A Midsummer Night’s Sweat

Posted July 7, 2010

We spent a good portion of June in the great state of Texas, the majority of which was spent listening to Texans say things like “there’s nothing more Texan than putting red beans in your chili!” and “there’s nothing more Texan than not putting beans in your chili!” and “you boys are from Virginia?! I bet you never felt heat like this before!” We didn’t really know what to say about the first two comments but we did respond several hundred times the third comment by saying “yea, it gets pretty hot in Virginia too.” We’ve been home for a week or two now and it seems the weather must’ve been listening and felt we had to prove ourselves. Holy hell, it’s been hot up here! James has been out weed-wacking poison ivy all week, sweating like a whore in church. Todd even told me he broke a sweat playing Halo 2 the other day! It’s getting serious.

But let’s not jump ahead in the story. We had a great time going South last month. We spent a week in Austin and New Braunfels with a bunch of new friends including Chris from KVET, Shane and Zach from LoneStarMusic.com and Walt Wilkins (who bailed us out with a last minute gig when ours got rained out). We also spent a couple nights greeting the sunrise after jamming all night with Brady and the crew from Randy Rogers Band and our new friends Matt Skinner and Dub Miller. Badasses all around.

While we’re on the subject of greeting the sunrise, we should make note of the Lake Charles, Louisiana crew who were still awake to greet us (mixing Bloody Mary’s with Marleboro Reds) when we rolled into town at 6am after driving all night to get there. We spent several great days in Louisiana reconnecting with old friends (including our boys from back east American Aquarium, who are currently on tour out west) and making some new ones along the way. That’s one hell of a state, and if you can figure out anything to do that will help keep it from getting covered in oil, do it. Here’s a link where you can donate to the Gulf Coast Fund that’s helping with the cleanup. Here’s a link to BP’s website to hear about what their doing to cleanup. Or maybe you can just tell them to f**k off while you’re over there. (sidenote: I was told we should clean up our language a little. Do ***’s count?)

In general, it was a great month. We capped it all off with a brief trip to Ft. Worth to jam at the Randy Rogers Stockyard Stampede Festival. The weatherman said it would rain all day, but we still managed to all get sunburned. We saw a lot of great tunes, but nothing quite touched getting to see MC Hammer do his thing with a crew of 12 backup dancers (total stage tally: 12 dancers, 2 singers, 1 Hammer, 0 musicians). Todd had the presence of mind to pull out his trusty Droid during a key moment and get some priceless backstage video for your viewing pleasure. This might be the only video I’ve ever seen that’s awesomer than us covering “Fade to Black” at the Paramount last year. Enjoy.

We’ll be heading down to do some shows at the beach in the next couple weeks. We’ll hope to see you there and if not, we’ll certainly be back on the road in August.

stay cool,
SoB

Life in Shambles Tour Update

Posted May 22, 2010

We’re just now completing the first leg of the Life In Shambles Tour 2010 and pleased to report things are going about as well as could be expected for a tour with a such a prestigious and optimistic title. We spent the whole month of May barnstorming the Southeast with our new friends American Aquarium from Raleigh, North Carolina and we managed to keep things just shy of absolute mayhem for pretty much the whole run.

We’ve parted ways (for now) with the American Aquarium boys but both of us continue to carry the torch independently. You can check their tour schedule on their MySpace, but ours can be found right here on SonsOfBill.com. We’ll be playing close to home this week in Richmond, VA and then spending much of June in Texas, after a brief run up to New York State to rock the Mountain Jam with some pretty heavy company (Gov’t Mule, Levon Helm, Drive-By Truckers, the list goes on).

We’ll hope you can catch us at one of the aforementioned get downs but if not, here’s a little sample from the road to tide you over. We’ve posted full shows from both of these venues before, but there’s just something in the air whenever we walk into the State Theatre in Falls Chuch, VA or The Windjammer in Isle of Palms, SC. We decided we’d make this a thematic posting and give you a song about driving to Charleston – recorded outside of DC – and a song about driving home on Route 29 (which runs from DC to Cville) – recorded just outside of Charleston. Even if you don’t follow that little bit of pretzel logic, you can still enjoy the tracks below. A special mention should be made of American Aquarium’s Whit Wright (the only human under the age of 43 we’ve ever seen competently rock the the pedal steel guitar) who sits in with us on “Charleston”. Get it Whit.

As a reminder the exclusive Life In Shambles EP and t-shirt have been selling like hotcakes, but we’ve still got a box or two of them left to unload on anyone who gets to any of these upcoming shows on the second leg of the tour. Enjoy the new tracks and we’ll see you out there.

Going Home (Live at The Windjammer)
Charleston (Live at the State Theatre)

Life In Shambles Tour: Brand New Songs Released

Posted April 16, 2010

Sons of Bill is back on the road, and this time WE’RE THE MAIN EVENT! The LIFE IN SHAMBLES TOUR 2010 kicks off April 23rd in Charlottesville, Va. Many of you may have caught us opening for various fine groups in the past year or so, but it’s been awhile since we’ve taken our full-on, night-long rock show on the road. If you’ve never seen Sons of Bill for longer than 45 minutes at a time, this is the chance you’ve been waiting for. If that’s not enough to entice you out to spend an evening with your favorite SoB’s in a grimy rock club, we’ll also have some brand new t-shirts and music for sale and we’re bringing our new friends American Aquarium from Raleigh, NC on tour with us for the whole run. These guys are one of the hardest working young bands in the country and they straight-up rock. Their CD release party is May 1st in Raleigh and don’t worry, we’ll be there too. Check the Tour Dates page for the full tour line up.

But wait, there’s more… WE’VE GOT SOME BRAND NEW TUNES! Sons of Bill spent the last month or so in the studio and we’ve come out with three brand new songs which we’ll be releasing in a limited pressing as Take a Shower, Call Your Mother, Your Life is in Shambles. As a special thank you to all our die-hard fans who come see us every time we roll through town, the new music will only be available for purchase at shows on the upcoming Life in Shambles Tour. That’s right: no iTunes, no Best Buy, you gotta come out to the dirty rock clubs and lay your greasy $5 bills on the merch table.

You can wet your whistle by going to MySpace.com/SonsOfBillMusic and laying your ears on a sample of the title track off this new peice of hot wax. But remember the only place to get your grubby little hands on a copy of it is at a Sons of Bill show, the first of which is THIS FRIDAY at the Jefferson Theater IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA!

There will also be exclusive Tour T-shirts and maybe Tour Matchbooks and Tour Lunchboxes and Tour Beer Coozies too (not really, just the t-shirts, and maybe the coozies). These will also only be available on the Life in Shambles Tour so don’t come without any cash and think you’re just going to pick up your new SoB gear on the website later. This new product line is for concert-goers only.

An interesting sidenote, our performance from a few weeks ago on NPR’s Mountain Stage will finally be airing the week of April 23rd. Check your local listings and tune in to hear us share the stage with the likes of Lucero and the Bottle Rockets (not to mention Mr Sam Bush and Bud Carroll & The Southern Souls). As usual, you can still get free live downloads on SonsOfBill.com and the YouTube Channel is still full of prime SoB. We’ll be recording more material for those two mediums on the tour so look for updates once we get out there and start kicking in some teeth. We’ll also be coming back around for Life In Shambles 2.0 in June and hitting a few spots we missed on the first go-round. Tennessee and the Deep South are the most likely targets for that run but even if you live there, I don’t want to hear any excuses. We’re coming to the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Texas and this economy’s not bad enough yet that you can’t put a couple gallons in the car and cruise across the state line to get your face rocked. Until then…

Take a shower, call your mom, your life is in shambles.
Sons of Bill

Mountain Stage and the Truckers (plus Richmond tracks)

Posted February 20, 2010

We’ve been fairly busy recently, but in case you’ve missed us, don’t worry: there’s more to come in the next couple weeks. We’ll get right to it. Tomorrow night we’ll be heading over to Charleston, WV for a taping of the NPR show Mountain Stage. It’s a great show and a real honor for us, especially since we’ll be sharing the stage with a pile of talent including Lucero, Sam Bush, The Bottle Rockets and Bud Carroll & The Southern Souls. The show will be recorded live, but won’t air on your NPR stations until the week of April 23rd. Check the Mountain Stage broadcast schedule for updates (and to know what other awesome programs you can tune in for).

We also joined Drive-By Truckers for the first time last week and we’ll be playing with them again next weekend in Charlotte, NC. If you live in the area, make your way down to the Neighborhood Theatre on Thursday February 25th for a full serving of rock in your face. If you miss that one (and you don’t already have tickets to see George Clinton and the P-Funk Allstars at the Neighborhood on Saturday night) we’ll be moving to Asheville, NC on Friday Feb 26th and down to Birmingham on Saturday Feb 27th to join the Randy Rogers Band for our first ever show in Alabama. There are plenty other dates on the calendar for early March too so if none of those shows bring us close enough to you, be sure to check the Tour Dates. We’re coming.

Speaking of places we’ve been recently, we spent the last few weeks hitting some favorite spots in our home state, including a full house at the Jewish Mother in Virginia Beach and a rowdy crowd down by the James River at the Canal Club in old Richmond, Va. We’ve been working on our mobile recording rig and managed to catch a few tracks from the Richmond show to share with you. Some vintage SoB – the second and third track off our debut album A Far Cry From Freedom – sounded especially good to us, so we hope you enjoy them too. And don’t forget, the Sons of Bill YouTube Channel is still chock full of new videos to tide you over till the next time you get to join us in person. Check ‘em all out and be sure to rate and review them to your little heart’s content. Keep an eye out for us, ’cause we’ve got a busy Spring ahead and it’s just around the corner.

Far Cry
My Hometown

New Videos on YouTube

Posted January 28, 2010

We’re back home safe after our tour out West and we’ve brought some video home with us. Actually a lot of the video we’ve recently unveiled has been sitting in our vaults for quite some time, but who’s counting? The important thing is the Sons of Bill YouTube Channel has been thoroughly updated and is teeming with brand spankin’ new clips of Sons of Bill putting on rock shows.

There are three main sources for this material, the first of which is the most recent. We just returned from fabulous Steamboat Springs, CO where every year several thousand Texans leave Texas (during one of the only months when Texas weather is tolerable) and head up to the Rockies (during one of those months when your cab driver tells you to shut the door quick because it’s 26 degrees below zero outside). It’s called MusicFest and it features some of the best talent from that Texas-centric music scene they call Red Dirt, plus an assortment of other great Americana and Roots Rock acts from around the country (for instance, Sons of Bill). We played a set in the Big Tent and young brother Luke Wilson captured some of it for us on a handheld camera from right down in the pit. You can check out smokin’ versions of “Rock and Roll” and “Joey’s Arm” on our YouTube page. We also got some love from a couple of the auxiliary film crews around MusicFest. Check MusicFog.com for acoustic, stripped-down versions of a bunch of the different artists at MusicFest – including an intimate brothers-only version of “Broken Bottles” – with more videos being posted every day. If you still haven’t gotten your fill (Lord knows no one up there ever did) head over to the Secondary AMP blog where Jeff Dykhuis posted a bunch of videos from the Big Tent, including a bonafide tent revival take on “Roll On Jordan”. Our “Lighthouse” intro misled him into titling it “Let It Shine On” but we appreciate the post anyway.

The other two sources of new YouTube material were our last two hometown shows. The most recent of those was the Grand Opening of the Jefferson Theater on November 27, 2009 which we played with Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit. It was a hell of a night and we were lucky enough to have Mr JJ Cohoon of Squid & Beard join us with several of his finest video cameras to capture the night. He was kind of enough to leave us with several songs which you can now view on YouTube including, amongst others, a scorching version of “The Rain”, our manic cover of the Jane’s Addiction jam “Mountain Song”, and Jason Isbell himself joining us on onstage to trade verses on Tom Petty’s “Rebels”.

The remaining footage came from our epic CD Release Party at the Paramount Theater back in June 2009. It was captured, a bit dimly, by a handheld camera on the balcony, but fortunately the rock was not diminished with the visual clarity. We managed to dig up two of the most requested tracks: our cover of Metallica’s “Fade to Black” and our namesake Bill Wilson joining us for Steve Earle’s “Ft. Worth Blues”. You can still download “Fade to Black” (and a few other tracks) from right here on SonsOfBill.com, but YouTube is currently the only place to check out the Bill guest appearance, so make sure you take that one in.

There’s sure to be more where those came from, so keep an eye on the YouTube channel because we’ll be posting more stuff as we get it. You can also subscribe to the Sons of Bill YouTube Channel so that it’ll automatically notify you when we post something new. That way you won’t take time out of your busy schedules to keep going back and watching “Fade to Black” over and over. Or maybe that was intentional.

Moving on to other subjects, as 2009 wound down, several blogs and publications noticed that we’d released an album this year. We were pleased to see that One Town Away made it on several Top 10 and Best Of 2009 lists. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone in the “press” that recognized our efforts last year and we’d like to return the favor by asking our loyal fanbase to peruse the list of websites that mentioned us. They’re all run by discerning critics, incisive writers and intrepid voyagers into the far reaches of the modern musical landscape. We hope you enjoy their work. You might even learn something!

Back to more pressing matters, we’ll be back on the road soon, mostly for shows on the East Coast. Many of them feature Sons of Bill as the headlining act so all of you who complained about only seeing us play five songs opening for Robert Earl Keen better make it out. On that subject, we’ll be doing some more shows with him soon as well as our first ever shows opening for the estimable Drive-By Truckers, one in Knoxville, TN and one in Charlotte, NC. We hope that the YouTube videos will just whet your appetites for some flesh and blood Sons of Bill and we’ll get to see all of you in person sometime in the next month or two. Enjoy the rest of the winter.

Sons of Bill