Some reviews for my Black Americana album "The Other Side"...

Here are a few review quotes for my self-released Black Americana album The Other Side – available now from your favorite digital retailer, including iTunes, Amazon and Bandcamp.  I'll keep adding more as they come in. And if you'd like to give the full album a listen, try Spotify or last.fm

"Secrets do have a way of leaking out, and one that desperately needs to be heard is Americana/country/ jazz singer, Queen Esther. Every song is sung with passion and fire, by this underrated female singer who should be a musical giant." -- Country Music People (UK)

"...the most exciting Afro-Americana release of the year.  She sings Steve Miller’s “Jet Airliner” (by the Creole songwriter Paul Pena) and original gospel and rockabilly tunes, but the bulk of the album is devoted to hard-country numbers that could have been taken from a Connie Smith or Lee Ann Womack record but were in fact composed by Queen Esther herself. These are ballads and two steps about romantic crises, and the strategic unsteadiness in her glowing voice suggests not the cool self-assurance of an urban sophisticate but the heart-on-a-sleeve transparency of a small-town innocent." -- Paste

"This album is amazing. And very difficult to classify. Can you imagine a black Lucinda Williams? Not like when she plays the blues torn from her first albums, no. A black Lucinda Williams in pop, rhythm, blues and even gender roots Americana. So it sounds, if you can imagine such a hodgepodge somehow, the latest album from this brutal, original, explosive singer." -- Vanity Fair (Spain)

"Our admiration for Queen Esther is almost beyond measure." -- Rootstime (Belgium)

“Queen Esther’s new album The Other Side is unlike anything you’ve heard in recent years…or possibly ever.”  -- Muruch.com

"Queen Esther literally has the voice of an angel." -- Jersey Beat

"In a world where so many artists are carbon copies of one another or rely on technology to hide a lack of talent or originality, Queen Esther comes across like a real lady with real talent who isn't afraid to bare her soul to the world." -- BabySue

“Simple intentions and promises gently take your hand as Queen Esther smiles in the knowledge that ‘sweet dirt can’t hold me’ before she hops aboard Ronny Drayton’s jet fueled guitar lead to arrive in ‘Sunnyland’” – Alternate Root

“Queen Esther takes "Jet Airliner" back to its Paul Pena roots and imbues many of her tunes with a Ted Hawkins-meets-Loretta Lynn vibe.” – East Side Slim’s Picks

“Queen Esther taps into a new musical genre, "Black Americana" as she mixes together pieces of folk with country, blues, jazz and soul to create some wonderful new sounds.” – JP’s Music Blog

"It’s the melancholy country cuts that Queen Esther excels in. 'I’ve Come Undone Again' is a particular highlight; a splendid slice of melancholy country complete with Hank Williams-esque melody and all. 'Love Is a Wrecking Ball' and 'I Feel Like Going Home' are wrought with emotion and are likely the best tracks here." -- Americana UK

 "Pedal and lap steel guitars, boom-chick rhythms and Atkins/Travis guitar picking dominate this set. Queen Esther's vocals, meanwhile, even at their hardest-rocking, invoke the high-and-lonesome plaintiveness of the honky-tonk/bluegrass/rockabilly continuum as much as they do the harsher-timbred blues tradition." -- Living Blues

"‘The Other Side’ is a collection of material that defies pigeon-holing, yet the intriguing term assigned to it seems to sum up the way black and white musical traditions intertwine in perfect harmony." - For the Country Record (UK) 

“In short: A masterpiece of an extremely talented singer / songwriter who can compete with the major players in this field, such as Lucinda Williams.” – Blues Magazine (The Netherlands)

Love from Poland

I did a really cool interview some months ago for an online Polish jazz magazine called Diapazon and then I totally spaced it. Just tripped over this link on last.fm and I'm really quite taken with it. So much love from so far away is a beautiful thing.

I'm going to find a nice Polish person to tell me exactly what this article says and then I'll wallpaper my world with the results. In the meantime, you can read the whole thing in Polish here and if you aren't that kind of bilingual, you can have a very rough translation from Polish to English here.

A book review - "Are You Somebody?"

Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O'Faolain


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
When a really cool black female friend presented this book to me as a gift, she told me that other black women had been reading it voraciously and that through it, they saw themselves. I think her exact words were that they found their voice. I didn’t understand how an Irish writer, journalist and tv personality could pull that off but I decided to keep an open mind. I’m glad I did.

I think that ultimately, it’s the human experience that connects us and binds us. This is the stuff that transcends culture and gender and race and anything else that people tend to wallow in and use in divisive ways. It’s this human experience that touched me to the quick as she swung back and forth throughout moments in her life, from her childhood to her love life to her mother’s school days to her father’s career to her brother’s demise and more, much much more. Back and forth she swung like a pendelum, exacting and so full of feeling, swirling you into a conversation that she’s having with you, with her subconscious, with her very soul, perhaps. It really does read like an intimate chat, the kind you have with a close friend well into the night that reverberates within you whenever you think about that friend. No wonder so many have taken this woman to heart, and cherish her, and hold her close. Especially other women.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. At the end of the book, she talks about how you become invisible in society or are treated like a nutter after a certain age if you are a woman because you are no longer considered sexually attractive or viable. (Remember how they treated Susan Boyle?) The frustrating thing is that you still have those sexual feelings. What’s true is that women outlive men – females outlive males of every species, actually – and so the population curve is that eventually there will be a lot of single older women out there. Actually, according to stats, over 60% of African-American women are single and/or have never been married.

In the end, the snapshots that she creates with her words are so vivid, so painful, so real that I couldn’t help but think and reflect on my own life. I think that black people are used to being treated like they are a collective nobody by society but this is especially true for black women. Society wants us to believe that we are invisible, that we don’t matter at all. We don’t become invisible when we are no longer sexual objects. We are perpetually fetishized sexually. We know exactly how that invisibility feels at ANY age.

My black female invisibility doesn’t phase me in the least. It just makes it easier to get stuff done, to get what I need for me and mine, and to conquer the ground I stand on. And we black women, we can certainly see each other and stand together. Maybe that’s our strength, our advantage. Maybe that’s the lesson for our Irish sisters.

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