Here is the link to Sunday's session with Doug Welch at the BBC Radio Kent Folk Show:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04nb0q8
It'll be there for 30 days (well 27 now!) so listen as many times as you like! Many thanks to Doug and Dave for being so welcoming - it was a really pleasant, relaxed evening. They even gave me copies of the recordings to keep!
Kent I will be coming your way soon - I'm hoping to pop down to Ron Truman-Border's guest show at the Orpington Liberal Club on the 27th.
2017 has been great for airplay so far. Here are some mixcloud links to shows who have kindly taken up tracks - thank you! Always such lovely words from Rick at Roots & Fusion and great to be picked up by Chelmsford Community Radio - I grew up just down the road from there in Great Baddow so that area is full of childhood memories!
Back in the Autumn last year I was offered the fantastic opportunity of a spot on the FATEA showcase sessions - a downloadable album of songs from a wide selection of current artists, which runs for three months (in this case to the 31 January, so get to the link and get your free copy before it runs out!)
The current session is called Mirror and is available for download here:
http://www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk/
It's packed full of great tracks on here from a real range of styles - I find myself going back to this over and over as the variety is fascinating and the quality of the musicianship is great, it's been a real inspiration to me. Personal favourites were Ruth Theodore's Buffalo, Bel Blue's Wild Dog Rose and Fara's version of The Games People Play. Also in great company with Ange Hardy and Lukas Drinkwater who have just won FATEA's award for Band/Duo of the year 2016, and Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage - I saw them supporting Sarah Jarosz at the Union Chapel late last year and my favourite song of the set, Lady Margaret, is on the Mirror Download.
To mark the download I've made a lyric video for Tide Will Turn which is now up on YouTube:
Here's a run down of releases this year that I've sung on: two singles of mine, the Sumner Anderson duo album we recorded in the spring, and some featured vocals for Devon Sol and the Calling For Serenity collective:
RENEGADES - iTunes // Amazon Download
SOME KIND OF COMFORT - iTunes // Amazon download
SUMNER ANDERSON - Out Along The Bend (album) - iTunes // Amazon download
CALLING FOR SERENITY - ENDLESS NUMBERS EP - iTunes // Amazon download
DEVON SOL - YOUR LOVE MADE ME LIE - iTunes // Amazon download
I've contributed to a couple of other projects that are due for release early in 2017, along with hopefully a new album of my own in the works - better get to it! I've written 15 songs this year without about the same number underway.
Here's the link to the Introducing Featured Artist interview I did at BBC Radio London -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04jx4wl
The interview starts about 17 minutes in and covers some background into how I got into performing and my songwriting process and you can hear Renegades straight afterwards.
Always lots of great new music packed into that hour every Saturday and I'm very grateful to Gary, Ollie and Jess for giving me the opportunity to be a part of it.
I'm going to be the Featured Artist on tonight's BBC Radio London Introducing show - it's broadcast from 8pm on 94.9fm if you're in London or any of the following if not:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04jx4wl
Radio London on Virgin TV Channel 937
Radio London on Sky TV Channel 0152
Digital Radio on 94.9FM
Freeview channel 721
Please tune in if you can!
Recording the interview meant a lunchtime trip to Broadcasting House, which was pretty exciting as it was the first time I'd been there! Here are a couple of photos from the day...
Earlier in the autumn I went up to Stockport to record a session for Rick Stuart's Roots and Fusion show. Rick and I had been in touch since he started playing some of the songs from These Hours back in the spring, and it was so great to finally get to meet him. It was a really lovely morning, my favourite session so far, and formed part of their special 400th broadcast.
The session is available online at the link below - live acoustic versions of 5 songs including Renegades, and an interview at the end that I think gives away how much fun we had!
http://podcast.pureradio.org.uk/index.php?id=2853
I've had songs played on the last couple of episodes of Roots & Fusion - you should be able to listen below or link through to their Mixcloud site. I found a great load of new music that I loved in these two shows and in between the two I'd been up to Stockport to record a session for them, which is going to be aired as part of the 400th show on 2nd November. It was one of the loveliest sessions I've ever done and it was great to meet Rick at last. Proof as ever that music brings you into contact with amazing people.
These Hours has just been reviewed for FATEA magazine and the magical link to the review is here: http://www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/reviews/AnneSumner/
I'm really delighted by this as you might imagine! It was around this time two years ago that I was about to start recording These Hours and I still love how much those songs represent that time - even now, when I'm in the process of starting to record the next album. I wonder how much emotional distance I've really covered in the past two years? This year has been particularly turbulent and I feel like I might be craving the relative certainty of things I've felt before; I know I've grown but perhaps can't see it yet. I guess we'll see how the songs emerge.
Thanks to all at FATEA for your support.
Listen out for Roots & Fusion this Wednesday evening... Heading up there very soon to do a live session and put faces to names, really looking forward to that!
Dear poor neglected blog! I realise I never shared with you the photos from my session with Nick Piercey at BBC Oxford. I have the amazing Chloe Ray to thank for capturing the photography and owe a sincere debt of gratitude to her, Mark Flanagan, Nick himself and Georgie at BBC Oxford for guiding me through my first ever live radio session. We had a lovely, sunny, boiling hot day for it!
I've been having a really brilliant summer out and about gigging and don't often make it back here to wrap-up what's been going on, but thought I would this week! I've been lucky enough to have gigs every weekend since the Calling For Serenity EP launch back in May, thanks to a bunch of local venues and festivals asking me back after last summer, some SumnerAnderson gigs in the mix and just being a bit more in the loop on events springing up around Croydon. Generally I'll try and cram as many open mics/singers' nights as possible in during the week and that's how I get to keep up with friends :D I meet so many wonderful people out and about gigging and the friendships that develop and the conversations that happen are the biggest blessing of all.
Got a few photos from this week - these are from the Apple Tree in Clerkenwell, which has an open mic on a Wednesday night hosted by the ever-wonderful Romeo Crow, the King William IV on Friday with another very talented host, Gian Luca, and then a really lovely afternoon at the opening of the Mitcham Community Orchard (I've been reliably informed that the collective noun for ukeleles is a "Plink". Yep. A Plink of Ukeleles! There you have it...) followed by the weekly Folk and Blues night at Ruskin House on Sunday. The video at the bottom is from the King William IV night.
I found out that Artie Martello had played Anywhere With You on one of his shows last week and I've been listening to the podcast this morning - turns out that Artie's soothing voice and chilled-out tunes are the perfect antidote to doing your taxes and makes them far less painful! Thanks Artie. Check it out below via Mixcloud or visit the Mostly Folk website for all the latest.
P.S. I secretly love doing my taxes but that's because I'm an accountant and it's even more fun than doing other people's!
Solid Ground found its way into the BBC Introducing Mixtape, broadcast on Radio 6 on Monday morning. You can listen on the iPlayer via this link until around 16th August and read more detail on all the artists at the Fresh On The Net page.
Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to be doing a live session with Nick Piercey on BBC Radio Oxford from 2pm. If you'd like to tune in the link is here to stream live:
Artie Martello played a 3-song feature from These Hours in this episode of Mostly Folk from last week. I love the 3-song lineups as way to get into an album a little bit more (plus it reminds me a bit of open mics!) and I really enjoyed listening to the other albums featured here.
You can follow Artie on Mixcloud, Twitter and he has a particularly wonderful Instagram account following his life up in the mountains.
I've been enjoying singing backing for Chris Sheffield/The 9 Lives - here's the first time we sang Hold Me at Hoodoo's:
A big thank you to Andrew Chatterton and James Tighe at Croydon Radio for taking up Some Kind of Comfort for their shows last week - you can listen to James's "Live this week in Croydon" podcast below. By complete coincidence I was standing outside the studio as James left after this show (while waiting for my open mic slot at Hoodoo's) and we're arranging a live session so keep your eyes and ears peeled for that!
So good news! The new single Some Kind of Comfort is out and available through all the usual channels - iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc. You can listen to the final edit on SoundCloud below, and there's also a video! The lyrics are here.
It's my first time releasing a single and I was lucky in that everything came together really quickly on this one, it only took a month from writing the song through recording it to getting it released. Admittedly I have been pushing it and playing it a lot as right from the start this has had special sentimental value to me and it also speaks to what I want to do with my music in general - bring comfort, since it seems there's not enough of that in the world and we could all use a little more. I'm not about to solve the world's problems but if writing a song can put a little bit of peace or love into someone's day, then that seems a good thing to put out there, and the more good things there are, the less room we'll all have for negativity. Right?!
A side note about where I'm at with releases and albums at the moment: I have a vague idea about trying to put a song out every month or so, that seems to fit better with where I am in terms of available time and resources right now. When I was recording These Hours I had a fairly coherent idea of what I wanted to do with the album as a whole and was determined to record in single takes as that was representative of what I was doing live at the time - the songs all kind of held together that way and that was pretty much all I did for a couple of months, rehearse and record and gig a bit in between. Fast forward 18 months and I am working on quite a variety of material, also collaborating a lot and looking forward to getting some different productions done of some of the songs. I'm not convinced about how it would hold together as an album at this point, even if I had the time to dedicate to just doing that - but I do have a backlog of songs, with new material coming through all the time, so working on them incrementally seems to make sense. I'm going to see where it takes me for now...
Hope you enjoy this song and we're starting work on the next one on Thursday... watch this space!
Last weekend we made a little live video of Running on a Spark - love this song so much! You can check out more of what we've been up to at www.sumneranderson.com