Entertainment For Lively Minds
Who the hell is Lauren O'Connell?
Passing tale ... was mucking about with YouTube a couple of weeks ago, listening to music, watching the vids, and happened across a poppet-like American girl singing songs with the ukelele ... Julia Nunes ... standard 'youth in the bedroom in front of the webcam' stuff, but with backing vocals mixed in
then I saw her and a pal (Lauren O'Connell) had done an REM cover, which descended into total silliness...
and then I saw that Nunes had been across to the UK and had done a Radio 1 interview back in January 2009 ... so maybe she was better known than i suspected? ... anyway, i was curious and clicked on her chum O'Connell's YouTube channel and listened to this... (Tangled Up Kites)
... so went and bought her album, The Shakes, off iTunes ... and why am i telling people this? Because i've never gone from never having heard of someone to "buying the album" in the space of half an hour before ... and O'Connell is quite the talent ... and i thought some people might like it ...
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Those videos...
...made me really happy. I just find it incredibly heartening that there are these kids all over the show just making music and having fun doing it. Both those girls look as if, but for a twist of events, they could be prom-queen-high-school-insert-cliché-here Beautiful People, but instead they're writing cracking little folky songs and learning all the words to It's The End Of The World As We Know It.
That's brilliant.
On this basis...
...I also downloaded "The Shakes". On the evidence of a first listen, it's very good, with some outstanding moments.
Her voice reminds me of Lisa Loeb, but she's got some cracking songs on there.
Good stuff
The internet as a power for good? I have gone from ignorance to purchase on occasion at gigs when the support act were suitably impressive and had product for sale at the end, but never online.
This though shows the power of the web at it's best, empowering talented people to bypass the old record company paradigm and genuinely do it themselves.
God bless Mother Nature, she's a single woman too...
Unheralded aspects of the internet part 563... reading the lyrics/chords off screen from a site like www.azchords.com, using it like a teleprompter, and singing into a webcam ... brilliant ... then using some simple software to add in harmonies and vid edits ... fantastic
also think that O'Connell is pretty good - she might be a winsome female singer-songwriter, but so was Joni Mitchell ...
Funnily enough, I had a similar experience just this morning
I was searching YouTube for tracks by Krautrockers Gila when I stumbled across this by accident:
(no embedding, alas)
Moments later, Amazon was £3.99 better off and I had added the album Devotion to my iTunes collection.