Search - Renee-Louise Carafice :: Tells You To Fight

Renee-Louise Carafice is a dark-folk-pop songstress born in New Zealand, based in Chicago. With a bitingly honest and brutally fragile voice, she sings of her 'messy rollercoaster ride of a life', over rich and complex melodic structures. Carafice sings with an alarming openness about desperation, love, loss, homelessness and longing, all the while maintaining a sense of glorious hope at the end of the road. Some of the songs on Renee Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight hark back to Carafice's experience with mental illness, and ultimately, institutionalization on her twenty-second birthday. But, states Groove Guide, 'far from causing the album to be pigeon-holed by context, the music's initial catalyst gives it a layer of heavy-lidded clarity - love, wisdom and longing by way of the addled brain.' 'Renee-Louise Carafice Tells You to Fight' was recorded in November of 2005 at Steve Albini's elite Electrical Audio in Chicago. Engineer Nick Abbott (Finn Brothers, Goldenhorse, Datsuns) and Renee-Louise Carafice chose this famous analog studio because of a mutual admiration for the work of Steve Albini and the music to come out of there. The album was recorded to tape, a method which eliminates the temptation to chop up, edit and punch in... instead what you hear are the unchanged, full takes of each musician. No effects or eq were used. Carafice teamed up with Angel Ledezma on drums (Defender, Alla) and Matt Lux on bass (Iron & Wine, Smog), without the two Chicago session musicians ever having met her or practiced the songs. The magic chemistry of the three artists, who on some tracks would record live in the room together, was undeniable, and Ledezma and Lux now act as her permanent backing band. Ben King from Goldenhorse acted as producer and also personal chef while he, Abbott and Carafice stayed for 14 days in the building at Electrical Audio. During this two weeks in Chicago, Renee-Louise fell in love with the city and permanently relocated there soon afterwards, where she now performs and records. Since her move, she has opened for extremely popular US acts Xiu Xiu and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. In New Zealand she has performed alongside Goldenhorse, Anika Moa, Pluto, Goodshirt, as well as US acts David Pajo, Micah P Hinson, Band of Horses and Crooked Fingers.