Strangers and Friends EP
Album art for “Strangers and Friends.”
We’d been looking forward to our first ever cross-country tour for months, and it was everything we’d hoped and more. We had literally traveled from one coast to the other over the course of two and a half weeks, playing everything from a one-off music festival in Spartanburg, SC to a beautiful downtown library in Kansas City, MO to a stripped-down fully acoustic set in a lovely little coffee shop and music venue in Phoenix, AZ. In addition to the music, we took the chance to have a little vacation of sorts, taking the time to visit places like Andrew Molera State park in Big Sur, CA and White Sands National Park in Almogordo, NM.
We kept telling each other how weird it would be for everything to “get back to normal,” after we got home. Well friends, as you know, that’s not at all how things panned out.
The last stop of our tour was at BREWS in Eureka Springs, AR on March 13th. The first real waves of the Coronavirus were starting to wash across the U.S. and we received our very first gig cancellation. “It’ll be fine,” we said. Over the coming days we had a couple dozen more gigs be canceled, and our calendar went from being packed full to completely empty over the next couple of months. It was terrifying, especially with the fact that it had been almost exactly a year since since Zack had left his job to pursue music full time.
On top of that, the virus had made the concept of finishing up our sophomore album we’d been working on since 2019 considerably more difficult. With all of this weighing on our minds, we started writing a batch of new songs, reflecting on touring, our life as musicians, and the viral crisis that was overtaking the world. After a while, we realized we had written five pretty great new songs, and thought it might be a good idea to do something with them, especially since the second album was going to be delayed for a while.
The cover for Amarillo.
Over the course of a few weeks during quarantine, we home-recorded, mixed, and mastered five new songs and decided to release them as an EP. The recordings are much less produced and full compared to our first album, with no extra musicians besides the two of us. This gives them a stripped-down authenticity that we really dig, and we hope you will, too. We’re really proud of this batch of tunes and think that it offers some insight into another aspect of the Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs. Here’s the track list:
Amarillo
Dream Train
Harbinger
Snowfall and Starlight
Then I Wake
Amarillo is out on all the streaming platforms now:
Make sure to stay tuned for a physical release in the near future! We’ll be posting some comments about the individual songs in the coming days. Thank you for reading, folks!