Planxty were a real shot in the arm for Irish trad music when they first rose to prominence in the 1970s. I don’t know much about this clip, but the playing is fantastic.

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I laid some mandolin, electric guitar, and lap steel tracks for my friend Tom Winters’ new record with his band Consortium. He’s put four tracks from the CD up on his myspace page if’n you’re interested in hearing them. I’m on all four tracks playing one instrument or another. You can check it out at myspace.com/consortiumband.

The mandolin solo on ‘Harper’s Ferry’ is quite possibly the longest I’ve yet recorded. The teenage guitar solo on ‘Resolutions’ is quite possibly the most tasteless thing I’ve yet recorded.

It looks like we’re heading back to the studio in a little over a week to record a song for the Old Town School of Folk Music’s songbook project. The first volume is out now on Chicago’s Bloodshot Records. We’ll be recording a tune from the Old Town School of Folk Music’s songbook for possible inclusion on a future volume.

I don’t know much about Mr. Stripling. I stumbled across these recordings on the Library of Congress website because he recorded a song that shares the title of our new record. The recordings were made at a Georgia folk festival in 1941. You can browse the complete recordings and listen to individual titles here: loc.gov, or you can click the links below to hear some of the individual titles. He has a driving frailing banjo style, and a powerful voice. The songs are lovely.
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The good folks at Milwaukee’s WFAQ have been playing our fine new record, Where You Been So Long?.  They’ve been playing it enough that it registers at number 16 on their most recent airplay chart. Many thanks, folks.

You can view the chart as a PDF file by clicking on this link right here.

As a former Hobokener (Hobokonian?), I was very pleased to see our new record played on what is surely one of America’s finest radio stations, WFMU.

You can see the playlist here, and listen to a stream of the show in MP3 or RealAudio. Thanks, Jeffrey.

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Here’s a link to a quick video our bass player Paul shot (while playing bass!) at the Marathon on Sunday. This is pretty much what it looked like to us for almost 2 and a half hours!:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1332205677

We had a killer time playing at Mile 9.5 of the big Marathon today.  40,000 intrepid runners from around the globe gave us a steady stream of love and gratitude as they rounded the bend from Clark St. onto Webster, and we blasted it back at them best we could amidst the coolest temps we’ve ever played in. 

Juggling guy, Barefoot guy, Jigging Lady, and Team Outlaw were some of our favorites.  I also had to smile at the three fit-as-a-fiddle lady marathoners dancing in place to Tangleweed while waiting anxiously for the port-a-john next to our little bandshell.

The audience around us was great, too - plenty of dancing and cheering, a few cd sales, even a cash tip for the band.  A quick visit from our stunt-harmonica player Kevin (The Mayor of Bucktown) Burroughs was a sweet touch.  Kip’s trusty canopy gave us shelter from the rains that never came, and the city’s trusty diesel generator kept the wattage flowing to our little p.a. system w/ nary a hitch.

Heartfelt thanks to the Marathon organizers for having us back again this year, and extra-big ups to every one of the runners - we’ll savor all those kisses you blew us until we see you again next year.