Results for "Majel Connery"

Musician

Majel Connery

With past lives as an actor, opera singer, and academic, Connery approaches songwriting with an open embrace of diverse influences. Most recently, she wrote songs about porn, periods, and sad fish for 5 episodes of Radiolab’s “Gonads” series, including a Radiolab Live performance at NYU Skirball Center. While Connery holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and a composition degree from Princeton, her writing is deeply influenced by her parents' eclectic cassette tape collection circa 1984, which explains a compositional style part Schubert and part Elvis Costello (that’s a mangled quote from the Wall Street Journal). Former New York Times critic Steve Smith favorably compared her voice to Shara Nova/My Brightest Diamond and Joanna Newsom, while Peter Margasak, writing for Bandcamp Daily, describes her vocals as “expertly drawing upon a wide swath of approaches—British folk, madrigal, art rock.” In opera circles, Connery is best known as co-founder and director of Chicago-based opera company, Opera Cabal (2007-2018), whose premiere of G.F

Article: Radio

2020's Travel Songs - Part 1

by Ludovico Granvassu
January 9, 2021

In this year of painful confinement music has been a much needed source of solace, with its capacity to take us beyond our times and across space. Here some of the best “travel songs" that we've been digging this year, while planning on taking them on a real road-trip as soon as possible. Happy ...

Video

Majel Connery Live from Berkeley

Featuring the music of Majel Connery
Duration: 17:30
October 13, 2020

The songs on this set straddle different eras of composition for me. "This Kind of Love" and "Rebeam Me" come out of my 2019 album, Anything Chartreuse, featuring vocoder ballads with lyrics by Brad Balliett. These songs are floaty and atmospheric, and a bit melancholy. "He Had Had Gone" and "I Was Recognizing" are part of a later collaboration with poet Jeff Dolven, whose writing has often served as a muse to me. With these songs, I was beginning to write for drums and taking a more upbeat approach. "Euphoria," my most recent song, was born during quarantine, and helped me find a place of positivity during rough times. "Euphoria" also features buchla tracks (the buchla is a very, very early synthesizer) by my friend James Fowler. Finally, "The Umbrella Man" is a cover of a tune my grandma used to sing to me; it was first written in 1924.

Article: Radio

Majel Connery, Omer Avital, Nick Cave, Vijay Iyer and More New Releases

by Ludovico Granvassu
May 20, 2020

This week we go through another delicious stash of new and upcoming releases, many of them launched on Bandcamp on 1 May for the 'waived fee' events the website is promoting every first Friday of the month to support musicians in the time of Covid19. The cherry on top? The much anticipated first single, sung by ...

Article: Lyrics

Majel Connery, un talento da seguire

by Vic Albani
August 5, 2019

Allora, andiamo calmi per ordine e con calma perché questa signora merita davvero attenzione e quindi anche più spazio del solito. Di sicuro pochissimi ne hanno già sentito parlare. Si chiama Majel Connery e la sua vita è divisa da tempo fra la bay-area in California e New York. Delle due realtà respira da ...