It may be hot, but Continental Europe stays Cool!
Greetings from a somewhat warm continental Europe. And the summer has only just started! We’ve been averaging around 40C during the day for nearly a week now, in SW France. Thankfully, we have lots of cool music to soothe the fevered brow!
We start with the announcement that Germany’s only festival dedicated to Americana and Roots Music, the popular Static Roots Festival, is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year! Static Roots 2026 will be held on the 10-11 July 2026 at Zentrum Altenberg in Oberhausen.
If you want to go, and if you’re in the area it’s an absolute must, you’ll need to get your skates on, because over 70% of tickets are already sold, not surprising given its growing reputation for featuring particularly strong line ups. This year’s festival motto is “Chasing the shiver since 2016“. It describes the moment that has always been at the heart of the festival: that shiver that runs down your spine when a song hits just the right note at just the right time.
Grass roots festivals like this are at the heart of growing the appreciation of americana music in Europe and it’s particularly encouraging to see Static Roots celebrating ten years of bringing this music to the general public. Many festivals struggle to establish a strong identity and attract a loyal following and Static Roots has clearly done both, helping it get through those early, difficult years (especially surviving the problems of the pandemic) and really establish itself on the European calendar. It’s also an americana festival that doesn’t just focus on American artists, acknowledging the quality of roots music being played by musicians throughout our continent. This year’s line up includes great American artists like The Vandoliers, Jerry Joseph, and Emily Nenni, but also features Norwegian band, Silver Lining, the UK’s Dreaming Spires, and Catalan singer-songwriter Joana Serrat, among others. You can find the full, and very impressive, list of artists playing over at the Static Roots website, along with a host of useful information about the festival.
This year’s opening night will feature a special Release Show for a new album from Irish band, The Southern Fold, one of last year’s featured artists. The album title is more than a little appropriate, considering the weather in much of Europe at the moment. Beneath the Blaze of the Burning Sun!
It’s going to be a great festival; catch it if you can.
We have a new EP from Denmark’s Strawberry Jesus. Dreams and Realities is a 4 track EP from a singer-songwriter who openly acknowledges his fascination, in equal parts, with the Greenwich Village scene of the 1960s and the Laurel Canyon sound of the early 1970s and you can hear that influence in his music, but with a little bluegrass influence thrown into the mix from time to time. This is a musician who really embraces the roots of American music but interprets it in a way that has instant rapport with European audiences. He describes his songs as being “about events in the lives of people moving through the complex landscape of the 21st century” and his lyrics do reward careful listening. Jonathan Bøge Jensen, the man behind Strawberry Jesus, is fast becoming something of a favourite on these pages, and his thoughtful take on americana music promises much for the future. Like many singer-songwriters Jonathan has struggled to get his work out to wider audiences, and this EP has been two years in the making. Now it has arrived and more people will be able to hear the quality of his music and, hopefully, spur him on to record a full album before too long. He assembled an excellent bunch of musicians to support him on these recordings, with some particularly good pedal steel guitar from Mathias Tveit Hammersmark, electric guitar from Kasper Rekve, and keyboards played by Viktor Ryborg Hammer, along with Tom Dockray on bass and Felix Bondo Jensen on drums, with backing vocals from Frida Lindstrøm. The EP is currently available on all streaming platforms.
Staying in Denmark, we also hear that Danish quintet Lowly are currently putting finishing touches to an as-yet-untitled fourth studio album due for release this Autumn via Bella Union. This will be the follow up to 2023’s Keep Up the Good Work, which did a lot to establish the band with international audiences. The band’s sound has more of an Indie Folk feel to it, with their layered approach to vocal harmony being particularly noteworthy, and the group consists of Nanna Schannong (vocals), Soffie Viemose (vocals), Kasper Staub (synthesizer), Thomas Lund (bass), and Steffen Lundtoft (drums), who have all been together for over a decade now. That longevity means that the new album will explore themes of parenthood, family, love, and loss, all experiences that come with age and a deeper understanding of the people around you. Though the new album won’t be with us for a few months yet, we do have a new single from the album to be. Liminal Space is a mid-tempo ballad buoyed up by haunting guitar melodies and those exquisite harmonies. “The lyrics are about being a parent and realizing you have to actually do something to not pass on the mess that you were given as a kid,” says Soffie. “To create brave little kids, you also have to be a role model.” We’ll keep you posted on developments with the album, and here’s that new single.
Friday June 19th saw the release of the new single from another band we rate highly at Vox Continental, Norway’s Thomas & The Angry Hearts. What Went Wrong was recorded at the session our very own John Lee attended, earlier this year, and which prompted some excellent articles from John on the band and their work, both in the studio and live. John’s interview with Thomas was particularly illuminating and, if you haven’t read it, you can find it here.
The band have said that they think this is their best recording yet and, listening to it, it’s hard to disagree with them. There’s an exuberance to the playing and the delivery of the song that is genuinely exciting and the whole thing has quite a Waterboys vibe to it, in a very positive way. The shared vocal work between Thomas and his wife, Hilde, really drives this song along.
It’s well worthy of your attention.
It’s often easy to forget just how big continental Europe is. Forty four countries, a population of nearly 800 million people, covering approximately 10,186,000 square kilometres (3,933,000 sq mi), or 2% of the Earth’s surface!
All of this is my way of saying, I can’t cover everything! Sometimes I miss a few things. One of the few things that have eluded me is German band, Someday Jacob, who I had not heard of before and that is definitely my loss (and yours, if you rely on this column for news of good European americana bands!). The band formed in the Bremen/Hamburg area back around 2012 and they have four albums and one EP to their name, and they’re more than a bit good. A little bit Calexico, a little bit Jayhawks, a hint of Laurel Canyon, but all original. You can check them out on their website, and it’s well worth a visit. Hopefully we’ll find an opportunity to talk more about them in the future.
For now, we’ll focus on the debut solo album from their frontman, Jörn Schlüter. Under the project title J SCHLUETER (yes, all capitals, apparently), we have the album The Other Mile, released earlier this month. Jörn Schlüter has been the main songwriter for Someday Jacob throughout their time together and, as often happens in these situations, a songwriter will end up with songs that they don’t see as band songs, that need to find a different existence of their own. This is that album for J SCHLUETER. The songs were, apparently, written in early 2024 during a moment of crisis, and are about finding the best possible way to deal with fear, the aftermath of trauma, and the feeling of being isolated from the world. The album was released a couple of weeks ago and the focus track for the album is Win Me Over. As a solo artist, Schlüter has a more stripped down approach than that of Someday Jacob and it’s good that there’s a noticable difference between solo output and band projects. The writing is good, as seems to be consistently the case with Schlüter, and the artist has attracted some high profile support for this solo project, with pedal steel guitarist Eric Heywood (Son Volt, Jayhawks, Pretenders) contributing to a number of tracks and Wilco producer, Tom Schick, handling mixing duties for the album at Chicago’s The Loft studio. We expect this to be showing on the Euro Americana chart very soon.
Also from Germany, we have the latest single release from GAEDE. GAEDE is best described as a musical collective, formed to record the fairly prodigious songwriting output of singer-songwriter Mathias Gaede, when health issues made it impossible for him to continue with live performances.
This latest release, Your Place, is apparently a song that has been in the works for a long time and was recently finally finished. Featuring notable guests from Nashville, Naples, and the Rhine-Main region, the recording features poetic lyrics from Peter Wesley Bastone, with Tim McDonald on piano, Jake Clayton, violin and mandolin, Francesca Prattico, drums, Dietmar Wächtler on pedal steel, regular collaborator Muli on guitar, Chantal Hartmann, vocals, and Frank Motnik at the mixing desk.
It’s a moody and reflective song from a songwriter, and his collaborators, who always produce something of interest.
Finally, back to some live appearances. We have news of a fairly extensive tour through the low countries for American outfit, Jeffrey Halford and the Healers, scheduled for the autumn. They’ll be kicking off in Valkenburg, Netherlands on the 25th September and concluding in Veldhoven, also in the Netherlands, on the 15th October. Between those dates they will also be appearing at other Dutch locations and at venues in Belgium and Germany. You can find full details of the tour over on their website.
The band will be promoting their new album, Used Parts, scheduled for release a couple of weeks before the European Tour gets under way.
The band’s music is a powerful mix of blues and country rock that will play well with northern European audiences and there should be strong interest in this tour.
And we’ll end with what has to be one of the easiest festival sells in Europe this year. The Irish Wings Festival takes place in Paxos, Greece, on the 5th of July. According to the press release “A remarkable gathering of musical talent from Ireland and Greece will meet once again on the idyllic island of Paxos in July for Irish Wings, the annual festival of cross-cultural collaborations set against a backdrop of charming villages, crystal-clear waters and the island’s dramatic white cliffs”. Well, why would anyone want to go to that, I hear you say, when they could pop to Bognor for the weekend. Well, aside from the charming villages and crystal clear waters, this year’s headliner is the ever excellent Liam Ó Maonlaí, singer and frontman of Hothouse Flowers. He’ll be joined by Bright Phoebus, the house band of Irish Wings, a Greek-Irish ensemble conceived by leading Irish fiddle player and producer Dónal O’Connor. “Bright Phoebus brings together exceptional musicians who are ideally placed to explore the shared emotional worlds of Irish and Greek music: lament and love, rhythm and dance, ancient story and contemporary expression“. Here’s a picture of a charming Paxos village and crystal clear water.
Looks like hell, doesn’t it! And, it’s currently cooler in Paxos than it is in much of the rest of Europe!
We’ll be back again at the end of next month, July 30th.
Please remember – if you are an americana-influenced artist operating out of mainland Europe and have new music or a tour to promote, let me know. Contact information is on the webzine page under ‘Info’. This column is published on the last Thursday of every month throughout the year.
