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 :)

Return of the Roots Jedi -or- Hurtling Through American Highway Space

Skip to the end for a conclusion on the whole tour...

We had lunch with Suzie, hearing the story of how she got all the out to the Seattle area in the first place. For the afternoon we hung out with Dustin and Natasha, who have very comfortably set themselves up in the rainy city. We walked their tiny dogs, sat at a local cafe, and I sprayed their kitchen with over-carbonated cider.

When we departed, we cruised into the city proper to explore, but we rolled right through when free parking proved to be sparse and the afternoon wore on into evening. Instead we jetted toward Portland, planning to make our way out through the Columbia River Gorge. The weather turned fast and we were forced into another motel. Wal-Mart food in a microwave and some cable TV helped us drift off to sleep early, helping us get a quick start in the morning.

Through the next morning we blasted through the gorge, dripping rain graying the jutting cliffs and piny forests. In a couple of hours the mountains flattened and the landscape opened. Open ranges stretched in all directions and heavy clouds continued to drizzle. The trip through eastern Oregon and Washington was uneventful except for a quick visit to a sad little casino for some free soda and clean bathrooms.

Just as we crossed into the Idaho panhandle, mountains sprung immediately on the horizon. The highway hit the hills like a wall, and climbed steeply toward the sky. In a few minutes we were winding through rockies, dodging trucks with steaming breaks. When we hit the Montana border, a steady snow started. Solid four foot snow drifts were stacked by the roadside. The sun dropped and the wind picked up.

Stopping for a particularly strange roadside attraction, we turned off the twisting highway. With just an hour until Missoula, we took a moment to gaze over rattlesnake wine bottle holders and enormous but useless knives. This particular souvenir shop included a dimly lit bar and a small casino with a few slot machines and a bored looking dealer tossing cards to two haggard old cowboys.

Back in the van, we descended into Missoula, glided through, and shot across the valley floor toward Butte. Soon we saw a giant glowing Virgin Mary and some strange red lit structures. These were our only sign that we had reached and passed through Butte. In about another two hours we stopped in a small mountain town, the snow still gently falling. A very nice guy at a tiny motel greeted us with his gigantic dog. He set us up in an incredibly clean room, and we drifted off.

Waking early the next morning, we pointed the van toward South Dakota with the aim of seeing the badlands before powering through to good old MD. We passed through the last of the rockies and accelerated across the plains. Rocketing through a corner of Wyoming and into South Dakota at 80 mph took all day. We finally rolled through Rapid City just as the sun was setting.

A quiet rain fell on the silent canyons of the Badlands. A final pink line was shrinking on the horizon, and the sandstone glowed blue. A few bored goats traipsed quietly around the cliffs, apathetically gazing at us while we peered into the rugged gorges. The last sunlight retreated and we climbed into the van to search for our last motel of the trip.

We ate roasted chicken in our motel room and watched Conan. We were on the road again by 8 am. We stopped by the famous Wall Drug at an eerie hour, sneaking by usually busy shops, now silent on an off-season early morning.

Back in the van, while pulling out, the committee met. Blythe and I discussed the coming drive, money saving options, and the time remaining before we were expected back at work. It was decided that with a trade off driving, we could make a straight shot through South Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia,  and right on home into Maryland. We took a stop at a diner for some really good food, a few cups of coffee, and a last moment of rest before we crossed half a country.

A few energy drinks from a truck stop jacked me up enough for Blythe to get a full nights sleep. Cities blew by: Sioux Falls, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Columbus. Blythe took over around Columbus, and I passed out until Morgantown WV.

The last few miles from Cumberland to Frederick were the toughest. Both of us were tired. We were home now. The rest of the evening was spent with Blythe's mom, eating pizza, drinking beers, and watching old musicals. We slept full and happy.


Conclusion:
What did we get for all this? Certainly not money. Really it was a close up view of the music scene out west. Pretty similar to the one here, except the venues are very transparent. They talk openly about money, their usual crowd etc. Most welcomed us warmly, impressed with how far we'd come. Most shows generated some income. People on the west coast are less astonished with the kind of music we play, and more astonished by the energy with which we play it. I like that. The west is not a place where we could make steady money playing music, any more than here. I think that the west will be just another turn on the continuing path. Where could we really settle after all, when we're bored with any city we're in after just a few shows.

Now for some big plans in the local area. A foot in the door on Baltimore, 4 paid shows in Atlantic City, a residency at a new spot in DC, some fun weddings, and some work with Brett in DC Fringe Fest.