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ERIC „ROSCOE“ AMBEL shouldn’t be a stranger anymore, even though he’s been more in the shadows of the music business than on the front lines for most of his career. He really got noticed among Blue Rose Records fans with the band The Yayhoos, who released the 2001 album Fear Not The Obvious. But Ambel was active much earlier – he first played in the band of Joan Jett & The Blackhearts for two years before forming the band The Del-Lords with Scott Kempner and Frank Funaro in the early 80’s.

Very early on he also got a very good reputation as a producer, so he was responsible for almost all albums of the Bottle Rockets, he also sat at the producer’s desk with such illustrious artists and bands as Nils Lofgren, Go To Blazes, Big In Iowa, Cheri Knight, Blood Oranges, Mary Lee’s Corvette, Mojo Nixon or Marshall Crenshaw, just to name a few. His contributions as a songwriter and studio musician are endless, and not least Ambel has released a handful of albums under his own name. In short – Eric Ambel is a busy man!

At the beginning of the pandemic while locked out of the studio and sheltering at home Eric Ambel decided to release some tracks he had on hand digitally through Bandcamp as the Shut In Singles series. Between March of 2020 and April of 2021 he released 11 different tracks. Some unreleased, others that had been on various compilations. You Asked For It is all of those tracks, presented in a 28 page booklet with their artwork and extensive notes of each song plus one more, a version of „Honky Tonk Women“ that he had recorded with Jimbo Mathus and Keith Christopher.

Kommentare deaktiviert für Exclusively available on CD in Europe here: ERIC AMBEL with his new album You Asked For It !

2022 release. Dirt Does Dylan is a ten-track album highlighting some of the gems from Dylan’s vast catalog with the help of three new band members: fiddle specialist Ross Holmes; singer-songwriter and bass player Jim Photoglo (who wrote one of the Dirt Band’s biggest hits, „Fishin‘ in the Dark“); and Dirt Band founder Jeff Hanna’s son, the absurdly talented singer and guitarist Jaime Hanna. Produced and recorded by Ray Kennedy at Room & Board Studio in Nashville, Tennessee, Dirt Does Dylan finds a generation-spanning Dirt Band paying an appropriately great tribute to arguably the greatest songwriter of the 20th century with the help of friends like Jason Isbell, The War & Treaty, Steve Earle, and Rosanne Cash, to name a few.

Kommentare deaktiviert für The NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND pays tribute to Bob Dylan with Dirt Does Dylan !

As an artist whose lifeblood flowed from these real-life exchanges of camaraderie and community, the Boston-based SARAH BORGES was faced with perhaps the most daunting question of her professional career: How to connect and continue as a vital and viable working artist amid a frightfully uncertain future fraught with unknowns. That’s where the aptly named brand new album, Together Alone comes in. In a true-life twist on the old saying, “when life gives you lemons…,” a homebound Borges did the one thing she knew how to do better than almost anything else. She picked up her guitar and started writing songs such as “Wasting My Time,” which serves as a thematic linchpin of sorts for the new album. Even the job Borges took as an airport courier during the pandemic to keep the bills paid and home hearth burning proved creatively useful. The temporary gig translated into a boisterous new track, namely the lighthearted rave-up, “She’s a Trucker,” based on the multi-Boston Music Award winner’s four-wheeling across state lines, carrying occasionally strange cargo.
Sarah received a huge help in the person of her longtime mentor Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, the venerable producer and guitarist who’s played with everyone from Joan Jett & the Blackhearts to Steve Earle and the Dukes. More recently, Ambel’s been Sarah’s band mate and co-conspirator in addition to his usual job running his Cowboy Technical Services Recording Rig studio in Brooklyn, N.Y. Here’s how it worked: One by one, Borges would send along her home-recorded guitar and vocal demos — with Sarah singing into her iPhone, and utilizing her clothes closet as a vocal isolation booth — to Ambel’s home recording setup. He’d listen carefully to the rudimentary tracks, and then sort out who in his musical Rolodex might play what, where, when, and how. The tricky part, Ambel says, was that “I had to think of not only great players, but great players that could do a very good job recording themselves at home.” Among those ready, willing, and able was ex-Bottle Rockets bass player Keith Voegele, residing in Springfield, Illinois. Another was Keith Christopher, Ambel’s longtime Yayhoos band mate currently playing bass with Lynyrd Skynyrd and living in upstate New York. A talented trio of drummers scattered from New York to Nashville also sent in dispatches.
Sarah Borges proves she’s a survivor, coming out of it stronger than ever, still gorgeously twangin’ and rockin’ down the road.

Kommentare deaktiviert für SARAH BORGES: Wow, this lady rocks on Together Alone !