
Laura Siersema : My Mother's Keeper [ purchase ] One of my great pleasures in running Oliver di Place is discovering artists who are new to me. I feature their most recent work, and that usually means I don't get to share them with you here. That's because, at Star Maker, we have an informal rule against posting new music. But lately, I have begun to get from my Oliver artists some of their older work. Laura Siersema is one of these, and the first one I am sharing here. [...]

photo: Tanit Sakakini Laura Siersema (Greenfield, MA) needed some time to discover that she could write songs. After a discarded training to be a nurse she enrolled at the Berklee College of Music All, picking up here piano lessons and focusing on songwriting. She worked on her voice in the process, going for the classical approach with clear vowels and consonants. Her latest labum Talon of the Blackwater may sound bit new age, but successfully sidesteps the vagueness associated with that genre - she [...]

Welcome back to New Artists, Old Songs Week - a dedicated series of genre-related posts in which we turn our ears and hearts to those still-emerging artists whose coversongs have come our way in the past few weeks and months. We kicked off our theme week Sunday with a host of new popcovers ; today we keep the ball rolling with some of the best new covers of traditional and post-revival folk to come down the proverbial pike in a good long while. Enjoy...and don't forget to come back at [...]