Hello CheeversBelievers…

Having made it safely through the Christmas holidays, the new year has really been rockin’ my world. The Austin Songwriters Group symposium in January was the best I’ve been part of as was the annual National Folk Alliance in Memphis in February. Coming home from my long Europe tours playing 40-60 concerts is like running into a brick wall. Doing a show almost every night on tours like that is heavenly, but coming back to the U.S. and playing SO much less is always a downer. Having spent so much time in Europe the last ten years, I’m working harder on illuminating my place on the musical radar in America.

My Tall Texas Tales CD, which went into the Euro Americana top 10, will be released in the U.S. April 20th with a great coordinated campaign by Burnside Distribution and the PR/record promotion team I’m assembling. It will be interesting to see how the Americana format responds to my uhmmm…”interesting” perspective on Texas life. TTT is already available on CDBaby.com, iTunes and MyTexasMusic.com and will be released in America on Berkalin Records.

I’ve been real busy booking shows in and around Austin and putting the finishing touches on a summer tour which, right now, includes Tennessee, Indiana and California. This past week, I also began booking my next European tour which will begin October 3rd with many of the “usual suspects” on the list of venues. Having added Denmark and Sweden to the tour itinerary last fall, I’ve been trading info with a few fellow travelers and will be adding Germany, Holland, Austria and Switzerland this year.

I’m looking forward to seeing a whole lot of you on the roads I travel and wanna leave you with this amusing anecdote which, if you know me at all, you’ll know I find very funny. Ciao till I see ya…

Bob

One of my favorite promoters in the UK, Iain Streford, moved his very successful series of concerts from the lovely Georgian Hotel in Coatbridge, Scotland to a venue in the center of Glasgow called The Griffin. His explanation for doing that is as follows:

“I will no longer be doing anything at The Georgian. The lady who owns it has different ideas about what she wants and it is impossible for me to work with the restriction she put in place. An example is when you played there last time…she complained to me that you sang a song about having sex with a sheep (as per your song “I Like Sheep”) and that it is not appropriate for the type of hotel she is running, so you can see why it is impossible to work with someone with that type of mentality.”