New Music Thursday

Running Violet is an eclectic collaboration of musicians. What started as an online ad for musical companionships resulted in hip shaking, tear-jerking, raging songs that soon occupied some of Toronto’s best live music venues and underground parties.

Their explosive new offering, “Who Needs Love,” takes an uplifting, hopeful look at growing up and the consequential traumas that shaped our futures. It features a punchy guitar solo by their guitarist Petr Balaz who fully produced, mixed and mastered the colourful tune about self-discovery.

Running Violet initially had its roots planted firmly in old school rock & roll with guitar licks, tones and solos ricocheting from ear to foot. Now, they incorporate sounds of the modern era while still holding on tightly to the styles that shaped them.

There’s a fantasy about show business that we’ve been fed since performers started offering up their hearts on stage for public consumption. The glamour, the jetsetting, and the parties all get played up over the reality of the whole thing: a career that seeps into your real life and can dismantle your relationships, the exhaustion of the road, and more than a few hangovers. On his third solo album, the self-produced Papercut – armed with a couple lifetimes of songwriting and touring in his rear view mirror – Carleton Stone gets honest about the toll of devotion to craft while illustrating his mastery of it.

On his new single, “Hard Day’s Work,” Carleton puts himself in the shoes of the blue collar dads he grew up around, paying tribute to those who built the houses and towns on Cape Breton Island.

Papercut is Carleton‘s strongest and most candid songwriting to date, and finds him plumbing the depths of those feelings without succumbing to despair, gracefully switching between genuine moments of melancholy, anger, hope, self-deprecating humour, regret, anxiety, and bliss.