Jodi Shaw

///Press

Gail Worley - StarPolish

I have to say that there aren't many -- if any --female singer/songwriters "on the scene" today whose voices I like as much as I love Jodi Shaw's voice. Shaw is a local NYC folk-pop artist who -- based on talent alone -- should be huge. Her songs are exceptional and her lyrics are tightly woven word puzzles conjuring razor sharp mental images. "The President Knows" is a story-song of cryptic political intrigue with an almost whimsical feel to it, thanks to Jodi's clever phrasing and high-spirited backing vocals. It's really a great song. While Jodi's songs often recall the quiet beauty and subtle-yet-visceral impact of Chan Marshall's Cat Power, her uncommonly pretty voice and straightforward delivery is comparable to vocalists like Edie Brickel, Suzanne Vega, Natalie Merchant and Heather Nova. Her music is a strong acoustic blend of indie and folk with Jodi's melodically intuitive style of guitar playing recalling that of Joni Mitchell. Absolutely amazing.

Naomi Graychase - Girlfriends Magazine

Sublime, profound and groovy...

Bill Copeland - Skope Magazine

Jodi Shaw has a way with words. She also has a way with the acoustic guitar. And she is wise in her ways. On "Snow On Saturn," her third CD in four years, Shaw has reached a higher level of projecting her emotions and ideas. Shaw has always been a promising talent on the singer-songwriter circuit. Now she has reached that all important status of displaying huge talent.

Both playful and straightforward, she sings harmony lines that slowly dance and pirouette around her sweetly melodic lead vocal. On each tune Shaw’s voice just rolls out mellifluously, rising to new heights of majesty.

The song craft too has grown exponentially. This time around Shaw utilizes guest players on trumpet, piano, mandolin, and other instruments with greater aplomb than her first two efforts. A trumpet played by Tim Ouimette adds a tasteful pop flavor to "I Want To" to liven up this self-exclamation about life.

On a bouncy number called "Snow White" Shaw uses cellist Justin Kagan to play a prancing rhythm while violin and viola, courtesy of Lara Hicks, make moving melodies glide around Shaw’s muscular acoustic guitar strumming.

"In The Fall Light" harmonies wrap gently around lead vocal while acoustic a piano sprinkles the background with a texture of light, emotive notes before sparse piano moves into a pleasant mix of keys and acoustic guitar.

The careful rhythmic patter to her lyrics on "The Singer" moves the song forward with a confident surefootedness and verve. She actually draws her listener into an admission that being a singer leaves her feeling somewhat afraid and uncertain, but the cadence wouldn‘t lead one to believe it‘s about fear. Bass player Michael Visceglia shadows nicely here and there, giving Shaw’s tunes a notable low end without getting in her way or overwhelming the acoustic melodies.

Her unabashed love song "Your Lovely Face" is fanciful and deep with an unwavering devotion to someone, and singing without melodrama makes it a more forceful evocation of her beloved.

Shaw’s major achievement has to be turning a William Butler Yeats poem into a folk song. Singing "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" as lyrics and supplying her own melody and bass lines makes the early 20th century poem sound like a dye in the wool folk song. Other songwriters may have tried to render verse = from classic literature to contemporary music. Shaw pulls it off here without pretentiousness and without too many of the loose ends that usually emerge when pop composers try to wrap modern music around complex iambic pentameters from an earlier time.

Her ballad "Savannah Smiles" gets a muscular and almost classic rock touch on the acoustic guitar from producer Steve Addabbo who shows up now and then with his own instrumentation. And that’s pretty good for a producer who has already made sparse backing music sound large and full as well as capturing all the pretty nuances of Shaw’s unfailing and delightful singing voice.

The only thing I don’t understand is the CD jacket artwork. Shaw wears a flower rimmed straw hat with her hair pulled tightly back on the front. On the rear, shown only from the shoulders down, Shaw wears a pokadot sundress while holding daffodils in her white gloved hands. Yet, I don’t know how the art work relates to the lyrical content. The CD title "Snow On Saturn" made me wonder what connection Shaw had made between astronomy and songwriting. She does use stars and snow imagery. Having listened to her work, though, I still don’t know the connection.

I do know that Shaw’s talent is like an untamed animal working its way out of a net. This singer-songwriter will eventually bust out of her regional status and become something special. For more information, please visit www.jodishaw.com

Megan Donis (Producer) - Egg, the Arts Show- Thirteen/WNET

"...an absolutely refreshing second album of intellectual lullabies."

October 29, 2011
Mark Kirby - Dreamforge Magazine

The lyrical imagery of Jodi Shaw's song "The Forger," from her debut CD The Pie-Love Sky, recalls the haunted face of Gene Hackman in the classic film "The Conversation." Both the movie and song deal with an obsessive man battling head and heart. "The Forger" was inspired by the life story of one William Ireland, a master literary forger. He produced a number of documents purporting to be in the handwriting of William Shakespeare and came out with two new "Shakespeare" plays, all of which proved to be fraudulent. The forger in the song, though, is a master with the paintbrush:

My hands are steady, my eyesight sharp as a razor/ The great Mona Lisa, and still no one can duplicate her/ Like I can, oh I am the man.

In both movies there is a master craftsman who takes pride in his work and, in a society that devalues simple working-class pride in a job well done, goes about it in a lonely, thankless way until they're pushed over the edge by a conflict between professionalism and the human heart, much like the protagonist of the song:

And babe if you / Get on that train / My heart will never beat again/ There's so little truth / Left to bend / The truth is not my friend.

The simple chord changes are given a whimsical outlet by "virtual" synthesizer (which sounds like a disembodied calliope organ), kalimba (African thumb piano), live percussion loops and Jodi's guitar, all of which frame and create the perfect atmosphere for her close-talking-in-your-ear voice.

Though the production is atmospheric (and grows on this listener with repeated plays) and puts her voice and lyrics front and center, the recording of this song doesn't completely capture the magical realism she creates in her live shows.

Q. What do I mean by "magical realism"?

I mean that hearing this song live creates the same experience as when you're reading a good book and the images and sounds of the story spring forth, vibrant and alive, from your own imagination. It's very intimate, like dreaming while sleeping with someone during a mid-afternoon nap.

I use this song as an entry point to the world of Jodi Shaw. There are many beautiful babes who can sing and play guitar. But few, if any, have the depth, song writing skill, and mellifluous voice of Jodi Shaw. While other singer song-songwriters and anti-folkies solipsistically mine personal experience (emo geeks) or journalistically rant at the world from afar (slam poets, the vaguely Dylanesque protest singers), she takes characters or nuggets of the experiences of others and injects the "what if" question that empathetic, gifted writers in any form would ask. For example, take the song "Cabrini Green." Jodi says of this song: "This is one in a series of media inspired songs. I read an article in which a woman talked about life as on of the residents of Cabrini-Green, a notoriously dangerous neighborhood in Chicago. She was asked why she continues to live there, and she replied, 'Because it used to be so nice.'" Her song is told from the woman's point of view and poetically depicts that which keeps people in places called home, no matter how hellish. The music is simple, a lilting, Celtic waltz played only on guitar (one of her best live moments). It captures the nostalgia and dreaminess people attach to place:

Treasonous treasures these towers of steel/ Nothing so broken, nothing so real / The seasons keep turning . . . Hard to believe, a mother's dream/ The most beautiful thing you've ever seen / That's why we stay in Cabrini Green.

She is a young singer, but her song craft is of the old school. She sings about life, as real people live it.

While the heroine of "Cabrini Green" is in a state of denial, the woman in "The End," another song that is perfectly bare bones in its production, is clear about her feelings about the dark side of intimacy: dissolution of self. Seemingly about the end of a relationship at first, this song is a tale rendered poetically with images and a slight narrative: it's about a relationship - abusive or incredibly close - where the man is persisting to "go where nobody's been," forcing his way. Is it sex? Is it wanting some form of power? Maybe she's closed off the best or worst of herself from this . . . lover, husband, or girlfriend. I assume it's about a man, and I was never this guy. I hope. But enough about me. The lyrics and her voice lend emotional meaning that is beyond the words, the melody, and guitar chords. This song, like others on The Pie-Love Sky, goes where most writers fear to tread.

At the other end of production spectrum is the song "High." Though strong and brilliant when played live and direct, on CD it benefits from the color of added instruments. The trip hop drum beat is the sound of isolation (thank you Portishead), and the piano and violin add visual elements that are perfectly blended to the music. The off-kilter arrangement and instrumentation, mixed with her disembodied vocals, create the sensation and pure beautiful poetry of getting high:

I dreamed I had a horse it flew from the sky/ All the rosy colored curtains slid open wide/ No need to decide I don't have to try/ I can just get by High.

And there's more. Each of these songs offers the listener something to chew and that's filling. And while the songs "Kristine's Lullaby" and "Dumbo's Feather" veer toward the light Irish jig style of bouncy folk music, even these have something to say that runs deeper than surface impressions.

Lovers of good music, a great voice and lyrics should be all over this. Jodi Shaw can be reached at www.jodishaw.com, where you will find how to get the CD and when she's comin' to your town.

Keith "Muzikman" Hannaleck - MuzikReviews.com & Musicdish.com

"

...beautiful and beguiling vocals...heartrending."

Amy Lotsberg - Collected Sounds

...one I'm going to be listening to for a long time...Shaw really is unique.

Jon Worley - A&A

...lithe and supple...Shaw's voice and guitar accompaniment reign supreme.

Renatt Brodsky - New York Resident

". . . a cross between Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin."

Jamie Perkins - Spotlight Magazine (NH)
The Pie-Love Sky, the new album from former Seacoast resident Jodi Shaw, is a mature, artistic triumph, a marked improvement on just about all fronts from her excellent, but searching, debut, The Myth of Patience.
While maintaining a gift for complex and fluttering melodies and thoughtful, story-like lyrics, Shaw has greatly expanded her arsenal of musical wares. The disc shows a new sense of sonic experimentation, adding haunting organ and keyboard sounds and adding subtle percussion and guitar textures. Her songwriting is more focused and assured; her vocal delivery stronger and more refined. The sound and production levels of the disc have also improved exponentially, having recorded the disc with producer Steve Addabbo, who had previously cut his chanteuse teeth with artists like Shawn Colvin and Suzanne Vega.
Covering topics both humorous and poignant, there is a clever playfulness in how Shaw puts together her sing-song lyrics and adapts them to melody. Her words seem to dance through her songs, swelling and receding in a kind of inter-song pulse, and her dreamy folk and polished pop-rock seems almost intuitive in its ability to turn this way and that to give her literate lyrics the best possible ride.
In the song, "The Forger," Shaw writes, "The things you can do with just some pen and some paper/ I put the art into artifice, I am the ultimate faker." But the truth is, Jodi Shaw is anything but. Having avoided the dreaded sophomore slump by putting out a remarkable second album and getting increasing attention playing clubs and festivals in her new home of New York City, Jodi Shaw has proved beyond a doubt that she is, in fact, the real deal.