Cellar Sessions: Robby Hecht & Caroline Spence May 30th, 2018 City Winery New York Full Session
  • 5 years ago
Robby Hecht & Caroline Spence sit down for a One On One Session at City Winery New York on May 30th, 2018. For more info visit: http://robbyhecht.com & http://carolinespencemusic.com Audio & Video by: Ehud Lazin

Setlist:
All On The Table
A Night Together
Parallel Lines
Trying

Robby Hecht is a modern folk musician-of-all-trades: singer, songwriter, congenial collaborator to some of the biggest up-and-coming names in the genre, celebrity to some, generally decent human.

Robby first fell in love with the emotional potential of music as an awkward pre-teen in Knoxville, lying alone on his bed and listening to “Hits 100” on the radio. He hadn’t figured out how to talk to girls, but he was so moved by the music that one night he called in to dedicate Aerosmith’s “Angel” to a crush. He used full names. They played Mariah Carey instead. Robby will be forever mortified.

A couple of decades later, Robby tries to capture that same emotional resonance he felt during those earliest interactions with music. His music blends nostalgia with unabashed honesty: 1970s golden era of folk meets personal confessions of the Facebook era. He turns a lost battle with alcohol into a powerful country duet, weaves 2,000 years of history into a sparse musing on morality, and transforms insecurities left over from broken relationships and mental illness into deceptively catchy melodies.

******************************************************************

While Caroline Spence may not look like one of the road-hardened troubadours of America's past, with the release of Spades & Roses, the young songwriter from Charlottesville Virginia proves she is every bit as serious. Having won numerous songwriting awards from industry mainstays like the Kerrville Folk Festival and American Songwriter Magazine, and garnered nods and admiration from both Miranda Lambert and her fellow writers in the Nashville underground, Caroline has delivered a record to meet the expectation: Quite simply, 11 songs of gorgeous Americana that remind us of why we fell in love with the genre in the first place.

It’s is a rare but unmistakable authenticity and emotional resonance that can't be faked, all delivered from a voice that somehow manages to be both ethereally pristine and yet profoundly raw and human-- a disarming union of self-assuredness and vulnerability that runs throughout the record. Under the guidance of Producer Neilson Hubbard, "Spades and Roses" strips away all of the sonic barriers that might stand between Caroline and her listener, allowing her fragile melodies and first person confessionals to do their work-- reaching out and empathizing, providing a soundtrack to our own hidden stories. Every song on the record--whether pop or meditative, glib or heartbreaking-- asks the essential question of whether or not the listener can recognize himself.
Recommended