Well, Summer is here and it really feels good to me! The shows are going outside and the beautiful outdoor parks are ready to come to life with music and summer fun (and maybe a mosquito bite here and there)! We’re scheduled for a number of festivals and shows in a lot of different areas of the Country and look forward to the travelling and getting tbe chance to visit with you.
It’s been a few years since we have released a studio recording and we’ve got some ambitious plans to get a lot of music recorded this year. It’s funny how time gets away, you get in a routine of doing shows, look up and realize that you haven’t recorded in a while. We’ve been preparing for three different recording concepts and hope to have two of them completed this year.
October, 2014 was the anniversary month of The Warrior River Boys starting as a touring band thirty years ago (whoa!). We wanted to commemorate this and decided we would compile a CD (it turned out to be a double CD) that included as many different versions of the band that we could find. I have been given and kept a lot of the band’s “live recordings” and video through the years, so I had a few boxes and many shows to pick from. Robert Montgomery and I talked about creating a retrospective from all this material and he undertook this earbending job with vigor. Robert has been a big part of our show for 7 or 8 years now and he had recorded just about all of our sets since coming here. He is a great music historian and appreciates early forms of rural music and it’s evolution. He understands well the importance of preserving and presenting this to the public. I was more than confident to set down the material and give Robert the reins to produce this live retrospective. After he finished, and let me listen to the sequenced material, it was like going back to show one (in Jemison, Alabama in October, 1984) and proceeding through thirty years of memories in one and half hours. I could remember things from most of the songs, the crowds, the reception, the excitement of being there (whether or not we had time to take a bath after the usual 500 mile overnight drive, lol). It’s amazing how fast time gets away, how a memory ten, twenty or even thirty years ago seems and feels like only a few short years ago. I guess most of us know how that feels, but still it’s weird, isn’t it?
We’ll keep you updated on this particular retrospective CD and the release date on it, and hope you’ll get you one. Also, we’re planning on seeing the inside of the recording studio a lot this year and will keep you informed of all that stuff. Hope you’ll check into this blog regularly and I’ll try to keep you something new to chew on. Take care!