Alela Diane, Lee Bob Watson, and Mariee Sioux March 27, 2007

About Grass Roots Record Co.

Over the course of two weeks, twenty groups from or connected to Nevada City, California crowded into the Brighton Sound Studio to record their songs live and direct into the microphone. Inspired by releases from such seminal record companies as Sun, Motown, Elektra, and Studio One, Grass Roots Record Co.’s Family Album is filled with songs you will want to hear many times over. They are lasting, infectious melodies—honest music in a world where truth-telling is a great revolutionary act.

About Mariee Sioux

Naturalist Jon Young says that great musicians are healers, they are able to move energy with the storytellers mind. Mariee Sioux has a divine gift for such storytelling. She is a stunning poet who exercises great fluency with her truly loving and richly emotive voice. Her music seems to have emerged from a state of being wholly connected to her spiritual nervous system like whispers of long lost elders.

She is 21 with an ancient soul singing stories of the earth and its inhabitants with intense feeling and a sense of natural connection. It seems as though she weaves in and out of past lives letting them pour out through fingers and tongues. She sings of bodies from the inside out and things buried below like the bones of bird wings, organs, muscles, hearts, fossilized ferns, and looks at the world as though it's also a body with all the things underneath pumping, churning, and flowing as one.

About Alela Diane

Alela Diane Menig es mi nombre. I make songs, mostly using the guitar, and I sing them.

I used to live in the crazy-land. Nevada City, California. It is real nice there. Lots of trees. A River. The family spirit. Beautiful creaters of craft and music. You see, I just left the cabin with crystals in the grout between the logs to move to this new place of city forest wandering: Portland, Oregon. I've got the sweetest kitty named Bramble Rose, who keeps me company during the days here. In the passing of the time, I wind the songs round the strings... sing! sing! sing! I crit around… sew curtains... get domestic. All the while...I've these fascinations creeping up on me of things long gone. I stop in my slippers to hold a rock I found on a beach of fog, or scatter the contents of my button jar onto the floor to explore the history of my collection. Who lost all these buttons? I'll sit for a while pawing an old grandma's handkerchief or the scrimshaw of a sailor. I think about whose hands did make these things! When outside.... feathers and fall leaves go in my hair or are tucked quietly into a pocket. What wind did blow them! Tatted lace? Bones? Children of Children of Children?

These are the cuckoo wind!

About Lee Bob Watson

Lee Bob is the writer & producer of 3 solo albums and one album with the group Santa Cruz Gospel Choir. His current project, Happy Mayfield, is a Pop Phenomenon (!) assembling some of Northern California’s finest musicians (from Cake, Jackpot, Deathray and more) and one hot engineer/producer, Dana Gumbiner (Daisy Spot, Golden Shoulders, High Speed Scene, etc.)

Lee Bob played in the early ‘00s with the band Jackpot—which was hailed by the New York Times as “one of California's greatest unknown bands” and by some folks as “the best rock band in the world...” Lee recorded two albums with the band for Surf Dog Records, toured America and Europe, went on the T.V., and got lose-yr-shit-drunk in places like Winnemuca, NV.

More recently, Lee Bob has appeared on recordings by Kings and Queens and Golden Shoulders, Prairie Dog, James Finch Jr.. His work has also been featured in two films by San Francisco filmmaker Mike Missiaen.

Lee Bob has lived in L.A., Sacramento, Santa Cruz, England, Alaska, San Francisco and Taiwan R.O.C. He currently lives in Grass Valley, CA with his hot wife, Rochelle Celeste Reynosa.

Official Website: http://www.grassrootsrecordco.com/