Pete Correale is a professional stand up comedian originally from New York. His comedy is reflective of his life and the experiences he’s been through. Being married for almost twenty years and having a young daughter, Pete’s never at a loss for material. With a conversational delivery and disarming regular New York guy attitude, Pete makes you feel like your listening to the funniest guy at a party as opposed to just another comedian on a stage. Combined with top notch writing skills, this has led Pete to the top of the stand up profession.

Pete has performed numerous times on The Tonight Show, Letterman and The Conan O’brien show. As well as filming two of his own one hour television comedy specials. The first special-The Things We Do For Love aired on Comedy Central and was voted by Time Out Magazine as the #2 Comedy special of 2008. His second one hour special debuted on Showtime in 2016 this one titled Let Me Tell Ya. It was filmed at the famous Vic theatre in Chicago and Pete once again delivered a stellar performance. Pete has also released two comedy albums, Give It A Rest in 2010, and his second album Made For Radio which was released in June 2018 and quickly rose to number one on the iTunes comedy charts.

Aside from stand up Pete has used his comedic skills in various other platforms throughout his career. As a writer he’s been hired for several projects, most recently as part of the staff on the CBS sitcom Kevin Can Wait which he did for both seasons. He also made a few guest appearances the show playing Larry the fish guy.

Pete was also the co-host on a daily two hour live comedy radio show on SiriusXm titled Unleashed. He did this show with comedian Jim Breuer for four years from 2008 to 2011. And In 2012 Pete began a podcast with comedian Sebastian Maniscalco titled simply enough The Pete and Sebastian show. Starting off with a couple of microphones and an internet connection Pete and Sebastian kept at it and today the show airs every Friday afternoon on Siriusxm the Raw Dog channel before being released as a free podcast episode. Currently up to episode 310 and still going strong, the Pete and Sebastian show is one of the most popular comedy podcasts on air today and the fans have been showing their support in full force most everywhere Pete headlines.

THE NEAL MORSE BAND—Neal Morse (lead vocals, guitars, keyboards), Mike Portnoy (drums, vocals), Randy George (bass), Bill Hubauer (keyboards, vocals), Eric Gillette (guitars, vocals)—will take fans on THE GREAT ADVENTURE with their latest double concept album due out January 25, 2019 on Radiant Records via Metal Blade Worldwide. It will be available in three formats: a two CD package, two CD/DVD Special Edition featuring behind-the-scenes video clips of the making of the album, and three vinyl LPs. Pre-orders begin December 4 on Radiant Records’ website.

The follow-up to 2016’s critically acclaimed THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM, which critics hailed as “a masterpiece,” will be the ninth studio album with Morse, Portnoy and George, and the third as a true collaboration with this current lineup. Together, Morse and Portnoy have launched four bands, but the one that has endured the longest and thus with the most musical output has been THE NEAL MORSE BAND.

“Let the great adventure now begin…” The closing line of THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM, has proved to be strangely prophetic. The new album is exactly that: a perfect companion piece to TSOAD’s partial retelling of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It has everything that fans would expect from an album by THE NEAL MORSE BAND, and more: rock, metal, classical and jazz elements appear throughout, as well as some killer melodies, all played faultlessly by some of the greatest rock musicians on the planet.

As Neal Morse explains, “This band continues to amaze me! I have to say it was a little daunting to follow up THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM as it was such a special album and it delivered every night at our concerts, but I believe that THE GREAT ADVENTURE will have a tremendous impact as well. This new double album is everything that I hoped it would be! I listened through last night and I was in tears at the end!“

Mike Portnoy emphatically agrees. He says, “How do you follow an epic double concept album??? Well, create another epic double concept album!! Hahaha. I always knew topping THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM was going to be difficult, if not impossible, as I held it in such high regard, but alas, I am absolutely blown away with what we achieved here! We’ve created what is the ultimate companion to TSOAD.”

“Sometimes there are things that you just can’t mess with,” Randy George continues. “On THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM we tapped into something special. I was sure that the follow up should be something quite different, but you have to follow your heart and follow the music where it wants to go. THE GREAT ADVENTURE is nothing short of a miracle. It’s similar to SIMILITUDE in concept and form, but yet it’s tougher and deeper in its tone! This is a powerful work and I look forward to playing it live!

True to the album’s title, the creative process was indeed a “great adventure.” Unlike many previous Morse albums, which have often been written and arranged within weeks, this time around these prolific and world-class musicians spent almost a year working on the end result, producing an abundance of top quality material. This meant some ruthless decision-making: some already completed songs and characters had to go, and-–with studio time running out–new links and ideas were being composed and recorded up to the eleventh hour. “A lot of work and re-work has gone into this,” says Morse, “but I know that some of the most successful and far-reaching albums I’ve been involved with have been just like that. SOLA SCRIPTURA and Spock’s Beard’s SNOW album come to mind.”

Another key question that had to be addressed in the studio was how to pull all the ideas together into a coherent whole. In the end, what unlocked this “adventure” for Morse was the realization that THE GREAT ADVENTURE needed a new voice and perspective. This time, it is that of the Pilgrim’s abandoned son, a younger, perhaps angrier, voice than was heard on THE SIMILITUDE OF A DREAM.

At a recent performance, the host made the mistake of introducing Adia Victoria as an Americana artist. Victoria leaned into the microphone with a correction, “Adia Victoria does not sing Americana, Adia Victoria sings the blues.” From there, the artist let her guitar and powerful lyrics speak for her. After a self-released single that drew the attention of Rolling Stone and others, Victoria continued to dazzle and confound with her first studio album, Beyond the Bloodhounds. The album takes its title from a line in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Just as Jacobs sought to get beyond the reach of her master’s bloodhounds, Victoria is always reaching beyond the facile notions of what a Black woman artist should look like and sound like.

Instead of following the model of the folks that she saw around her who had been worn down by white supremacy, poverty, and oppression in the rural South Carolina town she grew up in, Victoria set off to shape a life of her own making. She dropped out of school and worked a series of odd jobs. At 18 she went to Paris and then spent time in Brooklyn, Atlanta, and now is based in Nashville. Victoria is a polymath who studied ballet, acting, wrote poetry, before finding a home in the blues. It was when a friend gave Victoria an acoustic guitar that things began to click. “I fell in love with the practice, the discipline of learning. It was the first time in my life that I felt capable of learning and progressing at something.” According to Victoria, this practice was a lifesaver. “I don’t know if I would be alive if I had not found that. Had I not found this outlet of expression. Probably in prison or dead.”

In the wake of Beyond the Bloodhounds, touring, press and enormous expectations a lesser artist would have just rested on her laurels. Instead, Victoria released two short albums that show the immense wingspan of her talent and curiosity. How It Feels is a French-language short album that reimagines French pop classics with a blueswoman’s edge. Victoria returned to her roots with the EP Baby Blues, a trio of classic blues covers that first inspired her.

A mere two years after Beyond the Bloodhounds, Adia Victoria returns with her
second full-length studio album, Silences. After a season of dealing with others trying to define, claim, and name her art and artistry, Victoria went inward. “I found when I went back home that the thing that disturbed me the most was the lack of activity. Having to deal with myself once again on an intimate level.”

Reading and literature helped her find her way back in. The title of the album comes from Tillie Olsen’s Silences, which deals with the myriad ways that the stories of oppressed people’s stories have been silenced over the years, even though they continued to create despite being ignored. “I struggled to write this album in a way that I never had to before. I took for granted I guess my freedom and my alone time and I felt that something had been taken away from me. And I felt like I didn’t have a voice anymore. This album was the therapy that I needed to find that voice that had been silenced.”

We find a voice in full holler on Silences. The listener is thrust into a completely formed world that opens with a twisted creation tale. “Clean,” is reminiscent of the story of the Garden of Eden, but instead of withering under God’s judgement for her shame, our protagonist announces that “First of all / There is no God / Because I killed my God.” This bold act instills in her “The kind of calm I hope to keep.” Any student of stories or life knows that this is can only be the beginning. A calm so deep must be earned along the way.

Silences is at its heart the mythic journey of a woman coming back to herself. “It’s just very much this character is acting out from various oppressions. You’ve been held down, you’ve been smothered, and she reaches her breaking point.” From this departure, the album moves her protagonist out into the world where she meets up with the devil and her own desires for her life in the uptempo rockers “Pacolet Road” and “Different Kind Of Love.” In the next movement, we find a woman daunted and damaged but still resolved. Once we get to “The Needle’s Eye” and “Cry Wolf” she’s gained some well-earned maturity down in the dark of the world. In Silences, Victoria brings the topics of mental illness, drug addiction, sexism, and all the things that try to consume the very lives of women attempting to make a world of their own making to the forefront. The album closes with “Get Lonely,” a plaintive, urgent ballad that our hero could be imploring to “get lonely” with a lover. Or she just as easily could be pleading with this new woman in the mirror that she has found along her journey to be still and marvel at all that she has created and survived.

Just as Victoria has been intentional about creating the kind of life that she wanted to live, she’s done the same thing with her collaborators. The band has changed a lot like Destiny’s Child since the first album, to get the perfect presentation and I think I finally found it. Victoria’s guys are Mason Hickman- Lead Guitar, Jason Harris- Bass, Peter Eddins- Keys, Timothy Beaty aka Knapps- Drums, Chazen Singleton- Horns, and Austin Wilhote aka Willé- Horns. “No. This is the greatest possession that I have. I have a bunch of guys now that I’ve been with and they allow me the ability and the space to command them, to direct them. They have faith in me.”

When it was time to record Silences with Aaron Dessner of The National who has also produced albums for Sharon Van Etten, Frightened Rabbit, Mumford & Sons, Local Natives, and more, Victoria remained hesitant. “I want to let you into my art, but I was so very, very cautious. And I just found that as a human being and as a fellow artist he had the warmth and the understanding and the respect that you don’t come across too often in this industry. He opened his home and his studio to me and my guys and it was like there was no ego. We were just free to experiment and together and we got work done.” With Adia Victoria’s steady hand and fearless vision at the helm, Silences does indeed get work done. Of the recording process, Dessner notes, ““From the very beginning of our collaboration, it was clear to me that Adia’s vision for this album had a cohesive and very particular narrative thread. It was incredibly rewarding to help realize it. The substantive nature of her writing and strength of Adia’s lyrics really guided us through the entire recording process. Every sound and direction, whether subversive, experimental or leaning into a groove, it was all in service of her broader vision and the text. Ultimately, the album is both an incredibly personal narrative of Adia’s journey and a powerful, broader statement of resistance.”

(Late Show) Smokin' Betties Burlesque Presents: From the Betties, with Love. Featuring Amoxie Villain, Macabre Noir, Eden Ivy, Morigana Regina and Hosted by Lillith Deville