Indiegogo: Murder Ballads Presents “The Ash Grove”
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We are delighted beyond measure to announce the crowdfunding campaign for our upcoming second album, to be entitled The Ash Grove. It’s been going on three years since we last hit the studio for Pretty in Scarlet, and we’ve amassed enough material for a full release and then some, so we’re declaring this project overdue and hitting the ground running and screaming. We’ve narrowed down our track list (all originals this time out), we’ve had initial planning sessions with our producer extraordinaire Joel Lord about arrangements and recording strategies, and we’ve begun listing our dream rogue’s gallery of session musicians and guests. We’re on the verge, and it’s starting to feel so very real.

Most importantly, we have once again turned to the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to help make this project a reality. Our fans made Pretty in Scarlet possible in a way we never could have managed on our own, and with recording and mastering and pressing costs staring at us we’re hoping to make it happen again. We’re offering what we think is a fantastic array of enticements for those who donate (CDs! Embroidered book covers! Our upcoming songbook! House concerts!) in the hopes that you’ll toss a shilling or two into the hopper.

Come take a moment to visit our Indiegogo page at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/murder-ballads-presents-the-ash-grove-music#/, share this link with others, and if you’re able please consider sending a few dollars our way to make The Ash Grove happen. We can’t keep the music to ourselves any more, and we’d be ever so grateful.

A veritable cornucopia of audiovisual materials
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Good morning, dear murderdumplings! In a flurry of activity as we light a fire under ourselves to begin work on our second album, we’ve recently uploaded a boatload of live videos from our May 2016 house concert with Marnen Laibow-Koser to YouTube for your viewing and listening pleasure: in addition to the “White Stag” clip posted earlier, we present three tracks off of Pretty in Scarlet (“Strowler’s Song,” “Five,” and “Battle Raven”), one old solo bit of Adam’s (“One by One”), and one new co-written track, “Fireside Song,” which we created as our non-dairy “Parting Glass” substitute.

Also, we’ve been posting to our Patreon again in earnest. There’s one more video from the Medford show, the not-yet-released “Spider and Wasp,” which is avaiable only to our Patreon subscribers, so if you’re of curious mind and have a few pennies to toss our way, please consider subscribing at http://patreon.com/murderballads. Thanks again to everyone who has joined, and watch this space for more shiny moving objects of fascination.

 

“Same Old Song”
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Our last official act of this just-past rehearsal weekend: a video of our most recent, “Same Old Song,” revisited. Lyrics by Catt Kingsgrave based on Rudyard Kipling, melody by Michael Longcor, arrangement by us, camerawork by Ken Ernstein. There are times in this life for silence. This is not one of those times. We hope you like.

Lunacon 2016
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We are delighted and honored to announce that Murder Ballads has been invited as music guests at this year’s Lunacon, New York’s longest-running science fiction and fantasy convention, in Rye Brook, NY on the weekend of March 18 – 20. Schedules are still being finalized, but as it stands we’ll be doing a full set on Saturday during the day and halftime  at the Masquerade that evening, with our usual drop-ins hither and thither. The event promises to be a blast: an amazing guest list, a great venue, and a really fun con (this will be Adam’s first Lunacon experience, but Catt has greatly enjoyed her previous visits). Plus, this will be our first gig within a stone’s throw of NYC, for those of you who can’t get further afield. Give them a look at http://2016.lunacon.org/, and we hope to see you there!

Philcon 2015! Huzzah!
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At last it can be told: Murder Ballads has been invited as the Musical Guests of Honor at this year’s Philcon, held in Cherry Hill, NJ on November 20-22. Philcon is the oldest SF/F convention in the US, and we are honored beyond words to be invited, not to mention excited to the point of Kermit-flaily-hands-levels of hyper. This is our first GoH in the history of ever, and we hope you all will check out the event and come join us for what we’re anticipating will be a weekend of, dare we say, epic proportions. Let the strategy meetings and obsessive rehearsals begin!

You can find out more information at https://philcon.org/

“White Stag”
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So this is the one we’ve been knocking them (proverbially) dead with this year, a Catt original entitled “White Stag,” performed here at our May 2015 house concert in Medford, MA with Marnen Laibow-Koser tearing the roof off the joint on fiddle. Hells to the yeah.

Announcing our new Patreon page
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So! What have we been up to? Writing. Rehearsing. Recording demos of new songs. Making videos. So much we want to share.

Which leads to this: our new Patreon campaign.

We, your murderous balladeers, are stuck with a living situation that keeps us too far apart to just drop in whenever we feel like making music, which leaves us with one whole weekend a month on average to cram everything in. And cram we do: our song list has increased by at least a dozen titles since Pretty in Scarlet came out in November, but with all too few performance opportunities and no studio time available to us, sharing is bloody hard.

By becoming our Patreon supporters, you’ll enable us to get all this good stuff out in the world. We’re going on a per-item rather than a monthly subscription model, in anticipation of putting out roughly two things every month, most of it exclusive to our supporters. (Our page opened a month ago, and so far we’ve posted two items. Quod erat demonstrandum.) Our focus is on demo recordings of new material and concert videos, but possibly offering other nifty doodads that come up. In so doing, you’ll be feeding the band, putting gas in our cars to make that long drive back and forth, and eventually, hopefully, start funding our second album, which we’ve already begun to discuss.

So if you have a couple of bucks to toss our way, we’d love to hear from you at https://www.patreon.com/murderballads, and to share some of what we’ve been up to. We’re tremblingly excited by our new material. We hope you will be, too.

“Crúiscin Lán” with Matt Young
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All hail breaking the silence! Rest assured that the lack of news shared since the release of Pretty in Scarlet does not represent a lack of music-making. To that end, we have an announcement coming shortly that we’re pretty excited about; in the meantime, please enjoy this video of us in Catt’s Mandala House living room with our dear friend Matt Young, who lent his bodhran skills to “Battle Raven” on the CD, tearing up the joint on “Crúiscin Lán.”

Pretty in Scarlet has arrived!
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So guess what’s available for purchase today! Go on, guess!
(Have you guessed yet? No? Okay, I’ll tell you.)

It’s that album we’ve been working on for a damned year now, is what! It’s available for download on Bandcamp as of this morning, and that means that if you want to stream the whole thing before you pay a cent for it, you totally can.

Obviously, we’re hoping you like it enough to pay for it, but hey, at least this way you know what you’ll be getting. (Among other things, your own copy of The Ballad of Captain America’s Disapproving Face, which a few people have mentioned wanting…)

So here it is! Go have a listen, and if you like what you hear, please shill the site — we’ve put a lot of work into this one, we’re proud of it, and we really want to share it with the world.