Britney King writes psychological, domestic, and romantic thrillers set in suburbia. She is currently writing three series and several standalone novels. Turns out, she didn't. Thus she finds herself tangled in a messy, dangerous, forbidden love story and face-to-face with a madman hell-bent on revenge. It has been compared to a crazier version of Mr. Also, the hit series Dexter. If she were the only one with things she wanted to keep hidden, then maybe it wouldn't have turned out so bad.
But she wasn't. It has been compared to Love, Rosie. Britney lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, children, two dogs, one ridiculous cat, and a partridge in a pear tree.
She enjoys hearing from readers and would love it if you would connect with her at britneyking. To receive an email whenever the author releases a new title, sign up for the VIP newsletter at britneyking. Her characters may be hard to pin down, but she's not. She loves talking to readers, so feel free to email her at britney britneyking. Happy reading.
Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel. They have an old EMI desk which apparently the Stones recorded with in the early 70s. We went there for about a month, and got lots of backing tracks recorded, drank lots of great wine.
It was in the foothills of Mont Ventoux, there was a local musician cooking for us and bringing us wine, so the whole experience was fantastic. The plan was to reconvene about six months later, and of course that became a year, because that just seems to be the way we do things. But its almost done. It will be five years since our last release, and the plan is well tour it extensively, so Im looking forward to that.
I think were all keen on being a bit more productive and getting albums out every couple of years in the future. On one song Im channeling the Buzzcocks, its a fast punk rock song, and then Ive got something thats quite heavily orchestrated with strings and a harp.
Theres a bossa nova-influenced one too, with lots of Latin percussion, so some of the tracks are quite different! Im pretty happy with it. The singer and pianist follows up s return with a very thankful new record Bill Fay: The title track is really a tribute to music itself. I see myself as a song-finder rather than a songwriter. All the chords are there before any singer-songwriter comes along. The starting point is the chord sequence and the feeling you get from it.
There is a sort of mystery involved in that. The title track is shifting the credit from the writer on to that mysterious thing called music. Sometimes I found going back to the topline on an older [unreleased] song, a completely new topline can appear, and with that completely different words but some of the songs are completely new.
He set up a caf in Nevada City, then emailed me seven months ago and said, I need a break, Bill, can we do another album? The label financed 13 days at Konk Studios. Fortunately, the same personnel that were on the last album became available.
The albums not a major departure. The subject matter is still spiritual, yes, all my songs have lyrically reflected where I was.
People rediscovering my music is touching, but I just carry on finding songs. The band spent an entire week there writing and playing songs. Weve just been touring ever since. Have I been stockpiling songs since? Yes and no, I never really stopped writing.
But the truth is I did for a minute. Thats because for the most part Ive been in Istanbul, jumping in and out. I met a very sweet Turkish girl who Im engaged to. So now I came home and all my shit is strewn out across New York, but thats fine. Ive got a studio in Dumbo and one here in East Williamsburg: a piano here, a pump organ there, and I also have hard drives in both. I basically have songs scattered. I have about 12 or 15 that Ill stick with. When I go to the studio I name the songs, just as placeholders, after meals I ate on the way there.
I have one song called Dim Sum, a song called Kebabs. I have three songs that are named after burgers. Its kind of funny because a few days ago, our bass player had to take my hands off the Space Echo on one of the songs.
I love it to death but it can be abused. A lot of major symphony orchestras are in trouble because their audience is getting old and the younger audiences prefer softer stuff, he explains.
I think that Quadrophenia would reinvigorate their audiences and bring in people who might not otherwise go to see an orchestra perform without lights and fireworks and a movie screen. The material on it is a reflection of a part of my musical foundation, he explained to Canadas Jam!
Music in Songs I heard on the radio and on my parents record player in the 50s and 60s. Next for Gilmour is his own new album: his first solo release since s On An Island.
The first mention of Gilmours latest project came in November , where Graham Nash revealed during a TV interview that he and David Crosby were due to visit Gilmours home studio near Brighton to contribute vocals to a new album the pair had previously appeared on the title track of On An Island. Aside from Nash and Crosby, Phil Manzanera has also confirmed his involvement in the record.
More recently, on September 4, Gilmours wife Polly Samson tweeted a further update: Husband very trusting this afternoon: Can you just engineer me for a moment? Now, see that red button. Gilmour himself finally broke silence about the new record in October , telling Rolling Stone, Its coming along very well. There are some sketches that arent finished, and some of them will be started again.
Theres a few months work in it yet. Gilmour also spoke of his plans to undertake a tour of smaller venues; Places like Radio City Music Hall sound like the right sort of vibe for me. The hard-working Virginian tackles death and darkness on his soulful second album. Id wake up in the morning and work all day on the record as long as I could.
Theres 10 songs. The first song on the record is called Take Care, My Baby. The albums title, Fresh Blood, is from a. Theres a song about Philip Seymour Hoffman and his drug overdose called Tranquility. I dont think theres been a celebrity death thats affected me more in my lifetime than his. I took it to heart, I dont remember being sad like that for a celebrity or public figure dying in my life. I had a friend whose mum killed herself. That was close to me, but far enough away where I could write about it a little bit.
Its called Circle Round The Sun. Theres also one about. I wouldnt say the record is dark as much as those things are pretty rough, but theres a lot of celebration of joy and hope. When I worked in the 70s and 80s, I had the musicians in the studio.
Now I have my guys, my musicians, some in LA, two guys in Germany. I send them the demo, they send me the first two minutes, I send back, we talk, its almost like being in the studio. The new album has a good combination of some traditional disco sounds, like the violin, and some songs that are like EDM, with the more metallic, new sounds. I have maybe five or six songs at tempo, the dance tempo, then some that are at , After some stirrings, Jack White is preparing to get behind the drum kit again.
I had so many things I was working on. I designed a sports car, made some short movies, played a lot of golf. I was happy until Daft Punk and the DJ world got me back into music. I came back to LA in I have a small studio here. I make demos. I do drums, bass, keyboards, some. The message was reassuring: blistering riffs, howled vocals, hard-hitting choruses, everything pretty much as youd expect from White and his pals. It was an excellent reminder of The Dead Weathers thrilling live skills, and a welcome taste of what to expect from their third studio album interviews by michael bonner and tom pinnock.
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Involves threesomes in LA, ghosts in New Orleans, naked mushroom epiphanies in Big Sur, and a healthy dose of Mascara, blood, ash and cum. Im here, he claims, to help liberate people. Maybe to liberate myself most of all. There was very little forethought, other than just a feeling they might like it there. Why did we move here? Tillman asks rhetorically, folding his tall 6ft 4in frame into a brown leather couch in his living room.
Raking a hand through his beard and cracking his knuckles, he takes a long time to answer. No good reason, really. I think the reason for moving is still revealing itself. Ive only ever moved with an earthly ambition before, he says, putting extra emphasis on the last word, a signifier that this is something else altogether.
The couple who only married in September under a cover of redwood trees in Big Sur, each with a crown of white flowers didnt know anyone in New Orleans. They had no ties to the place Tillman is from Rockville, Maryland, while Emma is an only child from Santa Barbara, California but in the way of all genius ideas, it came to them in a moments flash.
Not the first one that Tillman ever had, either its usually how he travels from one place to another. The thing that makes Josh pretty extraordinary is he has these epiphanies and then hell act on them, explains Casey Prescott, Fleet Foxes former keyboardist and Tillmans best friend. Its how he got to Seattle. Its how he got to LA, and how he moved to New Orleans.
Most people just think about what they want to do. Josh always takes action. I moved to Seattle to pursue music, continues Tillman. Then I moved to LA to blow up my life, then we moved here just because we could. There was just a feeling that we could do whatever we wanted. And the prospect of moving was symbolic of that, especially moving somewhere where we didnt know anyone, he says, incessantly clicking the top of a ballpoint pen, emphasising every word.
He is never at rest; and its possible to understand why his parents got him a drum set at 11, to drain off some energy. There was nothing I wanted to study. I couldnt engage. I took a perverse pleasure in failing, he says. By , he knew he had to leave. All I wanted to do was to play my music.
I figured Seattle was the place to do it. There was a lot of fear and trembling that went into me leaving there and extricating myself from Christianity, which had been my entire world. But an epiphany that size requires leaving your family, moving to the other side of the country, all that.
I do feel a responsibility to my internal world to act on those kinds of things when they come up. So far his instincts have been correct.
No matter that he didnt know anyone in Seattle. He got one of his demos to Seattle indie legend Damien Jurado, who brought him out on tour with him about a year later. When the band fired their drummer, the job was offered to Tillman.
For the next four years, he was in one of the most successful folk ensembles of the past decade, with Fleet Foxes heralded as the spiritual descendants of CSN. But the trouble was, Josh Tillman didnt connect with the external pastoral world the Foxes inhabited, so after three albums he quit the band by email in January [see panel], following it up with a simple announcement on his Tumblr account: Back into the gaping maw of obscurity.
Four months later, hed released his ninth solo album, Fear Fun, the first recorded under the new moniker Father John Misty, all but instigating his own religion. Im not sure hed tell you. He was searching for a way to bust out and become himself.
When we got here, we had this fantasy that we were going to move to this haunted palace, he explains. We found an unheated, haunted barn thats 10 blocks down the way from here. That might have been OK had we not moved in the middle of the polar vortex. The couple signed a lease, moved in. Almost immediately, they moved out. We lived there for three weeks and it had some really negative vibes, explains Emma, who looks unnervingly like a mythic sea nymph, with her dark curling hair, her bare feet as slender and bony as a ballerinas, and her blood-red lipstick.
The newly-weds found friendlier spirits in the Marigny district, near a section of the city that the New York Times has taken to describing, somewhat accurately, as the Williamsburg of the South. But no matter how gentrified New Orleans may become, theres something of a spiritual miasma permeating the place, as befits The Most Haunted City in America, a moniker that inspires many of its 9.
Josh Tillman, on the other hand, came here to leave his ghosts behind. Just like all the other times. Or to quote Emily Dickinson: One need not be a chamber to be haunted.
The improbability of me living here made it more appealing, says Tillman. That this isnt a place Id normally belong. They live on a street filled with neat rows of small wooden structures tiny as doll houses, all painted in primary colours.
There is a black Chevy hearse with California license plates parked in front of a Czanne-blue house. Very Neil Young circa Dark shutters and wrought-iron bars cover all the windows of the house.
The interior is long and cavernous, filled with dark wood and jewel-coloured rugs running the expanse of a hallway that gives you the sense of being inside a train.
Each room feeds into the next, without dividing walls, ending in what looks like a billowy white tent, which hides a claw-foot bathtub. Theres a Persian rug in the bathroom, atop it a pair of brown leather Moroccan slippers you could imagine Jimmy Page wearing. One wall is bright blue, and houses an oversized gardeners sink where you could either efficiently chop up a body or trim roses.
We dont know anyone here. This is the extent of our world, pretty much, Tillman admits. Emma wrote her first feature-length script this year. While she was doing it I was losing my goddamn mind, I was unable to he lets the words hang in the afternoon air, as if its hard to continue.
Well, I wasnt able to do anything. Its only now, within the last few months, Im able to do anything. My body moved here but my spirit was still back there [in LA].
A painting hangs in the foyer of the house, with a mirror embedded in the centre. Running across the top, in quaint, old-fashioned psychedelic script, the words You Are Here. That was painted for us by the guy who painted the sign for the Laurel Canyon Country Store, Tillman says. He [Spike Stewart] gave it to us as a wedding present.
The market, a meeting place for the Canyons glitterati in the. There was a lot of fear and trembling in extricating myself from Christianity. Elsewhere, the haunting beauty of his guitar playing is discreetly complimented by Mellotron and soft, scurrying beats. Autobiographical to a fault and damn the fall-out, the former J Tillman may sound like Harry Nilsson, but he parties like Jimmy Page.
It shares a similar, deep woods sound; subtly melodic, full of richly harmonised vocals. The tale of a promiscuous father and his two children who keep devising supernatural ways to get rid of the women he romances, it relies on the music to set the mood which it does beautifully, hinting at some of Tillmans hidden talents.
Deft, understated and unnerving. More orchestrated than its predecessors, his sixth is nevertheless striking: I possess a holy fear, he intones on the witchy, backwoods horror of There Is No Good In Me.
Recorded in three days by Steve Albini, Tillmans bleakest record is typically hot on apocalyptic. More literal than its predecessor, Tillman has tried and succeeded in making his version of Two Virgins, chronicling his own unorthodox love story, complete with what he was doing the night before he met the future Mrs Tillman.
He sings like Marvin Gaye, or at least a Chi-Lite. PReview early 70s, is where Tillman first met Emma in September It confounded me, he says now. Everyone was on some weird ego trip. Myself included. There were certain aspects of the band I was just not jiving with. I felt the sentimentality about the wilderness and otherness and these external worlds was just symptomatic of a certain type of affluence. I just thought that was just kind of played out and I wanted to get more out of my creative time and how I expressed myself.
How did you really feel about the CSNY comparisons? Neil Young, now hes all right. You quit the band by email That realisation was a very small step towards where I am now. Just being like, Oh, Im just a monster. OK, Ill just live that way. I wanted to be like a noble savage or wanted to justify and redeem certain all-consuming, destructive aspects of myself and to like fully engage with those. But real monsters dont think about it that way.
They dont have a conscience about it. Theres something kind of ludicrous about that email. Look, guys, Im just a selfish monster.
And its best for everyone if I just engage that. You know, like best for everyone? Like what does a monster care about that? Both times he couldnt stop sobbing. But in this womb-like space, with its subdued lighting, old world charms, and lack of TV, he seems spectacularly sane, his eyes clear, his thoughts coherent and erudite.
He sips tea from an earthenware mug and its noticeable that the man who has made smoking onstage an artform on a par with Ian McCulloch hasnt had a single cigarette.
The Tillmans have eschewed drugs, the very things that helped accelerate some of his more trenchant observations on s Fear Fun. I never viewed it [drugs] as amusement. I dont view my experience with it as a failed experiment whatsoever. But I dont want to stay there. I want to keep pulling layers back, and while this doesnt have a whole lot to do with this record per se, the last year has been the process of de-polluting my body and being able to have clarity.
It seems like natural extension from a self-destructive place. I was so polluted with low-grade addictions like drinking, smoking, all of these self-soothing kinds of habits, that it took amphetamines, hallucinogenics just to have some degree of vital energy. It was like finding the most complicated way possible to skin a cat. Now Im just trying to simplify everything, he says, his hands splayed out dramatically as he gestures around the room. This LP is far less obtuse, and the subject matter is simpler.
The structures of the tunes are, too. Im also finding some excitement in the idea that the process can simplify. What it comes down to is, I want to live like an artist and work like an accountant.
On s Fear Fun, Tillman artfully arranged a breadcrumb trail to where he was in his life, and where he was going next, and its that trail that connects the two LPs. Tillman had an epiphany, sitting naked in a tree in Big Sur after ingesting mushrooms.
He realised the best things he was doing were the things he did between his songs, and that he needed to incorporate that wry, self-mocking, offbeat humour into his material. In his words, he was done with making wound-licking music. Its funny; I thought Id found my authentic self when I allowed the humour into my songs on my last album, Tillman reveals.
I get some cheap thrill out of analysing myself, and I like intimidating other people. That song should have been on this album. It certainly foreshadows it, allows Tillman. When Tillman was in Seattle, he was a mountain of a man, burly, hirsute, wearing oversized jeans and shirts.
Then something happened. It was as if he unzipped a bear suit and came out like a model for Vogue Hommes. Josh has always been handsome, give or take a haircut or two, argues Casey Wescott.
It was a synchronistic thing where we both gave up the dude beer vibe and became paleo [following the Paleolithic diet], explains Jonathan Wilson. But he went from the long-hair Seattle guy to a more dapper guy. It was the time for that version of himself.
He suddenly started showing up every day in suits. Weird thing is, it didnt seem strange. I do know Im a handsome person, says Tillman. But I never liked the way good-looking people get treated. Didnt trust it. Why be valued for that? So for a long time I put a mask on. Long hair. Bad clothes. It was part of not liking who I was. Trying to find my way to myself. John, hes only dancing Father John Misty is becoming well known for rather unorthodox dancing, by way of early Jim Morrison and a young Scott Walker T singing Silent Night in three-part harmony in a bathroom with two naked women.
People ask me if meeting Emma changed anything, he continues. It changed everything. But not at first. Both of us thought that relationships were idiotic. We were really connecting on that, and that fed my vanity. I liked the idea of us as the two misanthropes in love. Then pretty early on we had been hanging out, and she left in the morning, and I had the worst anxiety all day long. She came back to my house and she was like, Oh, I just had the worst anxiety all day long.
Emma was a big part of this album, besides being an inspiration behind it. You know the line in Honeybear that goes, Mascara, blood, ash and cum. One morning I got in the shower and she said to me, The sheets are covered in. I wrote the Rorschach part. That was all me, he crows. Does she get a writing credit? She needs more than a writing credit.
When nobody else cared, including me, she told me the truth. The best thing she did was tell me I needed to not be afraid for these songs to be beautiful. I was afraid of shedding a version of myself Id become comfortable with.
Like OK, wry, sarcastic works for me. That will fill seats. I was like a Republican senator, the guy going around telling everyone about personal revolution and growth while desperately clinging to this previous incarnation. But what about the next incarnation? Id like to get to a point musically where Im onstage in the foetal position in a diaper screaming, and just being like thats what I do now.
Its a male voice. There are no lyrics. Im trans-lyrical. I get quite a bit from the music and from the performance. Im trying to disrupt things. Ive never thought of myself as being a musician. I see myself as a proselytiser, to some extent. Im here to help liberate people. How will you know? Ill know.
I even sign autographs, Yours Eventually. It was always this thing that people who knew me were well accustomed to. I think those same people cant believe it was happening in a professional context. In hindsight I can go back and try to break it down, but its a shaman dance. Its meant to hypnotise. But there was no forethought. It wasnt until I got to Letterman [in ] and it happened during the rehearsal. I found I couldnt do the song without doing the dance.
My ego tells me I do it because Im sick of these narcoleptic indie rock performances, and Im going to be a culture warrior or whatever but I dont actually have any real interest in being a culture warrior. OK, you got me. Thats where I tell the truth, says Tillman. Even if Ive sung them times before, theres more personal truth in my lyrics than there are in most anything I could say to an acquaintance.
I think its almost impossible to suss out what someone believes with a direct line of questioning, Tillman explains as he begins to fold in on himself. His steely blue eyes become more grey than blue, narrowing a bit. The direct questioning thing is a lot better at determining what people fear than a belief per se, he continues.
I understand what people mean by beliefs. Its a placeholder for imagination. One of his beliefs was that relationships and monogamy were bourgeois. In fact, in an effort not to make this album predictably cloying about romance, he included a pair of songs that hed written right before hed met Emma, one of them about a rather shrill threesome in The Night Josh Tillman Jonathan Came To Our apartment.
Thats exactly when it happened. There were a lot of songs from that time period, and there was a whole other album that could have been made around that time, and that album went up in smoke very quickly after meeting Emma. There were a few good songs, but there was no humanity to it.
It was certainly a reflection of what my life was like before Emma. The album is not an advertisement for love. Its closer to like Portnoys Complaint. The point of putting a repellent song on an album is not to be repellent, its to demystify it.
Its not so much about this girl or this episode so much as it is about my self-hatred. Its like this is the only place you end up,. If I was a shitty dancer it wouldnt work. But its not like I just invented this for the Father John Misty show. I danced before that. At parties and. August , and DaviD Bowie is a man carrying a heavy burden. Management problems, extravagant stage set, a whole wardrobe full of personae.
Soul music was his rescue: it poured balm on his problems, and pointed the way ahead. It may be his best album, says Mike Garson. It was straight to the music. Bowie and Ava Cherry rehearsing in David was really trying to dig, dig, dig. Was it David Bowie, and his protge Ava Cherry, there to check out some music? Or the customers of Harlems Apollo Theatre, stunned by what they saw emerging from the car: a black woman accompanying a white man with orange hair, in an electric blue suit.
We pulled up outside the theatre, Ava Cherry remembers of their visit to the venue in , and people were like, Woah, who is this guy? Whats he doing here? You got a lot for your dollar. On his Diamond Dogs album of that year, and When You RocknRoll With Me offered inklings that heartfelt passions ran beneath the albums intellectual constructs, soul bubbling under his rock. Now, his presence in New York to rehearse for a tour to promote that album allowed him to explore his passion for black culture more fully: hear the music, attend the shows, even wear the clothes.
Ava Cherrys jazz musician father lent Bowie a suit and tie he had worn in the 40s so he could use it for a photo shoot. When the shoot was over, Ava suggested Bowie now return the suit to her father. He said, No, its mine. Whatever he touched at that moment, he owned it, do you know what im saying? A new suit of clothes. As far as it went, it was a nice metaphor for David Bowies career to that point, in which he had explored masks and characters, trying them on for size then moving to the next.
Now, after Ziggy and Halloween Jack, thanks to Avas dad, Bowie had a new costume for a whole new cool cat: the 40s Gouster, a romantic, slowdancing, lucrative sideline in something hed rather not discuss kind of a guy. But was that really what he was doing? This music was in the air and in the culture, says Mike Garson, whod play keyboards on the new recordings. But you could tell it resonated with him on a very deep level.
He just sounded like himself. Appeared on albums from Young Americans all the way to Reality in Ava left has new recordings pending and has latterly represented the David Bowie Is exhibition in Paris. Jean plays and teaches saxophone, flute and drums.
His limitededition prints are also on www. Jean still plays and records occasionally with her sister June. Andy Newmark is a freelance drummer. He has recently been heard on Bryan Ferrys Avonmore album. Davids new LP will be out March on Okeh. Earl Slick has a range of guitar products available at: www. He is also a producer. Later, Bowie would refer to the music as a snapshot of America and most notoriously, as plastic soul. To his delight, she's even more enticing than before, and better still, she has a lot more to lose than he'd imagined.
As Mooney's campaign of terror mounts, the police seem powerless to protect the Stone family, who must rely on their wits to survive a psychopath hell-bent on revenge. Britney King writes psychological, domestic, and romantic thrillers set in suburbia. She is currently writing three series and several standalone novels. Turns out, she didn't. Thus she finds herself tangled in a messy, dangerous, forbidden love story and face-to-face with a madman hell-bent on revenge. It has been compared to a crazier version of Mr.
Also, the hit series Dexter. If she were the only one with things she wanted to keep hidden, then maybe it wouldn't have turned out so bad. But she wasn't. It has been compared to Love, Rosie. Britney lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, children, two dogs, one ridiculous cat, and a partridge in a pear tree.
She enjoys hearing from readers and would love it if you would connect with her at britneyking. To receive an email whenever the author releases a new title, sign up for the VIP newsletter at britneyking. Her characters may be hard to pin down, but she's not. She loves talking to readers, so feel free to email her at britney britneyking.
Happy reading.
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