Photos and information by: Michael Hujsa
JD & The Straight Shot put the Sand’s Event Center’s acoustic sound to the test! Their tour is in support for the band’s 5th album, Ballyhoo! According to the band’s founder, James Dolan, “We’ve always approached writing songs acoustically, so it made sense to go in that direction. They just sound right this way.”
Their infectious groove will have you toe-tapping in no time! We fell in love with their hit “Better Find A Church.”
JD & The Straight Shot have toured alongside The Eagles, The Allman Brothers Band, ZZ Top, and Robert Randolph. Members of the Straight Shot also tour with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Their song “Can’t Make Tears” is the theme song for Cablevision-owned AMC’s TV show Hell on Wheels.
According to Jeweljk.com, over the course of the ‘Picking Up the Pieces’ album, Jewel conveys the emotional turmoil of life during its most difficult and challenging moments, with genuine emotional pain fueling her vocals and reaching a new intensity level with her music in the process. A singer cannot transmit feelings into listeners without tapping into those feelings and this collection of songs provided the opportunity to dig deep into her own experiences.
Meditations on lost love and broken relationships are prevalent on Picking Up the Pieces, with the potent and poetic “Love Used To Be” and the hopeless despair of “It Doesn’t Hurt Right Now,” a penetrating collaboration with Rodney Crowell that explores the aftermath of an affair. Previously unrecorded live staples from the original Pieces Of You era like “Everything Breaks,” “Here When Gone,” “His Pleasure Is My Pain” and “Carnivore,” which manages to convey heartbreak, hostility and defiance simultaneously, are also among them. Family relationships are also eloquently explored, with the self-examining “Family Tree” and “My Father’s Daughter” – a stunning autobiographical collaboration with country legend Dolly Parton.
“I was trying to keep my mind quiet and honestly get back to something I feel like I’d lost touch with in my life,” she adds of the reflective LP. “It was really an exercise in shutting out fear. I was giving myself permission to be exactly who and what I was.”
To be sure, this is an album about self-awareness: namely, the way it affects our evolution, maturation and acceptance. “It really felt like returning to a part of me that I didn’t mean to lose, but with time and relationships and life and surviving and dealing you take on new things and not all of them are great,” she admits. The recording process for the album, which Jewel describes as a “very holistic process,” centered on “carving away things about myself and returning to a sense of myself that I really needed.”
Photos: Michael Hujsa / The Valley Ledger
