Video: Vimeo – YouTube
Photos: Flickr – Blueback Hotrod
Audio: below

Shenandoah Davis plays the piano, and needless to say, we don’t just happen to have one in the house.  So given she was on a Summer tour of Europe, and given we’d invited her to Edinburgh to record a Toad Session we needed a Plan B.  That Plan B came in the form of Penicuik Town Hall.  Our friend Ben comes from Penicuik and his dad was able to secure three hours in the Town Hall for us to rock up in the Toad Van, unpack like some sort of alcoholic SWAT team, record our session, and bugger off before we were chased off.

Fortunately it has all worked out extremely well, with the usual videos below to be watched, or alternatively you can find them on the Song, by Toad page at either Vimeo or YouTube.  As you probably know, we always make individual videos of the songs and then an overall video of the whole day – sort of like Jools Holland, but with more gin and far less boogie-woogie piano.

The excellent photos were taken by Dylan from Blueback Hotrod and Fiona Buckle, and the main set can be found on the Song, by Toad Flickr page, with Dylan’s full set available on his own site.  As ever the session tracks are all freely downloadable and pass-roundable, and the podcast tracklist can be found at the bottom of the page.  Enjoy!

Toadcast #100 – Shenandoah Davis Toad Session

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Shenandoah Davis – Proof (Toad Session)

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Shenandoah Davis – Our Favourite Idols (Toad Session)

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Shenandoah Davis – Milagros (Toad Session)

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Shenandoah Davis – We, Camera (Toad Session)

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Below I have embedded all the videos, starting with the overall session video, and followed by those for the individual songs.

Toadcast playlist:
01. Shenandoah Davis – Proof (Toad Session) (04.25)
02. Hello, Broken Arrow – Golden Fools (10.57)
03. Karen Dalton – Katie Cruel (13.46)
04. Shenandoah Davis – Our Favourite Idols (Toad Session) (20.37)
05. Grand Hallway – Blessed Be, Honey Bee (24.49)
06. Shenandoah Davis – Milagros (Toad Session) (36.56)
07. Christopher Bell – All My Ghosts (40.31)
08. Anni Rossi – Glaciers (47.47)
09. Shenandoah Davis – We, Camera (Toad Session) (58.44)

I was contacted a couple of days ago by a group called Hello, Broken Arrow.  I almost titled this post Hello, Hello, Broken Arrow, but the explanation would have stripped away whatever thin humour was there to begi… never mind.

The songs are lovely, but their MySpace page is so sparse that I could have done little more than re-post the music here and say ‘here ya go’, which somewhat defeats the purpose of mp3 blogging if you ask me.

So, a little more detail: they are a group of Seattle musicians who started getting together once a week to try writing songs with different people.  Initially, the idea was simply to generate a kind of creative freshness which would improve their own individual projects, but it turned into something with a life in and of itself.  The participants come from bands like Huma and Shenandoah Davis (who introduced herself to me only recently), and they haven’t quite got as far as finding labels to release anything yet, but they’re thinking about it.  They’re also applying to play Pickathon this year, which would be brilliant, but it’s still clearly very early days indeed.

I love the sound of this.  It’s West Coast alt-folk, in the broadest sense, and does sound to have obvious kinship with so many other bands from the Pacific Northwest: sparse, and slightly otherworldly, but with a good rhythm to keep things moving along.  You can’t be too definite about anything with only two demos around, but I’d say this sounds really promising.  More please!

Hello, Broken Arrow – Mine is a Light (Demo)

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Hello, Broken Arrow – Golden Fools (Demo)

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