Front Country — winners of the Rockygrass and Telluride bluegrass festivals — return to Atlanta's Red Light Café for a special Sunday evening show! ATL favorites City Mouse open the show.
$7 Adv – $10 Door
Doors @ 7 PM
Front Country formed in 2011 as a collective of the Bay Area’s finest young acoustic talent, Adam Roszkiewicz, Jacob Groopman, Jordan Klein, Leif Karlstrom, Melody Walker and Zach Sharpe joined forces to play a monthly gig with friends in San Francisco’s Mission District. They quickly found a musical rapport that was open to challenging arrangements, unique covers and original songwriting. Since then they have continued to expand their repertoire and push the boundaries of bluegrass on the national scene. In 2012 they won the Rockygrass band competition in Colorado and followed up in 2013 with a win at Telluride becoming the third band in history to win both contests. Also in 2013 lead singer Melody Walker won the Chris Austin Songwriting competition at Merlefest and mandolinist Adam Roszkiewicz was nominated for Grammy for his work with the Modern Mandolin Quartet on their album Americana.
2013 and 2014 have seen Front Country break onto the national scene with festival performances at Rockygrass, Old Settlers Music Festival, Wintergrass, Grass Valley Bluegrass Festival and many others along with headlining performances at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Along with performances and Telluride, Summergrass and IBMA's Wide Open Bluegrass Festival, 2014 saw the release of their highly anticipated debut album Sake of the Sound in September. Chris Pandolfi of the Infamous Stringdusters says of the album "Front Country have arrived, the latest acoustic ambassadors to emerge from the California coast. This first album will certainly serve them well, meeting all the technical criteria without getting lost in, focusing instead on the substance of these great songs. They represent their roots well, both musical and geographical, but the door is clearly open to transcend both. With Sake of the Sound, Front Country are well on their way".
"Front Country draw on the ever valuable lessons of bluegrass while making music that is distinctly their own........Front Country have arrived, the latest acoustic ambassadors to emerge from the California coast" Chris Pandolfi (Infamous Stringdusters)
"Front Country's willingness to stretch the bluegrass boundary while maintaining the acoustic integrity of the music will solidify them as one of the top new bands on the acoustic / bluegrass scene" Woody Platt (Steep Canyon Rangers)
City Mouse is the collective spirit of Atlanta-based songwriters, Brian Revels and Michael Hudgins. Born in the latter part of 2012 amongst the trash heaps and decay-filled dumpsters of the Big Peach’s outskirts, City Mouse is a bastard-spawn of too many nostalgic nights of drunken conversations about a shared sense of appeal for the Americana movement.
One lucky day, these rat bastards stumbled into the Tin Roof Cantina to find Jenna Mobley sawin’ a fiddle in half with Atlanta-folk badasses, Sailing to Denver. And after a few songs and few beers they worked up the courage to get a name and number (for business reasons, of course).
Generally accompanied by a banjo (plus Brian’s overzealous, tempo-tempting footstomps), a guitar, and a double-bass, played by the talented Miss Mobley, the Mouse’s lyrics are the words that keep these brokeass, hopeless romantics spending all their tip money on microphones and strings.
That is only to say that they mean them. And hope you can relate in this collective human experience. This rat race.
…Mouse race.