Release Month and Lil' Bill

We're coming up on one month since the sold out release show at Cafe Du Nord and our epic Southern California consummation in San Diego. Now we're looking down the road at a summer tour and spring time sprints along the coast. The album is up in all corners of the internet thanks to an arrangement with JMD Distribution, INGrooves and Universal Music Group.

Like Slider's johnson, the list of artists we've worked with on this record is long and distinguished. Tonight the spotlight's on Brooklyn Bill Bell, or Lil' Billy Tickles as he came to be known around the studio last summer...

Bill was born and raised in Brooklyn where I met him in 2007 one night that ended in a Williamsburg bar at dawn. He was the bartender, sound man, and house pianist/guitarist/mandolin player at the legendary Banjo Jim's on 9th and C with a talent for accents and a taste for super hoppy beverages. We were in a band together out there for a year or so, playing venues like Rockwood Music Hall and the Knitting Factory before I moved back to the west coast. Since then Bill has flown out to California about ten times to play on our coastal tours, record this album, and sample the India pales and coconut porters that are hard to track down in New York. He camped for the first time in his life last year at Jalama between shows in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, and he still can't drive a stick which earns him a spot in the cramped back seat in the cab of Peters' Ford pickup. He's one of the most versatile musicians I know and has an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure artists that I'm ashamed not to know.