The official home of Marty Willson-Piper
Curious how records are made? 🎶
I’m at the “WELCOME TO 1979” studios in Nashville, producing an album and playing guitar for Texan singer/songwriter Salim Nourallah. The studio complex also contains a cutting suite and an electroplating lab. After a record is done, the fun part begins. Watch to learn more:
DATES AND TICKET LINKS
10/07 – SIBERIA LOUNGE, New Orleans, LA
TEXAS DATES (Special Guests: Salim Nourallah & Laish):
10/11 – FT. WORTH LIVE, Fort Worth
10/12 – PERIOD MODERN, San Antonio – only DOORS
10/13 – CACTUS CAFE, Austin
10/15 – HOTEL SAINT GEORGE, Marfa – only DOORS
10/16 – THE STUDIO AT WAREHOUSE LIVE, Houston
10/18 – PATTERSON-APPLETON ARTS CENTER, Denton
10/19 – PALO SANTO GALACTIC HQ, Dallas
10/20 – PALO SANTO GALACTIC HQ, Dallas
EAST COAST DATES (Special Guests: Edward Rogers & Stephen Butler):
10/24 – THE LOFT/CITY WINERY, New York, NY
10/26 – STAGE ON HERR, Harrisburg, PA
10/27 – THE VAULT/VICTOR RECORDS, Berlin, NJ
Whilst visiting New York ostensibly to pick up my Seagull 12 string guitar on the way to Texas we decided to take a short historical musical look at Greenwich Village in a short video.
Although one could spend the whole 11 minutes just reeling off names (I noticed afterwards that I hadn’t mentioned Phil Ochs) you would need a proper film crew and a script to document the New York scene in the sixties. But this was a spur of the moment wander through the streets looking at some of the landmarks that celebrated what have become ‘icons of the sixties’, some of them became household names and others languished in relative obscurity.
Enjoy!
We will be playing Christian Leding’s GEISTERFEST (“ghost festival”) at Sternberg castle near Bielefeld in Germany on 22/12/18. Candles, ghosts, knights in shining armour, the castle’s ancient chapel and acoustic music all night – and all of that so close to Christmas. Can it get any better? Yes – we’ll be sharing the stage with four beautiful singer/songwriters:
Joanna Gemma Auguri (Berlin)
Brigitte Handley (Cologne/Sydney)
Leding (Detmold)
Elktooth (Bielefeld)
Information on times, tickets, pre-sale and accommodation coming soon.
OFFICIAL GERMAN ANNOUNCEMENT:
Geister: Es ist uns mehr als nur eine große Freude, das finale Ensemble für unser GEISTERFEST ankündigen zu dürfen. Vorhang auf für Olivia und Marty Willson-Piper!
Dass Marty ein fantastischer Gitarrist, Sänger und Songschreiber ist, hat er während seiner Zeit bei All About Eve, Anekdoten und The Church mehr als bewiesen. Nun ist er mit seiner Frau Olivia an der Geige und Vocals unterwegs und wird im Dezember zu uns auf Burg Sternberg kommen.
Somit ist das Lineup komplett. Alle Infos zu Zeiten, Tickets, Vorverkauf und umliegende Übernachtungsmöglichkeiten werden jetzt schnell nachfolgen.
This week we have a new idea for a regular spot on my website, SONG OF THE WEEK! You will find it at the end of the front page, click here.
I seem to have a lot of back catalogue between solo albums, Noctorum, MOAT, collaborations and even bands I have been in. So it seemed like a good idea to slowly let the songs out one by one, some of which you will know, some of which you won’t. Ironically, old songs will be your new songs and as I have a new Noctorum album coming out in November, a new MOAT album on the cards for next year, plus hopefully some Anekdoten recording, as well as potential Record Store Day releases it might be a good time to catch up.
On a slight tangent, it’s fascinating for musicians that are constantly (hopefully) evolving to have the audience craving the old songs and not the new ones as they coincided with some alleged important part of their life. In fact all parts of your life are important in different stages, despite your age and circumstances and I feel like it’s more about keeping the passion for music rather than a taste for nostalgia – after all, the old songs were also once the new songs.
The first song in this series coincides with our good friend Derek’s YouTube release of an All About Eve gig from 2001. For those of you (mostly in America) who don’t know who All About Eve are – I joined them after two albums and made two more studio albums, two acoustic live albums and one electric live album before we parted ways. In fact Ultraviolet, the last All About Eve studio album, is pretty much the album that got me the gig with Anekdoten. AAE were pretty big in England, playing the Royal Albert Hall in London and had something like 9 songs enter the Top 40 or thereabouts. Martha’s Harbour was the biggest hit, reaching the Top 10. This week is also the 30th anniversary of the release of Martha’s Harbour.
Here we have another celebration of the song that appeared on the White Rose Transmission album Bewitched And Bewildered in 2006, originally a collaboration between The Sound’s Adrian Borland and The Convent’s Carlo Van Putten. Adrian sadly passed in 1999.
Carlo originally had the idea to do a covers album of songs sung by women. Carlo asked me to play guitar on a couple of tracks that he wanted to sing and I of course knew that tricky guitar part for Martha’s Harbour from my time in All About Eve and that song was one of his choices.
So I hope you like the idea of SONG OF THE WEEK and let me know if you would like to find a physical copy of the song and I can try and direct you to where they might be available beyond digital.