''BEAUTIFUL YOU''
AUGUST 14 2015
48:23
1 Black Dirt Track 04:04
2 Beautiful You 04:33
3 Dark Highway 03:58
4 6000 Miles 03:32
5 Somebody's Gonna Get Hurt 03:21
6 Come Away 03:26
7 When A Man Gets Down 04:05
8 Cracks of Dawn 04:05
9 Blindly Believing 03:53
10 Rowena & Wallace 04:55
11 Born to love 04:13
12 February 04:13
REVIEW/AMG
by Timothy Monger
Beautiful You, the seventh studio LP by Australian expats the Waifs, finds the group's core trio reunited after a four-year hiatus. Two decades into their career, sisters Donna Simpson and Vikki Thorn and co-bandleader Josh Cunningham all found themselves living in the U.S., yet miles apart geographically and uncertain whether or not they had any real desire to carry on. Their last effort, 2011's Temptation, was a slightly disjointed affair, with Cunningham extolling his newfound Christianity and Simpson confronting her battles with alcohol addition, post-rehab. They made it work well enough, but there was still a sense that the three Waifs were no longer on the same page. On Beautiful You, they remain three separate individuals, tied together by friendship, familial ties, and a love for creating music. While the songs still reflect each singer's personal narratives, the overall sound feels more unified this time around and that's partly due to the efforts of Nick DiDia, an American producer now, ironically, based in Australia. Beautiful You is generally unfussy and organic-sounding with enough rock muscle to keep it moving along at a decent clip. Opener "Black Dirt Track" is a gently urgent, slow-building rocker from Vikki, who looks wistfully back on the rural Australia of her childhood. Addiction still looms in Donna's consciousness on the title cut, but this time she's on the other side, observing someone else's struggle. Cunningham, having released a solo album prior to the Waifs' return, tones down his faith and delivers a trio of warm-hearted, often bluesy songs, the nicest of which is the laid-back, country-tinged "Dark Highway." Other highlights include Donna's gritty "Somebody's Gonna Get Hurt" and Vikki's delicate "Come Away," which boasts one of the sweetest melodies on the album. At their core, the Waifs remain a fairly standard Americana-roots act, but the three members' individual personalities offer plenty of appeal, and with Beautiful You they've fallen into a nice rhythm.
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About
It’s not a typical starting point for a new album, the band members asking each other to nominate the worst song they’ve ever written. Then again, there’s a lot about The Waifs that defies convention.
This unlikely scenario unfolded when Vikki Thorn, her sister Donna Simpson and Josh Cunningham got together in a studio in Western Australia last year. The three mainstays of The Waifs hadn’t seen much of each other since touring on the back of their last album, 2011’s Temptation. The reunion called for a break with tradition. Instead of writing separately, the formula that has served them so well for almost 20 years, it was time for total collaboration. The three musicians would work together as a unit until a bunch of songs emerged.
Much to their surprise, the three amigos drew a blank.
“It was all very exciting,” says Vikki. “We probably hadn’t sat together in a room like that for 15 years. We got out pens and paper and guitars. It felt like it should be an easy thing … but it wasn’t. We tried in earnest to jam and shape songs. We tried going through ‘what’s the worst Waifs song you’ve ever written?’ Even that became awkward because we couldn’t all agree which were the worst ones. It was all very intimate and personal. Then Donna one day got the shits and went off and wrote a song.”
We can be glad she did. That moment of frustration opened the floodgates to what has become The Waifs’ seventh studio albumBeautiful You, an exquisitely crafted collection of songs from the three songwriters that bears all the hallmarks of a Waifs classic.
“I thought, ‘I’m just going to walk outside and write something'”, Donna recalls of that false start. "It just kind of comes to me that way. It came and just kept rolling.”
In January 2015, aided by their regular rhythm section of drummer Dave Ross Macdonald and bassist Ben Franz, The Waifsentered 301 Studios in Byron Bay, NSW with producer Nick DiDia (Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine, Powderfinger) and emerged several weeks later with Beautiful You. The emotionally raw but musically buoyant Beautiful You demonstrates the easy chemistry that has bound The Waifs together for more than two decades, as well as celebrating the depth of songwriting talent they have at their disposal.
The 12 new tracks - four from Donna, three from Josh and five from Vikki - play to the strengths of one of Australia’s most enduring and lauded folk, pop and roots outfits. There’s a familiar mix here of celebration and reflection, combined with that easy musical energy and intuition spawned from so many years of touring, whether in the pubs of rural Australia in the early days or on the road internationally ever since then. Beautiful You boasts abundant choruses, intoxicating instrumental exchanges and joyful harmonies, the characteristics that make so memorable the band’s noughties hits London Still, Bridal Train and Sun Dirt Water.
The title track, Donna’s aching vocal drifting over a simple guitar motif, has a deeply personal undertow, a plea to a friend struggling with addiction: “You gotta change the road you’ve been taking,” sings Donna, “lay down your weapons and surrender. ”
Simpson’s shuffling, alt country ballad When a Man Gets Down, another personal account, this time of a relationship breakdown, is equally emotive. “I sat bawling my eyes out when I wrote that song,” she says. “It was something real that was happening in my life.”
Josh’s country stroll Dark Highway is a gentle prod at humanity inspired by the night his van broke down and no one stopped to help him. He wrote the song in the back of the van to kill time until assistance arrived (“obviously I eventually got out of there” he says).
Then there’s the overtly poppy Blindly Believing, complete with a killer hook that explores the fleeting nature of love. Vikki wrote the song with WA singer Bex Chilcott, better known as Ruby Boots, in a session in Utah that marked Vikki’s first attempt at co-writing and that produced several co-writes for Ruby Boots’ debut album, Solitude.
Donna’s Rowena and Wallace is a bluesy coming-of-age romp punctuated by Vikki’s harmonica stabs and Josh’s piercing electric guitar, while Josh’s Born to Love echoes the folk/blues swagger of his hit song Lighthouse from the band’s breakthrough, ARIA Award winning album Up All Night (2003).
Home has been in a variety of places for The Waifs during their career. Donna lives in Fremantle after spending eight years in Minneapolis, where the band recorded Temptation four years ago. Josh splits his time between California and the NSW south coast, where he’s building a house for his family. Vikki is based in Utah. It’s no accident that what inhabits Beautiful You most of all is that attachment to home, wherever that might be.
Twenty-three years after Donna and Vikki set off from Albany to play music across Australia to anyone who would listen, teaming up with Josh en route, the three have come to appreciate the places they left behind. It’s hardly surprising then that Vikki, who with her sister grew up at Cosy Corner Beach near Albany, WA, steeped in the simple, rural traditions of their salmon-fishing family, should reflect on and celebrate those things on the new album. This she does beautifully and longingly on the pulsing, heartfelt album opener, Black Dirt Track. “The longer I am away from Australia the more connected I feel to Australia and I keep writing songs about that,” Vikki says. “I grew up near the salmon camp where my grandfather fished, my father played there as a kid and when I go back there now I do the same things with my children. I physically feel connected to that place when I’m there. It’s almost a spiritual thing. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I learned to play guitar, where my husband proposed to me. I’ve had all these deeply personal moments and significant things happen in this one place.”
There’s a similar bent to 6000 Miles, on which Vikki contemplates the distance between her old home and her new one.
The closing February, a sparse acoustic ballad that develops quickly into a full-tilt rocker, has Vikki anticipating warmer, brighter days: “February hitches up her skirt and rolls her stockings down,” she sings.
There are plenty of brighter days ahead for The Waifs. As Josh notes, “the relationship deepens”. Beautiful You is a powerful statement of the individual songwriters’ skills, their beliefs, their passions and their dreams. Bound together by expert musicianship and the love and respect that have developed between them since the early 1990s, it’s also a moving, entertaining and ultimately joyful statement from a group of musicians dedicated to each other and to their craft.
“It’s still great to look across at each other and know where we are going to go with the music,” says Donna. “That has never changed. And we get along better now than we ever have.”
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Beloved Australian folk rock band The Waifs will be releasing 'Beatiful You' on Compass Records / Jarrah Records. Produced by Nick DiDia (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Powderfinger), the album was written between the USA and Australia by The Waifs' songwriting trifecta of Donna Simpson, Vikki Thorn and Josh Cunningham.
The resulting 12-song collection merges the three separate songwriters into a cohesive, roots-rock musical feast. Along with bassist Ben Franz and drummer David Ross Macdonald, the five-piece outfit created an album that echoes with both wisdom and pop appeal.
A trip that began in a van in 1992, with the three troubadours playing gigs anywhere in Australia that would have them, has led The Waifs to multiple ARIA awards, platinum albums in Australia and successful tours across the world, including opening for Bob Dylan in North America and Australia in 2003.
True to form, BEAUTIFUL YOU features their trademark sound: "a bit of blues and roots, a bit of country, a bit of jazz, anything really.
True to form, BEAUTIFUL YOU features their trademark sound: "a bit of blues and roots, a bit of country, a bit of jazz, anything really.
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BIOGRAPHY/AMG
by Jason MacNeil
Originally performing Bob Dylan covers in and around bars in their native Australia, the sister duo of Vicki and Donna Simpson were known as COLOURS. Formed in 1992 and touring constantly in their homeland, the pair hooked up with Josh Cunningham during a stop in August 1992. A year later, they changed their name to the WAiFS. From there, the group released a cassette of original material but decided to head for Melbourne, the mecca of Australian music. A loyal following and hectic touring pace resulted in three albums, the self-titled debut in May 1996 and 1998's "Shelter Me." Folk festivals across the United States and Canada also fell in love with their sweet harmonies and self-described "wholemeal" music. They have also shared the stage with such artists as Bob Dylan, Kasey Chambers, and Michelle Shocked. In 2001, the band released their third album, Sink or Swim in Australia, though it didn't arrive in America until the following year. The Waifs' musical honesty was captured once again with their critically acclaimed follow-up Up All Night in Spring of 2003. The album went on to net the Waifs four ARIA awards later that year. In 2004, the (mostly) live double-disc A Brief History... was released, though the band wouldn't deliver their studio follow-up until 2007's Sun Dirt Water. A second live album, Live From the Union of Soul, was released in 2009 documenting their 2008 collaborative tour with labelmates John Butler Trio. Their sixth studio album, Temptation arrived in 2011, by which time the band's primary members had all settled down in different parts of the U.S. Things remained relatively quiet for the band with Cunningham releasing his first solo LP Into Tomorrow in 2011. By 2015, the Waifs had resumed touring with their seventh album, Beautiful You, scheduled for release later that year.
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