New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Folk art songwriter, Skye Steele, joins forces with authors from Asymmetrical Press on the upcoming 42 city Word Tasting tour which starts on May 1 at a series of bookstores across America. Steele, whose lyrical content unfolds as a story of his own telling, will play a set of songs from his 2015 album release, Up From The Bitterroot, as well as live-scoring passages during select author's readings. Additional info on the Wordtasting tour can be found at https://asymmetrical.co/wordtasting/.
Asymmetrical Press is doing in the literary world what Indie labels started doing in music a few decades ago: circumventing the traditional gatekeepers, working from the grassroots to develop a following by doing it their own way. Steele says, "They're cultivating relationships with indie bookstores, hitting the road and touring a lot, and building it up from the ground, just like we do as independent musicians." Comprised of Steele, along with novelists (Josh Wagner and Shawn Mihalik), a professional vagabond philosopher (Colin Wright), and a duo of essayists (Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of The Minimalists), the Word Tasting tour will present an evening of stories, reflections, ideas, and songs to flavor the mind and nourish the spirit.
Up From The Bitterroot
Release Date: January 20, 2015
The People Make The Music
Hiromitsu & Yuko
No Matter Love
Wild We've Been
Wild Mind
New Mind/Old Mind
My Mountainside
You Be Yours
In The Sun
Your Silence
Growing Song
Last fall, Steele and novelist Josh Wagner, an old friend from Montana's Bitterroot Valley, had the idea of touring together when they realized that Wagner's new novel, Shapes The Sunlight Takes, was to be released the same day as Steele's Up From The Bitterroot. Asymmetrical Press took the idea and ran with it, creating the Word Tasting Tour. Skye's 2014 summer tour landed him at several bookstores, a natural fit for the songwriter who not-so-coincidentally also holds a Creative Writing degree. Skye says, "Up From The Bitterroot in particular is so much about reflection and the inner life of the mind-- presenting the songs in a room full of books feels really right. As I songwriter I aspire to deal with language on the level of my favorite authors: to achieve the flow and lyricism of Wallace Stevens, Li-Young Lee, or fellow Brooklyner, Walt Whitman; to paint characters and situations with the depth of Raymond Carver or
William Faulkner."
Born out of a winter's seclusion in the deep woods of the Bitterroot Valley, Skye Steele's new album Up From The Bitterroot (HouseTown) offers an unflinching chronicle of the downward arc of a crumbling marriage, the turmoil of separation, and the painful first steps of moving on. This folk song cycle cuts a wide path from bluesy psychedelia to meditative dreamscapes, all of it gilded by the delicate improvising of a band of intimates and lead by Steele's unmistakable voice and fiddle.
About Skye Steele
Through a decade of paying dues, playing his fiddle in the subways, to recording with
Rufus Wainwright, collaborating with
Vanessa Carlton, and landing at Carnegie Hall, a restless spirit was gleaning grist for its mill, and on Up From The Bitterroot he steps forward with an unmistakable voice as singer, poet, and fiddler. Skye Steele's tale of wrenching heartache, loss, and moving on, burns bright thanks to the broad palette of a well-traveled artist, and the afterimage will hang haunting before your eyes long after you turn away.
