I am a singer/songwriter that makes his home in Connecticut. I have loved music all my life. It is and has always been the source of great pleasure.I have always viewed music as a passion and not just a hobby. When I write and record a song Im hoping that I am connecting to the listener on some level. If someone is moved by one of my songs then I feel as though I have succeeded.. The biggest influences musically for me have been The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Sting.
Although I write and record my own songs, I still love to do some covers.
Young Man is Colin Caulfield from Chicago. Regarding his music, “It’s enough to make you stop and say, “What is that?” It being the gorgeous melodies and lean, spellbound guitar lines of Colin Caulfield, an English/French lit major who’s about to change what it means to be a shape-shifting singer-songwriter in the YouTube age.
Just ask Bradford Cox. He knows. Why, just a year ago, the Deerhunter frontman stumbled upon Caulfield’s organ-grinding rendition of “Rainwater Cassette Exchange” and said it’s “fantastically superior to the original. It actually sent shivers up my spine, especially during the second verse.”
Believe it or not, that chilling cover was just a warmup session. As killer as he is at capturing the very essence of everything from Animal Collective to Ariel Pink, Caulfied’s true talent is in telling his own Young Man stories. The first chapter of which goes by the name Boy, a deceivingly-simple suite of songs about wanting to grow up without having the slightest idea of what ‘being a man’ actually means.
Now that’s a reason to hit rewind, from the tone-setting tenderness and psych-infused harmonies of “Five” to the restless rhythms (Caulfield was a drummer well before he became a singer/guitarist) and room-engulfing intimacy of “Up So Fast.” Both of which feature some of the most hopeful/haunting choruses you’ll hear all year.
And that’s just the beginning, of course. Since Young Man was conceived as a concept project about the passing of time, love, and loss, Caulfield already has two loosely- linked LPs on tap—a faceless collection of fragile characters that could be any one of us, really.
James was raised in Sheffield, England, and first began cultivating his musical interests participating in his school concert band and big band as a bassist. Meanwhile, he took home vinyls of Peter Gabriel, early Elton John, Robert Fripp, Talking Heads and Paul Simon, and began producing his own home-made albums on the side. Within time, he began showcasing his songs on the school stage, performing “interpretive dance” to his under-rehearsed rock numbers in front of bewildered peers and teachers, and running the gauntlet of early-morning assembly performances.
At the University of York, James became involved in the university’s drama and musical theatre scene, performing in everything from Ayckbourne to Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, and risking arrest for indecent exposure in front of nearly 2,000 people in 'The Full Monty'. However, it was James’s performance as the title role in 'TONY! The Blair Musical' at the Edinburgh Festival that truly stuck; and, after sell-out performances at two consecutive festivals, the shadow of Tony Blair became hard to shake. The play recently secured itself in posterity, in the Telegraph’s piece ‘Five Great Political Plays’. At university, James also started collaborating with student filmmakers, and nurturing a passion for film music.
After graduation, James began pursuing a music career, starting work on his debut album, 'The Red Room' – a much more personal endeavor than any of his preceding home-made efforts – written and produced under the influence of Nick Cave, Duke Special, Neil Hannon, Noel Coward, Nick Drake, Antony and the Johnsons, Kate Bush, and a host of others, and produced on next-to-no budget. A solemn but whimsical twelve-song record, it collects together the flotsam and jetsam of broken love and fading youth. During this time, James has also continued to score music for short films, and has acted in a number of shows, including an hour-long comic monologue called ‘Simon Says’ on the off-West End stage, which won him a Spotlight Emerging Artists Award for best actor, and in a black comedy short as a bowler-hatted-gentleman-serial-killer. James is currently living in London, collaborating with independent filmmakers and writing for his second album.
What they are saying!
“Delicate, soaring pop" - Indiestore panel of music journalists, including NME and Rolling Stone
“A smooth voice reminiscent of The Divine Comedy ... A name to look out for" – Britmag
“Providing enough physical presence to make the audience ripple with excitement every time he is on stage" - Broadway Baby
In a music scene where cookie cutter performers claim to be unique, Dark Beauty combines elements of dance, rock, opera, theater and world music into a true one-of-a-kind experience. The band’s classically influenced gothic alternative progressive rock gives fans a way to stretch their ears and experience styles and mixtures of music that they’ve never heard before.
Lead Vocalist and Songwriter Liz Tapia began this journey back in 2009 when she wrote and recorded the first song from the project “Save Yourself.” The song mixed a Middle Eastern beat with Santana-esque guitars, gothic lyrics and a soaring melody, beseeching a lover to turn away before it was too late. The song became instantly popular with fans of many musical styles, leading her to pursue the project and its main character on a grander scale.
Dark Beauty has since become a concept album depicting the tragic tale of the Dark Angel, and her tragic tale fall from grace. Banished from heaven she is pulled down from grace above, falling deep into the woods of the dark primeval forest. With a broken wing she now rules an old abandoned castle, containing secret passages, hidden staircases, and ruined sections.
Liz is a lyric coloratura soprano, whose smooth, warm, versatile voice adds infinite textures to the epic music she writes and performs. Her background in acting, film and musical theater all affect the musical scope and cinematic feel of her work. As complex as the music is, Liz knew the band would require the highest level of musicians possible to fulfill the full potential of her project!
Bryan Zeigler was the first member to join the Dark Beauty team as lead guitarist and co-writer. His years of experience with a multitude of progressive rock bands, as well as knowledge of the music business and arrangement skills were a perfect match. Soon after came the musical talents and versatility of master Drummer/Percussionist Dan Granda, who added a perfect combination of strength and finesse needed to stylize the epic story.
Gary Perkinson joined on bass, lending his classical skills, super easy going personality and wonderful musicianship, to anchor the band with Dan.
Dark Beauty is currently getting airplay by several stations hitting high marks on all charts and growing rapidly. The album is being engineered and produced by Artie Rodriguez, and the first album is scheduled to be released by Spring of 2013.
The members of Capitol 3 found each other in the band Blackberry Wednesday. In the fall of 201l Blackberry Wednesday came to an end, and three of the members, Rod Henson (singer), Lucien Croy (guitarist), and David Wade (Drummer) came together to form Capitol 3, with a new concept.
In the summer of 2011 while on a short tour that include playing at the Florida Music Conference, we had one of those "on the road" moments that would change everything. While sitting at a bar in Jacksonville Beach, FL, the 3 of us were forced to ask ourselves what if?
So over the next couple of months we worked on the recordings and presented the idea to our label. The label strongly objected to our new concept, and sense we had fulfilled our contact, we parted ways. Unsigned and Loving it! Within a few weeks we were able to streamline the music by putting the bass and rhythm guitars on tracks , and took the show on the road. As it was, due to the abrupt end to our last project, we still had some dates to fulfill and after a brief tour as a 3 piece we new this was the proof that the jam is really still the jam.
Capitol 3 is currently working on our debut album that is due out in September of 2012, and is planning a pre and post release tour. Stay tune for schedule updates and exciting news from Capitol 3. wasssaaaHH!!!!
Hard times tunes of days gone by (economic woes, unions, exodus, murder, influenza).
Indie Folk/ Americana music with turn-of-the century costumes & film projection.
BIO: Haun’s Mill
Haun's Mill combines folk, spaghetti western, and classic country into a sound distinctly their own. Their live performances are coupled with period movie projections, resulting in a powerful presentation of sights and sounds. Described as haunted saloon music, Haun's Mill has found a home in Austin's quirky environment since moving there in late 2010. Since their relocation, the five piece band holds residency at the swanky 1920's themed East Side Showroom and has played local clubs and festivals including Swan Dive, Continental Club, Art Outside, Pecan Street Festival, Parish, Club DeVille and Momo's.
Songwriters and bandleaders Eliza Wren (Austin's own revered songbird) and Nord Anderson (Salt Lake City) joined forces after meeting at college in 2005. Initially a duo, their first gig was opening for a sold out Monkey Grinder Halloween Bash at Velour in Provo, UT. The great reception prompted expansion to a full band with Mike Crandall, B.B. Melanson and Anthony Phan (double bass, drums and trumpet) and their first self titled album, released in January 2010. After Eliza and Nord moved to Austin, they added current members Keith Palumbo (drums), and Courtney Jackson (double bass). The band is in the process of recording their second album at Public Hi-Fi Studio in Austin, taking the months of November & December to do so. The album is scheduled to be released in early Spring 2012.
Black Cherry are a British/French electro pop band. The band was formed in London in 2007 by singer/songwriter Megane Quashie, drummer/producer Guilhem Fraisse and guitarist Robert Moore. After performing at Glastonbury 2008 on “The Other Stage” as well as many other festivals that year, Black Cherry release their first EP 'This is Control' in the beginning of 2009 and embarked on an American Tour. After playing a number of festivals including Hungary's Balaton Sounds the band lost guitarist Robert Moore after he died. The band's second EP "The Preface" was dedicated to his memory. After playing at Glastonbury Festival again in 2010 festival organiser Michael Eavis called them "The best looking band at the festival". In 2011 the played at South by Southwest Festival and toured America. In Summer the band announced the release of their double A-Side "One Another"/"Lost in the System" on August 29th to be distributed by Island/Def Jam Records and received positive reviews in The Guardian Newspaper. The band are currently working on a full length album.
Held every year on verdant polo grounds in Indio, California, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is many things to many people: A way to hear the best alternative music, a giant lawn party of hipsters wearing hemp sunhats, or the one place you can gawk at members of super-bands as they ride around on golf carts. For Brooke Fraser, Coachella 2009 was the event that re-awakened her desire to make music. It was April and the New Zealand-born singer and songwriter was burnt out after completing a three-year tour supporting her second album, 2006’s Albertine, which debuted at No. 1 in New Zealand, reached five times platinum, and remained in the Top 20 for nearly a year. “I felt so exhausted, I could barely get out of bed,” Fraser says, “let alone think about writing songs for a third album.”
As the sun went down over Indio on the Saturday night of Coachella 2009, Fraser found herself watching one of her favorite bands, Fleet Foxes. “Robin Pecknold began to sing and the purity of his voice seemed to melt away every memory of trauma and disillusionment,” she recalls. “Then the other voices joined his and it all felt so human and honest; I and everyone around me was enthralled. We were all being spoken to, and we were all listening. It was a moment where I remembered the power of music as a language, a connector. I remembered that I’ve been given the gift of speaking a particular dialect of this language and realised I didn’t have the option of being resigned to silence and I didn’t want it.”
The experience inspired the song “Coachella” — one of several emotionally resonant and uplifting tunes on Fraser’s new album Flags, a dreamy, alternative-pop collection that showcases her agile soprano, lilting melodies, and knack for telling her stories through the lives of vibrant characters on songs like “Betty,” “Crows and Locusts,” “Jack Kerouac,” and “Ice on Her Lashes.” “I’ve never used as many characters or as much narrative in my songwriting as I have on this record,” Fraser says. “On my previous albums [2003’s What To Do With Daylight and Albertine], I was singing completely as myself, which is why I think I got so burnt out from touring. Albertine was inspired by incredibly significant events and people and every time I’d sing I’d go back to that moment where my heart was ripped open. So singing such heavy songs nearly every night for three years took a toll. On Flags, it’s still me speaking, but it’s me speaking through the voices of different characters and their stories. It’s more survivable.”
“Betty” (co-written with Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman and Ben West of Detroit indie duo The Real Efforts of Real People) is about a cool, unapproachable girl who hides her Canadian-shaped birthmark – a thinly veiled metaphor for all the other things she is afraid to show people. “Crows and Locusts” is a Steinbeckian story of a farming family helplessly witnessing the decimation of their crops through various forms of pestilence, told through the eyes of the young daughter. “Ice On Her Lashes” is a meditation on the cycle of grief. “There’s that moment when you get a phone call and find out that something life-shattering has happened and you look around and wonder how other people are still going about their daily lives, sitting in traffic or buying milk, when yours has just been changed forever,” Fraser says. “The song is about how most of us will at some point be somewhere in that cycle. Life goes on and the pain doesn’t go away, but becomes liveable.” Other album highlights include the rollicking pub song “Orphans, Kingdoms”, the high-energy, summery romp “Something in the Water”, “Who Are We Fooling?” a duet with Aqualung’s Matt Hales, co-written by the two, and the title track “Flags”, a meditation on injustice.
Fraser wrote the songs in bursts, making writing trips to the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and Northern California’s Bodega Bay before she and her husband decamped from their home in Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles in February 2010. Once in L.A., Fraser invited a group of local musicians, including guitarists Michael Chaves and David Levita (who played on Albertine), to join her in the studio where they set Fraser’s powerful stories to exquisitely textured backdrops of acoustic and electric guitars, bass, drums, piano, strings, horns and wild percussion often played on the body parts of Brooke and the band themselves— creating an earthy, organic feel to the proceedings. The album was engineered and mixed by Joe Zook and produced by Fraser herself.
“I’ve always written and played my own songs and had my very particular say in the way they sound, and it just began to get to me the way people would ask, ‘Who’s going to make your next record.’” Fraser says. “Just this idea of ‘What man is going to help you to be a musician?’ I’m a good musician and I know what I want. People hire a producer because they like the sound that particular producer can create. I didn’t want someone else’s sound. I didn’t want someone else’s idea of my sound. I wanted my sound.”
Fraser’s confidence is rooted in a life-long history steeped in music. Her mom discovered her plinking out “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music on the piano when she was two, and made sure her daughter had access to instruments. Fraser grew up in New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington, and her earliest musical memory is of watching her great-uncle Athol, “a one-armed trumpet player,” practice circular breathing on his horn. At seven, she began piano lessons. At 12, she began writing songs after a music teacher asked her class to compose an original tune about Christmas. “I discovered that I felt at home in the process of creating words and melodies,” she recalls. “And I’ve been writing ever since.”
Fraser fell in love with the confessional lyrics and timeless melodies of James Taylor, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Paula Cole, and eventually began to play the guitar. In 2002, when she was 18, Fraser signed with Sony Music and moved to Auckland where she played regularly at local venues while she wrote the songs that would appear on her debut album, What To Do With Daylight. That album, released in New Zealand in 2003, debuted at No. 1 and achieved gold status the same week. It eventually went eight times platinum, selling more than 120,000 copies in New Zealand alone, and remained in the Top 10 on the album charts for more than a year. The album spawned five Top 20 singles and made Fraser a star in her home country, leading to 2004 tours of Australia and New Zealand with John Mayer and David Bowie.
In 2005, Brooke took a trip to Rwanda, 11 years after a genocide that claimed the lives of nearly one million people. During the journey, she met and befriended a number of Rwandans who entrusted their stories to her, including an orphan named Albertine, the namesake of her second album, which was released in the U.S. in May 2008. After being featured on the iTunes homepage as an “Editor’s Choice” selection, Albertine album climbed to No. 5 on the digital retailer’s U.S. album chart. Fraser toured the States that fall, winning over audiences with her dry wit and warm stage presence.
Now she’s starting anew with Flags, the title inspired by her writing trips into the more remote parts of the U.S. “I was traversing these incredible landscapes and wondering at all the people who had worked this land and what their lives were like, how they had come to arrive in and then leave these places. One day this image of a flag popped into my mind and I thought, ‘Our lives are like flags – flying for a short while, a stake in the ground, marking our territory,’” she says. “We fly our colors – our history, belief system, culture, identity – but eventually our flag will wear out and return to the ground and someone else’s flag will replace our own. I feel like that theme weaves its way through my new songs, like ‘Ice On Her Lashes’, ‘Crows and Locusts’ and of course ‘Flags’. The characters in these songs were flags, and now we’ve come to plant our flags in the ground where they once were.”
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Brooke Fraser CDs (Release Dates)
What To Do With Daylight (29 October 2003) What To Do With Daylight CD + Bonus DVD (29 July 2004) Albertine (1 December 2006) Albertine Deluxe Edition (3 December 2007) Flags (11 October 2010) Flags Deluxe Edition (11 October 2010)
Singles (Release Dates)
“Better” (4 August 2003) “Saving The World” (13 April 2004) “Arithmetic” (16 August 2004) “Without You” (17 January 2005) “Deciphering Me” (17 November 2006) “Shadowfeet” (9 March 2007) “Albertine” (1 December 2006) “Something In The Water” (1 August 2010)
Adam’s musical journey began at the age of 10 as a member of “The Young Canadians of The Calgary Stampede”. He received extensive vocal, dance, and performance training, while performing for millions of people throughout his tenure with the company.
In high school he formed the boy band “Off Limitz”. It was then that Adam discovered writing and producing music. Adam took the role of lead singer, writer, and choreographer in the band. Off Limitz achieved radio play with their song “Forgot About You” (written by Adam) on various Canadian stations, including TOP-40 station POWER 107.3 in Calgary. They won 2 consecutive “8 o’clock Showdown” segments on POWER 107, leading to the highest differential ever recorded on that station with a staggering 98% of listener votes.
In 2001, Off Limitz recorded a single with 15-time Grammy Award winner David Foster. The band was flown to Los Angeles and recorded at Capitol Records. They also spent time with David at his home studio in Malibu. It was the most fulfilling and encouraging musical experience of Adam’s young music career.
In 2002, Off Limitz signed a management deal with a firm in New York. They embarked on a 2 month tour of the United States, performing at venues such as Disney World, Busch Gardens and Sea World. It wasn’t until a sudden change of climate in the pop music industry that Off Limitz decided to take what would inevitably be a permanent hiatus. Adam continues to be great friends with his former band mates to this day.
In 2003, Adam decided to take on a new challenge: to produce and record music for others. He took an interest in the creation, arrangement, recording, and mixing of music. As a self-taught musician, Adam has spent the last 7 years writing and producing in the pop and urban genres for local and international clients, while continuing to lend his vocal abilities to many projects along the way.
This brings us to 2011, the newest chapter in Adam’s musical journey. With a return to writing, recording and performing, it is his immediate goal to further develop his music as a solo recording artist. Reality says that only a small portion of the world knows who he is now, but with more and more people gravitating towards his music, that is soon to be changed! In 2011, Adam began recording and posting videos to his YouTube channel, showcasing his vocal abilities, guitar prowess, and production skills. Starting out as an experiment, the immediate global response has been incredibly positive! His YouTube videos have already accumulated over 1.3 MILLION views! Attracting viewers from Vietnam to Australia, the United States to Sweden, there is a growing awareness of who Adam Stanton is! 2011 has proven to be a year of great strides for this Calgary based recording artist!
