It sure took us a while,
but we have persevered and produced a pleasant little EP, "Land Of Promise," featuring a Stanislove original you may already have heard on Car Talk — apparently they don't inform the artist beforehand — "Bio-Diesel Boogie" and four covers of Blues standards. It's available from us (at first) and soon on CD Baby, iTunes, etc. Only $5 plus $2 S+H if you just can't wait to latch onto a physical copy.
"Lonesome Steve" Mitchell on string bass and Mike Daugherty on a minimal drum set round out our group. Engineered and produced by Jon Goff at Self-Adhesive Records and mastered by Barry Corliss at Master Works, both in Seattle. The five tunes on this EP presage the full albums we're concurrently working on, "Blue Highways" for roots and acoustic Americana, and "Merge" for our originals.
Who are The RooTsters?
We are Alan Kausal and Stanislove, singer-songwriters in the folk-blues tradition who blend American acoustic- and pop guitar styles into intimate conversations, edgy rants, and suspiciously improbable tales. The result is our own special blend of acoustic music that pays respect to the famous American artists who influenced us and all the forgotten immigrants who came before.
The RooTsters are the successors to Teeth, Hair & Eyeballs, which in turn was an outgrowth of Seattle's Emerald City Jug Band, the notorious but family-friendly outlet for Stan's love of Dixieland and jug-band music. Here, we bring you a diverse but strangely compatible and compelling mix of styles of mostly unplugged, very listenable music — too interesting to be ambience and too artful to be cliché. We mine the rich lode of America's acoustic-guitar and songwriting traditions, from Ragtime to Blues to Jazz to Swing to R&B to Rock, all the while staying connected to the European, African, and Caribbean folk songs, broadsides, and hymns that set the foundations of the popular music we hear today.
Stanislove started the Emerald City Jug Band in 2001, but as a singer-songwriter soon realized that his more lyrical, heartfelt compositions didn't fit into the jug-band idiom. (You just don't goof on certain subjects!) He and several of his ECJB co-conspirators then founded Teeth, Hair & eyeballs, which morphed into The RooTsters after our first album. Stan and Alan are folkies drenched by decades of pop music and pummeled by that inconvenient joy known as Life, who still think they have something to say. As The RooTsters, we combine decades of listening to and playing blues, jazz, rock, and world rhythms with a poet's eye on the world. And we do remember to have fun in the process!
Check our Gig Calender to see when we're playing somewhere close to you. If you want to know more, send us an e-mail. See you at the next gig!
Hear samples from our current CD, "Ten Left." Our next one, tentatively titled "Modern Traditions," is brewing at this time, and we expect to release it in June.
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