Bambi Lee Savage premieres a new song from her forthcoming third solo album, Darkness Overshadowed today. The track, "Nearly Gone" is available for streaming and/or free download HERE.
As with most things in existence, it's the secrets in music that speak truest. The fact that Bambi Lee Savage has remained a secret for so long is testament to that. Over the past 25 years, the world-wandering singer-songwriter has worked with Daniel Lanois as well as members of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Einstürzende Neubauten. She counts among her patrons Billy Bob Thornton and Bono. Her timeless ballads and haunted anthems are stark, lush, elemental, and ethereal as smoke. And like smoke, they conceal -- even as they signal deeper mysteries well worth the effort of unveiling.
Savage began life in Florida, but following the death of her father -- a stunt pilot tragically killed during the filming of the Pearl Harbor drama Tora! Tora! Tora! -- her family relocated to Colorado. In Denver, she played in various punk bands, including the Pagan Cowboys, as the '80s raged around her. It was upon moving to England in 1985 that her secrets began to weave themselves. After fronting the post-punk outfit Horseland, she moved to Berlin, drawn by the industrial allure of Einstürzende Neubauten. In Berlin she began working as an assistant engineer at the famous Hansa Tonstudio. There she wound up scoring credits on two definitive albums of the era: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' The Good Son and U2's Achtung Baby.
Behind the scenes, though, Savage was working on her own songs. In 1992, Bono funded a recording session in Berlin that included the Bad Seeds' Mick Harvey and Hugo Race as backing musicians. Shadowy and steeped in a shivering mystique, the four-song recording went unreleased, although Harvey would later cover one of Savage's other songs, "Demon Alcohol," on his 2005 album One Man's Treasure. From there, Savage appeared on the German music documentary Lost in Music: Out of Country, playing two of her songs with Neubauten's Alex Hacke.
By then, Savage's music had taken a turn toward the dark end of the Americana street, driven partly by a homesickness for her native country. Back in the States, she captured another handful of songs with Daniel Lanois, with whom she'd worked on Achtung Baby. One of those songs, the ghostly folk threnody "Darlin'," caught the ear of Billy Bob Thornton, who used the song on the soundtrack to his breakthrough film Sling Blade.
In 2003, she released her first album, Matter of Time, a collection of the various sessions she'd done to date. Although a patchwork, the disc is stunning in its quiet force and sublimated passion. In it, Savage explores illicit substances, spirituality, tenderness, and terror, always with a thrilling tension between myth and confession. In the years that followed, she toured Australia (accompanied by Harvey on some dates) and played a triumphant set as the handpicked opener for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in Denver. She moved to Los Angeles soon after and, with Josh Klinghoffer on guitar (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dot Hacker) she completed work on the daring GJ and the PimpKillers, a conceptual and synthetically textured album that delved into the underworld of sex trafficking. As always, though, Savage's rich, hypnotic, full-blooded voice lends both humanity and otherworldliness to her songs.
Savage's new album, Darkness Overshadowed, is both a culmination of all she's done before-and a brave move beyond it. From the guttural punk undertow of "Easy Way" to the atmospheric dread of "Elsinore" to the whispery twang of "Waiting," the disc is based around hopes, fears, memories, regrets, and scraps of confessions written on Berlin bar napkins. Produced by Mick Harvey, who also provides most of the backing instrumentation, it's by far the most vivid and chilling of Savage's work to date. Above all, though, Darkness Overshadowed reads as a secret history of the pre-apocalypse, a gnostic gospel decrypted and given human form. Or in Savage's case, something slightly beyond human.
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| Artist: Bambi Lee Savage Album: Darkness Overshadowed Label: Bambi Lee Savage Music Release Date: November 13th, 2012 01. Easy Way 02. Nearly Gone (MP3) 03. Speed of Life 04. Nicht Mehr 05. Oh Loneliness (STREAM) (MP3) 06. Elsinore 07. Take Me Down 08. Good Advice 09. No Stranger to Sorrow 10. Waiting bambileesavage.com bambileesavage.bandcamp.com www.facebook.com/pages/Bambi-Lee-Savage |
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