Sonya Jevette has an obvious and immensely delicious talent in her voice but not noted so often is her gift for poetry. Making rhymes is not enough alone to make a song and Sonya has a special phrasing she uses for expressing her poetry.
Left to right: Medora Chevalier, Silas Scarborough, Sonya Jevette, Cat Boucher
"Big Girls" may seem like something just for fun and it is but it's more than that as well as being big is one thing, how you carry it is what counts. Big girls know Web design, big girls can shoot some pool, big girls will mess you up if you don't treat them right. Tell them Sonya said so. And tell them Medora said so as well as she loves this song and it was great to see her back as well.
Sonya also wrote a song called "Black Woman" and it's delivered casually but, as with "Big Girls," that belies the seriousness of the message. That's not accidental as last night Sonya mentioned her classical and jazz training. She knows exactly what she's doing and if it were her purpose to write an angry, shouting song then she would have done that. But any message will be delivered better without shouting and Sonya is tuned right to that.
The big change in Sonya Jevette's act is she accompanies herself on an acoustic guitar now. I don't know if this is permanent but it's a delicious change because there are subtle differences in style between how she plays this guitar and the electric blues guitar she usually plays. One of the best moves anyone can make with a guitar is The Wiggle and it's the hardest to learn. Sonya has a great wiggle and, listening to "Big Girls," quite a good wobble as well.
The Wiggle is when you wiggle your finger over the string to make a note sustain and, electric or acoustic, this brings out nuances you won't hear any other way. You won't ever hear it with speed players as they don't have time, not and still manage that blazing Yngweh Malmsteen arpeggio. To my taste, I'm a lot more interested in the nuance of The Wiggle than I am in blazing solos as you'll never find any psychedelic soul in a blazing guitar lead but you can make lots of it with The Wiggle.
Plus she's got the most killin' growl you will hear from a singer anywhere.
lefty Unplugged and Sonya Jevette are worlds apart stylistically but there are many artistic similarities, particularly in the approach to poetry. Just as with Sonya, lefty Unplugged doesn't use a formulaic approach but rather whatever is appropriate to the message. My purpose isn't to compare them except to note the artistic approach is similar and if you like one then you will probably like the other. So Cat Boucher schedules them on the same night and you can hear them at once.
Last night we heard more about snot than would probably be warranted in most conversations but lefty made it cool. We could hear him coughing and that really sounded painful and his voice was obviously affected when he spoke ... but ... you could not tell it by how he sang. Making music is one thing but doing it when you're sick as a rat is a whole other world. lefty Unplugged showed all kinds of bad-ass last night for the show must go on. It did and he played it through. Definitely bad-ass.
Bad-ass ... what I'm sayin', man. Maybe you don't think it's so bad-ass to perform with a sparrow on your head but lefty can do it and you can see he was doing it last night. At first I thought it was Pidge but Cat corrected me as of course that's not Pidge because sparrows may dream of becoming pigeons but it's never going to happen. There's a long story behind this and I can proudly tell you lefty even introduced me to Pidge, personally.
We talked about 12-string guitars a bit last night as lefty is playing one with eight surviving strings. It is such a screaming pain to tune a 12-string and it's an even bigger one to re-string the guitar. When you replace one string, you have to replace all of them as the tone won't be right otherwise. The new string will be much brighter ... but ... you don't have a choice if a string breaks in a gig. Oh, the trials of guitar players ... and double all of them with a 12-string. But they sound so pretty.
There was almost a picture of Cat as she was the hippie girl last night. I aimed my camera at her but she teleported just before I snapped the pic. In Second Life, if you fix your camera on something then the camera will follow the subject. She TPed back home and suddenly she was in the bedroom. I didn't know what she was going to do there but I did know I wasn't going to shoot a pic. Next time.
Left to right: Medora Chevalier, Silas Scarborough, Sonya Jevette, Cat Boucher
"Big Girls" may seem like something just for fun and it is but it's more than that as well as being big is one thing, how you carry it is what counts. Big girls know Web design, big girls can shoot some pool, big girls will mess you up if you don't treat them right. Tell them Sonya said so. And tell them Medora said so as well as she loves this song and it was great to see her back as well.
Sonya also wrote a song called "Black Woman" and it's delivered casually but, as with "Big Girls," that belies the seriousness of the message. That's not accidental as last night Sonya mentioned her classical and jazz training. She knows exactly what she's doing and if it were her purpose to write an angry, shouting song then she would have done that. But any message will be delivered better without shouting and Sonya is tuned right to that.
The big change in Sonya Jevette's act is she accompanies herself on an acoustic guitar now. I don't know if this is permanent but it's a delicious change because there are subtle differences in style between how she plays this guitar and the electric blues guitar she usually plays. One of the best moves anyone can make with a guitar is The Wiggle and it's the hardest to learn. Sonya has a great wiggle and, listening to "Big Girls," quite a good wobble as well.
The Wiggle is when you wiggle your finger over the string to make a note sustain and, electric or acoustic, this brings out nuances you won't hear any other way. You won't ever hear it with speed players as they don't have time, not and still manage that blazing Yngweh Malmsteen arpeggio. To my taste, I'm a lot more interested in the nuance of The Wiggle than I am in blazing solos as you'll never find any psychedelic soul in a blazing guitar lead but you can make lots of it with The Wiggle.
Plus she's got the most killin' growl you will hear from a singer anywhere.
lefty Unplugged and Sonya Jevette are worlds apart stylistically but there are many artistic similarities, particularly in the approach to poetry. Just as with Sonya, lefty Unplugged doesn't use a formulaic approach but rather whatever is appropriate to the message. My purpose isn't to compare them except to note the artistic approach is similar and if you like one then you will probably like the other. So Cat Boucher schedules them on the same night and you can hear them at once.
Last night we heard more about snot than would probably be warranted in most conversations but lefty made it cool. We could hear him coughing and that really sounded painful and his voice was obviously affected when he spoke ... but ... you could not tell it by how he sang. Making music is one thing but doing it when you're sick as a rat is a whole other world. lefty Unplugged showed all kinds of bad-ass last night for the show must go on. It did and he played it through. Definitely bad-ass.
Bad-ass ... what I'm sayin', man. Maybe you don't think it's so bad-ass to perform with a sparrow on your head but lefty can do it and you can see he was doing it last night. At first I thought it was Pidge but Cat corrected me as of course that's not Pidge because sparrows may dream of becoming pigeons but it's never going to happen. There's a long story behind this and I can proudly tell you lefty even introduced me to Pidge, personally.
We talked about 12-string guitars a bit last night as lefty is playing one with eight surviving strings. It is such a screaming pain to tune a 12-string and it's an even bigger one to re-string the guitar. When you replace one string, you have to replace all of them as the tone won't be right otherwise. The new string will be much brighter ... but ... you don't have a choice if a string breaks in a gig. Oh, the trials of guitar players ... and double all of them with a 12-string. But they sound so pretty.
There was almost a picture of Cat as she was the hippie girl last night. I aimed my camera at her but she teleported just before I snapped the pic. In Second Life, if you fix your camera on something then the camera will follow the subject. She TPed back home and suddenly she was in the bedroom. I didn't know what she was going to do there but I did know I wasn't going to shoot a pic. Next time.
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