For the span of a little under 60 minutes this past Thursday night, soulful songstress Brittany Howard and the members of Alabama Shakes transformed the sold-out House of Blues into a tiny, crowded, Deep South southern bar on a warm summer night. Continue reading…
L.A.’s Audra Mae is not your average folk singer-songwriter. With pipes that approach Neko Case and a soul like Janis Joplin, she possesses a kind of sincerity that speaks to you but doesn’t succumb to the over-sharing that plagues the genre.
She might be best known for covering Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” (and it is an excellent cover), but you don’t really get a sense of what she’s capable of until you hear a song like “Cliche.”
In anticipation of her show with Good Old War and Yukon Blonde at the Soma side stage this Wednesday, June 9, we got a chance to hear her top ten moments to seize.
Stream: Audra Mae – “Cliche”
[audio:am-c.mp3]
The setting at the Copley Symphony Hall is not unlike Leonard Cohen himself. With its stained-glass windows and walls of intricately sculpted marble, the building seems as though it should house sermons rather than symphonies. But at the center of the basilican architecture lies the stage itself, lit in smokey reds and swanky purples that would feel more at home in a brothel than a cathedral. The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane has long been a tenet of Cohen’s distinguished career, which has been as defined by prayer songs like “If It Be Your Will†as it has by the lurid recounting of trysts with Janis Joplin.