Chicago based songwriter Rachele Eve has come into her own with the wonderful new CD, Mouth of Feathers.

Attracted to Chicago's diverse music scene she set out for the windy city on the search for a much more intimate yet driving sound.  It was not even a month until she met her partner, Nikolai Giefer, a drummer and producer that relocated to Chicago after Hurricane Katrina.

In October of 2007, Giefer introduced Eve to his former professor and record producer John Snyder, a veteran in jazz recording (Miles Davis, Etta James) and founder of Artists House Music Foundation. A couple months after Snyder's visit to Chicago, he invited Eve down to Louisiana to record. After months of seeking out local musicians and fundraising for the album, Rachele Eve, Nikolai Giefer, and multi-instrumentalist Packy Lundholm ventured down to Dockside Studios in Maurice, Louisiana in July 2008. The three of them cranked out an astonishing fourteen songs in four days, making up Rachele Eve's first full-length album.

Entitled Mouth of Feathers, the distinct and unabridged instrumentation incorporates a modern yet vintage feel, colored with distorted guitars, toy piano, an accordion cameo, Wurlitzer, and Hammond B-3 organ. All behind her seamless whisper-to-wail vocal inflections the album is brave in parts and meek in others bringing about the entire spectrum of human emotion. The lyrical component of Mouth of Feathers illustrates more abstractly Eve's personal journey through being her own worst critic, finding a new love, and trying to make sense of society's strange antics. Rachele Eve's influences that are especially prominent on Mouth of Feathers include: Fiona Apple, Feist, Jon Brion, Regina Spektor, and Bob Dylan.
 

Like a caged canary yearning liberty from the deepest coal mine in Appalachia, so springs Ashley Brooke Toussant’s voice from her modest 5-2 1/2 frame. Her foundation was set in the fertile grounds of Canton, Ohio, some twenty-four years ago.

While in college, she secured an internship at NPR affiliate station WKSU-fm in Kent, Ohio. Working under the esteemed tutelage of folk music host Jim Blum, her exposure to folk music broadened. Her tastes expanded to include the likes of Carole King, Jackson Browne, Kate Wolf, Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian and Patty Griffin. Though Ashley admits to drawing inspirations from those songwriters, she tends to stray away from any particular artist as someone to emulate. She distills the raw emotion intrinsic to any folk song, makes it her own, then dispenses it, ever so gingerly, in her own voice.

After several years of gigging around Northeast Ohio, Ashley decided a change was in order. In particular, she wished to validate her earlier claims to break free of the cage of Ohio and make her living as a singer. She flew the coop and landed in Chicago.

Settling quickly into the rhythm of the big city, she lugged her guitar and amp to various open mics, and within a few months of the move, found herself in a studio with Grammy Award winning producer Jim Tullio.

With the release of Ashley Brooke Toussant’s debut EP, All Songs In English, a wonderful little showcase of her talent, she comes a smidge closer to the dream planted in her crib, sprouted in adolescence, then nurtured into young adulthood.