Bio:
Taylor Ashton was raised by his father in Vancouver, Canada. He now lives in Brooklyn, where he wakes up around 8 a.m. and begins his day by playing Bananagrams with his wife. He doodles constantly, on iPads and napkins. He buys all his clothes second-hand, and he once sewed the top of socks onto the sleeves of a jacket that were too short for him. And now, he’s bringing that creativity and ingenuity to his first ever solo album, The Romantic.
Taylor’s career began in Vancouver as frontman and songwriter for Fish & Bird. The Vancouver Folk Fest called them “Canada’s most unique folk-rock ensemble”, with reviewers taking note of Taylor’s “off-kilter lyrical excursions” (The Georgia Straight) and his “rich, compelling voice” (Exclaim!). From 2006 to 2014 they recorded 4 albums and exhaustively made the rounds of the festival and touring circuit of Canada, the U.S., and the UK.
The 12 new songs on Taylor’s solo debut chronicle leaving a relationship, a band, and Canada. He moved from Toronto to New York City, ready to take a break from the heavy touring schedule of Fish & Bird and to find himself in a new setting. He survived by singing and playing clawhammer banjo in the subway, turning heads with covers that leaned more Motown than hoedown. Over the years he also made a living as an illustrator, an audio book narrator, an occasional sideman for British country soul singer Yola, a songwriting teacher, and was even hired by the New York Times to write a song about the debt-ridden subway system. Fueled by $1 pizza slices and the intoxicating creative energy of his new home town, he wrote over 400 songs. “A lot of them were pretty dumb,” he said. “But some that I thought were dumb turned out to be good.” (See track eight on the album, “Everybody Used To Be A Baby”).
The first session for what would become The Romantic happened while Taylor was living above the old Mason Jar Music studio in Borough Park, Brooklyn, with engineer Jacob Blumberg. Playing clawhammer banjo through a guitar amp, Taylor played a few new songs live off the floor in duo formation with a drummer, and this unlikely combo forms the rhythmic backbone of the album. Over the next two years, recording occurred in stops and starts. Taylor rode between friends’ houses and studios on a yellow bike he built himself, recording instruments and vocals piece by piece. Slowly but surely, with no specific deadline.
In the meantime Taylor teamed up with fellow songwriter Courtney Hartman to record a spare duo album. 2018’s Been On Your Side was nominated for an Independent Music Award and earned praise in Rolling Stone, who said it “packs a punch in today’s mainstream.”
Some friends started to wonder when, if ever, the solo album would be finished. Eventually, Brooklyn producer Alec Spiegelman (Cuddle Magic, Ana Egge) helped finish the initial sessions and helmed the recording of 6 new ones at his studio. Jacob Blumberg, who engineered the first sessions, was brought back to do the final mix, and shares co-producer credit. The result is a love letter to this time of Taylor’s life; an ode to the devastating, ecstatic, gritty, sexy decade of his twenties, woven together through his 5- string banjo with the help of 18 different musicians from the Brooklyn music scene and all across the U.S. and Canada.
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—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; recorded "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
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—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
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Salvador is our base. If you plan to visit Bahia, there are some things you should probably know and you should first visit:
Conceived under a Spiritus Mundi ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to Havana and the provinces of Cuba to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago to the sidewalks of Harlem to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...*
*...in conversation with Raymundo Sodré, who summed up the irony in this sequence by opining for the ages: "Where there's misery, there's music!" Thus A Massa, anthem for the trod-upon folk of Brazil, which blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south until Sodré was silenced, threatened with death and forced into exile...
And thus a platform whereupon all creators tend to accessible proximity to all other creators, irrespective of degree of fame, location, or the censor.
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, bewitching and bewitched, contouring the resplendent Bay of All Saints (end of clip below, before credits), absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome (seat of the Integrated Global Creative Economy* and where Bule Bule is seated below, around the corner from where we built this matrix as an extension of our record shop).
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
*Darius Mans holds a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, and lives between Washington D.C. and Salvador da Bahia.
Between 2000 and 2004 he served as the World Bank’s Country Director for Mozambique and Angola. In that capacity, Darius led a team which generated $150 million in annual lending to Mozambique, including support for public private partnerships in infrastructure which catalyzed over $1 billion in private investment.
Darius was an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where he worked closely with the U.S. Treasury and the IMF to establish a framework to avoid debt repudiation and to restructure private commercial debt in Brazil and Chile.
He taught Economics at the University of Maryland and was a consultant to KPMG on infrastructure projects in Latin America.
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).
EX TERRA BRASILIS
The Small World Phenomenon
Susan Rogers
Alicia Svigals
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Sodré
Betão Aguiar
Bule Bule
Caetano Veloso
Darius Mans
Sparrow/Pardal Roberts
RÁDIO MATRIX