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.”
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).