We Speak Music
Jonah Connock Shines In Debut Album ‘I Kept Your Secret, Saoirse’
Jonah Connock’s I Kept Your Secret, Saoirse is an album that doesn’t so much announce itself as it settles into the room and slowly changes the temperature. Across eight carefully measured tracks, the UK singer-songwriter builds a world out of acoustic restraint and emotional proximity, where every lyric feels like it’s being spoken just slightly below full volume. It’s a record that understands intimacy as craft, not accident, and treats understatement as its guiding principle rather than a limitation.
From the opening moments of “Letter to You,” the album establishes its core aesthetic: stripped-back guitar work, unembellished production, and vocals that favour nuance over projection. There’s a clear folk lineage here, but it’s filtered through a contemporary sensibility that resists nostalgia. Instead of reaching for grandeur, Connock leans into detail; small melodic shifts, carefully placed pauses, and lyrical fragments that suggest more than they explicitly state.
That lyrical approach is where the album finds its emotional centre. Tracks like “Bones,” “Black Dress,” and “Half-Awake” unfold in impressionistic layers, where memory and feeling blur into one another. Themes of connection, loss, resilience, and hope are present throughout, but they’re never overstated. Instead, they emerge through recurring imagery; coastal weather systems, shifting tides, and transitional spaces that mirror the emotional uncertainty at the heart of the record.
Musically, the album thrives on cohesion. Rather than offering sharp contrasts between tracks, Connock builds a consistent tonal environment that prioritises atmosphere over variation. This can occasionally soften the distinction between individual songs, but it also creates a unified listening experience that rewards immersion. The production choices reinforce this effect, keeping everything close, warm, and intentionally unpolished in places that feel emotionally appropriate rather than technically incomplete.
By the time the closing track “Clandestine” arrives, reflecting on time passed and “the feeling of perpetual possibility”, the album resolves not with closure, but with openness. That ending feels entirely in keeping with what precedes it: a record more interested in emotional continuity than narrative resolution. I Kept Your Secret, Saoirse ultimately succeeds because it trusts quietness to carry weight, and in doing so, marks Connock as a voice capable of making restraint feel like momentum.
Connect with Jonah Connock: Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, Website
We Speak Music
SCARECROW’s John Blaze Delivers a Career Milestone With “Twisted” and Earns Josie Music Awards Song of the Year Nomination
John Blaze has spent nearly four decades fronting SCARECROW, the New York hard-rock outfit he founded in 1989, and in 2026 he delivered one of the most ambitious releases of his career with “Twisted.” Now, the song has reached another major milestone: “Twisted” has been nominated for Song of the Year in the Metal/Alternative category at the Josie Music Awards.
The nomination places Blaze and SCARECROW among this year’s recognized independent artists and songwriters at the Josie Music Awards, with the awards ceremony set to take place at Nashville’s legendary Grand Ole Opry. For an artist whose career has been built on persistence, independence and decades of hard-rock storytelling, the recognition gives “Twisted” an entirely new chapter.
Written by John Blaze and Chaffin, “Twisted” pulls together a lineup of guest players that reads like a rock family reunion, built around Blaze’s long-standing friendship with Dee Snider and the legacy of Twisted Sister, a band woven into SCARECROW’s story from its earliest days.
That connection goes all the way back to the beginning. SCARECROW’s original lineup featured guitarist Eddie Ojeda, best known for his work in Twisted Sister, and the two camps have remained connected ever since. “Twisted” makes that history explicit: Dee Snider appears on the record with guest vocals during the track’s climactic second verse and chorus, lending the song an instantly recognizable jolt of arena-rock power.
Snider isn’t the only marquee name in the credits. Mark Wood, founding violinist of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, contributes electrifying violin work that gives “Twisted” a cinematic sweep uncommon in modern hard rock. Rounding out the track are TJ Jordan on lead guitar and Bobby Marks on drums, creating a powerful, road-tested foundation behind Blaze’s signature gritty vocal delivery.
The Josie Music Awards nomination feels particularly fitting because “Twisted” isn’t simply another SCARECROW release. It brings together different eras of Blaze’s musical life while pushing the band’s sound forward. There’s history in the recording, but there’s also urgency. It doesn’t sound like a band looking backward. It sounds like one with unfinished business.
For Blaze, the nomination also represents recognition of a career that has largely been built outside the traditional machinery of the mainstream music business. Independent rock artists rarely survive for decades without a fierce commitment to what they do, and SCARECROW’s longevity speaks for itself. From the band’s early years and its 1991 debut, through the Blood, Sweat and 20 Years retrospective and the theatrical production I Am SCARECROW, Blaze has continued developing a world around the music rather than simply releasing songs.
That makes the Song of the Year nomination especially meaningful. After nearly four decades of building SCARECROW, Blaze now heads to the Josie Music Awards at the Grand Ole Opry with one of his most ambitious songs recognized in the Metal/Alternative category.
And there’s something wonderfully appropriate about the song that got him there.
“Twisted” connects SCARECROW’s beginnings to its present, reunites Blaze musically with figures tied to the band’s history, and demonstrates just how much fire remains in the project. With Snider and Wood contributing to the record and Blaze still driving the band he created from the ground up, the track feels less like a nostalgic reunion than a statement of survival.
Now it’s also an award-nominated song.
For John Blaze and SCARECROW, nearly four decades into the journey, “Twisted” has become more than another entry in the catalog. It’s a career milestone — and this September, that milestone is taking SCARECROW all the way to the Grand Ole Opry.
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