When not doing her "day job" as backing vocalist for Neil Young, award winning singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalists Nancy Hall is at the creative core of her band The Curios. They build what Northern California Songwriter has called a “wonderfully eclectic, quirky and beautifully complex musical universe”.
The Curios play “hyphen-music”: freak-folk-funk-psychedelic-cabaret, a juicy blend of mystery-rich, textural grooves and cliché’-free lyrics, alternately abstract and narrative. “...
When not doing her "day job" as backing vocalist for Neil Young, award winning singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalists Nancy Hall is at the creative core of her band The Curios. They build what Northern California Songwriter has called a “wonderfully eclectic, quirky and beautifully complex musical universe”.
The Curios play “hyphen-music”: freak-folk-funk-psychedelic-cabaret, a juicy blend of mystery-rich, textural grooves and cliché’-free lyrics, alternately abstract and narrative. “You can think and party”, says Hall,
Comparisons? When pressed, a fan offered “If Feist and Beck had a baby that was raised in a gypsy orphanage where they put Absinth in her bottle, handed her a tuba and told her she had to play in train stations for food, that is as close as I can get”.
Hall and Parvin have evolved a seamless, tandem playing that is like “psychic band mates”; they follow each other in melody and harmony like partner dancing, switching from a slow-motion piano/guitar meditation on marital infidelity called “Kiss and Tell”, to a rollicking ukulele and harmonica duet about money (or the lack of it) called “Sailor on a Windless Sea”.
They variously combine electric and acoustic guitars, organ, dulcimer, piano, ukulele, accordion, banjo, double bass, hand-drums and full kit drums with band mates Michael Tyler, Marc Games and James Kerwin helping to create the psychedelic pirate cabaret ambience they have become known for.
Hall has toured with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, twice through the US and on to Hong Kong, Japan and Australia. If you were on her E-list you’d have been treated to Road Dog Grrl; Letters to the Virtual Entourage a widely forwarded tour-chronicle that includes hilarious and insightful accounts of having been swept up in a world-class rock tour after playing the small concert hall, house concert and coffee house circuit. Hall subsequently recorded with Young on his very recent “Chrome Dreams II” CD.
Back from tour, The Curios have been busy playing sold-out local shows and completing their second CD “Pillow Book”, a follow-up to their debut “Everything Knows You” which was voted “Best of” on the popular Acoustic Sunrise show on San Francisco radio station KFOG. Program director and DJ Rosalie Howarth said, “The Curios are one of the three highest-reacting Artists we’ve had in our History”. Their song “Hope for the Modern Man” won in the folk category of The John Lennon Songwriting contest, as written up in the SF Chronicle’s Pink Section. Ani Difranco was the judge.
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