I stumbled across this review of Tangleweed’s new record, Where You Been So Long?, on a Belgian website: ctrlaltcountry.be. Being a hopeless monoglot, and lacking a Dutch speaker in our group, we ran it through babelfish to get an inkling of what is says.

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We’ve been getting kind notes from folks all over the world who are playing our new record, Where You Been So Long? on the radio. So far the new CD has gotten airplay in the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand. I’ll have a more complete update soon. Many, many thanks to all of you for your support.

Thus far, ‘Hard Times’ has been the most popular tune among DJs, but nearly every song on the CD has been played somewhere.

If you want to hear for yourself, you can listen to samples and pick up a copy on our merchandise page. You can also download it from iTunes.

This is a track that I had forgotten about for quite a while, an unreleased recording by my old band the Kennett Brothers. The song is the Clash’s Combat Rock classic, ‘Atom Tan‘. The basic tracks for this were recorded during the Clinton administration, so my memory is a bit sketchy, but here’s the personnell to the best of my recollection:

• Ryan “The Viper” Jerving, PhD: Vocals
• Edward Burch: Vocals
• Jay Bennett: Guitar and Banjo
• Kenneth Rainey: Bass and Jawharp

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Fans of the Embarrassment often call them ‘the best band you never heard of’. Band members made some noise in their post Embos projects, in bands such as Big Dipper and the Del Fuegos, but the Embarrassment’s Wicheta heyday passed by before most folks outside of Kansas could notice. Most of their best work is collected on the excellent Bar-None anthology Heyday 1979-1983. There’s also a very good live anthology: Blister Pop.

Their song ‘Sex Drive’ is one of the finest an American rock band ever produced. Like ‘Road Runner’, it sounds effortless, almost tossed-off, and it navigates the territory between the inane and the profound gracefully. The original recording is all energy and power, with Bill Goffrier’s high harmony vocal threatening to push it all over the brink. You can hear it and download it in MP3 form their MySpace page or by clicking this link.

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We’re running low on copies of our new CD, Where You Been So Long?. As we prepare to have Discmakers crank out another batch, our designer Tony Nuccio has made some nice changes to the cover art. There’s more of the beautiful Dorothea Lange photograph on the front to see, and the background color on the back cover is lighter to make the text easy to read. You can click on the image to see the full-size version. As always, you can grab a copy of the CD from us on our merchandise page.

It’s true–at long last, you can download our new CD from iTunes. Just follow this link.

You can also buy our first CD, Just a Spoonful from iTunes. Just follow this link.

If you prefer to have your zeroes and ones stamped onto a CD that you can keep when your hard drive crashes, we can do that too. Just visit our merch page.

The Hoosier Hot Shots held court on the WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago beginning in 1933. It’s easy to forget that one of the biggest shows in the history of Country music came out of Chicago. It helped launch the careers of people such as the aforementioned Hot Shots, Bradley Kincaid, Gene Autry, Patsy Montana, Homer and Jethro, and the Prairie Ramblers. The Hot Shots went on to become a staple in Hollywood films, from which this little clip was taken. Their work has been collected on a few CDs, Rural Rhythm probably being the best of the lot.

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No one sang better harmonies than the Louvin Brothers. Here’s a clip of them playing one of their secular hits on the Grand Ole Opry:

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