Maestria New-Yorkaise

Could you tell us more about the Amelia Players record ? Will that eventually come out ?
It might, but don't hold your breath. About a year ago I had the idea to rope some friends into doing a three-way split album. So I convinced my friend John Lindenbaum (who actually wrote "Last Night I Saw God on the Dance Floor") to participate, and also TJ and John, who for a long time have played together in a project called Ulf Magnet. TJ and John also played drums and bass on the Maestro songs for the album, so they're actually all over the record. Anyhow, Ulf Magnet has a running history of performing rock operas, and one of these performances made me think that we should try to thematically link all of the songs. After discussing some potential themes, we settled on trying to write songs about Amelia Earhart. I suggested her only because I knew that she had disappeared, but I didn't know how interesting her story really was. In the course of putting the album together, we learned a lot about the theories of what happened to her and also about some of her family history, which allowed us to develop some of our own theories, which then came out in the songs. So what you hear may be fact, or it may be speculation based on fact, and it creates a nice story-like quality that flows through three "sections" of the record that are divided by artist, and which more or less correspond to the early, middle, and end years of Amelia's life.
We all recorded it by ourselves, so it's a homegrown record from start to finish. John Lindenbaum recorded his songs on an 8-track in his room in San Francisco, and TJ recorded the rest of the songs to 8-track in Altoona, Pennsylvania where we drank a lot of beer and played some par 3, because that's what you do when you're in Altoona. I think the album has a lot of great stuff on it, but the songs that we contributed aren't really representative of Maestro Echoplex. Maybe eventually it will come out under the name The Amelia Players, but I think we all agreed that we needed to prioritize our other endeavors. In the meantime, if anyone wants to hear some of it, I put up 2 mp3's from each part of the record on the Maestro webpage (www.maestroechoplex.com/ameliasongs.html).

What other band would you recommend : in DC, in NY, friends or just artists you think we ought to discover ?
Check out The Gena Rowlands Band (www.genarowlandsband.com), from DC. Beautiful songwriting with powerful lyrics. It's mostly electric guitar with some brush drums and violin. Really stunning. There isn't anybody out there making music like this right now.
We've recently met Burd Early (www.burdearly.com), and I think they've got some wonderful songs, too. They're from NYC.

site officiel : www.maestroechoplex.com
le site de Zeal Records : www.zealrecordds.com

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