On April 7, 2009, Bat for Lashes’ mulit-instrumentalist Caroline Weeks is to release her debut solo album on Manimal Vinyl, the same Los Angeles based label for whom she covered “The Drowning Man” for their Cure tribute album. Available across CD, vinyl and download formats, the album Songs for Edna, features 9 tracks of stark minimal folk all with lyrics borrowed from the late American poet, Edna St. Vincent-Millay. Caroline songs are full of insight, sensitivity and intimacy and do justice to a poet whose love sonnets are undeservedly slighted in our day.
For info on Edna: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St_Vincent_Millay
Having toured the states with Lewis & Clarke and performed across the UK, Caroline has gained cult status as a solo artist since stepping out from Bat for Lashes, for whom she will be opening on several dates of their forthcoming April UK Tour (see below for live dates). Her music has been compared to everyone from Karen Dalton to Sandy Denny.
Having been a full time member of Bat For Lashes for over three years, Caroline previously performed under the name Ginger Lee, but having discovered (via a somewhat shocking Google search) that a young American lady who appears to relish having her photo taken in the nude shared this particular moniker, Caroline has now reverted to using her family name.
Born and bred on the Sussex coast, Caroline comes from a long line of musicians: in the 1920s the fifteen-strong “Weeks brass band” was famed across East Sussex, while, more recently, her Grandfather can be seen playing the church organ in the movie of Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.
A classically trained flautist and effortlessly self-taught multi-instrumentalist, Caroline currently prefers a three-quarter-sized classical Spanish guitar, which she uses to brew a heady mix of cantering finger picks and delicately decaying sound shapes, where the spaces are just as important as the notes. Add to this her own “secret” tuning (which has been known to flummox even the most competent of guitarists looking to have a quick strum in the Green Room) and you have a truly original sound.
All of this is topped of with a classic English voice. Her songs are both powerful and at the same time fragile; and to hear Caroline sing is to witness traditional folk music colliding with a contemporary stitching of everyone from Nico and Joni Mitchell to Kate Bush and Vashti Bunyan.
Caroline now lives in Brighton where, aside from her solo work and commitments to Bat For Lashes, she also plays accordion in Euchrid Eucrow (a howling death-folk-roots trio featuring British Sea Power’s Abi Fry), occasionally ventures out with the theatrical all-girl chamber quartet Pthhh (with fellow BFL player Quinta), sings in a Bulgarian folk choir and is also instigating an experimental vocal group and flute ensemble.
CAROLINE WEEKS
Mar 07 London Word Festival London
Mar 26 The Luminaire London
Apr 11 The Westhill Hall Brighton
Apr 12 Birmingham Town Hall Birmingham
Apr 13 Cambridge Junction Oxford
Apr 15 Anson Rooms Bristol
Apr 16 Brighton Corn Exchange Brighton
Apr 18 Cafe Oto London
Caroline Weeks
Songs For Edna
(Manimal Vinyl)
Street date: April 07, 2009
1. See Where Capella with her golden kids
2. What lips my lips have kissed
3. Wild Swans
4. Renascence
5. Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave
6. The return
7. Pity me not
8. I shall go back
9. Elegy
CAROLINE WEEKS LINKS:
MySpace – www.myspace.com/carolineweeks
Label Page – www.manimalvinyl.com