Where Did I Go?

Lovley Friday Sun in Los Angeles has no resting at all. As the Music, Truth & Tunes week closes to its end it's with delays and alot of work. The delays are the new Quadro Q and some music reviews that I was planning to get up on the blog. So what about alot of work, besides going to school I have taken on a new project with MT&T and that's the building and creating of a free webpage that doesn't rely on the services of google or any adsense.

By building a seperate site that I own I will be able to manage the functions and the content more widely as well as the language of expression which I love to fire up to get the feeling and emotions on music. The new site will be called simply 'MusicTruthTunes.Com' which will be a easier way to search in on and it will contain 4 seperate blogs dealing with the four main labels of the site, Reviews, Profiles/Articles, Interviews and last but not least more Chronicles or 'Signature's' as I refer them to.

Also new on the site is links to order the music I speak of daily and pictures, podcasts that present to you the true side of MT&T's YouTube entrance. But a bulding progress takes time and the new site will probably be done in the middle/end of the next week and untill then, MT&T will be ran as usual but unfortunetly with lesser content. So enjoy and look up for MT&T's entrance to real world and also look forward to the new 'Quadro Q' interview with Swedish underground Singer/Songwriter Annicka Hammar and her views and perspectives on Music and Life in a small Swedish coastal town.

Until further a due, stay tuned, stay interested.

Stefan LG. Henriksson

Three Personalities of a Great Known for Wrong Reasons Musician or A Story Of John Mayer

When I ask people what they think of John Mayer I recognize two constantly repeating answers. The first is that he’s a great musician but to much of a pop singer and the second is that he’s great. It it’s different and the answer’s background often has to do with musical background or knowledge in music. What he really is and what we think of him is of course dependent on personal experience, but if we look behind and try to educate the unknowledgeable and not caring or if we try to explain to well educated what John Mayer is.

Mayer was originally schooled as a classical guitarist but always had a lot of love for the genre of blues. After a short time spend on Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mayer moved to Atlanta where he gained a lot roots and experience that started his early music career. He was a well known act in the nightclubs circuit of Atlanta and it was around this time that Mayer got signed by Aware Records and released his first full length album ‘Room For Squares’ with hits like ‘Neon’ and the grammy winning ‘Your Body Is A Wonderland’. It was first after his ‘Heavier Things’ in 2003 that Mayer considered his fame that big that he dared to change his concept which lead to the forming of ‘The John Mayer Trio’ in 2005.

About his past and background Mayer says following in his Live Concert/Documentary ‘Where The Light Is: Live in Los Angeles’ from 2008: ‘I come from playing guitar in alone in a room, that’s my story... I must have played alone in a room for eight years’. That’s the schooling that makes us understand the basic fundamentals of John Mayer. After his debut with the Trio where Mayer started to convey his musical roots into his music that he was making. When Mayer talks about the start of the Trio he says that it was an antidote that helped him get rid of the cornered feeling he felt that had gotten to with his pop melodies.

Shortly after the debut of ‘The Trio’, Mayer got back with his band and created ‘Continuum’ that was released in 2006. Keeping his pop sensibility, he brought on many of the influences from ‘The Trio’ and mixed it together to a mellow, blues, melodic critical success. During this time Mayer has shown us many sides of himself, an acoustic, a blues and a pop man hidden in the shy and mysterious personality of John Mayer. When Mayer talks about how he wants his career he simply says that he enjoys when you get something in your grasp, he says: ‘Once you caught it, you throw it back into the water and that’s really what I want to do my whole career’.

Mayer has pulled off everything from his own pop melodic love songs to Hendrix’s ‘Bold As Love’ and ‘Who Did You Think I Was’ including his last year acoustic cover of Tom Petty’s, ‘Free Falling’. Through all this Mayer has showed a calmer side and with his biggest hit ‘Waiting On The World To Change’, people of all musical circles always has something to say about Mayer and artists in all genres have worked with Mayer, including Hip-Hop Artist Kanye West to the blues legends Buddy Guy and B.B King.

Mayers blues influences and great interest to the world as far as politics goes is a growing subject matter for Mayer. With humor his personality has made the reputation of Mayer to be a perfectionist and sometimes a arrogant man, still inside the head of this man lies different music styles that only can be compared to the personalities of folk singer/songwriter or legend Bob Dylan. With a touch of humor Mayer claims that no one have seen all of him. Mayer likes to play with music and he is an explorer of importance as being one of few musicians bringing the heavier influences of Blues and Rock into the pop music today and as a better guitarist than singer he has really showed the basic fundamentals of being from the roots of great music pays off, he is a symbol to the instrumental, basics of learning and that’s why I choose to totally love the music of Mayer, together with his original sound, influences and depth.

The Records of John Mayer; 'Inside Wants Out' (1999), 'Room For Squares' (2001), 'Any Given Thursday' (Live), 'Heavier Things' (2003), 'Try! John Mayer Trio Live Concert' (2005), 'Continuum' (2006), 'Village Session' (2007) & 'Where The Light Is: John Mayer Live in Los Angeles' (2008).

So Kings of Leon? Kings of 2009? Kings I Would Say

Compared to be a southern version of the past years rock revolutionaries The Strokes, Kings of Leon has really reached the main room of music as the summer and festivals are approaching. The Tennessee band released their new album ‘Only By The Night’ last year and has so far reached their biggest success, so what about Kings of Leon?

Claimed as a experimental rock band, Kings of Leon has emerged trough the 00’s discovering exploring and become an act fitting in to the music transition that I would like to refer is happening right now. We have reached a part of our age here in the late 00’s where we can see a what’s becoming birth of a new regonized era, a reinvention of Rock & Roll is around the corner, the difference is that it comes in a new kind of outfit, the experimental, highly technical music like The Strokes, The Killers, The Hives have all been around for quite a while, but it’s not until now when we can finally enjoy the music daily on the pop radio channels all around the world.

What Kings of Leon are, is that they are the latest piece to the puzzle, a great band who comes in and stabilizes the new somewhat underground music movement that slowly reaches the surface of the unknown mass effected population and with their fast, energic and mellow rock they approach a different appeal than the Hives does for instant. Kings of Leon fits everyone and what the music falls back on is the basic fundamentals of what the rock/punk that we faced in the early 00’s carried on.
Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park was on the other hand our of my world to find any interest in and that explains the less-so-functional era that ended as fast as it showed up. What Kings of Leon does is that it stabilizes a in between that has a chance to appeal to the mass media effected population and hopefully turns things around, at least a little bit. Like the aces or kings in a deck of Cards, enjoy Kings of Leon, I will and I am!

Truth about ‘From Hell To Texas’ by Nashville Pussy

It’s not often these days that you run into a hard, heavy and raging rock & roll record. After Nasville Pussy’s debut album ‘Let Them Eat Pussy’, four rather mellow albums has been produced from the Atlanta rock husband/wife vocal duo and their band Nashville Pussy. Their new album ‘From Hell to Texas’ has a lot more to be thrilled about, it has a bad ass attitude that totally appeals to me. A missing link in a lot of new rock & roll that’s produced today.

‘From Hell To Texas’ reminds a lot of what ‘Slash’s Snakepit’ tried to do, but without the extended sound of Slash. In the opening track of ‘From Hell..’ the band rage on from the start with heavy drums, cow bells and clean rock & roll guitars in a classic rock & roll tempo. Singer and guitarist Blain Cartwrigth sometimes reminds of a punk singer but the clear middle parties of solo’s define the rock influences.

The songs ‘Lazy Jesus’ and ‘I’m So High’ are pure rock songs that sound like a composition in the early eighties before the glamour era came upon and ruined the charm (an exception from Guns N’ Roses). What Nashville Pussy possesses is the straight from hell attitude that makes hard influential rock & roll alive again. The album falls a little short in the middle but has a great end act with the songs ‘Late Great USA’, ‘Pray For The Devil’ and ‘Stone Cold Down’ and one can sense the influences from Guns N’ Roses, Slash in particular and Alice Cooper as the album has a straight on approach to be a raging journey on horses in a wild texas terrain. It’s almost lovable in a sense that it has a relaxed rockish tension over it but as mentioned falls a little bit short on the lack of originality and musical brilliance, yet though a blast worth giving more than just a chance.

Truth about ‘Last Night The Moon Came Dropping It’s Clothes Down the Street’ by Jon Hassel

Jazz has always been a unknown medium for me as a genre. The organized chaos as I have nick named the genre to has never had much appeal to me. So when taking on the album ‘Last Night The Moon Came Dropping It’s Clothes Down the Street’ by musician Jon Hassel I choose to go simply on instinct. Hassel’s new album is not the Jazz you imagine, it has a mellow depth to it, from start with ‘Aurora’ it has a mystique. The blowing trumpet reveals nothing but mysterious thoughts that some how leads out to an organized chaos in some way.

The following ‘Time and Place’ and ‘Abu Gil’ is against my principles but completely fantastic. It’s not until ‘Last Night The Moon Came’ that I realize how influential this kind of music has always been to me. The sore, calm and beautiful song reminds me of a mixture between Thomas Newman’s fantastic ‘Ghosts’ from ‘Road To Perdition’ and Miles Davis ‘Little Church’. It’s a fantastic mix in the true sense that it’s jazz that I am listening to and the personal relations to this calm and beautiful composition may be the edge of the album.
‘Courtrais’ follow the same example but also lifts in the mystique into the music that makes inspiration flow. The sense of a dark and lonely street in a big city at nighttime is the first that comes to mind and the instrumental touches of belonging strikes perfectly well all the way through the end part of the album. The end part is on the other hand a little bit more of that jazz I never tend to fully understand.

The sweet, somewhat misery ending with ‘Light on Water’ for fills the album that overall is more than a pleasant monday afternoon listening. It has a sense of depth, mystique that brings out creativity and inspiration out from the everyday. It’s a pinch of brilliance involved in this mellow, beautiful album of Jazz, that I don’t fully understand came to me a pleasant surprise.