves as both bookend to Act I of an extraordinary career which, like Unfollow The Rules, began in the studios of Los Angeles, but also now as the first lines of a remarkable new chapter. Inspired by middle age, married life, fatherhood, friends, loss, London, and Laurel Canyon, songs like “Only The People That Love” and the spirited, symphonic “Hatred” find the gifted singer-songwriter ready to tackle new challenges, yet compelled to confront his past by making sense of how he has grown both as a musician and the contented family man he has become.

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT

UNFOLLOW THE RULES

(BMG)

Release Date: Friday, July 10, 2020

TRACKLISTING

ACT I

1. Trouble in Paradise

2. Damsel in Distress

3. Unfollow The Rules

4. You Ain’t Big

ACT II

5. Romantical Man 

6. Peaceful Afternoon *

7. Only The People That Love

8. This One’s For The Ladies (That Lunge)

ACT III

9. My Little You

10. Early Morning Madness

11. Devils and Angels (Hatred) *

12. Alone Time

* French versions for Peaceful Afternoon "Pièce à Vivre" and Devils and Angels (Hatred) "Haine" available as well 

See lyrics on Genius