Here are the final two songs from our Wakarusa ‘07 set, “Heroin” by Velvet Underground and “The Orange Blossom Special”, featuring a quick chunk of “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd.

Most of the hair you see on Billy’s head in this vid has since been donated to Wigs For Kids, and that pole holding the tent up apologizes for somewhat blocking your view of Paul playing bass.

Big Thanks again to Bret Mosiman for booking us at Wakarusa - we had a fantastic time.

Here’s a quick excerpt from our August 15th appearance on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special. The song is ‘California’, which will be on our next CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals.

The picture at left is Paul and me with the Grit Pixies from Asheville, NC, and Corduroy Road, from Athens, GA, all of whom are better looking than we are. If you’re interested in hearing the rest of our show, you can download the whole thing in MP3 format by visiting the link in this previous post.

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Tangleweed’s WDVX appearance available for download

Tangleweed’s August 15th appearance on WDVX’s Blue Plate Special is available for download on our music page. It’s five songs, recorded live in Knoxville in front of a studio audience. The sound quality is quite good. Matt, the house engineer, got a good, loud mix for the radio feed.

The set, as best I can remember, was this:

1. Listen to the Mockingbird
2. California
3. Short Life of Trouble
4. The Logjam
5. The Takeup Reel/ Cold Frosty Morning/ Grey Eagle

All are tracks from our forthcoming third CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals. This is what we sound like the morning after an all-night drive.

You can download the whole thing in MP3 format (approx 16MB), or you can stream it in the player thingy below.

We played a show at the Abbey Pub a few months back, opening for Hot Buttered Rum (nice folks, they). Our friend Brian taped both band’s sets, and they’re available for download at Archive.org. Here’s a tune from midway through our set: a fiddle tune medley of The Takeup Reel, Cold Frosty Morning, and Grey Eagle.

The clip should play in the flash player dealie above, or you can download the show at Archive.org.

A studio recording of this medley will be on our forthcoming 3rd CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals, due out soon. The first tune in the medley is a fiddle tune that I wrote for the band about a year ago. I included sheet music for it in an earlier post, should you feel motivated.

This popped up on my iPod this morning, a live recording from June, 2006, at the Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was shortly before our second CD, Where You Been So Long, came out, and we were playing our first real out-of-town shows.

The Ark was a good place to start–it’s a nice-sounding room, with an attentive and appreciative crowd. The show was an opening set for the Hackensaw Boys. Decent folks, they, and a good band as well.

Fun fact: the hollering you hear in the background is me yelling cues to a band member.

You can download the whole show @ Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/Tangleweed_The_Ark_20060623

Here’s another early Tangleweed clip, from our days of slogging through our Sunday sets at the Metropolis Coffee House in Chicago back in the halcyon days of 2004.

The song is ‘Spoonful’, about a month before we recorded it for our debut CD. We still hadn’t figured out what to do with it — it’s zipping along at about 142 beats a minute, while we pass around solos and sing the chorus until we meander to an ending. The album version is about 108 beats a minute, and, even by our meager standards back then, tightly arranged by comparison.

We hadn’t yet hooked on to the unison riff (borrowed from the Texas fiddle tune version of ‘Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down’) that we used for the intro and instrumental break. Slowing the tempo down–way down–was Ryan’s idea, and it turned out to have been a good one.

For more about our early Sunday shows, and another clip from the same set, see my previous post.

Download: tangleweed-just_a_spoonful_metropolis_10_10_04 (MP3)

Four years ago this month, Tangleweed got our start at a little coffee shop way up in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. In between blasts of steam from the espresso machine, we would play two sets each Sunday to largely disinterested onlookers who would occasionally look up from their Powerbooks to ask us if we were through yet.

We did the gigs without mics or amplification of any kind. We would just shout over the din when we had to sing, and beat our instruments a little harder when we had to take a solo. This set us up well for our first CD, which we recorded live to two-track tape using three microphones and vintage gear. For worse or worser, that’s what we sounded like at the time. This was recorded a little over a month before we recorded Just a Spoonful.

For reasons known only to himself, Scott taped a lot of these early shows for posterity. Many of the early shows are agony to listen to, but there were occasional bursts of competence, such as this here. The tune is the Earl Scruggs classic ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’, with a wee bit of an insert borrowed from John Williams. We’re joined by our pal, the Mayor of Bucktown, some dude whose name escapes me on harmonica for this one.

If’n you feel like downloading it, you can fetch the file here: MP3 Download

Our recent show at Chicago’s Abbey Pub with Hot Buttered Rum is now available for download on Archive.org. Many thanks to our pal Brian for taping the show and making it available on the Live Music Archive. Now you can relive the show in all its silver-caped glory in the privacy of your own head.

The set list, as best I can remember:

1. Train #45
2. Listen to the Mockingbird
3. California
4. Shortlife Of Trouble
5. The Logjam
6. The Takeup Reel > Cold Frosty Morning > Grey Eagle
7. Trishenku’s Heaven
8. High on a Mountain
9. Mississippi Trashboat
10. South Australia
11. Sandy River Belle
12. Dead Flowers
13. With a Bottle in My Hand
14. Ginseng Blues
15. Hard Times
16. Where You Been
17. Heroin
18. Orange Blossom Special

Download page for Tangleweed, April 12, 2008 @ the Abbey Pub w/ Hot Buttered Rum