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