Shaina Taub to Celebrate Album Release at Joe's Pub
By: A.A. Cristi Mar. 26, 2018
Award-winning singer-songwriter Shaina Taub will independently release her second full-length studio solo album, Die Happy on Tuesday, May 1, 2018, it was announced today. The album will debut digitally exclusively on Bandcamp in May and will be released widely on all digital platforms later this year. Die Happy is the follow-up to Taub's debut album Visitors, released in 2015.
Taub will celebrate the release with a special one-night-only concert and release party on Tuesday, May 15 at 7 PM at her creative home base, Joe's Pub at The Public Theater. She'll also be previewing songs from the new album at her Joe's Pub shows on March 27 and April 23. Tickets for all shows are available at joespub.org.
"This album contains the most personal and most political songs I've ever recorded. I wrote them over a time of great change in the country and my own life," Taub said of the album. "Die Happy is both a reckoning with adulthood and a celebration of love in the face of fear."
The record features twelve original songs, ranging from protest anthems to intimate ballads. Taub co-produced Die Happy with bandmate Mike Brun and Dean Sharenow of Steel Cut Audio, at Vibromonk Studios in Brooklyn. The tracks feature her longtime core band Brun, Hiroyuki Matsuura and David Farrell Melton as well as an ensemble of horn, wind and string players and a large choir comprised of friends and collaborators.
The track listing for Die Happy is as follows:
If I Die Before You
Huddled Masses
Where Are The Grown-Ups?
She Persisted
Family Plan
Holy Old City
Fortnight
2 Captains
Our Solitude
Your Old Guitar
Still I Will Love
Inevitable
Shaina Taub possesses rare fluency - creative, artistic and cultural- that gives her music wide-reaching appeal. A versatile vocalist and accomplished pianist/accordionist, her unique sound crosses many genres, cultivating a vibrant medley of soul, jazz and gospel through her humorous and heart-rending songs. NPR says "Taub's music is an infectious blend of Billy Joel's piano-driven pop, Aretha's soul and Regina Spektor's whimsy, with an imaginative lyricism all her own." The Huffington Post raves "I have seen the future of the Great American Songbook, and her name is Shaina Taub. At times like the ones we live in today, when someone like Taub comes along, you have to be grateful." The New York Times describes Taub as among "a breed of performers who, apart from being artists, are gravitational forces around whom others cluster like filings to a magnet."
In addition to her work as a singer/songwriter, Taub is one of musical theater's most promising new voices. The winner of a Jonathan Larson Grant and a Fred Ebb Award, Taub will star in her original musical adaptation Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, returning for an encore run this summer in The Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park season, as part of their groundbreaking Public Works initiative. This follows up an acclaimed run of her adaptation of As You Like It last summer, featured on the New York Times Best Theater of 2017. She also appeared in the original Off Broadway casts of both The Great Comet and Hadestown. Her songs have been performed by Broadway luminaries Audra McDonald, Jonathan Groff, Sutton Foster, Phillipa Soo and many more.
Shaina Taub is a New York-based songwriter and performer. Her concert work includes a Lincoln Center solo debut in the acclaimed American Songbook series, a Carnegie Hall performance with the New York Pops, as well as residencies at Joe's Pub, Ars Nova and Rockwood Music Hall. She is a winner of the Jonathan Larson Grant, a Fred Ebb Award, a Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award, a MAC John Wallowitch Award and the first female recipient of the ASCAP Foundation's Lucille and Jack Yellen Award. She writes songs for Sesame Street and wrote the theme song for Julie Andrews' Netflix series Julie's Greenroom, performed on the show by Sara Bareilles.
Her performing credits include: Bill Irwin & David Old Hats (featuring Taub's original songs), Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (as Mary in the Off-Broadway production, Lortel nomination), Karen O's Stop the Virgens (St. Ann's Warehouse/Sydney Opera House) Hadestown (original cast, NYTW), and as Emma Goldman in Ragtime on Ellis Island.
Taub's original musical adaptations of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and As You Like It were commissioned by The Public Theater as part of the groundbreaking Public Works initiative and received critically acclaimed productions at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, in which she played the roles of Feste and Jaques, respectively. Taub is currently writing a new musical about Alice Paul and the American women's suffrage movement in the decade leading up to the passage of the 19th amendment.
A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Yaddo Colony, The Sundance Institute and the Johnny Mercer Songwriter's Project and a TEDx conference speaker, Taub served on the music theatre faculty at Pace University and is a University Scholar alumnus of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
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