CAROLYN MCCOY PHOTOGRAPHY, WORDS & DRONE
  • Home
  • Drone Photography & Videos
  • Photo Essays & Music Reviews
  • Professional/Business Photo Shoots
    • Headshots
    • Promotional Photo Shoots
    • Live Gig Photo Shoots
    • Products & Business Shoots
  • Personal Photo Shoots
    • Weddings & Engagements
    • Boudoir Photo Shoots
    • Parties & Events
    • Kids, Pets, Families
  • Testimonials
  • Carolyn McCoy's Bio

Album Review: Katie Knipp - Live At The Green Room Social Club

11/17/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
The short-story version of Sacramento blues singer Katie Knipp is this: She’s a little go-getter, she’s got her shit together and she’s not wasting time with making her career happen.

But the long-story version of blues singer Katie Knipp has quite a bit more depth .

The last time I interviewed Katie Knipp was about 2 years ago. She had just come out with her 6th studio album, The Well, she was ALMOST nominated for a Grammy and she had a few of her songs on the Billboard Blues Charts alongside Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Buddy Guy.  She is a winner for Best Blues Artist in Sacramento twice over, and she was voted Female Artist of The Year in 2020 and 2021 by the Country Folk Americana Blues Realm.

​Now do you understand my earlier comment of “she’s a little go-getter”?

“I would say hitting top 10 Billboard Blues Albums charts with the last 3 albums has been more of a boost!” states Knipp. “It helps with credibility in getting better opportunities for the band."

Fast forward to here and now, Knipp has yet another album for us to feast on with our ears and mind, a live album, no less. Live at The Green Room Social Club, her 7th album, is Knipp and her incredible band showcasing what they do best, performing live in front of an audience. To most bands, playing live is really the end-all of why they create music.​
Picture
Photo Credit: Bob Hakins
Why a live album? “My first thought was to release an album called The Greatest Hits You’ve Never Heard,” Knipp humorously states. “But after finally getting back onstage after Covid, I had to capture the magical energy of the band that brings these songs to life."
​

Knipp’s band has some sort of magnetic connection to her, and they hold Knipp’s songs like an attentive lover. “I feel safest when I am with them,” she states. Lead guitarist Chris Martinez bounces off of Knipp’s playing with tandem magic, weaving pure blues chords in and out of her songs. Bassist Zachary Proteau and drummer Neil Campisano create such an intense pulse that one can literally feel it in your bones, and percussionist & woodwind maven Otis Mourning adds such depth and feeling with his horns (sax, clarinet) that meld so beautifully with the music.

For the recording of Live At The Green Room, Knipp used producer Dustin Ryan to come in and mic the stage in such a way that it was very much like a studio. The band then played and recorded at a lower sound level (compared to an actual live show). They had more control over what they got on tape but still had the freedom to really have at it with playing live. “Obviously, no overdubs,” states Knipp. “I think we started one song over, but I told the audience to expect that may happen. It was actually pretty fun to laugh with them and show them my very flaw-filled human side even more than normal.”

For “Live At The Green Room Social Club”, Knipp culls from her past albums and makes the music new, fresh and ALIVE. “I Don’t Sing For You” funks it up and the energy of that song is incredible with each band member doing what they do best. “Ya Make It So Hard to Sing The Blues” is a wonderful takes on domesticity from 2018’s Top 10 Billboard Charter Take It With You. In “Chamomile & Cocaine”, a fabulous song from 2020’s The Well, Knipp uses her epic vocals to state “…been singing the blues since the age of 13.”
Picture
Photo Credit: Bob Hakins
Knipp takes her music seriously both as a talented multi-instrumentalist, playing keys, dobro, and harmonica, as well as her songwriting, which spans the gamut of blues-inspired subjects such as abuse, sex, drugs, and love and hope. She sings with great exuberance, allowing her deep, powerful, rich, and full voice to be the muse of the lyrics, punctuating each verse with juicy howls, fierce moans, and a "fuck you" attitude, all controlled with sheer brilliance. 

“I plan to record my 8th studio album next year, and my new co-producer is Gabe Nelson, who is also our new bassist as of 3 months ago. He was in Cake for 20 years and he has his own band, Bellygunner, as well. His creative mind and gentle soul are the best.”

Knipp is humble about her accolades, but she also knows she has worked her ass off to get to where she is, and she claims that. Her love for her band is definately reciprocated and it shows in the cohesion of what they all do, together and separately, to make Knipp’s music come to life. She offers “a simple thank you for your support. Thank you for listening, thank you for your time at live shows, buying the music, sharing the music. I love you.”​

LISTEN:
Live At The Green Room Social Club...go here!


0 Comments

New Singles Released By West Marin's Peppermint Moon

9/24/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
The one-man band that is Peppermint Moon is at it again with the release of two wonderfully composed and sonically layered new singles!
​

Peppermint Moon is the pseudonym for West Marin songwriter/musician Colin Schlitt, whose other job is being the bassist for dark alt rock band El Radio Fantastique. Schlitt’s choice to not use his own name for this project is a bit unusual. He explains, “I like the idea of a set of music having a poetic name as opposed to just being the name of a person. I am also pretty shy and introverted most of the time and felt more comfortable giving this project a name that wouldn’t draw as much attention to me personally and would focus more on the songs. I thought it would be cool if people were fooled and thought it was an actual band.”
Picture
The two new singles, “Foxy Friends” and "He She They” are not part of any upcoming Peppermint Moon albums, but instead they were more of a “creative surprise” for Schlitt. “I wasn’t planning on working on any new recordings for a while, but these two recordings just sort of happened quickly in unexpected spurts,” Schlitt explains. “He She They”, was recorded after Schlitt took his son to a concert at the Fillmore featuring artist Cavetown. “I was blown away by the concert and by Cavetown’s recorded stuff. 'He She They' was already almost all the way written, and with that concert as inspiration, I started recording it, trying to emulate the Cavetown songs I had been listening to."

A funky electric organ groove opens “He She They” as it tells the story of being a circle in a square world, with psychedelic and layered Beatlesque vocals stating, “Some words are spoken/With no grace/And no taste/Some people feel broken/And they can still fly…Sometimes it’s hard to show who are you inside.”

“Foxy Friends” is all crunchy guitar feedback and bite-sized chunks of grunge topped with pop sprinkles. It’s a fun song and defiantly my favorite of the two releases. “Foxy Friends” was recorded during Schlitt’s home quarantine with Covid a few months ago, and in many ways it was therapy. “I was climbing up the walls with nothing to do and my fiancée suggested I use the time to make some music,” states Schlitt. “I had the chord progression and the melody for the song, but that was it. I had been watching a Sex Pistols documentary and a lot of cable news; that was the inspiration to finish the song and record it. Within three days of starting to record, I had it knocked out."

"One thing that is different about “Foxy Friends” is that I recorded it so quickly. It has much more of a raw feel than lots of my other songs. I didn’t fuss over getting perfect takes and it has a sense of immediacy because of it. Also, you can really hear the Covid in my throat!"

Along with these two new singles, Peppermint Moon has three EPs, Mr. Manager (2021), A Million Suns (2020) and his 2019 debut release Symphony Of Sympathy.  As with all his music, Schlitt does all the instrumentation, the vocals, the recording, and the mixing for his albums. “My production style is much more punk rock – not so much in the sound, but in the attitude. I have no real production or engineering training and have learned as I go. I basically just say ‘screw it’ and try not to let my lack of technical knowledge get in the way.“

​Check out more on Peppermint Moon.

​
0 Comments

Rick Turner: The Masterpiece Life Of True Renaissance Man

4/18/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Author's Note: Luthier Rick Turner just passed away, I am sad, he was a genius and a friend. In my 15 years of covering the Bay Are misc scene, Rick was a champion of my work. I had the wonderful opportunity to visit with Rick at his shop in Santa Cruz a few years ago, where we talked guitars, wood and creativity.

​Here is my story on him from that interview from 2016.


Santa Cruz based luthier, engineering genius and all around rock star Rick Turner has built his life around music, and perhaps music has built a life around his work.  Rick Turner is someone whose life has taken so many loops, turns and 180 degree backflips, therefore, I am befuddled as to where to begin a story about this man.  Overall, I suppose that there is not so much a beginning and an end to his story, but a continuous narrative of adventures and hard-won luck.
Picture
Photo by Max Mobley (used with permission/RT)

Let us begin with an analogy about the guitar, as guitars have been a central character in the story of Rick's life....
 
Guitars begin as chunks of wood waiting to be transformed into vehicles of artistic expression by caring and talented hands. Each one is uniquely crafted, some even hand-made, comprised of many components that are fused to form one instrument. Every instrument collects the mood and spirit of not only the hands and life of the maker, but the experiences of the musician ​who will one day hold it in their arms like a cherished lover and make her sing with her own stringed-voice.


Read More
0 Comments

Photo Essay: The Moon, La Lune, La Luna

1/19/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Photos & Artwork Carolyn McCoy©
According to scientific belief, the celestial object we call the moon was, quite possible, created approximately 4.5 billion years ago. But, as scientific ideas often begin with guesswork and intuition, with small clues pointing the way to another idea, we can only hypothesize at the true origin of our beloved satellite. No one will ever fully know how things went down that long ago, but some ideas include its creation from a rogue or displaced planet caught in Earth’s orbit, or quite possibly it was formed with debris from Earth itself after a massive impact from a meteor or comet. Gravitational and magnetic forces that create the magic of physics may have bound the debris together, slowly forming a sphere that has tagged along with Earth on its yearly circumambulations around the sun for eons.
Picture
With blooming technology, it was inevitable that humanity would find a way to get to the moon. That historic visit with the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969 culled a scientific treasure chest of new and massively important information that has helped us bash many an absurd myth about what the moon was. We discovered no spacemen were living there; we found the moon was not made of cheese, and we were enlightened to find that it was not a large cardboard cutout made by a stage crew and hung in the air in a sound studio in LA.
Picture
Picture
We have discovered much about the moon since those first non-terestrial steps. As we now know, it is in synchronous rotation with Earth, taking 27 days, 7 hours, and 43.1 minutes to make a revolution around our Big Blue Marble flying at 1.02 kilometers per second. Because of the lack of its own rotation, we always see the same face of the moon, with its dark volcanic landscape interspersed with the brighter ancient crustal highlands and the prominent circular impact craters from meteors of days past. We have also discovered glass beads strewn all over the surface, indicating a past nova of our beloved sun. The moon has “moon quakes”, it has water molecules, and it shows that without an atmosphere, it’s fair game for every type of flying space rock to pummel its surface.

The moon is a powerful force. Without it following our planet we would have a very different world. Lunar power drives our oceanic tides as well as the blood-tides that flow through our veins, as we are water-formed beings. It guides the monthly cycles of fertility with women, hence creating new life.

Read More
0 Comments

Photo Essay: Places I've Made Out With Boys

12/28/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
"If you want to know if he loves you so, it's in his kiss"...or so the song goes. But the reality is, that's a lie. We all know kissing, especially a really good kiss, is all about a chemical connection via hormones found in spit.

​The mouth is a sensual place if you ask me. Warm, inviting and chock filled with chemicals in the saliva that will set the heart pattering during a kiss. The mouth and lips contain over 40% of the nerves connected to our face, so the lips respond intensely to every kind of stimuli, which, in turn, triggers a massive response in the brain. During a passionate kiss, our blood vessels dilate; more oxygen is routed to the brain; our breathing quickens and becomes erratic; our cheeks flush; our pulse quickens; our pupils dilate. We are inundated with dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, oxytocin, and our adrenaline levels spike, leaving our bodies awash in a chemical bath that is equivalent to an amazing drug high that often leaves us addicted and wanting more.

So, a good kiss really means nothing in the grand scheme of commitment. It doesn't mean he loves you, it doesn't mean he'll stick around, but it does mean there is some seriously good sexual juju that may or may not lead to love. 

​#1: It was just a mild flirtation and I never expected anything to happen. But for only one night it did. I remember the sound of the creek below as my hands wove through his hair. So soft, both the sound of the water and the feel of his hair. He sat on the guardrail before me and we were then face to face. The trees shook in the wind, the night blended the darkness into various shades of light and for a few moments I was oblivious to it all...
Picture

​#2: The wooden footbridge was dark, empty and probably not more than 50 feet long. But when one is lustily distracted by a wild and curly-haired man with a dark soul and a fiery passion, a bridge, even a short bridge such as this one,  can take hours to cross...
Picture

​#3:  As we sat on the bench in the dark, he told me he was emotionally bankrupt and couldn't give me anything, I said that was OK. But when my lips touched the warm, salty skin on his neck I was hit with a desire I hadn't felt in awhile. I knew at that moment that I was lying to him and that eventually I'd want more....
Picture

​#4: The intimacy of my bedroom is rarely shared with anyone. The honor of being in my sacred space is something that is earned, not freely given. But if you find yourself standing next to me near my bed, you can expect that I want more than a kiss.
Picture


Read More
0 Comments

Mirabelle's Release - A True Ghost Story

11/1/2021

6 Comments

 
Picture
When I was in my early 20’s, I was hanging out with a folk band from San Francisco, The Straw Coyotes. Their music was filled with multiple harmonies, lyrics with “thee” and “thou” and they were acoustic in a troubadour kind of way. I was deep in unrequited love with one band member, a lanky songwriter boy with a wandering, gypsy heart. I loved to hang out with the band, party with them, and experience the wonderment of having beautiful songs come to life in my living room (or my bedroom, as the case may be).
 
During the summer of 1992, the band members packed up their vans and cars for an epic road trip. The plan was to jam, write, and make music while communing on the shores and woods of Puget Sound’s gorgeously wild Vashon Island near Seattle. I decided to road trip up to Washington for a few days on my own to visit with the band.
 
I was a lot wilder in those days than I am now, and I was always up for adventures. My favorite road trip ritual was to consume massive amounts of Sudafed and guzzle Snapple Ice Tea.  I would  then leave at night, cracked out of legal uppers and drive till the morning light appeared over the two-lane blacktop. It was so exhilarating to be one of the few drivers on the road at 4:00 in the morning. I could freely drive 90 miles an hour with my mixed tapes blaring, the Sudafed making my scalp tingle, and all the crazy thoughts I had about life flying through my mind.
 
On this particular trip, I made it to Seattle in about 11 hours, stopping only for gas, pee breaks, and more Sudafed. When I disembarked from the ferryboat and headed to where the band was staying, I had been up for over 36 hours. That’s what being 22 years old and a wild child is all about.

Read More
6 Comments

The Magic Of PoisnIvy Circus - 5.29.21

6/2/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
A circus is more than a circus, it’s a community. It’s people working together to create something larger than themselves. It’s also a place where we can leave our troubles behind and step into a dream world for a while where the magic happens and reality is blurred by color and music and activity. 

The idea of what a circus should be has changed, a lot! Thanks to organizations such as Cirque Du Soleil and Burning Man, circus arts are making a very cool, very hip, and very grand resurgence into mainstream consciousness. Today’s modern circus model eschews the use of animals and focuses more on the great feats that the human body can dish out. From contortionists to aerials, fire dancing to burlesque, LED light dancing to clown comedy, all wrapped up in chains, ropes & silks, tattoos & piercings, and a lot of sexual innuendo & bravado. ​
Picture
Picture
Picture
PoisnIvy: Marisa Gregory, Viva La Glam, Natalie Nelson
With all that said, a new circus has come to town! PoisnIvy, the Bay Area circus troupe that has been wowing folks since 2011, has found a permanent home in Marin County’s tiny hamlet of Forest Knolls, about 40 minutes from San Francisco.  Founding member Marisa Gregory has created a new art and performance hub that will host yoga and martial arts classes, movie nights, live music, theater performances, and the famed circus. 

May 29th, 2021 was ground zero for the first installment of magic for PoisnIvy in its new space. With an amazing assortment of talented folks culled from the vibrant Bay Area circus arts scene. Along with Gregory and co-producers Viva La Glam and Natalie Nelson, PoisnIvy pulled out all the stops and created a visually stunning night of entertainment. The show sold-out and the lucky crowd bore witness to such acts as physical comedian Snatch Adams, a hilariously talented gag-master, who loves to envelop herself inside a large balloon; aerialists Megan Gallagher contorting in a metal cube, Jo Kan elegantly flying on a hoop, and the massively amazing and dynamic aerialist Drago wrapping herself up in chains while suspending herself via a leather strap in her mouth. Slim Chance and Nathan Holguin were caught clowning around more than once while burlesque feather dancers got juicy amid the darkening skies. 
Picture
Picture
Picture

Read More
0 Comments

Album Review: Katie Knipp - The Well

3/14/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture
Photo credit: Phil Kampel
By now, most of us have a serious case of the Lockdown Blues. But there is hope! Almost like a homeopathic dose of the blues to cure the blues, Bay Area blues darling Katie Knipp’s latest release, The Well, is just the antidote for the overall hell we are experiencing right now. 

​
Last year at this time, Knipp was climbing the Billboard Blues charts, in which she shared honored space with other masters like Buddy Guy and Kenny Wayne Shepard. She was also flying high on a nod from the Grammy Association by almost acquiring a nomination for her 2019 release Take It With You, as well as planning this latest release of The Well. But then Covid hit and The Well took a detour of process. 

With no real safe way to rehearse, Knipp rocked it regardless, using today’s technology to distance-share the songs with her band before recording The Well together. “I just gave my band the raw songs (live phone recordings of my playing and singing), told them the vibe I was going for, and I made sure they had the lyrics to get into the story,” states Knipp. “Because they are such great players and people, they showed up for recording and absolutely got it. They nailed the first take, which was ‘The Gospel of Good Intentions’. The fact that we had never played it together, and that what you are hearing on the album was our first live run through...well, I feel like the luckiest gal ever to work with people like that”

“I also went into this knowing I wanted my bass player Zack Proteau to co-produce with me. In the past, I would always go into a project producing myself, but this time I knew better. Dustin Ryan, our engineer, ended up in the co-producer role by the end of it as well. There is no stronger structure than a triangle! Zack was also the producer behind Jackie Greene's Gone Wanderin’ album, so he has been producing quite a while now. The special guests on here, like Mick Martin (harmonica), the Au Bros (horns), and Joan Osborne's Keith Cotton (Hammond) were also people that I didn't need to direct. I knew that if they were being themselves, we would get the right sound.”
Picture
Photo Credit: Phil Kampel

Read More
1 Comment

Album Review: Kyle Stringer's House Plants

1/11/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Here we are, closing in on a whole year since our lives and our global existence have morphed into different beasts, and I have a feeling things might not go back to what we knew of as "normal." But within that, life does go on; the Earth keeps spinning on its wobbly axis, and music is continuing to be made and heard. 
 
The other day I was sad. I was grieving for the old normal and needed to shut off my brain for a little while. I put on my headphones, spread myself onto my bedroom floor, and pushed play on Kyle Stringer's solo project House Plants (which is both the name of the "band" as well as the title for the album.). I cried for the first time in a while. You may think that a weird statement to start an album review, but in my mind, if music evokes strong emotion, it's an excellent album. The crying led to a smile, which led to a laugh, then onto a small boogie-dance session, which ended with thinking many thoughts and feelings about my life. All that and more are encompassed in the various moods of House Plants.
 
Stringer has grown up playing music, starting on Euphonium (a tiny tuba) in elementary school as well as learning guitar. "My love has pretty much always been the bass, though," Stringer says. "I love how it glues music together. It's really the unsung hero of music! Listening to it and playing it is so rewarding." He also works as a music therapist at a Veteran's Home in Napa County, where he uses music to heal. 
 
Up until the life-sucking shutdowns, Stringer was in Oakland-based rock band Milk For The Angry. But because surviving in life is about making the best of bad situations, Stringer felt that now that he wasn't able to gig, he had the chance to record many of his own songs that he had been stockpiling over the last five years. Like most musicians recording in this particular historical period of time, Stringer created this album by recording in his bedroom on his computer while doing most of the vocals and instrumentation himself (including his Squier Strat and Silvertone Archtop plus lots of pedal effect, as well as his trusty Rickenbacker 4003 bass and more). He had friends on board who filled in various musical parts from their own bedrooms across the country with file sharing. Welcome to the Pandemic Age of recording music. 
Picture
Photo: Carolyn McCoy

Read More
0 Comments

Album Review: Physical Suicide Deterrent System Project - Luddite

9/30/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture
Co-written by Carolyn McCoy & William Wayland
The music of Physical Suicide Deterrent System Project (or PSDSP for short) is complicated. We could easily plop them into the genre of “grunge," but it’s more than that. The trio, guitarist/singer Eli Carlton-Pearson, drummer Michael Pinkham and bassist Brian Wilkerson pull from jazz and psychedelic genres while adding some hardcore ass-kicking punk for kicks. The songs the band creates often eschew the typical “verse/chorus/bridge” construction to create a river of sound that takes you on a sonic journey with intelligent and poetic lyrics that uphold deep imagery to tell a story of both darkness and hope.
 
The band’s songwriting process is definitely a collaborative effort. “I write all the songs, though several come about from jams, or at least evolved within them,” states Carlton-Pearson. “Michael and Brian contribute a lot in the way of arrangement, rhythmic conception, and what's perhaps the most significant thing, how much fire they cook up playing. That then permeates the whole ‘thing’; it changes the way I sing the lyrics I wrote; it gives the song more real-life meaning. {The song} has to be a living thing, and that happens because of the band.
Picture
Picture
Photos: Carolyn McCoy
​PSDSP has just released their latest album, Luddite, on vinyl, an old trend that seems to be resurfacing as a common practice among musicians lately. The album culls from new and old songs that have never been recorded before. Inline with the definition of “Luddite” (one who eschews or is mistrustful of technology when creating), the band decided to record in analog, raising funds via a Kickstarter campaign so that they could make the sound they were looking for.

​The band traveled to New Paltz, NY, to work with Tom Deis at Pineapple Room Studio. “I've known Tom for 16 years now. We've been in bands together and worked together a fair bit, but moreover, we're just really good friends,” says Carlton-Pearson. “Tom worked so fucking hard on this record it's ridiculous. He signed up for one of the gnarliest hazings an engineer could go for, going into a 100% analog recording process from a largely digital workflow and buying several pieces of equipment specifically for Luddite. All the technical limitations we experienced just wound up being the magic on the tape at the end, which is why we chose to do the whole thing as we did.”
 
“I wanted to work with Tom basically because I trusted him. I trusted him musically, and I trusted him personally. He gets it. He gets that music is a spiritual entity you access through the physical world. I guess this whole recording was way more intense and vulnerable than I'd like to admit. I trusted his understanding of how to use technology to capture the spirit of things.”
 
When asked why the band decided on analog, “Because it sounds better,” replies Carlton-Pearson, “It just does.“ 

Read More
1 Comment
<<Previous

    Author

    Carolyn McCoy

    Archives

    November 2022
    September 2022
    April 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    June 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    May 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.