Shake The Spirit Elle King

• 1 Talk Of The Town 03:36
• 2 Baby Outlaw 03:19
• 3 Shame 02:39
• 4 Man's Man 02:48
• 5 Naturally Pretty Girls 03:13
• 6 Told You So 02:35
• 7 Good Thing Gone 04:51
• 8 Runaway 04:28
• 9 It Girl 03:42
• 10 Ram Jam 04:05
• 11 Sober 04:25
• 12 Chained 04:12
• 13 Little Bit Of Lovin' 06:33
• Total Runtime 50:26

Info for Shake The Spirit

Die fantastische Vorab-Single Shame wurde vom Rolling Stone und dem Time Magazine abgefeiert und stürmte die US Radio Charts - nun veröffentlicht die dreifache Grammy-Preisträgerin Elle King mit Shake The Spirit ihr zweites Album. Der Longplayer ist der Follow-Up zum weltweit erfolgreichen Debütalbum Love Stuff und enthält neben Shame auch die ebenfalls vorab veröffentlichte soulige Ballade Good Thing Gone, die Elle mit ihrer Band The Brethren schrieb. Die Aufnahmen fanden unter der Regie von Matt Pence in dessen Echo Lab-Studio im texanischen Denton statt.

Die US-Presse ist bereits voll euphorisiert: Eines der heiß ersehntesten Alben im Herbst 2018 (Billboard), Die Aussicht auf neue Musik von ihr ist unglaublich verlockend (Rolling Stone). Ich entschied mich für den Titel Shake The Spirit, weil mich die letzten eineinhalb Jahr wirklich bis ins Mark erschüttert haben, erklärt die 29-Jährige. Ich habe mich buchstäblich mit Geistern unterhalten. Der Entstehungsprozess des Albums hat nicht nur mein Leben komplett verändert, sondern auch mein Leben gerettet. Wenn man jemanden sieht, der Probleme hat, dann möchte man ihn schütteln, damit er wieder zu Klarheit kommt. Mit der Veröffentlichung dieses Album schüttele ich mich quasi selbst wieder wach. Einige Fans haben die Gelegenheit, das neue Material erstmals im Rahmen von zwölf intimen Konzerten in den USA, Großbritannien und Kanada zu erleben, die im Anschluss an die Albumveröffentlichung stattfinden. Weitere Tourdaten sind in Planung.

Die Single Shame, die von Tim Pagnotta produziert worden war, kletterte in den USA bis in die Top Ten der iTunes Alternative Songs Chart. Seine TV-Premiere feierte der Song in der Show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert . Einige US-Presse-Stimmen zur Single: The song, a shuttering, shimmying blast of pop ...a brazen invitation to give in to temptation...she sings in a near growl. Rolling Stone ... mix(es) a bluesy tendency with her soulful tones, full of attitude and a catchy pop sensibility underlying its hard edges...give(s) her voice an extra raspy quality, making her sound distinctively her own. (Time Magazine) ...the soulful Elle King captured hearts across the world with her sassy, lovelorn ... Ex s & Oh s ... Shame (is) a brassy tune about bad-girl antics...unstoppable series of hooks, as if daring us to feel shame for loving a song this wickedly good. Paper If you thought the Black Keys had cornered the market on blues-based stompers, she's here to change your mind.

Refinery 29 Elle Kings Debütalbum Love Stuff, ein in jedweder Hinsicht verschärfter Badass-Mix aus Rock n Roll, Blues, Country und einer Prise Pop, brachte u.a. die Breakthrough-Single Ex s & Oh s hervor, die ihr neben zwei Grammy-Nominierungen auch US-Doppelplatin einbrachte. In Deutschland erreichte der Song über das serielle Zurücklassen von Ex-Lebenspartnern mit gebrochenem Herzen die Top Ten der Airplay-Charts und wurde mit Gold ausgezeichnet. Das Album war fast drei Monate in den Offiziellen Deutschen Albumcharts notiert. Eine weitere Grammy-Nominierung erhielt sie als Duett-Partnerin von Dierks Bentley bei seinem Country Airplay-Nummer-Eins-Hit Different For Girls.

Elle King
When it came time for Elle King to choose a title for the follow-up to her 2015 gold-certified debut album Love Stuff, she thought, “How do I sum up ‘The year I lost my fucking mind’ in an album title?’” she says. “Because that’s really what this record is about. I decided to call it Shake The Spirit because I was shaken to the core over the last year and half. I was literally talking to ghosts. But making this album not only changed my life, it saved my life. It’s like when you see somebody who is struggling, what do you want to do? You want to shake them! Putting this record out is like shaking myself awake.”

Over the past few years, King seemed to be leading the charmed life of a rising star. Love Stuff — a sultry mix of rock and roll, blues, and country, with a twinge of pop — featured the breakthrough single “Ex’s & Oh’s,” which earned her two Grammy nominations and was certified double platinum. The track, about leaving behind a string of brokenhearted exes, hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs Chart, and topped the AAA, Hot AC, and Alternative Radio charts, leading King to become the second female artist in 18 years to reach No. 1 at the latter format. Other career highlights included performing for President Obama at the 2016 Kennedy Center Honors, being featured on Dierks Bentley’s Grammy-nominated No. 1 Country Airplay hit “Different For Girls” (she performed it with Bentley at the CMA Awards and took home an award for “Musical Event of the Year”), and seeing “Ex’s & Oh’s” featured on Kidz Bop. (“Whenever I was having a bad day, I’d watch videos people sent me of their kids singing along to my song,” she says.) King earned critical accolades — The New York Times described the Ohio-born, New York-raised artist as “a sassy, hard-drinking, love-’em-and-leave-’em hellion with bad tattoos and a broad pedigree across rock, pop, and country. She has Adele’s determination and Joan Jett’s stomp, Brenda Lee’s high-voiced bite, and some AC/DC shriek."

For three years, King worked tirelessly to promote Love Stuff, performing on every morning and late- night talk show and touring the world, during which time she says, “I partied harder than anybody and their brother and their brother's cousin. I was staying up later than everybody else and still getting up earlier than everybody else. I’d play a show, take a red-eye, wake up, do a morning show, and never cancel a performance.”

Though King’s hard work was paying off professionally, personally, she was falling apart. “I was struggling with mental health issues and exhaustion and literally felt like I was losing my mind,” she says. “I was so lonely and broken and desperate for love that I was reaching out for anything.” Then the day before the 2016 Grammy’s, King secretly eloped with a man she had met in London three weeks before. The marriage unraveled quickly, marked by substance and physical abuse. “It was happening behind closed doors on the back of the tour bus. It was really scary and made me start to keep everything inside because I couldn't tell anyone we were married.” After the couple separated, King suffered from PTSD, became severely depressed, and took to self-medicating. “I was struggling and I wasn't really able to talk to anyone because the nature of everything was so dark that people started to pull away from me,” she says.

King left the couple’s home in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles with the intention of staying in a detox facility, followed by rehab, but left after seven days. “I convinced everyone I was cured and, I’ll be damned, everyone believed me,” she says. She arrived in L.A. with one suitcase “and a bad habit.” She also reached out to the members of her band, The Brethren, about reconvening to write a new record. “My band are not hired guns,” she says. “They are my family. These characters changed me as a musician and helped make me the person I am. They didn’t give up on me in literally my darkest and most insane time.” A natural-born story-teller, King can reel off multiple highly engaging tales about making Shake The Spirit, but here are the facts: The album was written and recorded with The Brethren partly in Los Angeles and partly in a small studio in rural Denton, Texas, with King herself producing many of the tracks. She wrote most of the songs on her own, but did work with a few key collaborators including Tim Pagnotta (on the album’s first single “Shame”) and Greg Kurstin (on “Baby Outlaw” and the ballad “Runaway”). “Greg has his own studio, but he came to my crazy house where I had a pinball machine, pink and blue shag carpet, three fucking pianos, and disco lights, and he didn’t judge me,” she says of the producer, who has written hits with Sia and Adele. “I have video of him playing drums in a sombrero and me in leopard pants and a disco top recording ‘Baby Outlaw’ and having a great time. He made me feel very comfortable.” During the process, King learned to play bass, which she credits with changing the way she listened to music, “which changed the way I wrote music,” she says. “I started writing songs on bass guitar and it set a different groove. I was so emotional and had such big feelings, they all just kind of came through me.”

Shake The Spirit is an album that transcends its influences, with emotionally cathartic songs that manage to be both witty and vulnerable (from “It Girl”: “In middle school I wasn’t very cool / but slutty girls taught me the golden rule”). They are also relentlessly candid. On “Man’s Man,” King cops to infidelity while calling out an ex’s transgressions. On “Sober,” she insists she’s fine and will fix everything when she’s clean. On “Good Thing Gone,” which was written during a particularly stressful time in her marriage, King laments its demise. “Look at this good love we’ve wasted,” she sings. For King, the highlight of the album is its gutsy final track, “Little Bit of Lovin’” — an uplifting song about emerging hopeful after a breakdown. “The original lyrics were, ‘I don't need nobody. I don’t need no one. There just ain’t no lovin’ left in this heart of mine,’” she says. “I looked at them and thought, ‘You know that’s not true, Elle, and you don’t want to put that out into the world.’ So I changed it to, ‘But I still got a little bit of lovin’ left in me.’ When I sang it with the band for the first time, I felt this joy coming through me. I’ll never forget it. Instead of having an out-of-body experience, I had an into-my- body experience. I felt myself snap into my body and I fell to my knees and burst into tears. I just started weeping. And I looked up at my bassist and he looked at me and he said, ‘It’s really nice to see you again, Elle.’”

King views Shake The Spirit as an evolution not only of herself as a musician and writer but “as a human being,” she says. “This music is truly me. I said what I wanted and what I believed in and I really wouldn't take a step back. It’s exciting for me to show people that you can struggle, but if you don't give up on yourself you can get through things and become a better person. I have my year and a half summed up in one crazy-ass, goddamn album and I'm proud of that. I'm ready to bare my spirit and soul and heart and hardships to the world and say, ‘You know what? I got through it. And this is how I did it.’"

This album contains no booklet.