Real Estate is a band from Ridgewood, New Jersey, United States, now based in Brooklyn, N.Y. The band has roots in the Garden State and they’re led by singer/guitarist Martin Courtney and feature guitarist Matthew Mondanile (the latter known to some for his work in Ducktails, Predator Vision, and The Parasails) as well as Alex Bleeker on bass and Etienne Duguay (also of Predator Vision) on the drums.
New Ruins began in 2004 as a home recording project of Elzie Sexton and J.Caleb Means. In 2005 "The Sound They Make" was recorded in the cold back room of a Champaign house. In 2006, New Ruins was signed by A Hidden Agenda Records. "The Sound They Make" was released in 2007 and received positive critical reviews, including All Music Guide and an Emusic editor's pick. Several songs from the album have been licensed for use on tv shows. Sexton and Means are joined by Paul Chastain (multi-instrumentalist, formerly of Velvet Crush) and Roy Ewing (drums/percussion, formerly of Braid).
Tim Barry is a solo folk singer who sings in melodic hardcore band Avail. He released an album titled "Rivanna Junction" on the label Suburban Home Records in the fourth quarter of 2006. In 2008, Tim recorded a album titled Manchester. Recently he has recorded 28th & Stonewall, again on Suburban Home Records.
Michelle Shocked is a traveller, a troubadour, a 'picker-poet', as they say in Texas. As a young feminist, she left Texas to travel, Kerouac-style, and was caught up in Reagan-era grassroots politics. Her musical career was ignited by a bootleg recording made around a Kerrville Folk Festival campfire on a Sony walkman. Released in England as ‘The Texas Campfire Tapes’ without Shocked’s authority, its success abroad enticed Mercury Records to offer the newcomer a recording contract.
The Blackeyed Susans are an Australian band, formed in Perth in 1989, based in Melbourne since 1992. They were initially a "holiday band" put together by David McComb in 1989 while The Triffids were in hiatus. Although line-ups have varied from year to year, almost all of them have featured Rob Snarski and early Triffids member Phil Kakulas. www.blackeyedsusans.com.au
Steve Earle (born January 17, 1955) is a singer-songwriter best known for his country music and rock 'n roll tinged "alt-country." He is also a published writer, a keen political activist (particularly in protesting against the death penalty in the U.S., as in his song "Ellis Unit One" from the movie Dead Man Walking), and has written and directed a play. Steve also had a small role as a recovering addict on the HBO television show "The Wire".
Mary Gauthier (born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1962) is an American folk singer/songwriter. Given up at birth by a mother she never knew, Mary was adopted. At age 15, she ran away from home and stole her parents' car, and spent the next several years in detox, halfway houses, and living with friends; she spent her 18th birthday in jail. These experiences provided fodder for her songwriting later on (particularly her song "Drag Queens in Limousines").
Joshua Hayes Carll, known as Hayes Carll, is a singer-songwriter from The Woodlands, Texas (a Houston suburb). He is currently signed to Lost Highway Records. If you haven’t already heard of Hayes Carll, you soon will. In the three years since his self-released second album, Little Rock became available, Carll has toured relentlessly in North America and abroad (performing over two hundred shows a year), founded a successful singer-songwriter music festival on the Gulf Coast of Texas, secured a record deal with Lost Highway Records...
The Rainmakers were a Kansas City, Missouri-based original rock band whose members included: Bob Walkenhorst,
Steve Phillips (later a member of The Elders),
Rich Ruth,
Pat Tomek,
Michael Bliss (replaced Rich Ruth in 1995). Missouri has long boasted of being the home of two of America's greatest artists, Mark Twain and Chuck Berry. However, it wasn't until The Rainmakers thundered into the national music spotlight in 1986, had anyone combined the guitar power of Berry with the social wit of Twain into a unique brand of Missouri rock n' roll.
Half noise, half folk - khancoban’s songs deploy in low-gravity and with a dash of grit. They are performed calmly, utilising calculated space and tension, exploding at key points that leave the band’s filament still burning in their wake. The name khancoban is a hijacked car from a country town in the Snowy Mountains … its AM radio spilling out tunes by the likes of Wilco, Kingsbury Manx, The Clientele and Calexico – bands both influential and with kindred music. This is a band of vast sound riddled with hideaway nooks. Now in your city, that stolen car is all khancoban’s own. Get in.