It was about time to post this entry. A month ago I got an email from a young man from New York City that read
Hi Andreas, somebody sent me a link to your photo blog awhile back and I just wanted to let you know that I enjoy it almost daily from New York. Your pictures are wonderful and that countryside there is stunning! I would like to share my new record with you as thanks for sharing your photos with me, if you leave an address. Thanks Andreas, Clarence BucaroWell, how often do I get fan mail from someone I own records of? I was pretty overwhelmed, checked the mail again, but no, it seemed authentic.
Reply with my address, that’s what I did, and really, a week later a package from New York arrived with Clarence’s new record “‘Til Spring”, due to be available from March 3, 2009. Now you see why it was about time for this entry 🙂
It’s a pretty fantastic record, and that’s not only due to the music, it’s most of all due to Clarence’s warm voice, a voice that catches you and makes you want to hear more. The New York Times describes his music as “warm songs that hark back to late seventies Van Morrison”. Not at all bad, is it? And when I hear to it, there is always something very like Dylan’s mid-seventies “Desire”, and that’s not bad either 🙂
You can hear long excerpts from his new album right on Clarence’s site and you can pre-order the album at Amazon.com. Now tell me: can this guy sing? I really look forward to more of his music and to where he will develop.
It took me some time to come up with an image that I could honestly match with these songs. I mean, this guy’s so damn’ positive, I needed something beautiful and warm, not the slush and the rain and the gloom of the last weeks.
When I went back home on Wednesday evening, I went a way that I rarely take now, through a passage between Lerchenfelder Straße and Neustiftgasse. This passage was renovated a few years ago, with a café, an art gallery and a restaurant on each side, but it has never lost its southern charm. In fact, it always reminds me of Italy, and that’s another good reason to post the image here, because when I asked Clarence about the origins of his name, he told me his grandparents were from Sicily, Italy. Clarence, this one’s for you.
Technically, this is an image shot with the Nikon 24/2.8 at ISO 3200, f4 and 1/2s. Handheld. I used DxO as a RAW converter and put 21 Photoshop layers atop, mostly to re-distribute tones and to make it glow 🙂