It's not just us locals that are excited about new albums by Haley Bonar and Frankie Lee. Each of the Twin Cities-based singer/songwriters earned attention from national media outlets for their record announcements in recent days.
Bonar's new LP, "Impossible Dream," was written up by the popular indie music blog Stereogum, which also premiered the first track from it, "I Can Change" (posted below). The album – her sixth full-length -- will be out Aug. 5 via GNDwire, the label started by her longtime manager Mark Gehring and Trampled by Turtles' Dave Simonett. She returned to the former Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls (now named Seedy Underbelly North) to make the album with her band and enlisted a few known names to mix it, Chris Coady (Beach House, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist).
"Some of the songs are about my parents," Bonar is quoted by Stereogum. "Some of the songs are about sexuality. Some of the songs are about loss of youth, teenage parenthood, the lines of social disorder for women, or the terror of jealousy and suspicion. But what I write is borne of my own set of memories and ideas, and once they are released into the world, they do not belong to me anymore. The interpretation is all yours."
While Bonar has been steadily rolling with an album every year or two of late (counting last year's great Gramma's Boyfriend effort), Frankie Lee has been taking a less rushed approach as he admirably seems to do in general in life. The Americana picker's "American Dream," will only be his first full-length album after his acclaimed 2014 EP, "Middle West," and it's finally due for U.S. release on July 8.
RollingStone.com trumpeted Lee's release with a nice write-up accompanied by the "Easy Rider"-meets-American-Eagle video for the track, "Where Do We Belong?" which Lee said came to him in a bit of a crazed solitary state. "I was hiding out in a friend's studio [Erik Koskinen's] and could only record late at night when the building shut down," he told RS. "I think I'd been up for a few days at that point. It's the first time I ever played all the instruments on a song of mine."
It shouldn't be the last. Here's a taste of both Lee's and Bonar's new records.
