When we first heard the music of Bebel Gilberto, way back in 2000 with the release of Tanto Tempo, we became smitten with the Brazilian chanteuse.
Born in New York City, but raised in Rio de Janeiro, music was an integral part of her childhood, her father the legendary Brazilian guitarist João Gilberto a strong influence. At the age of 7, she made her recording début on her mother Miúcha‘s first solo album, The Best of Two Worlds. Two years later, she performed at Carnegie Hall with her mother and Stan Getz.
Fast forward twenty-seven years to the year 2000, when Ms. Gilberto released the luminous Tanto Tempo (a few cuts of which you’ll find directly below), and an entrancing, sensual neo-bossa nova jazz star was born.

A while back, VanRamblings introduced you to Rumer, the British jazz artist / Anglo-Pakistani soul singer / songwriter who’s been tearing up the charts in the the U.K., and seems ready now to break to acclaim stateside.
With her early 60s Burt Bacharach-influenced sound, Rumer doesn’t trade in the rough neo-soul sounds of an Amy Winehouse, rather she offers a more pleasing soundscape, an almost nostalgic, often pensive and always seductive foray into Karen Carpenter territory, full of graceful melodies and dream-pop lyricism, elegant and piercingly evocative at the same time.
As VanRamblings continues to explore the ‘new’ music of our age — with an emphasis on soulful female vocalists — today we present Rumer’s début album, Seasons of My Soul, available for download through iTunes, or as an import through HMV, or your favourite local record store.

Ever since we first read about roots / country artist Lori McKenna in late 2007, when she won Popmatters’ Best Country Artist of the Year award, we have been smitten. Here’s an excerpt from Roger Holland’s review …

If you don’t know the story, the 38-year-old McKenna is one of America’s most gifted singer-songwriters. Working out of the home in the Boston suburbs that she shares with her plumber husband Gene and their five (count them, five!) children, Lori McKenna had released a series of four increasingly impressive independent albums — culminating in 2004 with the critically acclaimed Bittertown …

With a voice a little like a female Adam Duritz, McKenna sings in the first person, effortlessly inhabiting her songs of everyday life in a manner that seems so simple, so natural, that you just know it must have taken a whole lot of skill and hard work to achieve. And when I say everyday life, I don’t mean red tag sales and soccer practice, I mean emotions like frustration and disappointment, love and hope, captured in their most natural habitat, the domestic settings in which we live our lives.

VanRamblings has engaged in a process this week of introducing our readers to a few of our favourite music artists. There is no artist we love more than Lori McKenna, no artist whose music we listen to more often.
Last evening, we uploaded a few of our favourite Lori McKenna songs to SoundCloud. Please find five of those favourites, for your listening pleasure, directly below …

As the folks at Allmusic.com write …

“Although she was born and raised in suburban New Jersey, Sharon Van Etten’s folk music evokes the open landscapes and lonely expanses of Middle America. A dedicated choir student during her childhood, she began writing songs on her guitar as a high-school student and, upon moving to New York, started playing them in concert. Van Etten signed with the Chicago-based indie label Drag City and issued her intimate official debut, Because I Was in Love, in spring 2009, followed by the lush, more band-oriented Epic in 2010.

Here’s an interview with Ms. Van Etten conducted by Rob Hakimian for One Thirty BPM from earlier in the year, and a gushing, well-written and entirely spot-on review by Jennifer Kelly in Dusted Magazine.