allison moorer takes to the piano for new album

Having inked a new deal with Rykodisc, country singer Allison Moorer will release her seventh album Crows on February 9th, her first collection of original material since 2006’s Getting Somewhere. Perhaps influenced by the research involved in making her 2008 covers album Mockingbird, for which she recorded several covers of songs written by women (Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and June Carter Cash to name but a few), Crows finds Allison departing from her usual country stylings with more emphasis on sophisticated pop arrangements, many of which were written and performed on piano. She’s also made a conscious effort to inject a greater poeticism into her lyrics.

The album was produced by RS Field and recorded at House Of David in Nashville, and features Joe McMahon on guitar, Brad Jones on bass and Chris Carmichael on strings. Discussing the album title with Billboard.com, Allison said, “I am a little obsessed with birds, and have been told that they are indeed our messengers from the other side. So I decided that instead of letting the crows make me uneasy, I would start to consider them as friendlies, and that they were actually bringing me a message of comfort.”

In December, Allison will appear alongside a huge cast of Hollywood actors and fellow musicians in ‘The People Speak’, a film based on Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s bestselling books A People’s History Of The United States and Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States and the 2008 stage production it inspired, in which Allison also starred. Among her musical co-stars will be P!nk, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder and John Legend, while her thesp friends include Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover, Matt Damon, Viggo Mortensen, Rosario Dawson, Josh Brolin and Casey Affleck.

Written by: Alan Pedder

Tags: allison moorer, crows

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 5:32 pm and is filed under news, the inside leg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.