Amoeba Music is delighted to announce that we’re sponsoring the Allison Weiss and Rachael Cantu West Coast tour in March! Catch them at Amoeba Berkeley for their only show in the Bay Area on March 8th at 6:00pm! If you're not in the Bay Area, never fear...look for their other dates starting in San Diego on March 6th and heading up the coast for a finish in Seattle on March 11th.

Rachael Cantu
Amoeba has been a big fan of LA-based singer/songwriter Rachael Cantu for a while now and Amoeba Records released a recording of an acoustic set performed in the Amoeba Hollywood Green Room! Check out  Green Room Sessions and download a free track from this exclusive session HERE.

Best known for her evocative blend of indie folk rock delicately infused with distinctly powerful vocals, gentle melodies and heartfelt lyrics, Rachael Cantu has the whole package. It's no wonder she's been aptly described as "something of a mix of The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde, PJ Harvey, Sarah McLachlan, and Norah Jones." She's toured all throughout the US and Canada opening for B.B. King, Pat Benatar, Tegan & Sara, Ben Lee, Joan As Police Woman, and more. Her music has been featured on TV shows such as Private Practice, Pretty Little Liars, Royal Pains, and Degrassi just to name a few.

"The main problem is that generally when you make an album, you record it first and then (afterwards) you tour. So by the end of the tour the songs are incredible because they are so practiced," said Brandi Shearer, pictured left earlier this week onstage in New York.

"I wanted to do this the right way; to tour first and record the album after....This tour is basically the pre- production."  The Amoeba Records recording artist was speaking two nights ago in New York City, moments after getting off stage to rousing applause at Manhattan's Mercury Lounge where along with current two-piece band -- drummer Ramy Antoun and guitarist Chris Bruce (the musicians on her soon to be recorded next album, and who just got off tour with Seal) -- sounded like they've already honed their sound on all the new tracks enough to go into the studio and record that next album right away.

The studio recording dates won't be for several more weeks, sometime this summer when Craig Street (Cassandra Wilson, Norah Jones,Me'Shell NdegéOcello, John Legend, k.d. lang, Manhattan Transfer etc.) produces the anticipated new album -- the follow up to last year's Close to Dark.  Currently Shearer & band are still in the midst of their hectic cross-country tour with another busy week of shows to go, all part of a coast-to-coast Amoeba Music Presents tour that also features Quincy Coleman and Kate Walsh.

Damn! It's already November 8th! Where did the time go? It seems like only yesterday when this AMOEBLOG corner of the Amoeba Music website started up. But actually it has been jumping off since March of this year -- not that long ago, true, but long enough for the accumulation of a bounty of engaging AMOEBLOGS covering oodles of different topics (music and otherwise) from a stable of gifted and insightful AMOEBLOGGERs including (but not limited to) Mike Battaglia, Job O Brother, Brad Schelden, phil blankenship, Miss Ess, Gomez Comes Alive, Whitmore, and the Bay Area Crew. In all, there are hundreds and hundreds (well in excess of a thousand) of AMOEBLOGS posted and available to read in the Archives right here. Just for me alone there are 170 AMOEBLOGS archived and I am only one of a dozen active AMOEBLOGGERs.

Glancing back at some of these AMOEBLOGS I have posted since May, I think it is time that I should follow up on a few of them. First up was the post (one of several) about the historic Paul McCartney instore at Amoeba Music Hollywood store on June 27th that generated a ton of COMMENTS from Amoeba shoppers who were lucky enough to make it inside to witness the former Beatle's memorable performance. Anyways, the follow up, good news, is that next week (November 13th) one of the songs from Paul's performance that day ("I Saw Her Standing There") will be released on an extremely limited edition 12" vinyl-only release titled Amoeba's Secret. This Paul McCartney maxi-single will feature four songs from the exclusive instore: “Only Mama Knows” & "That Was Me" (both originally on his latest release) plus ”C Moon” (the classic Paul McCartney & Wings song), and of course, the aforementioned "I Saw Her Standing There." The sure to be highly collectable, vinyl-only Amoeba's Secret will be available in all three Amoeba Music stores next Tuesday (11/13) and also here at amoeba.com -- priced at $5.98. (Note that this rare release will not be released digitally or as a CD and since it is limited, is bound to sell out fast.)

I remember the day Dave Prinz, one of the owners of Amoeba, came running into the office of the Haight Street store in San Francisco. Dude wasn't walking: he was floating. He was beaming, bouncing and dancing. He was pretty much out of his mind with the happy.

"You have got to hear this,"  he said as he reached for the office boom-box. Maybe he would've said that to anyone who was standing there, I have to grant his excitement that much. Cause the dude was on Cloud 9 and the fact that he even saw me standing there is a miracle, but I'll take it as he knew what all this would mean to me.

"This is it, this is the goods," he said as he prepped the CD player, and I knew exactly what he was talking about: the Gram, the live Gram Parsons that no one had ever heard before. He'd finally gotten it on the CDs to bring in and show us all that he wasn't nuts: this was GOLD. Hell, this is platinum. (industry joke, sorry.)

Man, that day was a long time ago. It was a damn long time ago, what with everything that happens in everyone's lives? You know how long a year or two feels. But there I was, last night, finally: I had my copy, I was reading the liner notes, and at first I was laughing, thinking "Dave! You left out the part where you talked about this record every day since then!! Every day!"


But that's the beautiful thing: when anyone is that much of a fan ... and we all knew how much of a fan Dave is before he ever got to go over to that magical place: Bear's Vault. (Forgive me, at 39, I am practically an old fogey to most of you and a lifelong Deadhead.) That much of a fan you can forgive almost anything. (Almost = Hinckley, Jr.)

As you likely already know, today (November 6th) was the release date of the anticipated Gram Parsons with the Flying Burrito Brothers' Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969 2CD set -- the first volume in the long lost sessions from the late great artist who created "Cosmic American Music," and the second release from the recently launched Amoeba Records. (The premiere release a couple of months back was Brandi Shearer's Close To Dark.) Coincidentally, there is also a new biography just out on the artist titled Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music written by David N. Meyer and published in hard copy by Villard Books.

Gram Parsons, who died of a drug overdose at the young age of 26 and who would have celebrated his 61st birthday yesterday, November 5th, is one of those great artists whose contributions to American music are realized increasingly more and more in every year since his 1973 tragic death. And as each year progresses the legions of fans and artists directly touched by this long deceased singer/songwriter/guitarist/pianist just seem to continue to grow.

"Parsons was born in 1946 into a rich but dysfunctional Southern family; his father committed suicide when Gram was 12, and his mother died of alcoholism the day Gram graduated from high school. Although he grew up in Georgia and Florida, Parsons wasn't turned on to country until he went north to Harvard (where, obsessed with music, he flunked out freshman year), but once he discovered Buck and Merle, he was smitten," wrote the New York Times in its lukewarm review of the new 559-page biography on Parsons. The book, and other reviewers agree, is by no means a perfect biography -- skipping some important details and over-emphasizing others -- but it is a good book to have, especially for diehard fans and Parsons completists. It is also by no means the the only book out there on the fascinating character that was Gram Parsons. Others include Grievous Angel: An Intimate Biography of Gram Parsons by Jessica Hundley with Polly Parsons (Gram's daughter) that was published by Thunder's Mouth Press a couple of years ago and is available in both hard-cover and on paperback. There is also the recommended Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons by Ben Fong Torres that is well worth reading to further understand the artist. Other books in the long list under Gram Parsons' bibliography include Pamela Des Barres' I'm With the Band: Confessions of A Groupie which was published by Jove Books in 1988. DeBarres, who counts Gram Parsons among her closest past friends, also wrote the liner notes for the new Amoeba Records release.