Music blogger OceanicBlue in the UK has nothing but sweet things to say about Stolen Season, and I’m so grateful to him for posting his review!
He calls my lyrics “pure gold”, my songs “exquisite” and “works of art”, and my voice “mesmerizing”. This kind of review is the stuff of dreams!
Read his full post here and while you’re at it, connect with him on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks so much, OB!
I took an unintentional blog hiaitus, and I apologize for that to anyone who might have missed me. All’s well, I just let the days tumble over on me and I lost track. I’m getting it all back together now so that I can catch you up on my recent adventures, as well as reviews and upcoming shows and stuff. Read on for more stories and photos.
I got to return to the Cerren Ered, Avalon and Dragonshire campgrounds in east Tennessee last week, which is a beautiful part of the world to visit in early spring. The Appalachians and the Smokies are currently overflowing with rampant green, flowers, and songbirds. The aforementioned Mitch and Amber made the journey with Ryan and me, and we took a few days to go hunting for gemstones, cook dinner together, and wander around in the mountains.
Violets happily growing in the middle of an old mine road in North Carolina
Our cabin in Franklin, NC had a lovely view.
Crabtree Emerald Mine is a spooky and lovely place, especially if you like being miles from anywhere or anyone.
Lost Boys at the mine: Ryan and Mitch
Lost Girls at the mine: Amber and me
Cerren Ered and Dragonshire then hosted their May Moon Magick festival, where we vended our music and shiny things, and where I got to give a concert for that incredibly welcoming, relaxed community. I also got to catch up with the truly wonderful and generous Oberon Zell-Ravenheart for the first time in over a year, which was grand. I love that man to pieces, and I’m so grateful when our festival appearances intersect! All my thanks for that lovely weekend go to Oberon, Mitch and Amber and Ryan, Lady Jewels, Solitaire, Dawn Raven, DJ & the kitchen crew, the Hoopeses and the pirates, Ember and Rowena and Mystic and the band, and most especially Thorne!
I’m still participating in my song-a-week group, and the joy of it is still super solid! This week is week fourteen, and I’m still in love with the group, the prompts, and the process. Fans can definitely expect me to release a few of the new songs I’ve written so far, even the one I wrote by mistake last week. I didn’t read the email properly, and so I wrote a song about something that wasn’t actually the song prompt at all. Whoops!
I’ve got two big events in the coming weeks, and they’re both at the top of my list of favorite witchy festivals.
—May 14-17 I’ll be performing and celebrating at the Living Earth Colorado’s Beltania Festival! Betsy has her own concert there as well, and we will of course do our shared magic on stage together. Speaking of magic, I’ll be sharing booth space with my buddies at Odyssey Craftworks/Underhill Alchemy, creators of lovely witchy metalwork-and-gemstone pendants as well as delicious perfume blends. If you’re coming to Beltania please stop by our booth! Rubiee of Dryad Tea and Pandora Celtica will also be my special guest on stage during the weekend. The headlining band on Saturday is Lunar Fire! I’ve been at Faerieworlds with these music makers before, and I’m STOKED to see them again!
Joy Burton, the head mover and shaker for Beltania and Living Earth, is a great friend to me and a wonderful human being. She is a teacher, a mom, and an organizational badass, and she gives all that she has to her spiritual community in the Denver area. When you support Beltania, you support Joy and all of the dreams that she and her fellow Living Earth members are working to build. I encourage you to check this festival out, not just because of how supportive Joy and the gang are of musicians like me!
***Sunday May 17 at 7pm Mtn, Betsy and I will be interviewed live in Colorado Springs by Tim Board of Front Range Radio! Tune in to KCMJ 93.9 FM if you’re local, or listen online here.
***Monday May 18 at 1pm Pacific, I’ll be a guest on the Backstage Gourmet Radio Show with PJ Grimes! Listen online here. We’ll talk about tasty food and tasty music!
—May 21-25 I’ll be performing, teaching and celebrating at Heartland Pagan Festival just east of Kansas City. HPF was the first good-sized festival ever to hire me, and they were a big part of my first-ever concert tour back in the spring of 2004. This event will be like coming home for me, made more so because my beloved peeps Big Bad Gina and Ginger Doss & Lynda Millard will also be performing on the Heartland stage this year! Abney Park will be there with us as well, which is gonna be a trip and a half, I’m sure! Off stage, I’ll be vending once again with my buddies Mitch and Amber Shineman, the mask makers and jewelry crafters behind SpiralFae Accents! Stop by the booth and visit!
Camp Gaea, the land on which Heartland Pagan Festival is held, inspired my song “Hymn to Herne” and has been a very healing, transformative place for me. I’m very grateful to Selene and the rest of the HPF team for bringing me back again this year!
Check out my tour schedule page to find out where I’m headed in June! The big events include St. Louis Pagan Picnic, Circle Sanctuary’s Pagan Spirit Gathering, Free Spirit Gathering, and New York Faerie Fest! It’s shaping up to be a gorgeous season, indeed.
Y’all, I am over the moon right now!
Matheson Kamin has been covering what we might call less mainstream music for over a decade. Matheson took the time to give a good listen to all of Stolen Season, and has now published a gorgeous, pretty darn comprehensive, FIVE STAR review! You can read the whole shebang by clicking here. In particular, I love what Matheson has to say about “Believe in Lullabies”:
Tucker’s vocal delivery will remind many of jazz vocalists from days gone by. The clear, beautiful sound of Tucker’s voice is the focal point on this track. The lyrical content will also remind listeners of songs from yesterday as the track truly sounds like something that belongs in The Great American Songbook.
!!!!!
I’ll be over here, doing a little singer-songwriter Snoopy dance.
Or maybe I’ll just invoke the time that my friend Angelica turned me into a cartoon. 🙂
Reviews are rolling in for Stolen Season and for the “Little Bird” music video, making my day and my mood absolutely soar. The latest is from Stephen Vicino, founder of MusicExistence.com:
S. J. Tucker’s album “Stolen Season” is the perfect mixture of folk, blues, and jazz. Her current single from the album is “Little Bird,” which is an upbeat optimistic tune that will get you through the rough days with ease. When listening to this song, there is no way you cannot feel a little bit happier than you were before listening. “Little Bird” is the perfect song to turn on when you are having a bad day. Towards the end of the track, S. J. encourages you to “keep on swimming and chasing after you big dreams” on tough days. All of that being said, if you are going through a rough patch, just turn on “Little Bird” and let S. J. Tucker inspire you!
I love high praise like this, but I love it even more when my intent for a song and the song’s effect match up perfectly in people’s listening experience! My highest hope for “Little Bird” is that listening to the song and/or watching the video will give you a lift, a smile, or a better day in general. Thanks so much, Stephen, and thanks also to all those who’ve given me Your stories and Your take on what the songs on Stolen Season mean to YOU!
This was so much fun to work on! All the stop motion work, puppets and sets were hand-created by Sabrael & Meg in St. Louis, aka Dork & Damsel Productions. 🙂 Spread it around! Enjoy it! We hope it makes you smile.
I had the good fortune to be interviewed for Radio KoL this week, and our host PVA has posted the (delightful and LONG) interview on his YouTube channel. 🙂 Check it out here! We had a blast, so I hope you enjoy listening to it! It’s rare that I get to geek out at length with a radio host about community, music genres, all kinds of music that we both love (including metal, surprise surprise), costuming, and inspiring others. We also managed to talk about Stolen Season a fair bit, so feel free to share the link around as a way to help me boost the new album. 🙂 Bonus: you can hear PVA’s birds talking and singing behind us. 😀
I’ve got my first concert of the month tomorrow evening in Lawton, Oklahoma! We will most likely have seats available at the door, but if you want to play it safe, you can grab tickets online until the early morning hours tomorrow – get tickets to the Lawton show here.
If you’re looking for a way to balance out a h8-allowing pizza joint in Indiana having raised over $500,000, I invite you to support Conway Pagan Pride Day 2015. They’re asking for a comparatively measly $3,000 to cover venue rental for this year, since the city passed an ordinance that makes grassroots events in city parks nigh impossible. SURELY, with our powers combined, we can raise this amount! I performed at their inaugural event last October, and I found the group organized, efficient and kind, the audience receptive, engaged and welcoming. Personally, I’d very much like to see the event continue, and not just because it’s the equivalent of a hometown concert for me. The good news is that their 3K goal is reasonable and easy for us all to achieve together. Donate via their website, or via their GoFundMe, whichever you prefer. (I’m gonna be done with GoFundMe after this, but I feel that Conway Pagan Pride Day deserves my support.)
The Locals, my favorite local performance venue and arts bazaar, closed its doors in December, but the brilliant hearts and minds behind it haven’t stopped working to feed and delight their community!
TODAY, through Arkansasgives.com, throw them a donation and you’ll help them “qualify to win up to $5000 in bonus dollars”, which will then go toward their mission to create and maintain mobile farmers markets this spring and summer, and also help them continue “hosting an Arkansas GardenCorps service member at the Urban Farm Project. Our service member is able to increase our outreach into the community, offer educational programming and donate more food to our local food pantry.”
The Locals care about food, people, art, music and getting them all together in the most beneficial ways possible for the central Arkansas area. I care about their mission, so I’m sharing it with you! Please donate to their cause today if you can, between 8am and 8pm CST, and help them score some matching funds as well.
The Locals!
I’m part of a group this year whose members have accepted a challenge to write a brand new song every week. My #songwriting prompt for the #Soulwriters2 group last week was “Jokers Wild”. This is what I ended up writing. Normally I wouldn’t share my rough tracks, but it’s April Fool’s Day. 🙂 I have several layers of emotional attachment to April 1st, thanks to a spiritual teacher of mine who’s passed away. So this is a bit of a tribute to her, as well as a legit prayer to various Trickster god forms.
Read on for the lyrics.