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Kindling, the most recent album from Beth Amsel, is a musical ride through love and loss, want and desire, grief and change as seen from the driver’s seat of a runaway car. Produced and engineered by Dave Chalfant (Erin McKeown, Ben Demerath, The Nields), the multi-instrumentalist and bass player from folk rock favorite The Nields, Kindling smolders with stellar work from Beth, Chalfant, and a host of New England’s greatest players (Kevin Barry, Jim Henry, Lorne Entress, Ben Demerath, Katryna Nields, Gideon Freudmann, and Dave Hower). From the R&B What You Can Never Have to the sweet waltz Simple, This Farewell, to the country tinged Lonely Rider, Kindling is poised to “establish Beth as one of the great folk voices working today.” (Tom Neff, Grassy Hill Radio) To hear Beth sing is to experience a stunning, commanding power. Daniel Gewertz of the Boston Herald calls Beth’s voice, “simply one of the most beautiful on today's folk scene.” Reviewers and club bookers agree. Wrote Roger Catlin of the Hartford Courant, “Amsel possesses a pure voice that flits easily from Joni Mitchell to duskier Dar Williams... a voice that seems destined for something big.” Her first full-length recording, 1997’s A Thousand Miles – initially released only on cassette – garnered the word of mouth that fills the folk-music chat rooms of the internet. In spring of 1999, demand for A Thousand Miles led to its release on compact disc (its sales resulted in three pressings in its first year). In 1999, more than three dozen non-com radio stations added it to their rotation and within six months, selections off A Thousand Miles could be found on more than 30 internet radio sites (as well as Napster). In February 2000, A Thousand Miles was nominated for a 2000 Boston Music Award for Best Debut Folk/Acoustic Album. As a rebellious adolescent, Beth fled what she calls “the black eyelined, hair sprayed depths of suburban Long Island” for a small ranching town on the Western Slope of Colorado, whose sere landscapes and towering mountains felt more like home than subdivisions and strip malls. In Colorado, she says, “I became intimately acquainted with potato peelers, wheels of barbed wire and my voice.” It was there, too, that she began keeping journals, noting snippets of conversation, listening in on lives glimpsed in bus stations, diners and smoky taverns she wasn’t old enough to be sitting in. When she was twenty, Beth was jarred in the middle of the night by a phone call from the Boulder jail. A friend was in the slammer and needed someone to pay his bail. In the best good-friend tradition, Beth paid the hundred dollars and accepted, as collateral, his guitar. “I don’t play guitar,” she told him. “You won’t have it long enough to learn,” he promised. Two years later, the repayment never made, Beth cracked the case for the first time and met her muse. Living alone through a particularly bitter Colorado winter gave Beth the time she needed to learn the instrument, to set her thoughts into song, and to begin to hone her craft to the sharp edge it holds today. Within a year she had amassed a devoted, almost fanatical, following among acoustic music aficionados in Colorado. And when in 1997 she moved to the vibrant singer/songwriter scene of the Northeast, she was ready to bring her music to a larger audience. Since then, the word has spread quickly. Sold out shows at clubs like Cambridge’s fabled Club Passim, appearances on an increasing number of compilations – such as lead cut on WWUH’s Mayday: Folks Next Door, a featured spot on NPR’s syndicated Anthem radio show, finalist of WRSI’s Singer/Songwriter Contest, one of only three finalists in the 2000 Rosegarden Songwriter Contest, a showcase feature on the mainstage of the 2000 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, and a return to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in 2001 as one of the four Most Wanted Artists. Beth is also a founding member of Boston Music Award nominated “Voices on the Verge,” a touring roadshow of Amsel, Rose Polenzani, Erin McKeown and Jess Klein. This dynamic foursome, with their delicate harmonies, unexpected instrumentations, tight arrangements, and unpredictable, raucous stage antics, have been heard by millions on NPR’s Morning Edition and on numerous nationally syndicated radio programs such as E-Town, Mountain Stage, and World Cafe. In 2002, Voices made their national television debut on the CBS Early Show in support of their October 2001 Rykodisc debut release, Live in Philadelphia. Recorded in front of an intimate audience at legendary Indre Studio in Philadelphia, LIP sold 20,000 copies within six months of its release and over 45,000 copies within a year. A three month, coast to coast, 65 date tour, including such venues as The Bottom Line in NYC, The Tractor Tavern in Seattle, The Gothic Theatre in Denver, Shuba’s in Chicago, and the Somerville Theatre in MA was a sell out triumph. Winter 2004 finds Beth once again in the studio with Mr. Chalfant recording the follow up to Kindling. With her continued success, more and more listeners are coming to know what a good thing it was that a debt was never repaid for a night spent in a Colorado jail. |
Visit the Beth Amsel web-site | |
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Other artists from CO Beth & Kort McCumber Estrojam Mike Berg | |
Uncommon Ground Past Show Dates | |
| 2004-09-18 (1385 days) | Katie Reider |
| Beth Amsel | |
| Leo | |
| 2003-09-20 (1749 days) | L&J |
| Beth Amsel | |
| Jim Pullman | |