Laura Cole via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Laura Cole:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Laura Cole
- City: Hamilton, Ontario
- Country: Canada
My Life & Work
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Bio:
In a digital download world where artist photos and clever packaging are often overlooked, Laura Cole makes us pay attention. On the front cover of her raw, gritty and wildly infectious debut full length album Dirty Cheat, the quickly emerging, raspy voiced Ontario based singer-songwriter smiles playfully, relaxed in a wicker chair. The back cover finds her in a sexy black dress in the remote woods of Upstate New York, aiming and shooting a friend’s licensed .45 – a wild episode that had neighbours calling out the SWAT team, thinking something sinister was amiss before the situation was defused as a big misunderstanding. That’s the perfect metaphor for Laura and her deep, complex artistry: the adorable badass.
A compromise free, colourfully blunt songwriter, Laura brings her edgy, soulful and distinctively bluesy musical vision to life with the help of two Grammy winning producers – Steve Bigas, who won his Grammy for engineering blues legend Taj Mahal, and the legendary Daniel Lanois, an artist in his own right whose vast resume includes Grammy winning albums by Bob Dylan (Time Out of Mind) and U2 (The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree) and others by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris and the Neville Brothers. Laura had the great fortune of growing up influenced by “Uncle Danny,” a close friend of her father’s who took an early interest in her development as an artist. “He’s been listening to me sing since I was a kid, whether he liked it or not,” she says.
Laura and Lanois have enjoyed a spirited musical history together, starting their dynamic “musical journeys” after she finished high school when he took her to Nashville to watch him work with Harris. She also sang with his friends The Blade Family (including renowned jazz musician Brian Blade) on several episodes of the Louisiana based gospel TV show “Hallelujah Train” in Shreveport. In 2013, he asked her to sing a duet with him on a song he wrote (and she later added lyrics to) called “Papineau” – which he surprised her by releasing as a Valentine’s Day single. After spending three days at his L.A. studio recording, she flew straight to Casablanca (yes, the one in Morocco!) to start a whirlwind two month gig at a hip after hours pub. Closer to home, the Ancaster, Ontario born and based Laura has built a growing fan base at hotspots like Lula Lounge in Toronto, This Ain’t Hollywood in Hamilton and at various festivals and “Taste of” events.
Drawing on a wide swath of rock, jazz and R&B influences ranging from Etta James and Aretha Franklin to Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke and the late Amy Winehouse – artists “who let you hear the soul in their voices” – Laura noticed a theme developing as she and Bigas narrowed her growing catalog of tunes to nine perfectly honed tracks. She says the theme of Dirty Cheat can be summed up in three songs: the sly and sexy “Sweet Escape” (about a “friends with benefits” moment that offered temporary relief from life’s struggles), the dreamy, mystical Tom Waits inspired “Death Row” (about the troubling end of a relationship) and the trippy, seductively sly title track, about raining hell down upon a cheating boyfriend – making sure she was “someone that you never forgot.”
“A lot of people get cheated on, but don’t like to talk or sing about it,” she says. “For me, these songs are my catharsis, honest stories I am telling because I have nothing to hide. It’s easier for me to be true to myself than put on a cheerful front all the time. My goal has always been to portray real things I had been through – and I started writing my best songs till I had experienced the heartbreak of being cheated on. I bring a lot of interesting stories about my romantic adventures to the mix. The songs about my most recent heartbreak had the most power and heart in them.”
Contact Information
- Email: info@lauracolemusic.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://lauracole.bandcamp.com
- ▶ Buy My Merch: http://lauracolemusic.com/merchandise/
- ▶ Twitter: lauracolemusic
- ▶ Instagram: lauracolemusic
- ▶ Website: http://lauracolemusic.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/lauracolemusic
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCUiN4ZCalEXZD5fTNDAkU8A
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/0iJ46fNleqvRmzuHlI0lZx
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/5t8jiCVAQvbquT0bz6jQ7I
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
