Chris Garneau is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist, whose distinct musical style combines elements of folk, Americana, pop, baroque, and carnival music. Garneau cites Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone, Nico, and Chan Marshall, among others, as musical influences.

Garneau, a native of Boston, lived with his family in Paris during grade school, and later New Jersey before moving to New York City. Garneau discovered a love of music at a young age while learning to play piano. After high school, Garneau briefly attended Berklee Music School in Boston, but left after completing one term and moved to Brooklyn, NY.

Not Nice (mp3)
Black and Blue (mp3)
Relief (video)

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Starting with the release of White Ladder, Gray began to make significant use of computer-generated music to accompany his voice and acoustic instrumentation, a technique which differentiates him from many of his peers.

His musical career received early support from a dedicated Republic of Ireland fan base. His first two albums A Century Ends (1993) and Flesh (1994) made Gray a popular in folk-rock circles. Third album, Sell, Sell, Sell was released in 1996 and this was time when he was seen use his now-trademark blend of folk, alternative rock and electronics for the first time.

His breakthrough into the pop mainstream came in year 1998 with the worldwide release of his fourth album, White Ladder. In November 2002, Gray released A New Day at Midnight. The new release did not receive the same critical acclaim as the previous one, but still went straight in at Number One. In March 2007, Gray released the compilation album Shine: The Best of the Early Years.

Discography
1995 Karmic
1996 High/Low
1998 The Proximity
1999 North 6th Street
2002 Let Go
2004 Live in Brussels
2005 The Weight Is a Gift
2008 Time for Plan A

Lavender Diamond began in 2003 as a character Becky created for a traveling operetta. In 2004 was rebecca seen playing country songs with guitarist Jeff Rosenberg who left the band shortly after recording first album. Classical arias and tin pan alley tunes she played with pianist Steve Gregoropoulos, and voice and drum psychedelic doo-wop with drummer Ron Rege Jr.

“Peace on earth forever!”

Listen to Levander DiamondYou Broke My Heart

The name “Postal Service” was chosen due to the way in which the band produced their songs. Jimmy would write the music then send DAT tapes to Ben, who would edit the song as he saw fit, adding his vocals along the way, and send them back to Jimmy via “Postal Service”.

Give Up
Track Listing

1. The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
2. Such Great Heights
3. Sleeping In
4. Nothing Better
5. Recycled Air
6. Clark Gable
7. We Will Become Silhouettes
8. This Place Is a Prison
9. Brand New Colony
10. Natural Anthem

The name of the band was originally inspired by a racehorse called The Archduke. After seeing the horse run on television the band began to discuss Archduke Franz Ferdinand and thought it would be a good band name because of the sound of the name and the implications of the Archduke’s death.

Franz Ferdinand have been quoted as saying they wanted to make “music that girls can dance to.” This was combined with their art school background on their self-titled debut released in early 2004. Their second album, You Could Have It So Much Better, was released in 2006.

Franz Ferdinand
Track listing
1. Jacqueline
2. Tell Her Tonight
3. Take Me Out
4. The Dark of the Matinee
5. Auf Achse
6. Cheating on You
7. This Fire
8. Darts of Pleasure
9. Michael
10. Come On Home
11. 40′

You Could Have It So Much Better
Track Listing
1. The Fallen
2. Do You Want To
3. This Boy
4. Walk Away
5. Evil and a Heathen
6. You’re the Reason I’m Leaving
7. Eleanor Put Your Boots On
8. Well That Was Easy
9. What You Meant
10. I’m Your Villain
11. You Could Have It So Much Better
12. Fade Together
13. Outsiders

Biography

Lamontagne was born to musicians family. His mother and father was constantly traveling, and when Ray was a child, his mother left his musician father, while his father was on tour, and moved him and his siblings up North.
From that moment his father had no contact with Ray and for years had no knowledge about him.

Ray’s early life

Because of the stories told to LaMontagne about his father, LaMontagne refrained from most musical activity, instead spending much of his time reading fantasy novels in the forest. He has five other siblings, and it was difficult to his mother to take care for children and also to work.

They often moved to wherever Ray’s mother could find work, so it was difficult for LaMontagne to make friends with other children. LaMontagne attended high school at Morgan High School in Morgan, Utah, but frequently ditched class, wrote stories, or got into fights with other students. This caused him to get poor grades and LaMontagne barely graduated. After graduation, LaMontagne moved away from his family to Lewiston, Maine in order to find a full-time job.

But you know, great stories made a great musicians and your destiny will always find you so was Ray’s example.

Way to the top

LaMontagne found a job at a shoe factory in Lewiston where he worked 65 hours a week. One morning at 4 a.m., LaMontagne heard Stephen Stills’ song “Treetop Flyer” on the radio as it awoke him for an early work shift.

After purchasing the Stills Alone album, LaMontagne decided that he wanted to quit his job at the shoe factory and start a career as a singer-songwriter.

He suddenly realized “This is what I am meant to be doing, singing and songwriting”.

LaMontagne began touring in 1999, although he maintained a side job as a carpenter. In the summer of 1999, LaMontagne amassed 10 songs for a demo that he sent to various local music venues. The owner of a local theater heard the demo and invited LaMontagne to open for folk acts such as John Gorka and Jonathan Edwards.
A business executive heard LaMontagne’s recordings and introduced him to Jamie Ceretta of Chrysalis Music Publishing. CMP recorded his first album, and sold it to RCA Records in the US and Echo Records in the UK.

LaMontagne as musician

Trouble
His 10 tracks demo was re-recorded as Trouble at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, California with producer Ethan Johns. RCA Records released the album on September 14, 2004. Trouble sold over 250,000 copies and worldwide has sold over 400,000 copies.

Ray LaMontagne is particularly known for his raspy voice, which he claims to have learned by singing through his gut and not his nose and for his powerful and moving melodies.

Standouts of Trouble include the title track, “Hold You In My Arms” or “Forever My Friend”, but every other song is pretty good with the “All the Wild Horses”, pretty “How Come” and well everything, because there is no trouble with Trouble at all.

Till the Sun Turns Black

LaMontagne’s second album, Till the Sun Turns Black, was released August 29, 2006 in the US. His task was difficult, cause how do you follow a debut record that achieved out-of-the-blue grandeur on its way to selling a quarter of a million copies?

Album was reportedly written during a relationship crisis, the second album from Ray LaMontagne delivers on all the promises of “Trouble” and opens the singer up emotionally.

Some reviewers claims that Till the Sun Turns Black is better than the debut album Trouble, but make your own opinion. Both albums are great in own ways, Ray is a truly talented person and is the best “unknown” singer and songwriter today. No doubt about it.

Lou Barlow was born July 17, 1966 in Dayton, Ohio, but more commonly associated with the late-80s to early-90s Western Mass-Boston music axis.

He is widely considered to be among the most prolific and ground-breaking indie musicians of the 1990’s. He’s best known for his work with sebadoh, folk implosion and Dinosaur Jr.’s original lineup.

Many labels have been applied to his unique brand of acoustic rock, including lo-fi, folk-pop and folkcore. Barlow’s latest album, his first official solo effort under his own name, is titled Emoh.

Barlow’s latest album, his first ????official???? solo album, is entitled Emoh , recorded with a bunch of friends.

The album, released in January of 2005

takes the songs of Sentridoh and rolls them up into the production values of Folk Implosion to create a sound rarely found in the Barlow catalog.

Similar artists

Sufjan Stevens, Sebadoh, M. Ward

Discography

1990 Losers (cassette) Shrimper
1992 Most of the Worst and Some of the Best (cassette); selections included on Wasted Pieces reissue Shrimper
1994 Wasted Pieces (cassette); reissued on CD in 1996 Shrimper
1994 Winning Losers: A Collection of Home Recordings 89-93 Smells Like Records
1994 Lou Barlow and His Sentridoh (compilation) City Slang
1995 The Original Losing Losers; reissue of Losers cassette Shrimper
2002 Free Sentridoh Loobiecore
2005 Emoh Merge

A self-taught musician, the young Sufjan pounded out elaborate Mozartian sonatas on a toy Casio, and by college became proficient on the oboe, recorder, banjo, guitar, vibraphone, bass, drums, piano, and other instruments too numerous to mention. Somewhere along the line he also started to sing, though at the time his friends didn’t encourage it. He bought a 4-track tape cassette recorder and painstakingly composed 90-minute concept albums for The Nine Planets, The 12 Apostles, and The Four Humors. He read William Blake, William Wordsworth, and William Faulkner. At that time, in college, the world loomed large and daunting, and Sufjan’s music came to sound like a medieval woodwind ensemble waving swords and torches at the twelve-headed dragon of death. During his last semester in college, Sufjan pruned, picked, and assembled a selection of these songs to produce the inaugural release “A Sun Came” on Asthmatic Kitty Records, a home label Sufjan initiated with his step-dad Lowell. A thousand copies were manufactured and shipped to a dark, dank closet somewhere in the vacuous black hole of the universe, where they shifted and snored in their sleep for several years to come.

Sufjan then moved to New York City and lived bohemian style, with three other college graduates, in the unfashionable financial district, commuting by bike to The New School for Social Research, where he was enrolled in the masters program for writers. There he met Jhumpa Lahiri, harassed Philip Gourevitch on the telephone, and tried unsuccessfully to complete an epic collection of stories and sketches about backwoods Midwestern kinsmenChristian Fundamentalists, Amway salesmen, crystal healers all set in a small rural town in Michigan. Hmmmm. No one seemed very interested. Sufjan went back to the 4-track, tired of “words, words, words,” and set out to complete his most ambitious project to date: a collection of programmatic, symphonic songs for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac.

There were no lyrics, but more than a few cymbal swells, flourishes on the oboe, and ambient organ drones, all accompanied by computer-generated techno beats, and digital noise. The result was enterprising, but not quite flattering. He sent a few copies to press, which fell on confused ears. “A hyper-modified Atari battling a souped-up Colecovision in a chess match/battle royal,” one writer noted. Feeling inspired, Sufjan dropped off a copy at New York’s favored record store, Other Music, only to find it in the used section, reduced price, two weeks later. Sufjan took this as a compliment. His label did not. Write songs, his step-dad insisted. Write something with words and melodies. Sufjan went back to the books, mainly his own unwritten one. Taking bits and scraps of unfinished stories (character sketches, plot lines, penciled diagrams) Sufjan began to arrange his misshapen fiction into the bold mechanics of song, making friends with line breaks, meter, and rhyme scheme. These things led to melody, odd time signature, and a litany of jingle jangles on the drum kit, which had been taken out of storage once and for all. Here and there, on weekend trips, in quiet gasps of free time, Sufjan carried around his 8-track, recording songs in people’s homes, in cinderblock basements, in barn houses and rehearsal rooms.

The vibraphone in Massachusetts, the electric organ in New Jersey, his sister’s husband’s grand piano, upstate Michigan. Word by word, note by note, everything came together like one great cosmic shuffle, the Big Bang. The result was a lushly orchestrated road trip through the backwoods of The Great Lake State, from motor-city to the winter beaches of Lake Superior. Now this is more like it! his step-dad said. This sounds pretty good! They decided to release it to the public, to act like a real record label. They found a distributor, a publicist, a booking agent, a make-up artist, a mime. Things were looking good.

People lent an eager ear. The critics lowered their knives and their critical brow. Other Music put it in New Releases, top shelf! Europeans weren’t offended! Sufjan began to feel gallant and bold and confident about this great place called Planet Earth. This is just the beginning! he proclaimed over loudspeakers. This is just the tip of the iceberg! Galvanized by tourist brochures, road atlas maps, and the spirit of Walt Whitman, Sufjan began to intimate at other songs for other states, the American Dream, the national anthem, the continental rigmarole, the Delaware shuffle, Florida flamenco, California swing, all dramatized in song, the great epic symphony, in 50 movements, in 50 years! Lord help us!

Once the clang and clamor of patriotism subsided, Sufjan’s musical inquiry fell fast on the Land of Lincoln, stirred, perhaps, by sentimental recollections of his rebellious young adulthood on Clark Street in Chicago, Wrigleyville, the beachfront parks, the homeless kids with their pets, the abandoned school house, where he slept on a desk. During the winter of 2004, Sufjan spent four months in isolation, reading books and biographies, memorizing the unfashionable poems of Carl Sandburg, laughing and shuddering through Saul Bellow’s novels. He uncovered police blogs and books on tape. He solicited correspondence from old friends, Illinoisans once lost or estranged; he studied travel guides; he quizzed chat rooms; he made stuff up.

All research, he decided, begins with your imagination and with your intuition, relying heavily on the convictions of the heart. During those long winter hand-clapping, piano-playing, drum-rolling months, Sufjan’s heart began to expand, leaving its fist-shaped mark on a series of songs that not so much pay homage to the Prairie State, but rack and rend its characters through potato farms, steel factories, street fairs, marching parades, convoluted rivers, and centuries past and present.

The result was something bold, flashy, and ripe with advertisement, like the Goodyear blimp, but not without Sufjan’s tender rendering of the imagination. When all was said and done, Sufjan felt irrevocable changes taking place within his body, like a second puberty. His shoulders broadened, his mind quickened, his heart began to beat with quiet, patient thumps in a rhythm as fluid and faithful as the Chicago River. And so on and so forth. Sufjan’s other interests include graphic design, painting, running, knitting, crocheting, weaving, quilting, cleaning, photography, haircutting, and dry wall installation. He collects stamps and wheat pennies.

He cooks legendary omelets and can whip up a sushi feast at the drop of a sake glass. In high school he played second string guard on a district champion basketball team and created his own language, now spoken by only two other people. His brother Marzuki is a nationally recognized marathon runner, elite status. His sister Djohariah has the most complicated, most whimsical, most monumental laugh in all of mankind.

h1. Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens plays oboe, English horn, piano, electric organ, electric piano, banjo, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, recorders, wood flute and likeminded whistles, drum kit, various percussion, shakers, sleigh bells, tambourine, dramatic cymbal swells.

Discography

2000 A Sun Came
2001 Enjoy Your Rabbit
2003 Michigan !