FRESH WIND SESSION No. 39
Lady Nora Madonna
Recording Date: 12 April 2025
KNCE 93.5 FM Premiere: 20 April 2025
Substack Premiere: 2 May 2025
I first met Lady Nora Madonna at a Big Numbers concert in 2023. She had driven up from Albuquerque with her boyfriend to see us play at The Old Montgomery - a DIY space in Taos located inside an ancient woodworking shop. That Big Numbers show ended up being one of the final concerts held at the Old Montgomery, as it was shut down by the town for a number of code violations the following week (during a blues concert put on by local promoters Roots and Wires Presents that was too-well-attended for the powers that be to ignore).
At the time, Nora was fronting a rock and roll group called Firebird FM that I was lucky to book for a show at Ennui Gallery later that summer. Video footage of much of that set can be found on the Sunset Series YouTube Channel. I was struck by Nora’s songwriting during the Firebird FM set. Though she writes in a 90s rock kind of vein (think Goo Goo Dolls, Bends-era Radiohead, or early Foo Fighters), the songs hit in a much deeper way than those influences might suggest - and deal with more complex emotional topics and spaces than her forebears had the mind to address.
When the Firebird band splintered (like Big Numbers) in the summer of 2024, Nora briefly played out as a duo, and then slowly started making appearances as a solo act - taking on the Lady Nora Madonna name. I had been asking her about recording a Fresh Wind session since we met in 2023, and a few months ago she reached out about coming back up to Taos and doing it.
On the day we recorded this session, Nora and I also both played sets at Heads Up Music (Taos’ only dedicated record store) as part of their Record Store Day event. It was a relatively unattended event (unfortunate for the record store and the performing artists), but it did allow me a very intimate chance to hear her new songs before recording them. It was the first time I’d seen Nora perform solo - and I was even more struck by her songs in the solo context than with the full band. When we got to recording the session on the afternoon of April 12th, we went ahead and recorded all nine of the songs she’d performed earlier in the day (“Black Fables,” “The Archer of Time,” “Hard Fall,” “Hollow Medicine,” “Ebony Diamonds,” “The Odyssey,” “Mary Jane,” “Die High,” and “I Sit Alone In Parking Lots”).
Listeners to this session will hear a lot of interesting stories from Nora, who once hosted an online radio show of her own. For those looking to dig deeper into her work, I recommend checking out the firebird.fm website, as well as her own Substack
. This session ended up being the final Fresh Wind session that I recorded for radio broadcast - as I’ve recently stepped away from my partnership with KNCE 93.5FM here in Taos. I’ll share more about that in detail in my next missive to you all!
I truly appreciate all of you who support my work here as part of the One More Song project on Substack. If you’ve been enjoying these sessions, I would love it if you took the leap and became a paying subscriber today!
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