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The  new music video for Bike Ride was premiered on the All Songs Considered Blog – NPR Music.com  !

Our amazing director Dycee Wildman spliced in 8mm footage that her grandmother shot in the 50’s and 60’s which is so beautifully appropriate given the theme of this record.  Huge thanks to Dycee for lending her incredible talents and vision in directing and editing this beautiful video.

I also want to thank Ms. Ann Powers for being my champion and helping mymusic reach a larger audience through her writing for NPR.  I’m honored to be included in the amazing group of artists that she supports.

This is my favorite track on the record; every time I perform it live I am able to be totally present.  Thanks to Robby Hecht for writing this song with me.  It truly brings me so much joy and peace.

Finally, thanks to East Side Cycles for kindly lending us the classy bicycles we enjoyed riding aroung our neighborhood.  You’re good fellas!

 

Share it with your friends too please.  

Here’s what Ms. Powers writes about the video: 

For those who haven’t yet discovered Nora Jane Struthers, the summery song “Bike Ride” is a great introduction to her beguiling, well-considered worldview. The first time Struthers sings the song’s most important line — “I can go anywhere” — the phrase rises up out of her throat, free, wide open. The second time, a phrase later, she clamps down on it with some grit. “‘Bike Ride’ is a song about a re-awakening,” the 29-year-old Nashville resident said in a recent email. “When you propel yourself forward through time and space on your own steam, you realize your own agency.”

Purposefulness is a major theme in Struthers’ updated brand of bluegrass, whether she’s sharing tales of female adventurers, taking on the murder ballad form, or writing of her own journey from Virginia to New York and back down South. “Bike Ride” is the new single from Carnival, Struthers’ first album with her current band, The Party Line. The tune is a lark, a bluegrass-flavored lope that turns into a singalong. But it contains some blue notes. “I think the wistfulness you’ve identified is, perhaps, the melancholy that sets in when you discover that you’ve lost yourself for a period of time, that you’ve lived feeling trapped or stagnant and didn’t even realize it,” Struthers wrote when I told her I though the song was a little bit sad.

The video for “Bike Ride,” directed by Struthers’ longtime collaborator Dycee Wildman, interweaves footage of the band cycling around the leafy streets of East Nashville with clips of vintage 8-millimeter film taken by Wildman’s late grandmother. The older material helps reveal another bigger story behind this ambulatory lark: that as we move forward, we do truly lose some of what we love. It shows Wildman’s family members on tricycles, yes, but also in wedding scenes and gatherings that feature growing families. “The song speaks to something lost and the search to find it and for me, for the video, what is lost is the past,” Wildman wrote from Nashville. “We all miss the times to which we can never return. I think that is a special side of nostalgia that is truly sad and Nora Jane understands this.”

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2013/08/06/209598674/first-watch-nora-jane-struthers-bike-ride

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Dear Friends,

I bought this charming wrap-dress last week at an antique mall on Massachusetts Ave. in Lawrence, Kansas– which happens to be one of my all-time favorite vintage shopping towns! This dress is so soft. Seriously- it’s crazy soft. The top is red with small white polka dots and the skirt is a unique purple color featuring two roomy pockets each trimmed with the red and white polka dot material. The beauty of a wrap dress is that, if it fits at all, it always fits perfectly.

The mystery of this dress is, I cannot figure from what decade it hails! The fabric and the wrap style would point to the 1940’s but hemline may be too short for that era. The fit evokes sixties, but the buttons are reminiscent of the early 50’s. Can you help me solve the mystery?

Addition clues:
-ruffle around collar
-white buttons up the front bodice
-one white button fastening the top if the back
-the fabric is thin, made of natural fibers- cotton, I believe

Alright friends! Let me know your best guess!

Best,
Nora Jane

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Ann Powers’ includes Nora Jane in this NPR Music feature article discussing the new wave of female country artists!

She writes, “So it makes sense that halfway through 2013, I can easily make a Year’s Best list comprising the following albums: Same Trailer, Different Park; Like A Rose, by Pistol Annies member Ashley Monroe; Annie Up, the second album from that group itself; The Highway, the first independent release from Hank Williams’ granddaughter, Holly Williams; Spitfire, the emotionally unrelenting comeback album by LeeAnn Rimes; American Kid, by Americana veteran Griffin; The Stand-In, by a relative newcomer in the same field, Caitlin Rose; Love and Forgiveness, by Dusty Springfield’s spiritual daughter, Courtney Jaye; Carnival, by the quietly brilliant Nora Jane Struthers — just one of several younger women making major waves in bluegrass; Pioneer, by the ever more rocking The Band Perry; and yes, those two volumes of soundtrack from the series Nashville.”

Nora Jane’s thoughts on this:What an honor to be included in this talented group of women!  Woah!!!

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Ann Powers, for NPR Music, includes Nora Jane Struthers & The Party Line in a small group of musicians, spanning several genres, who she identifies as successfully borrowing sound to create something original.  Here’s what she writes about NJS & TPL:

Nora Jane Struthers makes bluegrass music that reminds us of how contemporary that strain of country music was when it emerged in the mid-twentieth century. The Nashville-based Struthers and her band, The Party Line, display an easy camaraderie that leaves room for virtuoso turns without ever letting their songs be consumed by showoff picking. What really makes Struthers special, however, is her songwriting. On her third album , released in March, Struthers — who grew up in New Jersey and has a from NYU — employs the high lonesome bluegrass sound to tell stories of adventure with a subtle feminist twist. Along with Sara Watkins, Aoife O’Donovan and Abigail Washburn, Struthers is an upstart spiritual daughter of Alison Krauss, creating a space within the competitive fraternity of bluegrass for women’s stories and women’s virtuosity.Screen Shot 2013-06-04 at 10.57.45 AM

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