The Galt Line Sausages and Beer Tour Day (- 1)

We have not stopped moving since April, when we returned from the West Coast. With frequent trips to Atlantic City, Magical Marriage Computer, recording and releasing our new album “Skin of Our Teeth,” The Main Street Music Festival, and Elephant Talk Indie Music Festival, as well as constant shows and our Residency at Bella through STTP, we have been busy all day every day. At this rate, another tour will actually be relaxing.

The day before the tour was spent taking our good friend Neha to swear into citizenship for our great country. We walked for hours around fluorescent lit hallways of the INS building in Baltimore, waiting for Neha to nervously answer civics questions fired by what we imagined to be a tall, non-descript man in a black suit. Soon she had her hand on her heart, proudly promising to pay taxes and sign up for the draft.

Afterwards we ditched plans for an all American celebration, and instead parted ways so we could do whatever was to be done to roll out the next day. Blythe and I spent the evening finishing t-shirts and burning CD’s while watching Simon Pegg movies. It was not the most Rock n’ Roll evening, but now we were ready.

There is some band business to deal with here. After our new CD release at The Main Street Music Festival we had a party, generously hosted by Chris and Neha. For this party we purchased a keg of Killians Irish Red Lager.

 The guests did a fine job on the keg, and drank about two thirds of the premium beer. We want to be sure that when we return the keg and tap for the deposit, that the beer is GONE. We have challenged Neha and those in the household to empty that keg before we return. Neha is expected to update all of us on our facebook page as to how many beers have been had each day. We want all of you out there to encourage those in the house with comments of confidence. We think they can do it.

Tomorrow… A podcast, almost. And The Pigeon Hole with one Pete Stallings.

Band Philosophy

I wrote this as a description of the new album. CD Baby suggested writing plenty of information so that the style of music is clear to the reader. What I came up with is a kind of band manifesto. It seems a little self involved but I thought I'd put it up so that people who like our music can crawl in our heads and see it how we do.

Thanks for reading,
-Willie

We are The Galt Line, a duo consisting of ukulele and guitar with innovative home-made percussion consisting of bottle-caps, chains, shin-belts, & bare wood. We play American dance music with rock and roll energy. We draw our influences from classic styles like Hot Jazz, Western Swing, R&B, Rockabilly, and Honky-Tonk. Our music has modern ferocity with the traditional sounds of hard strummed strings and roots influenced melodies.

American music is heaped haphazardly on a great stone edifice of dance. Americans have been dancing to music since the Irish began tapping in the dockside bars of New Amsterdam and since Congo Square rang with African drums echoing off the gleaming stone facades of New Orleans. Emerging American artists have always drawn on the music that haunted them in their childhood, and the greatest musicians are often dammed rivers that collected everything that came before. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Bill Monroe, Bob Wills, and anyone else who changed the face of our music were accidental scholars of the American musical canon.

We make dance music in the American tradition and deliver it with the passion of the originators, not the erudite, museum-like reverence that many roots acts show. From punk we learned that rock can be stripped down to a stream of pure, youthful energy, and we use that energy to decode the experience of hearing some of these classic genres for the first time. Do you think that all of our grandparents were sitting quietly in recliners, listening to this music float over the ghostly airwaves? No! Someone was in those audiences you can hear in the background of those recordings. They were in the dancehalls, theaters, juke joints, and honky-tonks, drinking sloe gin fizzes and blackberry brandy, dancing and sweating for hours before climbing in the back of an enormous car to steam up the windows and blast the local DJ constantly feeding music to fuel the night further. Why shouldn’t our American music be played with the same vitality and hunger with which it was received?

Though nailed together at a breakneck pace, this album represents several years of hard work. Listen closely and you can hear more than 200 shows; weeks on the road, gigs paid in beer, nights spent on venue floors, and all the splendor of the American landscape spilling through the windshield of our minivan. This album was assembled in three weeks of recording and mastering spread intermittently between playing shows, rehearsing for and performing in a play in a DC theater festival, and multiple day jobs, including our work at The Pritchard Music Academy, where the tracks were recorded on a mixer built for a live PA system. Many of these tunes are newer, but there are a few of old favorites, harkening back to our band's first days in Brooklyn, when we were dragging our instruments on the train to play night after night in every joint in New York that would have us.

We tried specifically to retain the energy of our live performance. Hopefully you’ll hear the uke and guitar pressed through your speakers, jangling percussion filling in the spaces, and Blythe’s voice crooning and howling in front of it all, with all of the abandon of one of our nights playing in a local beer joint. So, at your next party, crack a beer, down a shot of bourbon, and slide this disc into the player. Everyone will be dancing.

IGNORE LAST EMAIL FROM US!

If you received an email from us at 2:59am with just a link, DON'T OPEN IT!  We don't know if it's a virus or what but someone hacked into our account. I'm really sorry guys.  We're getting it straightened out with Google right now :(

Why We Love Lexington, KY

One of our favorite people and musicians, the stellar Jerry Belsak, just sent us this:

"
HEY, BLYTHE, Willie (The Galt Line):

GUESS WHAT?

I took my Father out to eat at Ramsey's - so I was at this random restaurant IN Lexington, on the south side of Lex. AND I was wearing the Galt Line T-Shirt;

and our waitress comes up to take our order and she says "I've seen them play"

And proceeds to shake her leg Like you WITH all the little cymbals and percussion thingies

just to convince me that she really does know what she's talking about.!

That was GREAT - it just MADE MY DAY, Big Time!

This was two weeks ago, but I'll never forget it- Thanks for all that you do!!

- Jerry Belsak
"


1. Jerry is the best for wearing our shirt.
2. Jerry is the best for telling us this awesome story.
3. Jerry is an INCREDIBLE guitar player so click the link above and/or look him up right now.
4. That waitress is awesome for remembering us!
5. Lexington was one of our first out-of-town shows (R.I.P. Cultural Preservation Resources) and all the amazing people there really lit a fire in our bellies.




Thank you, Jerry Belsak & Lexington, KY.  You keep us going.


-Blythe & Willie

Bands to look up!

So just about anytime we meet someone new, they suggest a plethora of awesome bands for us to look up.  Sadly, time for research has been sparse so the list has grown quite large.  Wanna see?

Jan. 6: The Acroyogis
Jan. 15: Chris Pureka, Girl in a Coma
Jan. 29: Heart Gets Monkey
Feb. 16: The River Knot Trio
Mar. 4: Pablo & The Dregs, The Cinammon Band, The Handsom Furrs, The Sketties, Weinerslav
Mar. 6: Mal Cooper, Dave Eggar, Paul Cusko, Lost River Cavemen
Mar. 7: Bottomsop
Mar. 24: The Monotonix
Mar. 26: Jackie Green, Tristan Prettyman
Mar. 27: Adele, Page France
Mar. 29: Hot Qua String Band, Tidewater Jam, The Bee Eaters, Karen Lovely, Stolen Sweets
Apr. 2: Kings of Nothing
Apr. 3: Whole Bottle Black
Apr. 9: War Paint, Man Man, Umphrey's Mcgee, Iliyamy
Apr. 15: The Mavericks
Apr. 27: Force Major
Apr. 29: Lucas & The Lovelies, Old Liners, Handsome Creatures, Harmonious Wail,
Apr. 30: Mad Tea Party, Ulu-smb, Big Fat Marker

There are more scattered throughout my purse on little scraps of paper.  I'll post them as I find them.  If you check any of them out, let us know what you think :)