City Songs 2024 / New Titles & Tracks
World Premiere: City Songs 2024
Last night in Knoxville we hosted the premiere of City Songs 2024, a community video project featuring local youth and Big Ears artists that celebrates music, creativity, and the city we call home.
Big Ears project coordinator Matt Morelock worked alongside Amos Oaks of Knoxville Community Media and a group of community partners to produce six music videos that capture the creative visions of dozens of local young people.
The videos will premiere tonight on KCM’s channels and streaming services (Comcast 12, Charter 193, WOW! 6, KUB TV 1019, Roku, Amazon Fire, and streaming live at knoxcm.org) at 8 p.m. ET, then again this Friday at 10 p.m. ET. You can also view them via our website and YouTube channel.
Read more about this project here.
Ann Powers’ Take on Joni Mitchell
NPR music critic Ann Powers has been an essential part of Big Ears over the years through her role in moderating some of our finest artist conversations and panels. This year she was on hand to moderate panels featuring Hurray for the Riff Raff (AKA Alynda Segarra), Robin Holcomb, and Sam Amidon, and for conversations with Kristin Hersh and Laurie Anderson.
Powers has recently released a new biography of Joni Mitchell, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, in which she explores Mitchell’s life and career in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself.
Read more about Power’s experience writing the book in this feature from the Nashville Scene.
Read: “Ann Powers Shows Us How Joni Mitchell Made Her Own Way”
Hermanos Gutierez: Sonido Cosmico
Produced by Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach for his Easy Eye Sound label, the spatial sounds of Sonido Cósmico are meant to lift the listener away from the desert landscapes of the band’s 2022 breakout album, El Bueno Y El Malo, into the infinite expansive of the musical universe.
Listen: Hermanos Gutierrez’s Sonido Cosmico
Zsela: Big for You
Dripping with rich textural treatments and amorphous, heart-on-the-sleeve arrangements, the dynamics and diversity that define Big For You prove Zsela is painting with a wider palette than ever before. In the artist’s words, the guiding undercurrent across this cycle of songs is heartbreak. Meditating on the album’s title, Zsela notes, “At the heart, it touches on the causal versus intentional dance we play between being ‘full of you’ and ‘full for you’ — the complexity and magnitude of the space we take and fill up for love.”
Listen: Big for You
