Contributed by Rob Bashleben
Head For The Hills Performance
3/22/2017 - 8PM
Head For The Hills
Fairview Inn
13301 E Main St. Talkeetna
FREE Admission
Head For The Hills Performance
3/23/2017 - 8PM
Head For The Hills
Chair 5 Restaurant
171 Lindblad Ave, Girdwood
FREE Admission
Head For The Hills Performance
3/24/2017 – 8PM
Head For The Hills
Williwaw
609 F St, Anchorage
Tickets: $10
Head For The Hills Performance
3/25/2017 – 8PM
Head For The Hills
Alice’s Champagne Palace
E Pioneer Ave. Homer
FREE Admission
Head for the Hills has a simple, but continuing dilemma they can’t seem to resolve. Specialists have been hired to no avail and the predicament persists. How does one describe the multifarious music of Head for the Hills?
Among the top contenders are catchy turns of phrase like post-bluegrass, progressive string music, modern acoustic noir and bluegrass bricolage. “On top of modern string music.” (Bluegrass Today), “Cutting edge!” (Drew Emmitt) or “Best in Colorado Bluegrass.” (Westword Magazine Readers Poll). Those are up there too. Strip away the artful descriptors and you have a forward thinking group of mostly acoustic musicians drawing on eclectic influences, tastes and styles. They didn’t grow up immersed in bluegrass music but came to it later in life, with each other. The result is a sound based in bluegrass that reaches into indie rock, jazz, hip hop, world and folk to stitch together fresh songs that bridge the divide between past and future acoustic music.
Head for the Hills - Adam Kinghorn on guitar and vocals, Joe Lessard on violin and vocals, Matt Loewen on upright bass and vocals and Sam Parks on mandolin - have been bringing their music, whatever you’d like to call it, to audiences from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival to South by Southwest and a multitude of stages in between since 2004. The band has independently issued three studio records and one live, been featured on NPR Ideastream and eTown, co-released a beer with Odell Brewing Company and charted on the CMJ Top 200 (Blue Ruin, 2013 and Head for the Hills, 2010).
Meta-fictional sea shanties, pop-infused newgrass murder ballads, urbane lyricism, twang and punch. Head for the Hills’ fourth and latest record, Blue Ruin, fuses bluegrass, jazz, hip-hop and indie rock into songs inspired by love and misery and comic books. Featuring twelve original songs marked by moving narratives and stellar musicianship, Blue Ruin showcases the quartet’s contemporary take on acoustic music, embracing the bluegrass pedigree while looking forward.
Recorded and mixed in Fort Collins, Colorado at Swingfingers Studios with ace engineer and banjoist Aaron Youngberg (Martha Scanlan, Cahalen Morrison and Eli West), Blue Ruin features contributions from Andy Hall (The Infamous Stringdusters), James Thomas, Gabe Mervine (The Motet) and more. Renowned screen print artist, Timothy Doyle, (Muse, The Black Keys, Lucas Films, NASA) created the stunning cover art and Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer David Glasser rounds out the production team. This is Head for the Hills at their most artistically fulfilled: self-produced and in top form. Blue Ruin is more than just a “bluegrass” record - it’s a Head for the Hills record.
