The late BBC DJ John Peel insisted that The Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ was the best song he had ever heard. Its first line is inscribed on his tombstone. I’ve heard it hundreds of times, and it’s hard to disagree. It’s absolutely beautiful.

(more…)

Bluegrass it ain’t, but if I were to choose the musical moments that changed my life, this might top the list. Lipreaders may notice the utterance of a 12-letter expletive at the start of Bob Stinson’s guitar solo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2-RJuIRAaw

Playing an acoustic instrument in a loud environment is always a challenge. Tangleweed tried playing shows with a stereo pair of condenser mics, but we weren’t able to cut it in loud bars. We tried using condensers on our instruments, but we suffered through some ear-splitting blasts of feedback at the hands of incompetent sound engineers. We finally gave up and started going with pickups and preamps for most of our shows.

Long before I joined Tangleweed, I used Fishman pickups on my mandolins, and ran them through a Trace Elliott acoustic preamp. The resulting sound bore only superficial resemblance to an acoustic instrument. The low end was boomy, the high end shrill. I had to compensate by running everything through a compressor to cut the sustain, and use a volume pedal to manage dynamics. (more…)

For those of you who weren’t up this morning between the hours of 6 and 7 am, here’s a little snippet of our appearance on WBBM TV Channel 2 this morning. How’d they get the arial shot? It’s a mystery to me. Anyway, here it is, courtesy of channel 2’s website:

http://cbs2chicago.com/video/?id=25919@wbbm.dayport.com

Many thanks to Channel 2, and to our fine dancers for braving the early morning hours today.

We’re going to be appearing on CBS 2 news @ 6am tomorrow morning (Friday, September 8th) as a preview of tomorrow evening’s performance at the Great Performers of Illinois festival. We’ll be playing some of the bumper music for the show, and will also be accompanying the Roots in Rhythm Dance Project for a quick preview of the piece they put together for the festival. (more…)

While Googling myself today (yes, I know that Googling oneself can cause blindness), I stumbled across this on the website iwde.de. It’s Aaron Cohen’s introduction to our new record, translated into German. Enjoy. (more…)