The Black Lillies
August 2, 2019 · Doors open at 19:00
The Black Lillies
Over the summer of 2017, Americana darlings The Black Lillies launched an experiment … a songwriting challenge for themselves that forced them to be accountable to their fans.
“The Sprinter Sessions” were a series of live videos broadcast via Facebook Live from the back of their Sprinter van while driving down the highway or at stops around the country, from the frozen cityscape of Philadelphia in late winter to the side of a Midwestern backroad with fallow fields stretching to the horizon. In various combinations, the Lillies — founder/songwriter Cruz Contreras, bass player/songwriter Sam Quinn, guitarist/songwriter Dustin Schaefer and drummer/songwriter Bowman Townsend — committed themselves to recording a brand new song every week. They weren’t lavishly orchestrated or fully fleshed out; sometimes lyrics had been written mere minutes prior to the broadcast. The songs were performed on acoustic instruments still grimy from shows the night before, and the guys didn’t bother to pick out their finest threads. Quinn, more often than not, played shirtless.
“You’re putting songs out there that weren’t finished, weren’t perfectly arranged, and we might barely have been able to perform them,” Contreras says. “We might be tired or hungover, playing them at a truck stop or wherever. It wasn’t glamorous — but it held us accountable to that a rate of productivity that was really important, and it kept our fans up to speed with the evolution of the group — even if a lot of them did offer to send us clothes or food!”
More than anything else, “The Sprinter Sessions” set the stage for “Stranger to Me,” their new album. The band’s first since the departure of longtime member Trisha Gene Brady, it has been highly anticipated by fans and members of the media who were curious to hear the “new” Black Lillies. It’s been a slow roll-out, but the new record is the sound of a group that’s been renewed and reinvigorated, anchored to the traditions that made it so beloved by so many but chiseled down to the bare essentials: Four men. Four friends. Four artists, each of whom could rightly put out a solo record tomorrow, tied
together by a bond to something that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Farm Truck
Farm Truck is an Alt Country / Americana band from Ramona California.