by Jane Lambert

Stacked with Swagger – Lil’ Red & The Rooster Deal a Winning Hand with “Stack ‘Em Up Baby”

Lil’ Red & The Rooster’s latest single “Stack ‘Em Up Baby” is a whole vibe. A low-slung groove with a wink in its eye and a strut in its step, the track oozes vintage soul and playful cool while bringing something unmistakably fresh to the table.

From the opening piano flourish, you are unmistakably dropped into a smoke-filled jazz lounge where every note has purpose and every phrase is dressed to impress.

This is retro-modern blues at its finest. Jen “Lil’ Red” Milligan’s vocals glide with a feline style finesse – cheeky, sly and drenched in charisma. In this son, Lil Red is not just singing about stacking ’em up, she is the dealer, the mood-setter and the ringleader of this cinematic scene. Her delivery evokes the smoky sophistication of Rickie Lee Jones, with the soul deep phrasing of vintage jazz and blues greats, filtered through her own unique sass.

Pascal Fouquet, the “Rooster” in this bluesy power duo, brings his signature elegance on guitar.

His touch is tasteful and timeless, letting each note breathe and smolder, and skilled application of tone, groove and a deep understanding of the genre’s roots. His playing is the slow burn to Lil’ Red’s flickering flame, and together they create a dynamic that is impossible to fake.

And then there’s the not-so-secret weapon – Grammy-nominated keyboardist Bobby Floyd (Ray Charles, Count Basie Orchestra, Dr. John). His B3 and piano work provide that plush, cinematic backdrop for this slow-burner, anchoring the whole production in something rich and luxurious. His presence is testament to the band’s commitment to real musicianship, deep soul, and that indefinable thing we call “feel.”

“Stack ‘Em Up Baby” leans into a nostalgic groove dripping with class and intention, much like the theme song to a 1960’s detective film that never got made but should have. There’s drama, there’s flirtation and there is an undeniable joy in how the band navigates the space between blues, jazz and retro soul. It’s as much a mood as it is melody.

And this track kicks off off a waterfall release schedule, leading up to the release of the duo’s upcoming album called “7”. If this track is the opening move, consider us all-in.

“7″ promises to explore themes of freedom and rising from adversity – core values that have always quietly pulsed beneath the surface of Lil’ Red & The Rooster’s work. But here, with “Stack ‘Em Up Baby,” those themes get dressed up in velvet, high heels and attitude.

Lil’ Red & The Rooster have never been content to just rehash the blues. They really embody the blues. And with this new era, they are showing that the blues is thriving and ready to seduce a new generation.

So go ahead. Put it on. Stack ’em up, press play and let this tune swagger into your soul.

Listen to “Stack ‘Em Up Baby” here

Find out all about Lil’ Red & The Rooster on their Website.

Stream music on Spotify and Apple Music

06.06.25

by Jane Lambert

“Wake Up” by Kristy Chmura is a Song with Deep Roots

Kristy Chmura’s “Wake Up” is not just a song but is a reckoning wrapped in ethereal sound.

With the cinematic sound that you would expect from a composer raised on both classical training and emotional intuition, Chmura has created a track that pulses with purpose. This re-imagined version, which was released on Earth Day this year, hits differently.

From the moment the track opens, there’s an atmosphere of awakening – of something slowly rising from within. Christian Eigner’s haunting percussion and Niko Stoessl’s textured production create a sense of vastness, while Damien Musto adds a grounded, human pulse.

Lyrically, “Wake Up” is deceptively simple. Each phrase carries a gentle but unmistakable plea about our responsibility for Planet Earth and a desire to reconnect with both the planet and ourselves.

But what truly gives “Wake Up” its staying power is the integrity behind it. Kristy not only sings about the Earth from a distance, but she lives the experience. As a decade long member of her local Shade Tree Commission, she has spent years helping to preserve the tree canopy in her New Jersey town, advocating for native species, fighting invasive ones and reminding neighbours of the quiet power of trees.

When wildfire smoke from Canada blanketed the East Coast in an eerie, apocalyptic glow, it was not a headline for Kristy. It was much more personal and close to home. That moment pulled her back to “Wake Up,” and from that tension this new version was born.

And Kristy Chmura is not just an artist reacting to a world on fire. She is actively tending the garden so to speak. Her music is that extension of her roots in the soil.

As “Wake Up” swells into its final chorus, there is hope. Not the shiny kind of hope, but the slow and stubborn kind that quietly grows. This song invites the listener to feel, but also to act, to plant, to listen and to love what is left and protect it fiercely.

About Kristy Chmura

Kristy Chmura is a singer-songwriter, harpist and environmental advocate. Classically trained, her songs bring introspection with social consciousness, inviting listeners into spaces of reflection and transformation.

Beyond the music studio, Kristy serves on her town’s Shade Tree Commission, where she helps preserve and protect the local tree canopy.

Her upcoming album “Inner Solstice”, explores the tension and healing found at the intersection of inner life and outer world. With each new release Kristy is continuing to bridge art and advocacy, offering music that resonates beyond the moment

Find out more about Kristy Chmura on her Website

Stream music on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.

05.31.25

by Jane Lambert

Reeya Banerjee Looks Back with Latest Single “For the First Time”

Reeya Banerjee’s latest single For the First Time is a quietly stunning ballad that peels back the layers of love, memory and selfhood with grace and vulnerability.

As the second release from her upcoming album called This Place, the track stands apart as the emotional anchor of the record – a moment of stillness and clarity that reflects on a transformative chapter in the artist’s life.

The song unravels like a letter written years after the fact, soaked in the bittersweet glow of hindsight. At its center, For the First Time is a love song – not only to a partner, but to the version of oneself that emerges in the right place at the right time.

That place, in Banerjee’s case, is the Hudson Valley’s Mohonk Mountain House. It’s a historic and slightly surreal resort tucked high into the Shawangunk Ridge. It’s not just the setting, but a kind of co-star in the story, embodying both the eccentricity and emotional grounding that shaped her early adulthood.

Banerjee’s vocals are tender and unadorned, and she sings each line with clarity. With a warmth in her tone that balances out the melancholy of memories and the comfort of knowing just how far she’s come.

For the First Time is co-written and produced by Luke Folger, and it is an outlier on This Place. It’s a ballad amid more uptempo tracks, and yet it feels like the heart of the album. Folger’s instrumentation is rich in texture – shimmering guitar lines, subtle background harmonies and open, airy production that evokes starlit nights in the Catskills.

Lyrically, this song is packed with subtle emotion. It evokes the quiet revelations that define young adulthood: learning to love someone while still figuring out how to love yourself, finding home in a place you never expected, discovering a new version of your voice in the midst of gravel paths and gossip filled dining halls. It’s a coming-of-age story told not in big moments, but in the slow accumulation of small, meaningful ones.

In many ways, For the First Time feels like the spiritual successor to “Need You There,” a fan favorite from Banerjee’s debut The Way Up. But where that track reached upward with longing, this one looks inwards with a calm recognition. It hums softly in the background of thoughts, reminding you of the place and people who shaped you and the person you were brave enough to become.

Find out more about Reeya Banerjee on her Website

Stream music on Spotify and YouTube Music

05.30.25

by Jane Lambert

“King Jaymes” Is the Folk Punk Manifesto We Didn’t Know We Needed

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There’s something quietly revolutionary about King Jaymes, the debut album from folk punk singer-songwriter Stephen Jaymes.

It doesn’t arrive in a blaze of hype or with the polished pagenatry of a major label rollout. But instead, it feels more like a notebook that someone has carried across a war zone, frayed and tear stained but full of truths that nobody else dared to say out loud.

Across ten tracks, many of them already familiar to fans of Jaymes’ trickle release of singles over the past two years, King Jaymes assembles a world that feels simultaneously mythic and also intimate. The songs are not just here to impress, but they resemble almost journal entries, roadside sermons and voice memos from a man documenting the collapse and his own quiet resurrection.

What is most striking about the album is not just the songwriting, although this is excellent and has always been Jaymes strong point. But it is the depth of self-examination and transformation on display here. There is a sense that Stephen Jaymes has survived these songs more than just written them.

Opening with one of Jaymes’s most personal songs, “Saving Daylight”, we are immediately thrown in to a noirish soundscape of piano and muted guitar lines.

The new mix of previously released “Chief Inspector” is more spacious and less raw than the original single, revealing the intricacies of Zsolt Virág’s production work. It’s a tone-setter that invites deep listening.

Elsewhere, songs like “The Evidence Against Her” maintain their haunting intensity. They feel more fully realized here, nestled among companion tracks and dressed in album wide cohesion. Jaymes’s voice is soft and cracked a times, then suddenly forceful in other moments and becomes the compass that guides us through shifting emotional terrain.

While the early singles gave listeners a glimpse into Jaymes’s artistic evolution, it is the album’s final track, “When I Was Young” that truly delivers the emotional knockout.

This previously unreleased track is a lament disguised as a lullaby. It deals with aging, not in the abstract sense but in the deeply personal way of someone who’s felt the world pull away from them. The line between resilience and resignation is walked so carefully that it becomes a kind of dance. This track alone justifies the format of an album.

Beyond the music itself, the King Jaymes era represents a conceptual shift for Stephen Jaymes as an artist and public thinker. His VISION2025 initiative and the accompanying Particles blog present a worldview rooted in hope, dignity, and practical utopia not just art for art’s sake, but art as taking action.

Meanwhile, King Jaymes may be Stephen Jaymes’s debut album, but it plays like a legacy statement. It’s a defiant and deeply human record that builds a world you want to live in, even if that world hurts.

Keep up with Stephen Jaymes on his Website

Stream music on Spotify and Apple Music

05.29.25

by Jane Lambert

Pete Calandra’s Latest Album “Night Mist” is a Tonic for the Modern Mind

Pete Calandra’s latest release Night Mist is an album that doesn’t shout to be heard. It simply waits, patiently to be felt.

This eleven track collection is steeped in quietude, unfolding with the elegance of falling dusk and the emotional gravity of late-night introspection.

As both a skilled pianist and prolific composer across Broadway, film and television, Calandra brings a rare blend of technical finesse and emotional restraint to this work. It’s one that feels like a much needed breather in an overstimulated world.

Listen here:

The pieces on Night Mist are deceptively simple. On the surface, they present as minimal piano compositions touched by ambient textures and occasional soft orchestrations. But underneath that lies an exquisite sense of pacing and purpose. Tracks like “Whispers of the Dawn” and “The Heart of Mount Seleya” operate like emotional landscapes: sparse yet vivid, introspective yet expansive. And it is Calandra’s restraint, the space between notes, that becomes its own kind of melody.

What makes this album resonate so strongly is its consistency in tone without ever becoming over repetitive.

Each track brings a new shade of the same emotional spectrum. “Peaceful Valley” introduces cinematic string beds that evoke a pastoral calm, while “Autumn Nights” leans into the warmth of a felted piano to conjure a deeply intimate sense of place.

The ambient title track, “Night Mist” blends light electronics with improvisational phrasing, perfectly capturing the album’s thesis — serenity in the unknown.

Though best known to some for his work behind the scenes, including more than 100 film scores and music for global events like the FIFA World Cup and Kennedy Center Honors, Pete Calandra’s voice as a solo artist has become increasingly distinct over the last decade.

Night Mist builds on the aesthetic developed in ambient-forward albums like First Light and Carpe Noctem, but it lands with much more maturity and emotional clarity.

In an era defined by speed, distraction and technology burnout, Night Mist feels like a defiant gesture — an insistence on presence, on listening slowly, on valuing space.

It’s not just a collection of music, but also a gentle journey inward.

Connect with Peter Calandra via:

Website / YouTube / Spotify / Soundcloud

05.27.25

by Jane Lambert

VIDEO VOYAGEUR: 3Q’s WITH STIGMA

Emerging from the heart of Germany’s modern rock scene, Stigma are not here to chase trends.

With their debut album Second Chance on the horizon, the band is carving out a sound that is both emotionally raw and powerfully cinematic in sound.

Their latest single, “Faraway,” serves as a stunning entry point. It’s a brooding, confessional track steeped in guilt, isolation and that quiet ache of waiting for redemption.

But what sets Stigma apart isn’t just the intensity of their music. It is the honesty behind it. For their first official video, the band turned the camera inward and cpatured not a scripted narrative, but the real-time journey of recording “Faraway” in a remote mountain studio.

We sat down with the band to talk about the origins of “Faraway,” the making of the video, and what fans can expect from Second Chance. What followed was a candid, heartfelt conversation about facing the past, embracing vulnerability, and holding out hope for what’s still to come:

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?

Faraway is about guilt, isolation, and the hope for redemption – someone exiled, trapped by both physical walls and inner regrets, holding on to the distant dream of being forgiven. It’s not about escape, but about waiting to be freed. That emotional weight runs through every line of the song.

We wanted to show that tension honestly. The video shifts between two sides: the intense, emotional live performance while recording the track, and the quiet, raw moments behind the scenes. No drama, no acting – just what really happened.

That contrast brings authenticity. It’s not a concept video – it’s a feeling. A haunting pull toward something just out of reach – but with the quiet certainty that the day will come.

2. What was the inspiration behind this new video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?

We approached the video like a short documentary – no actors, no script, just what actually happened. The storyline behind the scenes follows our real journey: arriving at the studio in the mountains, stepping out of the car, setting up gear, getting feedback from our producer, tuning, laughing, working. It’s that quiet buildup before the storm – a glimpse into the atmosphere that shaped the song.

Visually, the contrast was key. We alternated these raw, candid moments with close-up shots of us performing Faraway in the studio – not for the camera, but for real.

That mix gives the video its pulse. It’s less about acting out a plot and more about letting the setting, the process, and the people tell the story. The goal was simple: to make you feel the song, not just hear it.

3. What was the process of making the video?

I brought in Mattia Mariotti – a skilled video producer and guitarist for Philipp Burger (Frei.Wild) – to film our time in the studio. I asked him to capture everything without restriction. No script, no posing – just real moments. I trusted his eye and gave him full freedom to document whatever unfolded.

After several days of shooting, he told me, “There’s a lot of material here.” That’s when I had the idea to turn it into our first official video. What made it click was the natural rhythm of the footage – the way the calm, intimate behind-the-scenes shots contrasted with the explosive, emotional performance scenes. It mirrored exactly what Faraway does musically: restrained, confessional verses that build into a powerful, wide-open chorus.

That structure became the backbone of the edit. The camera follows the same emotional arc as the song itself – from inner conflict to a burst of longing and release.

That’s how the video found its form: through truth, not planning.

Follow Stigma on their Website