On iTunes, Lately…

Lovehammers released their latest single today on iTunes – it’s the first single off their upcoming CD, Heavy Crown. It’s been so long since we’ve had new Lovehammers’ music, I’m very very happy to have something new from them!

And Ryan Star released his long awaited EP, Last Train Home, earlier this month – you can hear a snippet of one of my favorite of his songs, Right Now, during commercials for the new NBC show, The Philanthropist. The full EP is only $3.99 on iTunes and features four songs and two videos.

And finally, I’m linking to Tamar Kaprelian‘s A New Day, just because it’s been my favorite song this summer and she deserves more exposure, so pass it on!

Lovehammers' Guns on iTunesRyan Star's Last Train Home on iTunesTamar Kaprelian's A New Day on iTunes

PS: Happy birthday and happy traveling to my brother Michael today!

ETA on 7/7/2009: Guess this should be PSS maybe? But Dino from the Lovehammers posted on RockBandLounge.com over the weekend about the single… http://www.rockbandlounge.com/forum/topic.asp?whichpage=1&topic_id=11274

America’s Forgotten Sweetheart

America's Forgotten SweetheartI received an email yesterday from one of the authors of a new book on Ruth Etting, coming out this fall. Ruth Etting: America’s Forgotten Sweetheart, by Kenneth Irwin and Charles O. Lloyd will be published by Scarecrow Press and is the first full-length biography of her life.

As excited as I am about the book, I’m maybe even more excited about the photo on the cover! It’s an image I’ve never seen before, and it features the pearls-around-her-upper-arm-look that I love – and in fact, the dress has strings of pearls hanging down her back, and off one hip. Ruth Etting wore pearls like no one else! Check out these images for further proof! 1, 2, and 3

More on the book…

“In Ruth Etting: America’s Forgotten Sweetheart, authors Kenneth Irwin and Charles Lloyd provide the first full-length biography of this ground-breaking artist. This book recounts Etting’s early hears as a pioneering radio performer who quickly attained national celebrity, her recording career as “Sweetheart of Columbia Records,” and her innovative work in early short subjects. The authors detail Etting’s unhappy marriage to her husband-manager, Martin (Moe “The Gimp”) Snyder, her second marriage to pianist arranger Myrl Alderman, and her Colorado Springs retirement. They also examine Etting’s place in the history of American entertainment, specifically her trend-setting vocal style and her innovative work in phonograph recordings and radio performance–as well as her enormous popularity throughout the 1930s and beyond.”

For more on the book and more on the authors, check out their website!
And for more on Ruth Etting, check out RuthEtting.com!

“Say goodbye, say goodbye to the way I was before…”

Am I Idyll? Or am I Wild? How about neither! My stay in the mountains lasted longer than I originally intended – Idyllwild’s a beautiful place, who can resist it’s charm? But as of this week I’m officially back to civilization, and loving it! Up in the mountains I had no cell phone reception, I got snowed in for days on end, and I was two-and-a-half hours outside of LA. On the upside I saw more deer than I could count and I made friends with at least one squirrel – we’d chatter back and forth at each other, and he told me stories. I may not have understood the details, but I understood the underlying emotion. Really! Get the right squirrel, and you’ll get an earful!

So onto the new!

First, I shot a new/redux band last week in LA – one of my favorite things to do! I think they’ll be debuting the images soon in a couple of different ways.

Second, I got an email this week from a fan who noticed some of my images on The Alexus Records site at http://alexusrecords.com. Some of the images have been enlarged and/or stretched, so it’s not the best place to see my work, but even so, I always love seeing my images show up in new places! If you want to see the original images, go to http://www.cherylspelts.com/blog/2008/08/la-guns-live-at-key-club-in-hollywood.html or http://www.rockbandlounge.com/news/2008-08-la-guns/ for the slideshow.

Third, I’m getting ready to debut my new web site AND a new site dedicated just to high school senior portraits. I’m really looking forward to working with seniors soon!

And finally, I wanted to mention Michael Jackson, and how sad I am that he’s gone, and that I never got to see him perform live. I always meant to…

I was making the final trip from Idyllwild to Riverside on Thursday, my car packed with my computer, cameras, and my cat – the three big “C’s” in my life – and I texted a Tweet that read: “Say goodbye, say goodbye to the way I was before. Say hello, say hello to a new way…” Just some lyrics to a song I blogged about earlier this month, referring to my move, and my very happy, fresh-start mood at that moment. Then a few minutes later the DJ on the radio blurted out that TMZ was reporting that Michael Jackson was dead, but that it hadn’t been confirmed by any other source at that point. So I pulled over, and went directly to Twitter on my iPhone. Later it occurred to me that two years ago this week I would have raced home to jump on the computer to learn more – since the iPhone didn’t debut until the very end of June 2007 – and I would have gone straight to a news source. And a year ago, I would have been able to pull over, and check right then, but I would have still gone to a news site to look it up. But this week? This week Twitter was the choice, and it didn’t even require any thought. I just knew that if something was happening, then Twitter was the place to be, and it was the right choice. I got immediate confirmation, along with disbelief, great grief, and straight from the heart sadness. When bad things happen, as humans we want to connect, and the immediacy of Twitter was the perfect vehicle. At first I felt guilty that my last Tweet had been so happy and frivolous – I hadn’t known when I tweeted – but still, it just felt wrong. But then I noticed that people assumed it referred to Michael, and I realized that while I hadn’t meant it that way, but that it could indeed refer to him too.

So Michael this is for you! “Say goodbye, say goodbye to the way I was before. Say hello, say hello to a new way…”

Site Update

So why am I posting screen shots of my current web site? Well the word current might be a clue…

I love my site as is – it was designed with my fine art background in mind. If you ever spent hours cutting mats for prints, bright white mats, four-ply, with sharp perfect corners, and never exactly square, always fuller at the bottom – then you get all the white in my current site. And if you ever signed your mounted prints with pencil, then you really get it. Even the little square images that repeat throughout the site are an homage to the square images on a medium format contact sheet.

But things change! And artists evolve. And it was time for an update. So that’s coming, soon. But today I just want to post a few screenshots, as an archive, because I like looking back! And soon, what you see below, will be the past.

cherylspelts.com

cherylspelts.com

cherylspelts.com