New on Park Paradigm: Music of the Week
Inspired by Marc Andreessen and my excitement in discovering the brilliant Rodrigo y Gabriela (their cover of Metallica’s ‘One’ on this album is amazing) via his blog, indeed I went right out and bought their Live in Manchester album on iTunes. (It’s really too bad that iTunes doesn’t facilitate linking to artists and albums…)
Now if you are interested in my somewhat eclectic (a polite way of saying strange) taste in music, you could always listen to my last.fm radio station (available from my sidebar) which not only plays music in my library but also music it thinks I would like (and I must say it is amazingly prescient.) However, since this is probably a bit much for most (all!) of you, I thought I’d try to identify artists or albums in my collection that I think are particularly good and perhaps not so well known.
With this in mind, there was an obvious first artist; Kate Walsh is an incredibly talented young singer songwriter who has a unique and mesmerizing voice:
Kate Walsh is a British singer/songwriter from Burnham-On-Crouch, Essex, a small fishing village. Her music is characterized by her beautiful voice and life caressing vocals. She is an artist who takes you away from the rush and madness of the world. Her music has a timeless quality, making it hard to believe she was only 20 when she released her first album (she was 23 when her second album, Tim’s House, was released).
Kate is an example of an artist who skipped the traditional label publicity machine,and rose to popularity on iTunes. Her self-made album, “Tim’s House” rose to #1 on the UK iTunes store. Her Myspace page, however, claims that she owns no ipod or walkman.
She includes Longpigs, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Rufus Wainwright, The Shins, Talk Talk, The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Red House Painters, Magnet, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Sufjan Stevens among her influences.
I first heard her at TED Global in Oxford in the summer of 2005 and I immediately bought her first album. But if you want a place to start I highly recommend her ‘Live in London’ performance on iTunes, which was recorded earlier on the same night she played this gig (which I was fortunate enough to attend) at the Water Rats Theater in London in May(this video is from a gig she played there in December 2006):
If you could buy shares in an artist, I would be getting very long Kate. Enjoy.
