The sopranos (and mezzo-sopranos, and contraltos)

For whatever reason, much of the music that I’ve found and liked has been by men. My favorite singers/bands/acts - Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, Great Lake Swimmers, Paul Simon/Simon & Garfunkel - are all dudes. Not very cool. So half the purpose of this post is to get you all to recommend me some lady singers and songwriters.

The other half is to celebrate/recommend some of the amazing female musicians I do know about and love.

Let’s start with Juliana Finch, who I heard for the first time a few nights ago at a house concert. She joked that her music frequently had a body count, and much of it is rather low, but she also has some quirky, up-beat songs I love like Anti-socialize and Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage-Lifter Tomato. Her sadder songs include The Other Girls (written for the It Gets Better project), Something Holy, and Carrying You. I also liked Glass Heart and her cover of House of the Rising Sun, which goes back to the traditional lyrics sung by a woman (as opposed to the male-narrator version of the popular Animals’ cover.)

Then there’s Agnes Obel. She’s only got one album out, Philharmonics, but every track on it is gorgeous and haunting. She plays piano for the album, and explains, “The piano and the singing are two equal things to me — maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices.”* Again, the whole album is wonderful, but these are the four songs I just can’t take off repeat. They’re best listened to with your eyes closed and no-one around for miles.

“Riverside” is probably her biggest hit, and it’s the way I found her:

“Just So” and “Avenue” are more up-tempo but still have that irresistible melancholy edge:

“Beast” is one of her less popular songs but I love it - it may have the best lyrics of any song on the album and the vocals and piano weave together perfectly:

Finally, there’s Janelle Monae, a relatively well-known R&B artist whose debut concept albums chronicle the life of an android traveling back in time to free the people from their dystopian metropolis. Her visual style is as compelling as her music, so it’s worth watching the videos she’s made:

There’s no music video for it, but I also really like Sincerely Jane.

So those are my recommendations. What are yours?

(Quick note: wordpress doesn’t let you embed videos in the comments directly, but I can add them in for you if you just provide a link.)