Some songwriters sit down to write today's version of what they do. Others apparently pick up their guitar and consider "Where do we go from here?"

Louise Taylor is not inclined to jump through anyone's hoops, and is not disposed to repeating herself. She is an unbridled creative spirit, with a soulful and transcendent voice, and a rare feel for the guitar. Her sensual rhythm on her earlier records and her fingerstyle approach on her later ones embody a real connection to her axe. I've known people with fantastic chops who still didn't seem inside their instrument. But Louise Taylor really owns that thing, she rides it like a horse, she's driving it. (And what amazing guitars she has! Louise is the de facto poster girl for the incredible Vermont outfit called Froggy Bottom Guitars.) And her voice, it's coming out of the person, the whole person, not just the throat or the lungs. You can hear all she's been and all she's seen.

Velvet Town is her fifth record, her fourth for the highly regarded Signature Sounds label. We covered her last release, Written In Red, in which she ingeniously wove her lyrical folk pop roots with strands of Celtic music and the Blues. (see our review)

In Velvet Town, the artist takes a bigger step yet. Her new batch of songs take on a much jazzier and World Music personality. Her drummer percussionist Dean Sharp was influential here, as Louise details in our conversation. Along with helping her to appreciate the scope of her own music through exposing her to new and far flung inspirations, Dean played brilliantly and preproduced the project, and mixed the tracks with Paul Antonell. Close friend and coproducer Annie Gallup was the third side of the triangle. She was the experienced and perfectionist confidante that Louise required to make the leap and land where she planned.

We think that Velvet Town is a great record, and an important one. I hope exposure to it incites programmers and DJ's to widen their playlists and acoustic artists to dig a little deeper for their music as well as their lyrics.  continue to interview