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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS & MUTUAL PRAISE

When Liz and Dee realised that Larry and I would be neither deterred or detoured on our musical pilgrimage of a chat, they decided to hitch their wagons to our star, and made their own contributions. Dee talked Motown, in the shape of Diana Ross & The Supremes, while Liz, to my amazement spoke of Canadian artist Robin Thicke and his huge, but controversial hit with Blurred Lines.
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TWO TOGETHER: Welch & Rawlings

And our taste is almost more than what you like. It’s what you dislike that is really important in a collaborator.
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WHEN WAS NOW AND THEN?

photo book She is just such an artist. I grew up in the same generation as Linda Ronstadt did and I love her rock and roll and country-rock songs and in an early middle age I loved her harmonies with Emmylou and Dolly Parton on the Trio releases. Then there were a couple of soul classic singles with Aaron Neville before she moved into Spanish language recordings, stage musicals and Opera.
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Meet AMY ALLEN: Singer-Songwriter Starlet

Allen approaches songwriting—and co-writing—holistically. She prefers to come up with the melody, lyrics and chords all at the same time, rather than try writing to somebody else’s track. “It feels like the emotion has been taken out of it,” she admits. “For me, in some way, I know people that are great at doing that, and they can write great, great songs that way, but my entry point to writing a song is finding the emotion in it from the very beginning. I have to story-tell from the early seed and then build everything around it.” Allen cites someone like John Prine as a guiding songwriting force, given how his stories are so concise and “each line needs to be there for the next one to make sense.” “And if one line was taken out, the story wouldn’t be conveyed,” she continues. “That’s how important each one is. Each part of it is so important to me that I like to be on the ground floor of it.”
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EMMET COHEN: VIBE PROVIDER

Funmi Anonsaiye was the Vive Provider, but he taught us all that we have that inside of us.
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THE INVENTION OF ANGELA CARTER

Her life was as vigorously modern and unconventional as anything in her fiction.
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ANGELA CARTER: a fairy tale?

Carter was deliberately messy, awkward, even paradoxical in her behaviour: she never allowed herself to settle into any predictable guise or attitude for long
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MAGNA CARTA: a musical body of work

Sometime in April 1969 the English folk rock band Magna Carta was founded in London. Founder and band leader Chris Simpson is still performing fifty years later and is the only original band member.