Tag: colter wall

Spotify Listeners are Discovering Music from Around the World

December 18, 2019

Every day, Spotify users discover a song, artist, or genre from outside their home countries.  Whether that’s through their Discover Weekly, a friend’s recommendation, or another Spotify-curated playlist, folks are stepping outside of their comfort zones to get to know artists from a different place. These songs and artists can take listeners to another world—metaphorically. Music is a great connector that allows us to understand and experience a life or culture beyond our own.

We’ve found that over 60% of Spotify users discovered an artist from a country outside their own within the last 28 days. So just imagine what they’ve uncovered over the course of a few months, or even the year. That’s a world of travel and learning—sans passport. 

On For the Record this year, we’ve also explored artists and genres from around the world, taking note of the songs and styles that have crossed borders. Hear from some of the artists, musicians, and experts we spoke to below.

The Viral Mexican Artist Making Music Worth Crying Over

Ed Maverick, who comes from the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico, didn’t grow up in a musical family but learned to play guitar by watching videos and playing in norteño groups—(norteño is a genre of music popular in the region he comes from)—throughout middle school. His style evolved through playing covers of songs by his favorite bands, such as those by Mexican indie rockers Little Jesus. But neither style of music suited what he wanted to do, so he decided to strike out on his own; he eventually started composing his own songs. “I felt the need to release what was going on in my mind,” he said.

Indigenous Australian Rapper Briggs Shares Message of Triumph through Music

“Shepparton has the largest indigenous population in Victoria outside of Melbourne. It also has the largest indigenous population in Victoria per capita. So there was always a presence, and it was always just a part of us and what we did and still do. We just operated as artists and rappers. You don’t really realize how different you are until it’s presented to you.” – Briggs

Santiago, Chile: Spotify’s Streaming Capital of Reggaetón

“What we are seeing with reggaetón in Chile is a great testimony to the absolute powerhouse that is Latin America when it comes to building and delivering audiences for Latin artists,” said Mia Nygren, Managing Director for Spotify in Latin America.

Meet Rich Brian, the Indonesian Rapper Performing at Spotify On Stage Jakarta

“A lot of things influence my sound, from listening to traditional Indonesian music to the stuff I listened to while spending full days on the internet making videos. Living internationally definitely influenced my attitude towards everything positively. I’m very grateful for everything that I have now, and things just never get old for me—each new experience feels like a blessing.” – Rich Brian

Charting the Meteoric Rise of South Africa’s AmaPiano

“I was fortunate to see the impact of kwaito music and what it meant for the then-young democracy that South Africa was. It became the voice of local youth to push for systematic change and fight the exclusion of the marginalized. I can’t help but think that AmaPiano is doing just that so far for this generation of young South Africans, and I can’t wait to see how many more boundaries it’ll break.” – Da Kruk

How Americana Troubadour Garrett T. Capps Went Worldwide

The European market has been turned on to Capps’s quirky brand of country too. “According to my statistics on Spotify, it seems like a lot of people in the Netherlands and Spain are discovering my music through the program,” he says. “And I’m excited to keep writing and finding ways to reach audiences.” – Garrett T. Capps

Lukas Graham Becomes First Danish Artist to Hit 1 Billion Streams for a Single Song

“I’m not sure if it’s too much to call ourselves the Arctic Monkeys of Spotify. I feel like our international breakthrough came about because of Spotify—the way streams in the Nordics and Germany pushed an unknown act into the global top 50 with a song that wasn’t available outside of the Nordics and GSA. It was a trippy ride, and luckily we’ve landed on the other side without losing our minds.” – Lukas Graham

Meet Tones and I, the Australian Ex-Busker Who Achieved a Global Hit Thanks to Streaming

In the span of just a year, Toni Watson has leapfrogged from working retail to busking full time to topping the charts in almost a dozen countries—including her native Australia. That’s all thanks to “Dance Monkey,” the viral smash that was the second-ever single for the artist best known as Tones And I.

Colter Wall Honors His Western Roots on Songs of the Plains

Nobody ever needed to explain western wear to Wall, who was raised in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada. “It’s predominantly cattle country,” he shares. “My last full-time gig I had before I started playing music for a living was working cows with my cousin on a thousand-head cattle ranch.”

How Spotify Helped Cigarettes After Sex Amass an International Audience

Since the release of Cry, Cigarettes After Sex’s momentum has continued to snowball; the band is now closing in on 4.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. They’re also continuing to find success in new territories. Within a month of Spotify’s February 2019 launch in India, the country leapt into Cigarettes After Sex’s top ten markets. This popularity translated offline: In May, when the band announced two late-July Mumbai shows via a local promoter’s mailing list, they drew 30,000 sign-ups within just a few hours, causing the list to shut down.

Take a listen to Spotify’s Global Top 50 for the songs rocking the international charts.

 

Colter Wall Honors His Western Roots on Songs of the Plains

November 27, 2018

Don’t call rising Canadian country phenom Colter Wall a cowboy. “To me it’s kind of a sacred title,” he says. But he’s a lot closer to it than many of today’s country singers. He grew up in cowboy country, steeped in the lifestyle’s lore, and he’s even a cattle owner. Still, he maintains, “I think you can only call yourself a cowboy if that’s your full-time occupation.”

For the last few years, Wall’s been too busy touring to devote his full attention to anything else, but he was compelled to fill his second album, Songs of the Plains, with cowboy tales. The closest anybody in Nashville ever comes to tales of the trails is singing about rodeos and barbecues, and Wall is weary of it. “The public awareness of that whole element of country music history has been kind of muddled,” he says, “and people just aren’t as aware of it as they used to be. I was talking to somebody the other day and explaining why Stetson hats and cowboy boots and pearl snap shirts are called Western wear…I had to explain that.”

Nobody ever needed to explain western wear to Wall, who was raised in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. “It’s predominantly cattle country,” he explains. “My last full time gig I had before I started playing music for a living was working cows with my cousin on a thousand-head cattle ranch.”

But the man who pledges allegiance to the sounds of the saddle started out as a hard rocker. “The first songs I learned to play were all Sabbath and Zeppelin and AC/DC,” reports Wall. “Country music was what the folks listened to, so as a 13 year old, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s lame, I want to learn rock ‘n’ roll.'” Eventually he came full circle, tracing classic rock’s influences back to the blues, and finding his way from there to folk and old-school country.

In 2015, just a few weeks shy of his 20th birthday, the precocious Wall released his debut EP, Imaginary Appalachia. It showcased his spartan folk/country style, based around his own acoustic guitar picking and his old-fashioned voice. Blessed with a burly, bottomless baritone that could easily belong to someone decades older, Wall came across from the start as an old soul inhabiting the body of a millennial. Once the EP’s opening track, “Sleeping on the Blacktop,” was featured  in the Oscar-winning film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Wall began blowing up.

Wall’s praises were emphatically sung by Steve Earle and Rick Rubin. The latter became so enamored with Wall’s work that he signed him to a publishing deal. Even now, Wall seems stunned by it. “Traveling to L.A. and meeting him was very surreal,” he remembers of his initial Rubin encounter. “I brought my guitar and played him some songs I was working on at the time, and he sat there with his legs folded in the middle of the floor, closed his eyes and listened.”

Photo credit: Little Jack Films

Listening to Songs of the Plains, it seems likely that Rubin heard in Wall the same sort of spirit that was at the center of the uber-producer’s legendary American Recordings sessions with Johnny Cash in the mid ’90s: A solitary man immersed in musical tradition, armed with an acoustic guitar and a growly, gravitas-laden voice, finding his place on the North American country/folk continuum.

Like that august album, Songs of the Plains shifts seamlessly between original tunes, traditional fare, and some songs by simpatico artists that  all come together to form a narrative about life on the plains. On tunes like “The Trains Are Gone” and “Wild Bill Hicock,” Wall the history nerd emerges. The former comes from his reading about the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway. “The rail lines and trains are really what connected this part of the world to the East,” he says.  “That whole importance of trains is kind of lost.”

Similarly, “Wild Bill Hicock” comes from Wall’s study of the Old West icon. “I knew that I wanted a proper gunfighter ballad somewhere on the record,” he explains. “There’s a ton of songs that were written about Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin, but not a lot of people ever wrote about Wild Bill.” Hicock was a folk hero of the plains, imbued with a mystique that crosses over into Canadian cowboy culture.

Photo by Stock Montage/Getty Images

Developing a real feel for another era appealed to Wall’s passion for anachronism.

“I like writing period pieces,” he confirms, “and being able to delve into that kind of language. People spoke differently in the days of Wild Bill, people had this sort of flowery way of speaking that’s really quite beautiful. That’s a good challenge as a songwriter, to try to tap into that as best I could.” As an example, on “Wild Bill Hicock” alone, Wall uses  terms like “pistoleer” and “ill-agree.”

But if you’re really after an antique feel it’s easiest to go straight to the source, which Wall does on a few tunes. “Calgary Round-Up” is an old trail song first cut by Canadian country singer/songwriter Wilf Carter in 1934, and “Night Herding Song” comes straight from the cowboys, a traditional song that’s been recorded by everybody from Tex Ritter to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

Meanwhile, tracks like the Wall-penned “Manitoba Man” steer clear of anachronism, maintaining a timeless feel that works just as well now as it would have in Wilf Carter’s day. The dark, minor key tune bears a Townes Van Zandt influence and is one of the most personal cuts on the album. “I wasn’t sure whether I should put that one on the record,” Wall hesitates. “That’s just a little part of my life at one point when I was going to see this guy from Manitoba quite a bit to buy various substances that would alter my mood. It’s a sad bastard song is really what it is.”

Wall’s ability to transcend time is what helps him meld the modern and the antiquated, making everything on Songs of the Plains feel like part of the same tapestry. “As much as I love that old language and old music,” Wall says. “You keep that stuff alive by finding a way to reiterate all the stuff that makes those old tunes great and retell them in a modern style.”

— Article by Jim Allen