Elana Belle Carroll

Blues / Pop / Other

Chatham, NY

You do not have the current Adobe Flash Player

To listen to this audio clip you will need to upgrade Adobe Flash Player

You do not have Adobe Flash Player

To listen to this audio clip you will need to install Adobe Flash Player

About

COMING SOON: ALBUM AVAILABLE ON CD BABY IN MP3 AND CD FORM

For the past eight years Elana Belle Carroll has been writing and performing her music, crafting a group of songs that are both heartbreaking and beautiful. Finally she has taken these songs and recorded them as an album. Various incarnations of a band have been formed around her material, while the record contains contributions from Nico Hedley, Melanie Snyder, Marlon Battad, Miles Read and Nathaniel Humpreys. It is through this recording collaboration that Carroll’s songs were realized beyond mere guitar and voice. The collaboration itself has been named The Checker Chance after the house of the same name that provided the space for them to play music together so often. Without this space, the music never would have happened.

Some of the songs are from her earliest days of songwriting while still others were created more or less the day of the recording. “About Traveling” was a random occurrence during a studio session with Hedley and Battad that was born out of the three artists committing to random elements that they had been fooling around with separately for weeks. “Crying and Cold”, originally a solo acoustic blues ballad employing segments of pulled time, is given new strength and power with Battad providing tear inducing drum drops, and Hedley re-spelling chords with his intuitive bass playing. Finally support of "the Checker Chance" can be heard on “Once Before,” giving the song a new vitality with Read's colorful synth line, and "Moving Song", where the voices of Humphreys and Snyder are so precise and balanced that at first listen, you barely notice how essential their role is in the unfolding of the song.

"Fuzz" is a recording that Carroll made in her bedroom at age fifteen, with a guitar, a slide, a tambourine and about five vocal tracks on Garageband. This inclusion, though it is from some time ago, is fitting because it exhibits, as do the other tracks, the primary influences in Carroll's sound with the Checker Chance: Americana–a take on American roots genres, including country and blues–and rock.

Alongside the band, producer John Froats, and sound engineer Joe Johnson, Carroll has crafted an album that is both familiar and new. In her arrangements you can hear a distinct sense of Americana, but never is the music tied to only this. Instead each song is as timeless as is it is powerful, and the album is a window into the growth and current place of a young and brilliant artist.