Catch The Buzz - September

KERLI

All you need to know about 21-year-old singer-songwriter Kerli is contained in the songs to her debut Island Def Jam album, Love Is Dead.

Born in Elva, Estonia, a tiny, then-Soviet occupied town of 5,000 people in the forest, Kerli grew up with a dream to escape from her surroundings. “Little creepy girl/Oh she loves to sing/She has a little gift-an amazing thing,” she declares on the autobiographical, world music beat of “Walking on Air. “She will go and set the world on fire/Nobody ever thought she could do that.”

“I’m a passionate person,” declares the blonde-haired beauty, who once drew a picture in a diary when she was 13 that depicted her going to America. “Where I come from, it was a shame to show your emotions. You could never be too happy, because something bad might happen. I was always a passionate person. I wanted to live every moment. I looked around me, and it was beautiful, but I wanted something more.”

Love Is Dead is the next step in that voyage, which has taken her from a tiny village on the other side of the world to an opportunity to tell that story so that it inspires others.

“Life is my creation/My best friend,” she sings in “The Creationist” of the way she has invented and then transformed herself and her life. “Whatever happened/Was meant that way.”

On Love Is Dead, Kerli is ready to share her amazing journey with the rest of the world.

Listen Here:
Love Is Dead
Walking on Air

DONNIE KLANG

The moment Donnie Klang heard Sean “Diddy” Combs say on the season finale of MTV’s wildly-successful reality show Making the Band that he was receiving a solo contract with Bad Boy Records, the hefty load of years of struggle, hard work and disappointment was magically lifted from his shoulders. The journey has just begun for this Brooklyn born and Long Island raised performer. Donnie’s debut Just A Rolling Stone is more than the typical debut in possession of a few potentially successful singles. Instead, it’s a throwback to a time when albums were cohesive collections of music. The first single, “Take Your There”, featuring Diddy, serves as the perfect introduction to Donnie’s fresh, funk-filled sound. He is ready, willing and able to show the world what he’s made of.

Listen on Windows Media:
Take You There

CARRIE RODRIGUEZ

Pigeonhole Carrie Rodriguez at your peril. Sure, she’s done a lot of duets. She plays a fiddle (a mean one at that.) She’s recorded songs with a pleasing, folksy twang.

But don’t think you know what you’re getting. Not yet 30, and with a critically-acclaimed solo record and several well-received duet records in her wake, the classically trained singer/songwriter has just begun flexing her artistic muscles, still figuring out how far her talents will take her. If you’re looking for someone playing it safe and sticking to tried-and-true ways of music making, as the title of Rodriguez’s daring new album aptly states, She Ain’t Me.

“Because I took some chances, wrote with some new people and actually co-wrote most of the songs on the album, it’s very different,” Rodriguez notes.

Also different: Malcolm Burn’s dense production, bulging with thoughtful details, yet always serving the song. “If the song doesn’t hold up on its own, without all the production, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it,” Rodriguez says. “And he was much more into the vibe than perfection—which is good for me, because my tendency is to try to make things perfect.”

The songs on She Ain’t Me, Rodriguez’s second solo outing for Manhattan/Back Porch, come from an introspective place, rife with self-assessment and questioning. “It comes from having to really look within yourself when you’re forced to be alone, and to not be afraid of that process,” Rodriguez says. “Taking some time off from the road this year to write allowed me to do some growing and reflecting that I often put aside when I’m touring all the time.”

Long before Carrie Rodriguez was a fiddle-toting, mandoguitar-slinging Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter, she was a junior violin student in Austin, Texas, absorbing the influences of an opera-obsessed mom and folk-singing dad. “In kindergarten, we had a pilot program at my public elementary school to teach five year olds Suzuki violin lessons,” Rodriguez recalls. “They would give the lessons during naptime, and I must have gotten out to go to the bathroom. And I remember walking down the hallway and hearing these violins scratching out ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ I was immediately drawn to that and came home and told mom I wanted to take violin lessons.

“Also,” she adds, “I really hated naptime.”

Group lessons soon led to private lessons, which led Carrie to a conservatory program at Oberlin. Enter Lyle Lovett, a family friend, who invited Carrie to sit in with his band at soundcheck in Cleveland, an experience that was both inspiring and frustrating. “My feel was awful and I knew it,”

Listen on Windows Media Player:
She Ain’t Me

THE AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT

Garnering comparisons to everyone from Modest Mouse and The Arcade Fire to the Clash and U2, The Airborne Toxic Event’s debut album is one of the most anticipated releases of the year. With songs that feature unforgettable hooks, their now legendary live shows have been converting fans from coast to coast. Features ‘Sometime Around Midnight’ (as seen on M2) and ‘Gasoline’. On tour this fall with the Fratellis.

Listen on Windows Media:
Sometime Around Midnight
Gasoline Full

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