Marketing Program/ Banner/ Listening Station Titles Promoted This Week:
Darin & Brooke Aldridge – This Life We’re Livin’ CD (Billy Blue)
Darin is a veteran of the bluegrass world, having played with top groups such as the Country Gentlemen and Acoustic Syndicate while Brooke entered many contests as a younger vocalist. Once they met, fell in love and married, the duo found themselves in the upper tier of the bluegrass genre. Brooke is the reigning International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Female Vocalist of the Year, her fourth win in a row in that highly competitive category. Darin was named the 2017 IBMA Mentor of the Year.
Leah Blevins – First Time Feeling CD/LP (Crabtree)
Imbued with the grit of vintage country music and the grace of gospel, Leah Blevins’ debut album is a scrapbook of sorts, a collage of feelings and memories from a decade spent working in the big city of Nashville while missing the small town she left behind. “It’s a timestamp of my twenties,” says the Sandy Hook, KY, native. “Here are all the stories and all the experiences from that decade. Here are all the mixed emotions I’ve felt about things I’ve gone through and people I’ve met along the way.” First Time Feeling turns tribulations into what Blevins calls “bundles of triumphs,” which lend weight to her well-observed lyrics and gravity to her soulful vocals. “It’s about coming into womanhood, but it’s more than just a coming-of-age story. It’s me discovering that I’m capable of writing a song on my own. I’m capable of staying sober. I’m capable of all these things that once felt so far out of reach. Within those walls these songs had to be unapologetically honest.”
Hippo Campus – Good Dog, Bad Dream CDEP/12”/Cassette (Grand Jury)
Good Dog, Bad Dream is the new EP from Hippo Campus, and the St. Paul, Minnesota five-piece’s first new music since their 2018 sophomore album Bambi. It finds the band at their most honest and vulnerable to date, with five new intensely cathartic tracks tinged with confessions and dark humor. It’s a collection of songs that came together with ease, and without pressure — a wildly different experience than the typical Hippo Campus recording process. The band – made up of vocalist/guitarists Jake Luppen and Nathan Stocker, drummer Whistler Allen, bassist Zach Sutton, and trumpeter DeCarlo Jackson — assembled Good Dog, Bad Dream with a genuine sense of freedom and enjoyment as part of their first sessions in their new Minneapolis studio space. It’s a celebration of brotherhood, and the “all for one, one for all” mentality that has permeated Hippo Campus’ work since the very beginning. [A limited-edition indie store exclusive vinyl pressing is available.]
