Two Ways Home are the songwriters and alt-country duo Isabella Mariee - originally from Vienna - and Lewis Fowler, who grew up in Gloucestershire. Now based in London, the pair have gone from strength to strength since a trip to Nashville inspired a new name and direction for their musical partnership.

In the two years that have passed since the release of their debut EP ‘Wood For Trees’ (March 2015), the band have enjoyed radio play across the UK & Europe, toured nationally - sharing stages with artists across the country/Americana spectrum from Phil Vassar to Red Sky July - and have been featured extensively in print publications including Maverick Magazine, Record Collector and The Sun, with the latter describing their sound as “...crystal clear harmonies tinged with melancholy”. Although their live setup is sometimes an acoustic duo or trio, Two Ways Home often play as a five-piece band with Chris Brice (drums), Michael Clancy (electric guitar) and Dominik Told (bass).

The acclaimed follow up EP, ‘Better Days’ (Dec 2015) - highlighted as “a stunning piece of art” by One on One Music - secured their reputation as a key player in the UK country & folk scene, with single ‘Just For Now’ played across BBC Regional Radio, Amazing Radio and on Chris Country among others. Described by The Upcoming as ”unique, unexpected and brilliant”, interest in their music has also led to increasing demand for Two Ways Home as a songwriting team, with other artists turning to the duo to bring their distinctive sound to collaborations and co-writes. The pair recently returned to Music City for an extended trip to write with fellow artists and friends, and are currently in the studio recording their third EP for release in April 2017.

www.twowayshome.com

Its been an incredible journey so far with a string of EPs and even a debut album “E.G” – which SBTV described E.G as “one of the standout projects of 2014”, Hit The Floor called the album "one of the finest, sublime pieces of original British music that has been produced in a very long time"

Following an exciting 2014 which saw the release of his debut album E.G to critical acclaim, and a first ever nationwide UK tour among other milestones, soul singer, songwriter and musician Midé released the single and EP of the same name: “The Only Way Is Up” early 2015 which culminated at a headline show at The Shaw Theatre in London in April.

There's so much to look forward to with Midé.

Jacko Hooper is a singer-songwriter from Brighton, UK.

Tour support to artists such as James Bay, Chet Faker, James Blunt, Foxes, SOAK, Amber Run, Flo Morrissey, Natalie Prass, Frances & many, many more.

From a young age, Danni Nicholls was soaking up American folk, country and rock n roll music from her Grandmother’s record collection in her small home town of Bedford, UK. When she inherited her Uncle Heathcliff’s 1963 Burns London Shortscale Jazz guitar (rumoured to have belonged to Billy Fury!) aged 16, all those influences came pouring back out in the form of her own original material and has been flowing ever since.

Danni met bassist/producer Chris Donohue (The Civil Wars, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant) in London in 2011 through a mutual friend whilst Chris was in the UK playing bass with Emmylou Harris as one of her Red Dirt Boys. The pair have now made two critically acclaimed albums together with some of Nashville’s finest musicians featuring on the tracks. Debut ‘A Little Redemption’ was released July 2013 and latest album Mockingbird Lane in October 2015. Credits on the albums include the legendary Al Perkins on Dobro (Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, The Rolling Stones) Steve Fishell on Pedal Steel (Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt) and Will Kimbrough (Jimmy Buffett, John Prine)

“My time in Music City working with these great, great musicians was a hugely inspirational and surreal experience. It forced me to raise my game and push my boundaries. I’ve come away with two albums which I’m immensely proud of”

Armed with her trusty, ‘weathered and worn’ Tanglewood guitar, Danni has been touring relentlessly far and wide, honing her craft and wooing audiences. A vibrant, spell-binding performer, she has been invited to support many artists such as Todd Snider, Jolie Holland, Kim Richey, Jim Lauderdale, Angus and Julia Stone, Bobby Bare Jr, Otis Gibbs, Mark Olsen, Nell Bryden, Tift Merrit and Diana Jones.

With performances guaranteed to melt your heart into the soles of your cowboy boots, her passionate delivery, captivating velvet voice and charmingly engaging between-song banter compel you to fall under her spell.

"Smoky soul, folk-pop and heart-wrenching alt-country, all in a rich v"oice - Q Magazine "Sumptuous…a warm wry line in confessional songwriting" UNCUT "One in a million" Maverick Music Magazine "Just Terrific" - Bob Harris, BBC Radio 2

“There was never a plan to start making solo records,” begins Michele Stodart as she reclines into the seat of a Soho caff and stirs the froth into her cappuccino. “But then something happens. The songs you’ve been writing just for yourself, whilst playing in a completely different band, take on a life of their own. Before you know it, you’re walking onto a stage where there’s just one mic stand, one monitor and no drums. And you’ve no clear recollection of what got you there!”

Not for the first time, Michele ends an utterance with a laugh that suggests she’s as interested to hear what she’s about to say as the person asking her the question. Over a decade since The Magic Numbers landed in the top ten with their double-platinum-selling debut album, Michele has taken temporary leave of the band she formed with her brother Romeo, to release her second solo album. Released four years after her solo debut, ‘Wide-Eyed Crossing’, the nine songs that comprise ‘Pieces’ confirm that, almost by stealth, Michele has turned into an artist whose work bears strong comparison to some of the touchstone songwriters that helped shape her outlook.

“With your first album,” she explains, “It’s very much a matter of planting your flag in the ground, assembling the best songs you’ve got, and saying, ‘Here I am.’ With this one though, I could start thinking about putting together something that felt more narrated and focus on the storytelling a bit more.” For Michele, it was a matter of getting tone and texture right rather than rushing into anything. One of the earliest songs to take shape on the record was ‘Something About You’. In doing so, it set the emotional temperature for much of what followed. It’s impossible to miss the aching vulnerability in Michele’s delivery, as she tells her younger self that “life waits for no girl/Who fears the dance of letting go” over a breathtakingly ornate string arrangement. “I think surrendering to an emotion, letting go of reservations and morality, to really feel something intensely, is actually a strength,” Michele argues.

Here and elsewhere, the bedrock of Michele’s writing is a reliance on rock-solid melodies that always stop short of outstaying their welcome. Keen to ensure that the tunes earned their place on the record, Michele wrote most of the songs on ‘Pieces’ away from her guitar – only setting them to chord sequences when they refused to leave her head. That would certainly explain the southern soul languor of opener ‘Come Back Home’ and the similarly tender ‘Oh By and By’. As Michele explains, the latter song is a good example of the unexpectedly fruitful restrictions that parenthood places on the creative process. “That was written when my daughter Maisie was still a baby. I was putting her to sleep and sitting next to her writing this song, which obviously I had to do almost silently. But actually, that’s not a bad way to write. Because if a song can sound good without even a hint of amplification, you know it’ll sound good whatever you do with it.”

Michele’s daughter also happened to be with her when one of the defining songs of ‘Pieces’ unexpectedly descended upon her. Recalling the socially conscious vignettes of John Prine and Iris DeMent, ‘Once In A While’ came together when Michele and Maisie were rushing from their West London home to catch a train into town. “The last thing on my mind was music,” she recalls, “I was walking down the steps of the station with my little girl and we saw a homeless guy just sitting there. He had suffered some sort of extensive burns – and my first reaction was to hide my daughter from that pain and hurt. I remember standing there, unable to do anything other than cry, then just gave him whatever change I had in my pockets and we moved on. For a while, the whole thing stayed fixed in my mind and the song grew out of it, in this case into a parallel universe where I could somehow make everything better. It’s not about tidying away difficult emotions, though: for me, a song can be about holding on to those for longer than would normally be comfortable.”

Having experienced toxic relationships and intensely loving ones, Michele feels well placed to hold forth on both scenarios. ‘When Is It Over?’ parlays sentiments that will be immediately recognisable to many women who have ended an abusive relationship only to realise that the underlying insecurities which propelled them there in the first place are harder to shake. “I wrote that one in a hotel room in Belgium,” she recalls. “You find yourself in a place where you keep repeating the same mistakes and you keep telling yourself it’s ok to do that. I used to seek out darkness, perhaps thinking that I would write better songs as a result of it. But really, you don’t have to seek it. It’s all around us.”

All of which brings us to the “trade off” to which Michele refers when describing one of the songs on ‘Pieces’ which concern loving relationships: the more precious the love you find, the greater the fear and awareness of the forces that conspire to take it away. ‘Just Anyone Won’t Do’, the song in question, is another example of the increasingly assured narrative voice that Michele is bringing to her songs these days. In this tenderly turned study of loss, we’re reminded that the longer and more loving the relationship is, then the greater the grief that follows it: “There’s a place to the left of you/Still cold and unlaid in/The bed’s all made up,” she sings. Even if she makes it to the chorus in one piece, you may fare less well.

The album concludes exquisitely with ‘Over the Hill’. “It took me a long time to write,” she says, “because I didn’t want to be too specific. I wanted it to be about life weathering adversity, into old age and maybe beyond.” Perhaps fittingly, given its place on the album, ‘Over the Hill’ is a dramatic marker of the progress that Michele has made since we first saw her plucking at the bass guitar that, as a 15-year-old, she only ever picked up at her brother’s behest. To hear her hushed invocations of “follow the sound” giving way to the song’s modal acoustic coda is akin to seeing morning reveal the extent of a frantically inspired night’s work. Michele Stodart has learned from the best, and in the clear light of day, it absolutely shows.