Tuesday Tunes: Sara Banleigh & Ashley Davis
Tuesday Tunes is a new weekly feature that I’ll be hosting here at Read All Over Reviews in order to offer more music content. There’s nothing I like better than discovering amazing music (save perhaps discovering a great book). Tuesday Tunes will appear every week on Tuesday, obviously, and will showcase favorites of mine as well as recently discovered wonders. This week I’ll be featuring folk singers Ashley Davis and Sara Banleigh.
Ashley Davis
I’ve been listening to Ashley for well over a year now. I can’t really remember how I came across her music, but I do remember that “Down By the Sea” (offered for free on her website) was the first song of hers I heard and it was pretty much love at first listen after that.
So far Ashley has released two albums, Closer to You (2005) and Down By the Sea (2009), with her latter album being available via eMusic for those not wanting to shell out over $20 through Amazon or are only looking for single MP3 downloads. Ashley began writing Closer to You when she was 26 and as thus it is a very intimate album of multi-layered original songs. Her rich alto voice is soothing, sensual and is like a siren’s call, flirting with Celtic and Eastern European sounds. Ashley reminds me a great deal of Loreena McKennitt with this album. Songs that standout to me are “Rhiannon’s Lullaby”, “Come With Me” and “Coming Home”.
Down by the Sea, however, is much more organic and simple. It features a good many traditional Celtic songs (“Raglan Road”, “Doire Cholm Cille”, “Mannanan Song”, “The Flower of Magherally O”, and “Ná Fataí Bána”) as well as some penned by Ashley (“Rathlin Rant”, “Down by the Sea”, “This I Do”, “Sea Blue Eyes”, “Lessons in Irish”, and “Beannachtaí”), giving it a great balance of traditional and modern. What this album has that Closer to You didn’t is help from some amazing names in Irish folk music (Moya Brennan and Joanie Madden to name a couple) as well as showcasing the languages Gaeilge (Irish) and Gaelg (Manx). “Mannanan Song” and “Down by the Sea” still remain my favorites.
Sara Banleigh
Sara Banleigh was unknown to me until a few weeks ago when I received an email about her from FlipSwitch PR. I checked her out and discovered she had self-released an album of piano-based arrangements of traditional folk tunes from Scotland and the British Isles. I definitely couldn’t say no to that, so I downloaded her album and I was blown away. Songs that are normally performed on guitar or violin had transformed much more gorgeously into piano than I thought was possible.
Being an EP (which releases today for those curious), The Folk EP only includes five songs–Railroad Boy (England), Mary Hamilton (Scotland), Geordie (Scotland/England), All My Trials (America) and Fhear A Bhata (Scotland)–but that’s more than enough to showcase what a marvelous musician Sara is with her haunting arrangements and ethereal voice. I very much look forward to hearing more from her. Check out her website, Facebook and MySpace.
