James Blake & Bon Iver, Fall Creek Boys Choir

Tags

Bon Iver, Collaboration, Fall Creek Boys Choir, Folk, Indie, James Blake, Justin Vernon, Limit to Your Love, Music, Rock, SXSW

Image courtesy of NPR

Today, August 29, is the day we’ve all been waiting for-and most of us don’t even know it.  Justin Vernon and James Blake have released a collaboration for consumption on iTunes (look for it on Spotify!). As fate would have it, Vernon & Blake would meet at the South by Southwest music festival this year in Austin, Texas. They kept in touch after SXSW, exchanged a few ideas over email, and now, our lives are better because of it.

London meets Wisconsin with this colaberation, aptly titled “Fall Creek Boys Choir.” I know Blake from his song,Limit to Your Love, when it was featured on a Paste music sampler back in ’09, and Vernon, well, from his self-titled album Bon Iver, which arguably is the best album of 2011. This song begins with what sounds like a wolf bark, then flows into Vernon’s smooth falsetto we know and love.

In the past, Bon Iver has collaborated with artists like Kanye West and St. Vincent. I can’t wait to see whom Vernon will team up with next.

Matthew Mayfield-Now You’re Free

Tags

Cover, Matthew Mayfield, Music, Rock

I remember living in Colorado anxiously counting down the minutes until Matthew Mayfield released his first EP, The Fire, on Amazon.com. It was torture. I didn’t have internet  and had to wait five excrutiating days until I could get to an internet cafe to purchase the EP on my laptop.

It was the fall of 2008, and I had stumbled upon Matthew’s MySpace page a few months before. I had clicked on the song, Element, at the top of his MySpace playlist, and the instant the closing chords faded into silence I knew it was destiny: Matthew Mayfield was meant to be one of my favorite artists.

This past April, Matthew released his first LP, Now You’re Free, to critical acclaim. He’s teamed up with fellow musicians John Paul White and Joy Williams from the Civil Wars for two tracks (Fire Escape, and Can’t Change My Mind) and Bo Rinchmet of NeedToBreathe (Ghost). Now You’re Free takes the listener on a melodic journey, Matthew’s journey, through yearning, longing, missing, and ultimately, hope.

“Now You’re Free, is everything I want it to be,” says Mayfield. ” Honest, anthemic and diverse.  The songs are full of hope, which in some ways is very new to me.  They are the sound of a fresh start.”

Matthew continues, “I’m excited about attempting to change something with this record…Music has changed everything for me.  I want to be a part of that for other people.  So here I am…A wise man once sang, ‘I know it’s only rock n roll, but I like it.’ I hope you do too.”-MM

Purchase Matthew Mayfield’s extensive library of music on Amazon, or download Matthew’s free sampler on NoiseTrade. Watch the official music video for Now You’re Free.

Need more Matthew? Watch him cover Fix You by Coldplay, Toxic by Britney Spears, Paranoid Android by Radiohead, and Where The Streets Have No Name by U2 to tide you over until his next release.