Noah Earle
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Noah Earle

Band Blues Singer/Songwriter

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The best kept secret in music

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"Noah Earle "6 Ways to Sunday""

Born in Topeka, Kansas Noah Earle (no relation to Steve/Stacey). Classically trained on piano, Noah has spread his wings into traditional folk/blues via acoustic, electric guitars, banjo, dulcimer, piano and ashiko drum. Taking the traditional themes from his Kansas days, such as the fall out from the Vietnam War, Noah shows a wide range of songwriting talents from political themes through to love songs - wonderfully demonstrated on the title track 'Six Ways to Sunday' - just piano, acoustic guitar plus Noah's fine voice construct a hypnotic song. Noah's stories of his childhood in Kansas are set against some great arrangements, and he makes each song sound different. At present Noah has no record deal, but this CD shows talent in abundance (songwriting and musician). If you wondered whatever happened to Stephen Stills after around 1972 - check this out! noahearle@myway.com AR - Americana-UK.com


"Noah Earle"

"After hearing Noah at the Spokane Singer Songwriter festival last May I was taken by his original regional songs, his clean yet driving style of playing guitar leaning toward Blues and R&B and the way he drew the crowd in. I have heard a lot of songwriters over the past 15 years but none have impressed me more than Noah Earle." - Jeanette Bair- New Coast House Concerts


"Noah Earle's "6 Ways to Sunday""

The opening track to Noah Earle’s Six Ways to Sunday almost makes your ass twist off the bottom of your spine. He’s got a strong picking hand, a big dynamic voice that‘s more akin to a saxophone than much else, and a talent for well-considered songwriting. The song, Land of Goshen, is insidious in its groove, slowly building up to a full- fledged boogie before you realize that you’ve been tapping your foot since the first bar. Maybe boogie is the wrong word, because it’s something more subversive and seductive than that, somehow less and no less wholesome at the same time.
Confused? Me too. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly Earle is after with Six Ways to Sunday. It’s a strange dichotomy between the blues and singer-songwriter, or familial love vs. lust and sex. All of the songs on Six Ways are well done, which is to say they have good lyrics, and a good level of production, but they pull the album in different directions. It’s more than stylistic or thematic differences between the tracks, or perhaps that the gulf between the styles is too wide to form a cohesive whole, but fully half the songs are different enough from the other tracks that they could have been their own album.
A possibility that occurs to me as I write this is; deep inside of Earle, R.L. Burnside and the Rev. Al Green are competing for his musical soul. I say this because you can hear the echoes of Burnside, Kimbrough, and Doc Boggs lingering at the fringes of Earle’s blues. On the other end of the spectrum, there is this Motown cum Baptist Gospel fighting for a place stylistically and thematically.
Obviously there’s a strong connection between these genres historically and musically, and if one were to draw a timeline of what is typified as American-Black music they would be concurrent. That said, Earle draws from the low-production, raw emotional power of the beginnings of the blues; then, from the glitz and glamour of post-Motown Baptist cathedral hymns.
It is precisely this tension between Saturday night and Sunday morning that pulls at the album’s seams. It’s a tension that needs to be resolved in Earle’s future albums, because the distance is hurting this album more than adding something to it. Personally, I’m pulling for R.L. in Earle’s tug of war (R.L.= Earle, think about it, it’s a sign…), Noah’s blues tracks give him a better opportunity to use the full range of his voice than the church tracks. If it were vice/versa I’d say so but the fact of the matter is, as a listener, you can feel him holding back in a way that he doesn’t when he sings about loose women and liquor.
Earle is a strong songwriter and a very talented guitarist. Six Ways to Sunday is a great first album, one to be proud of for sure, but I can tell he’s got something better bottled up inside him. Keep your eye out for this cd and any live shows that you might catch. I saw him in Iowa City, and from what I can tell he tours around the Midwest often enough. If you have the opportunity, go out, support your local music scene and check him out, you won’t be disappointed.

- Andrew Cantine, CRAM Magazine


Discography

Six Ways to Sunday- 2005, Noah Earle

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Bio

Noah was born in Topeka, Kansas, “a good place to dig potatoes.” His musical involvement began in early childhood when he would listen to the traditional country and country-gospel music that his family would play and sing at their gatherings. By around age six, his uncle had taught him some chords and he’d sit in the corner with his miniature guitar, struggling to mimic the chords that they fretted. Between the ages of about 5 and 18 he underwent classical training for piano, voice and fiddle (his grandpa said “never let anybody call it a violin”). By the age of 10, he had decided that he wanted to write songs, like his uncle and grandfather, starting with gospel lyrics (at a very young age) and moving on to sappy love songs with piano accompaniment. Throughout this time, he was also exposed to blues and jazz by his dad and another uncle, both of whom sang and/or played in a number of bands.
He and his brother Nathan spent several years singing contemporary R&B in junior high and high school, then got into alternative rock ‘n’ roll. In 1996, the year Noah graduated from high school, they went to Hollywood and worked with Mr. L. Entertainment (then a subsidiary of Disney). Dissatisfied with the synthesized production of their songs, and unable to crank out enough songs that seemed like pop single material, they came back to the Midwest, traveled to Europe and South America, and played around the Kansas City area for a couple years with the various bands they put together, including the Great Plains Weathermen.
Noah has been touring as a solo performer throughout the Midwest for two years. His debut cd, “Six Ways to Sunday,” has garnered him praise in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as at home. Most recently, Noah won the solo category of the Kansas City Blues Challenge and will play in the international competition in Memphis in late January, 2006.

Noah began playing with Aaron Harms in 2004, and added Mike Kardos to the band in 2005.