Shannen Moser - Sara Noelle - Sara Niemietz
The Philadelphia-based artist Shannen Moser just released “Ben,” the second single from their forthcoming album The Sun Still Seems To Move that will be released on September 30 via Lame-O Records. Moser announced they will celebrate the album’s release with shows in Philadelphia on 9/30 and in Brooklyn on 10/7 with support from Greg Mendez & Yours Are The Only Ears.
Shannen Moser explains the story behind “Ben”: When I was in the 3rd grade I made a friend who I would ride the bus with to school for the next 8 years. We were neighbors in an extremely rural county – the kind of rural that was kids riding their family tractors to school and cow crossings holding up “highway” traffic. The streets around our houses didnt get paved until I was in middle school. They didn’t even paint the yellow road dividing lines on until after I graduated and moved away.
I would spend a lot of time with this friend on the bus. We shared a headphone splitter to listen to music, we would put sticks in the middle of the road at our bus stop to try to slow the bus down and miss school, and one time he gave me five bucks to lick the bus floor- totally normal kid stuff I thought to myself. On our route to school there was a pothole in the road that, if executed just right by the bus driver, would send whoever sat in back two rows FLYING. Ben called it “Rocket Man.” He was the first person I ever used a swear word in front of. “Shit!” He said it back and it was like we had just robbed a bank and gotten away with it. Cursing in secret, at the time, was the most romantic thing my middle school brain could ever imagine.
I moved away in 2012 and didn’t see him again after we graduated. He stayed to work at his dads construction business and passed late in 2015. I wrote this song in 2016. It was originally voice and piano only. I brought it to Tyler Bussey ( of Thank you Thank you) and we rearranged it a bit together. This song is my favorite on the record and I really love playing it for people live.
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Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and actor Sara Niemietz’ fourth album, Superman, will be released on October 28th. The new album represents a reinvigorated era in her artistic continuum born from small, vulnerable moments brought on by lockdown and seismic, non-pandemic life changes. “This album is about speaking your piece, shaking off the past, and finding the superhero inside,” shares the LA-based creative polymath.
She continues: “As a kid, I used to run around with this blanket tied around my neck and call myself ‘Super Sara.’ This is a return to that, and it’s the most representative thing I’ve done to date.” The empowering album is also a showcase for a new collaboration with co-writer and co-producer Linda Taylor, the ace guitarist on the hit ABC show Whose Line is It Anyway.
The pair met fortuitously on Sara’s last gig of 2020, a showcase with Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown, and just three days after their meeting, the world shut down. Sensing intuitive chemistry, Sara and Linda began to collaborate, tossing wildcard musical ideas and playlists back and forth.
During the height of COVID, the two began to collaborate in earnest. A feverish flow of ideas went back and forth as Linda and Sara finished tracks self-contained, with Sara handling all her vocals and vocal production and Linda layering the tracks and mixing the recordings. Soon, the pair had six songs, with Sara producing earthy and engaging videos for each one. In addition, Sara’s broad internet reach and innate marketing savvy enabled the duo to become a buzzed-about collaboration.
The twosome quickly nurtured a signature blend of soul, sonics, and story with passionate vocals and prominent guitars. Some of their artistic touchstones included Sister Rosetta Thorpe, Janis Joplin, Brittany Howard, and the early Kings Of Leon and D’Angelo. Sara says: “I’ve never been happy being tied to any genre. I grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, polka records, Led Zeppelin, and Steely Dan. When I was a little kid, I would plug a Fender Squier into a cheap amp, tune down to drop D, and put on concerts bashing out power chords.”
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"I wrote this song after a long desert drive in the summer — where the temperature and the endless road almost warps your perception of the landscape and of your own mind — the sky changes sometimes rapidly from dust clouds in the distance to bright sun to heavy rain. The one constant were the hundreds of yuccas, many in bloom, that lined the road, seen as dots in the expanse past my window."
Sara Noelle’s latest single, “Blooming Yucca,” is a surrealistic on-the-road song that winds its way through the dusty Southwest. The song was produced by Dan Duszynski in Dripping Springs, Texas. The animated, psychedelic “Blooming Yucca” video was created by Kelsey Boncato. Noelle, a singer-songwriter who creates indie folk and ambient-inspired music, is readying her third full-length LP, recorded and produced by Duszynski.
Her 2020 LP, Cover the Blue, featuring “Clouds” and “Run Sun Run,” was written at the piano and envisioned as a wandering hike between the haze of uncertainty and clarity. Noelle’s 2016 debut album, Morning Moon, plots an introspective drive up the Pacific coast, and fits somewhere between Alternative and New Age.
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