Great reviews are awesome and we’re always grateful when a publication/website/blog takes the time to review our work but it’s the opinions of our listeners that ROCK our world – you’re the folks who come and see us play, support our work with your hard earned cash and keep us doing what we do! Thanks for your support, we really appreciate it.
What are our listeners saying about “The Long Journey Home”?
“It is everything I hoped for. A brilliant selection of songs, lot’s of original pieces, and a great example of authentic production. In other words, it faithfully reproduces my experience of these artists as performers and has captured their music perfectly. Sitting firmly in top position for my album of the year.”
“I just love listening to you guys beautiful harmonies and love your originals Brilliant thank you so much…… Fabulous CD .”
“Your beautiful songs, harmonies and melodies fill my heart with happiness and let it dance away the cobwebs and reclaim my home. The home in my heart.”
“If you love (authentic) ‘Blue Grass’ the recent album is a must. Incredible instrumentals and brilliant vocals. Close your eyes and you’re deep in the Smokey Mountains. Well done, brilliant.”
We love to travel and play in different places with different folk. Road trips are our kinda fun – Chris likes to drive and Jen likes to take photographs.
Dadswells Bridge, Victoria
We’ve been very lucky over the last few months to be able to travel to some fantastic places, we live in a beautiful place and appreciate it all the more when we return after a road trip!
Shoreham, Victoria
Balnarring Beach, Victoria
It’s a real challenge to get a good photograph from a moving vehicle and very satisfying when it works well.
Merton, Victoria
The Kelly Country Pick is in beautiful Beechworth – always a real pleasure the visit a gorgeous town and have a pick with excellent musicians. KCP is all about the pickin’!
Beechworth, Victoria
Beechworth, Victoria
We had a great time, a perfect mix of pickin’ and performing.
At Kelly Country Pick 2017 – photo thanks to Ian Fisk
Beechworth, Victoria
It’s lovely to live in a beautiful place – very inspiring, going away often inspires us to experience our area at home with fresh eyes.
Point Leo, Victoria
We were very lucky to be invited to return to Wirrina Bluegrass & Acoustic Roots Festival this year- a great time and really great performers – we felt blessed to be in such excellent company!
on the road to Adelaide – Horsham, Victoria
So we hit he road again – headed for South Australia.
Kaniva, Victoria
Wirrina Cove is on the gorgeous Fleurieu Peninsula, a real pleasure to visit.
Victor Harbour, South Australia
Despite some incredibly wild, wet and windy weather – we endured…..
Thanks to Lisa Martin for recording us on Sunday, in the wild windy tent! Jen was very ill all weekend with the flu but we endured! This is our version of the Ola Belle Reed song – I’ve Endured, which was inspired by South Australia’s own Cherry Pickers version of the same.
Wirrina Cove, South Australia
It’s always a pleasure to jam with great musicians and Wirrina was no exception.
At Wirrina 2017 – photo thanks to Ian Fisk
At Wirrina 2017 – photo thanks to Ian Fisk
As usual the most intrepid Ian Fisk was there documenting both festivals. He has become a stalwart presence at most events.
Wirrina Cover, South Australia
After a wild weekend of weather the sun peeped out briefly……..
Stawell, Victoria
and the wild weather followed us home again.
Point Leo, Victoria
for a fortnight of unusually cold weather all the way from Antarctica.
Point Leo, Victoria
Which bought some fantastic clouds our way and some welcome rain.
Balnarring Beach, Victoria
We headed north, but not too far to our first Guildford Banjo Jamboree.
Bolte Bridge, Melbourne, Victoria
We had a fun banjo-centric set all prepared.
Guildford, Victoria
We enjoyed playing with fine folk all weekend.
Castlemaine, Victoria
And appreciated the gorgeous historic area.
Guildford, Victoria
As always all photos by Jennifer Land unless otherwise credited
We recently traveled to Harrietville for GAP – the Great Alpine Pick. We stayed in the most excellent on-site caravan. It was so terribly awesome that we filmed some videos there.
It had an autumnal burnt orange vibe that absolutely matched the beautiful Autumn weather.
I fell in love with it and took WAY too many photographs of it’s 1970’s splendor.
I particularly loved the bedside lamp.
“Estelle” is a song we wrote a few years ago and with the encouragement of our Goddaughter we dusted her off and added another verse. We recorded it recently and it will appear on our new album ‘Travelogue’ – which you can preview here.
A classic folk song about share house living that tells the true, but sad story of Estelle, who owns only a few photos and a stained t-shirt as a result of her last few houses having burned down.
“Estelle” – Live at the Harrietville Caravan Park!
One of the reasons that we named our album ‘Travelogue’ is that we like to travel & I always take photographs as we go……. Here are some from that journey
Bonnie Doon
Mt Hotham
Mt Hotham
all photographs taken in April 2016 by J. Land – instagram
We’re just finished recording another album; it’s called Travelogue.
A Travelogue describes the experience of a traveler, often in images.
We recorded at Stovepipe Studios with Matt Walker and Rowan Matthews.
We prefer to record a live performance, preserving the human sounds of fingers on fret boards, breath and squeaky chair. It means it isn’t perfect, it feels more important to sound real in these times of heavily processed sound.
If you close your eyes we are sitting in the room with you, just two people playing music and singing.
photos thanks to Matt Walker
We recorded 16 songs over a day and a half, with no overdubs.
It’s important to find the right studio for the songs. Matt and Rowan immediately understood what we were looking for. It is challenging to record a live performance in a studio environment but they were up for it. For those of you who have never recorded, it’s important to have nice clean recordings of each instrument/ voice without anything spilling over into it, which is very hard with a live recording when the room is filled with sound. With the help of some really lovely microphones and their technical know how they caught our performances beautifully with very little “cross contamination”.
photo thanks to Matt Walker
After recording the songs all the tracks are mixed together – it’s a process……..
are we there yet?
photo thanks to Chris Taylor
Very soon we’ll have an album to share with you all – till then here’s a track from it we recorded by our friend Chris – “Coming Home”.
With the help of our friend Chris we recorded our original song “Coming Home”.
This song has been, in one form or another, in the repertoire for a while now but recently got a rewrite, buff and polish and it’s come up a treat! It’s a two point perspective story, two sides of a situation, two voices each in turn.
photo thanks to Chris Rickard
We are all on a journey “Home” – to that place where we feel most ourselves, whether that be a geographical location, an internal sense of peace or the kinship found within a relationship.
unknown photographer – please let us know if it’s you!
It can be hard to hear the lyrics clearly so they appear below. Chris plays banjo in the clawhammer style.
With the help of our friend Chris we recorded our version of the traditional song “I wish I was in Bowling Green”, which we learned from the Kossoy Sisters, adding to it with more lyrics: somethin’ old, somethin’ new, somethin’ borrowed & somethin’ blue.
The lyrics talk specifically about the town “Bowling Green” in Kentucky in the US of A, but the song for us is about the longing for that place that feels like home and a nostalgic recollection of the place you grew up in, or belong to.
A perfect home…….
Traditional songs last in popular culture because the message or meaning is timeless, continuously relevant, like any cliche there’s a deep truth enfolded inside,
“Shady Grove” is a lovely Bluegrass standard, which many really great musicians have done versions of. One of our favourites would have to be Doc Watson’s.
We recently enlisted the help of our friend Chris to film us playing a few of our favourite cover songs/standards. All these clips were recorded with a Nikon D90 – the sound quality is pretty good considering we’re outside!
Video Still from “Shady Grove”
We don’t make a huge fuss about our guitars but we get asked a lot what we play. Jen plays a Martin LXM tenor guitar and Chris plays a Martin D00-18V acoustic guitar. Neither have pick ups – all acoustic!
Video Still from “Shady Grove”
So here’s a link to our version of “Shady Grove” – hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoy playing it!
We write our own music but we also enjoy doing covers of well known songs in a Slim Dime kinda way. Enormously successful in the 80’s, Euro synth pop hit, “Take On Me” – lyrics & music by Pal Waaktaar, Mags Furuholmen & Morten Harket is a great example. Although recognisable, without that synth tag it sounds totally different.
Video still – Take On Me
With the help of our friend Chris this was recorded September 2015 in a house more picturesque than ours on our trusty iPad so the image and sound quality isn’t excellent but it’s certainly good enough. God bless technology!
Video still – Take On Me
We decided to share this particular song because it isn’t something we’d ever put on an album but it is a song we put in the set along with country & bluegrass numbers. It has that lovely bittersweet quality that we love so. And it’s fun to surprise folk with something a little unexpected.
Video still – Take On Me
One of the memorable things about this song is singer Morten Harket’s incredible vocal range, we don’t do that either! It’s more fun to make a song your own than to mimic someone else.
Here’s a link to the original video, which has a happy albeit sweaty ending……
Despite having a really busy month, with the help of our friend Chris we recorded some wee home videos. She lives in a gorgeous house with a brilliant garden. The Spring blossoms were bloomin’ up a storm.
Sliver Tongue & Gold Plated Lies video still
Silver Tongue & Gold Plated Lies was written by K. T. Oslin – country stalwart songstress, although we learned it from Suzanne Thomas on the excellent album “O’ Sister – The Women’s Bluegrass Collection”.
Sliver Tongue & Gold Plated Lies video still
We play it slow.
More like a blues song than a bluegrass number………
Sliver Tongue & Gold Plated Lies video still
Lots of fantastic musicians play this excellent song – this is our version!
Everything we do, we do with a little help from our friends…….
Slim Dime 