May you all hear the joyful noise of home and tribe and community in this track. If you haven’t found that heart-home for yourself yet, may you find it swiftly. We love you. Sherry and Bekah and I are so happy to share this little theme song with you at last!
And Sherry, thank you for asking us for this. Thank you for being the catalyst to get Bekah and me to finally write (not just produce) a new song together. I hope we get to do more of that!
The Green Man Review crew served up some tasty interview questions for me a few days ago, all about what my perfect summer feast would be! Here’s an excerpt:
What makes for the perfect chocolate experience?
Great ceremony, and a lack of the need to rush. A night at home, with spiced cocoa. A beastly hot day and a chilly frozen pudding, frozen custard, frozen drink, or frozen yogurt. Even home-made avocado chocolate pudding, served late at night by the lady of the house, whose Hobbit powers are unparalleled in the kitchen! One should never limit one’s chocolate options, if chocolate is to be an option at all.
You can read the rest of the yummy results here!
That was such a fun set of questions and answers. Thanks, gang! Now I need a snack though…
I’m safe in the PNW once again, and boy, does it feel good! Much love to everyone who helped make Sunday’s performance at Madrona and Curtis’ wedding ceremony such a sweet inaugural area gig for Betsy and me! The trend of getting rained on everywhere we go has continued, but I know that Washington state badly needs every drop of rain. And it turned out that rain during the ceremony made for a truly epic rainbow at the party! It was HUGE.
I’ve got a bunch of Washington state and Oregon shows coming up in the next few days, with some really fabulous people! I’m playing in Redmond on August 1st (this Saturday), Woodinville on August 6th, and the Second Star Festival in Florence, OR on August 8! All the info is on my tour schedule page – go here!
It’s been six lovely weeks since I hit the road for the summer. The intensity and the down-time have been decently balanced. I’m so grateful to my bandmates, and to everyone involved with New York Faerie Fest, as well as everyone involved with the self-produced shows I had in Chicago and Missoula, MT.
I’ve been posting a ton of tour photos over on my Instagram, so if you want to see them, find me there! Here are a couple from New York Faerie Fest at the end of last month.
Come, sit down. Kettle’s on. #fae #nature #tree #allweather #SultrySummerTour #NewYorkFaerieFest #NYFF A photo posted by S. J. Tucker Music (@sjtuckermusic) on
The trend of getting rained on at every single concert continued at this festival, but thanks to how well taken care of the staff and volunteers made sure we were, it didn’t dampen our spirits too badly. It’s hard to dampen MY spirit when I get to play a Tricky Pixie concert, anyhow!
We had a grand time listening to Kiva‘s concerts, and we got to make some mischief with our song-sister Wendy Rule during her shows! Definitely check out their music when you have time. I was also overjoyed to get some playtime in with my flow-sister, Soolah of Soolah Hoops! If you get your hoop on, you want this woman in your world. She’s a dynamo, and a sweet one.
Here’s Sultry Summer Night, live from my little studio at home!
Witchy review repository Green Man Review has been kind to me since the very earliest days of my touring life. This month, they’re featuring me as their Summer Queen, doing all sorts of posts on behalf of my work! I’m super flattered and grateful. Their first post is a roundup of all the great reviews they’ve done of my stuff over the years, as well as some new and very kind words. Check it out here.
Their second post is an essay they asked me to write back in 2013, now published at last, of my own thoughts on the magic of summertime. I went deep into my roots to get this one out. Here’s an excerpt:
I grew up in the Mississippi River Delta in southeast Arkansas, where the state lines blur near the tops of Louisiana and Mississippi, and life still moves at a very calm pace for most folks. I spent half my summers as a child outside playing softball, swimming, or riding my bicycle through my small hometown. I spent the other half indoors, hiding in the freezing embrace of central air conditioning, as far away as four walls could get me from ravenous mosquitoes and the thick air of Southern Summer Humidity.
Where I come from, Summer is not a nice girl. She is not gentle. She is fierce. She is not there to entertain you. Rather, she’ll eat you alive.
She turns the air to soup and the water to paradise, but you can’t enjoy the latter for long at the wrong time of day, lest the insects carry you off. She scorches the fields, drains the rivers, and chars the skin. She is the divine feminine in her Destroyer aspect, unapologetic and terrible.
But you can bet your ass I was glad to see her when school let out for the year. Every time.
And to tell the truth, she could be generous to those of us who learned how to work with her, to celebrate as one until our buckets of sweat ceased to matter, to appreciate the play of her brutally colorful sunsets through the dry dust of a field at harvest.
Read the full essay here. I hope you enjoy it!
Coming soon: an interview about what my perfect summer feast would look like, and more!
I’ve been slowly editing audio and video for a release concert made for YouTube. Of course, I wanted to have these done ages ago, but the reality is that I am a slowpoke of a video/audio editor.
So here are the first two songs on Stolen Season, performed live in my little recording studio! Hope they make you smile. I included some trivia and tidbits in each video, as well.
You can listen to the album versions of these tracks for free if you like.
My intrepid crew and I are officially past the week one mark for the Sultry Summer Tour. Let me tell you, week one was a hell of a way to start things out. Two concerts obliterated by inclement weather, and very nearly a third. Having a port-a-potty service truck for a wakeup call the morning before a cross-country drive– those beasts are loud, by the way, and more so when you’ve got nothing but a thin tent wall protecting you from what sounds like unstoppable diesel death from above. Surviving a pretty significant campsite flood, and helping others to do the same. Making the most of compromised opportunities by letting the music carry us, just like it always does. We’ve definitely got some stories to tell after this week. Read on for more!
Today I am getting ready to leave my quiet forest nest to go and sing to the wide world again. I’ll be away from home, performing and making people happy, almost all the way from Litha to Mabon. It seems like such a long time.
I know many of you don’t get to be home for years at a stretch. You have my respect and my sympathies.
At the moment I’m facing down the mountain of things I must pack, and trying to laugh at the thought that my cats won’t remember what I look like by the time I return. 😉 They will. They’re far too smart to forget.
This is a big shift from the thought process of the girl who lived solid nomad-style for upwards of eight years. Having a house (and cats and plants and stuff) is weird. It changes your brain.
I hope that you’ve each got really fantastic plans for your summer– and I mean intentional plans, too, not just vacay– and that you can look forward to those plans as deeply as I’m looking forward to mine. Even though, just now, I’m nervous as hell.
Stolen Season continues to get a whole lotta love, more than I would ever have asked for. I am so grateful!
Here’s a quote from Andrew Greenhalgh at Breaking Down Sound:
The best of music transports listeners to a place that is colored with bold emotion and powerful imagery. These are the songs that connect you to a place in the past while looking into the future and that transport you to places exotic, foreign, and yet altogether very familiar. As she tucks into Mississippi Delta inspired blues and jazz tones, accenting them with warm hits of contemporary folk and a little something extra, longtime recording artist S.J. Tucker does just that, taking listeners on a musical journey that leads down through the muddy swamp and into the hazy smoke of the local jazz club.
Andrew is a regular and experienced writer of independent music (and it shows) whose goal is to write about artists who are worth hearing. Color me entirely flattered! Read his full review here. He makes me sound, and feel, like a big deal.
Then there’s James McQuiston’s review, which I also love, on NeuFutur Magazine’s website! Here’s a quote:
Black Swan Blues is a sultry track that works from a bluesy, soulful backdrop that is pushed into high gear with a call and response chorus. Sultry Summer Night looks back into the era of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, spinning their style into a bold new space with a piano line right out of mid-20th century Harlem.
Scuse me. I gotta go chase down my heart. It seems to have fluttered completely away. 🙂
Thank you, James! Thank you, Andrew! Thank you, CyberPR, for helping me secure such favorable acclaim for my little record!