Words cannot express how excited I am that TOS has been invited to play the Surburban Home Records & Friends South by Southwest showcase show in Austin this year. I have been the biggest fan of their family of bands for quite sometime. I first got into Drag the River years ago and they set the bar as high as a rock band with alt-country leanings can go for me. I was lucky enough to catch Two Cow Garage in action when they came through Murfreesboro in 2008 supporting “Speaking In Cursive”, which is my favorite album of theirs to date. I remember watching their movie “The Long Way Around” on a portable DVD player when I was keeping watch over our fireworks tent in Le Verge last year. Amazing story.
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Austin Lucas is also an incredible talent. I still find myself baffled by the technical prowess of his guitar playing on “Somebody Loves You” and the songs are rich with excellent characters. There’s a plenty to be admired on that album, I highly suggest checking it out.
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Also - Glossary’s new album “Feral Fire” just came out this month. I’ve had it for the better part of the last year and I can tell you, it’s incredible. It’s gonna stand the test of time like all of Joey and the gang’s work.

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The showcase is a joint venture with Front Porch Musings. The folks over at FPM have been more than kind to us over the last past year and we are so appreciative that they asked us to play. FPM is new(ish) website but they post more than 99% of the blogs out there. They bust their asses keepin’ up. Subscribe to them!
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Here are some details about our new album, “American Stranger”:
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A few months ago the band relocated to Rockvale, Tennessee. A tiny, rural town just west of Murfreesboro. We moved into the pastoral house of the local Cumberland Presbyterian Church and went to work completing our 3rd album. Merritt’s mother is the preacher over there and it works out great because we have more than 150 acres to shoot guns, build fires and play music as loud as we want. Over a hundred of the acres have been in the Merritt family for generations and it’s so rocky you can’t put a house on it. That pretty much leaves it to us to horse around on. Pretty sweet. There’s two churches on the property, one being built back in the early 1900’s. It’s in that church we plan on setting up a studio and recording our new album. Back at the helm will be our partner in crime Mikey Allred and the producing duties falling on the shoulders of our good friend Joey Kneiser of Glossary. If it all goes down we should have it wrapped up and completed by May - then we will see where to go from there.

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Tentative track listing:
Hurt Someone
Cutting Corners
Warning You
Standing Water
Put Up a Fight
Just My Luck
Written Word
The Devil Does
Gone Down Swinging
Temptation
What Good
Beautiful Nobody

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While our ‘08 LP Young Lungs and our 09′ album Steel Hearts were really two sides of the same coin, American Stranger has turned out to be a far different beast. I lost my job selling tractors last June and between bouncing around between odd jobs, unemployment checks and 85 shows last year - these songs boiled their way to the top. I’m so pleased with how they’ve turned out. We’ve also bulked up our sound with the addition of Nick Naioti from Zombie Bazooka Patrol on keys and vocals and Brandon Harris of the Avery Set/Paper Navy on guitar. Oh, and I’m sellin’ tractors again…but for the competition (ol’ John Deere).

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To conclude this long-winded update here a couple of recent reviews of Steel Hearts:.

antiMUSIC.com
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In My Basement Room
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See you soon!

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-Kent

Check out the new music video for Lay Back Down from the STEEL HEARTS LP:

We are playing in Murfreesboro tonight at the Temptation Club. Our buds from Chicago, State Champion, are gonna play along with another out-of-towner Nighty Night. Also Justin from We Were The States new band, The Country Punks, are gonna lay it down. Starts at 9.

-Kent

Head over to the TOS Bandcamp page to stream both of our albums for free. Beats the hell out of myspace, i’ll tell you that.

We have a few shows in familiar places this month. Can’t wait to see some old friends!

-kent

After a long night at Lemmons.

St. Louis was great as usual. We played with some kick ass local bands, drank good beer and ate free pizza. This show closed out three shows in St. Louis for TOS in 2009 - looking to head back up there in February. It’s a great town with down to earth folks - at least the people I’ve met.

The next morning before heading back to Tennessee we grabbed lunch at Pappy’s, which already had a line out the door at 11 in the morning, with good reason. Pulled pork BBQ with a side of deep fried corn on the cob. Hell yeah.

Last night we played our last show of the year at Wallstreet with Hammertorch and Sons of Roswell. I always love playing with Hammertorch and Sons of Roswell killed it as usual. Check out the calender for a full run down of our shows in January - all on the road. See you next year!
-kent

2009 was a big year for TOS. We released our 2nd LP Steel Hearts back in June, trailing just 8 months behind our debut album Young Lungs back in 2008. We couldn’t be more happy with how both albums turned out. It took a lot of work and lot of friends pitching in to complete them both. I’m extremely grateful to Sophomore Lounge Records in Chicago for putting them both out in such a short period of time.

Here are the final two TOS dates for the year:
December 5th, 2009 - St, Louis, MO - Lemmons 9PM
December 12th, 2009 - Murfreesboro, TN - Wallstreet 10PM

This will mark the 3rd time we’ve played St. Louis this year - capping just over 80 shows for us. 2009 was without a doubt the busiest year we’ve had as a band and it feels really rewarding finishing with so many shows under our collective belt. We met so many gracious people on the road - and couldn’t have done it without so many people offering their floors to us.

All that being said I feel we’ve turned a corner as a band. Blake, Jonathan and myself are moving to a pastoral house on the edge of town just beyond the city limits. The house sits on a good 6 acres of land - complete with a winding creek and plenty of privacy. It’s there we are going complete work on our third LP which we’ve been hard at work on between shows this year. Most of the details of it are still up in the air but we are planning on hitting the studio in April. I can tell you this much, the songs are definitely different from anything we’ve done before and I’m really happy with the way they are coming to life.

Just a couple more things. Head over to antiMUSIC.com to read a new review of Steel Hearts. You can read a more complete rundown of recent reviews at our blog at Myspace. We also have new t-shirts for sale at our online store - printed by the good folks at Grand Palace.

We are looking ahead and can’t wait for 2010. We kick the year off with a January full of shows on the road. Be sure to watch the calender because we are adding shows daily! Everyone have safe Thanksgiving, see you soon.

-kent

The time is near. We are playing at the Boro Bar & Grill with Cuttlefish and Hammertorch on Halloween night. It’s a Saturday night, it’s free, what more reason do you need to get dressed up and get tanked? Starts at 10 PM. I think we go on first so be there early! Check out a couple videos about it if you need more encouragement:

Uno:


Dos:


-kent

We are heading to the “big” city on Thursday night to play with the Ocelots at Springwater. We’ve played with the Ocelots several times over the years and they never cease to put on a good show. I believe the show will get goin’ around 10 - 5 bones. We rarely ever play Nashville so if you got nothing else to do you should come out and have a beer with us.

I’ve uploaded a couple of new songs, “Just My Luck” & “Standing Water”, to my personal Myspace page. You can check those out HERE.

We’ve got a couple of big local shows before the year is up. One being at the Boro Bar & Grill with our good friends Hammertorch & Cuttlefish on Halloween night. The other is at Wallstreet on December 12th with the excellent Sons of Roswell from Muscle Shoals & James Jackson Toth’s Wooden Wand. Both should not be missed.

I broke down and got a twitter for TOS. Follow us HERE. There’s nothin’ you’ll find on there that you won’t find here, but I figured - hey, a program my mom uses sure could be helpful to the band!

-k

We played in Johnson City on Saturday night wrapping up an eight-day stretch of dates through the southeast. The tour couldn’t have been more of a success. After Florence & Jackson on Friday & Saturday night, we hit up Atlanta’s Smiths ‘Ol Bar for the 3 bands for 5$ night. It went well, as well as a Tuesday night could go. We played with a killer band from Austin, TX named Goldcure. Nice dudes.

We got into Auburn with way too much time to kill Wednesday morning. After bumming around the campus and seein’ just about all there is to see in Auburn, Alabama we headed to the Independent for free food and beer. The show ended up being one of the better we’ve ever played outside of town. The place was packed and the people were nice. After the show we ended up getting a 12 pack of miller light and staying in a cabin in the middle of 1800 acres (yeah 1800) in the woods outside Auburn. Here’s some pictures:








Unfortunately, we ended up canceling our show at the Hummingbird in Macon the following night (a TOS first). For whatever reason I got extremely ill from something and ended up spending the night laid up in an apartment on the outskirts of Macon. It was pretty big let down for me personally - the Hummingbird is an incredible place and I was looking forward to all that week. Hopefully we can make the trip back down there sometime early next year.

The next night we played in the small town of Cornelius, North Carolina. Just outside of Charlotte, Cornelius is mostly a tourist town for Lake Norman which is right beside it. We played at the Irish Cue and our set clocked in at just under 3 hours. It was a feat. It went well, our only entertainment competition for the night was billiard tables.

After Johnson City on Saturday it was good to be back home. We are adding more dates to our schedule before the end of the year to hopefully finish out around 80 shows played for the entire year - a personal best. Keep an eye out!

-kent

Headed down to Jackson pretty early Saturday morning to play at the Ole Tavern on George Street near downtown. The opening band, The Motions from Columbus, MS, ended up being so young that the owner made them go on at the unbelievable hour of 9 PM on the dot - which led to us having about a 2 and half hour set. We made it through though, thanks in part to a complementary case of Miller High Life.

After the show we made a much ill-advised trip to Taco Bell and then passed out in an apartment behind the venue. All in all - a good night in Mississippi. Tomorrow night we are playing at Smith’s Ol’ Bar in Atlanta. It’s an early one - starts at 7 PM!

-K