Cheese, more cheese, and some cheap beer.. please.

Hello!We're cooped up in a cozy little coffee shop in gorgeous Madison, Wisconsin and thought we'd share a few updates from the road. Thus far the tour has gone swimmingly: we've played some great shows, met wonderful folks, seen amazing sights, all without catching ourselves on fire! Not once!As we travel through the Midwest, we're looking forward to seeing some old friends and making our way to New England, where we're sure to gorge ourselves on chowda and make fun of people's accents.We recently printed some new shirts, designed by yours truly. Fashion experts claim they are "rustically modern; glimpsing into the past while paving the way toward the future" and "a triumph in design and a welcoming addition to any fall wardrobe". My next door neighbor claims they are "pretty damn cool".  We've printed up a number of colors, including navy, chocolate, and charcoal. Here's the front and back design, modeled by the dead sexy Ms. Howe. Click on the images to see a bigger pic.

I know, right?!? After (read: if) we get off the road we'll set up an online shop where you'll be able to purchase these suckers. If you're interested now, please send us an an email and we'll work something out.

In other news, brilliant up-and-coming director/filmmaker Nicholas Duarte has produced a short film titled "What you Need" that will feature Tumbledown House's music. Here is the trailer which features our song "My Papa's Waltz". Nick's a fantastically talented individual and has done short films and ads for such small time clients as Adidas and Heinz.You can view more of Nick's videos at his website. I highly recommend the six minute wrestling movie he did for Adidas.That's it for now folks. Thanks for tuning in! Check out our shows page to see where our misadventures take us next.Cheers,TR

Mosquitoes, Music, and a little Mayhem

My wonderfully intuitive and insightful girlfriend bought me a Flip video camera for my 30th birthday. This will no doubt prove to be an invaluable tool in documenting Tumbledown House's adventures, and will also provide hours of ridiculously silly entertainment and countless gigs of worthless footage.I managed to capture a lot of the aforementioned footage during my 30th birthday weekend, which included an ideal camping spot, voraciously starving mosquitoes, The National Folk Festival (in its last year in Butte, MT), and ended, as all birthdays should, with some drunken karaoke at a shithole bar called 'The Party Palace'.As this is my first foray into video editing, it's still a little rough, but hopefully you'll notice a glimpse of promise and  talent, budding through the choppy and poorly thrown together shots, that just needs to be finely honed and nurtured, like a young Spielberg or Almodovar. Then again, maybe not.At the beginning of August we leave for our tour in Alaska, which will likely provide tons of source material for our next movie. Stay tuned.Cheers,TR

Locusts, Plague, and Golf-ball Sized Hail in June

In Montana, June always brings one last good snowstorm. It's as if mother nature just needs to relieve herself one last time before our two beloved months of solid, sunny weather. Everyone here knows this and is somewhat prepared. We were not, however, prepared for what happened yesterday:

Here's a pic I found, taken by Andy Meehan, of the hail that fell in our fair town yesterday. Now, it didn't take much research to find out that this isn't that uncommon, especially in parts of the country such as Oklahoma or other places I wouldn't want to live. But,  for this Arizonan, I found the experience downright morbid and unsettling.The hail fell hard, breaking windows, denting cars, and scaring the shit out of dogs throughout Bozeman. Our beloved van, Rocinante, had two of her own windows damaged. Keep in mind, these aren't "Let's just run to the auto glass store and replace them" windows.. No, they are much more like "Wow, I haven't seen these manufactured since the early 90s" RV conversion windows. I believe her resale value just took a dive comparable only to BP's stock value. Our once pristine trailer is now riddled with dimples (of the unflattering variety) and landlords all over town are facing a barrage of complaints. I wouldn't be surprised if the damage caused reaches into the millions.The forecast today and tomorrow calls for more thunderstorms, so I must go now to buy plywood, food supplies, and rosary.Cheers,TR

Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt..

Last week we picked up a documentary on Pete Seeger called 'The Power of Song'. It was especially moving, full of great archived footage, and worth recommending to anyone. We were inspired to dig up some old union music and add it to our repertoire. Now, for some of you this song may be familiar, but apparently it wasn't too well known in the mines I worked in growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona.Here's a great video of Tennessee Ernie Ford singing 16 Tons:There are a couple of hilarious things about this video. The obvious, of course, is that a man with a mustache like that would name his fists 'iron' and 'steel'. Maybe Subscooby said it best in the comments of the Youtube video when he remarked "it seems a little incongruous, a song about back-breaking labour being sung by a guy who looks like he would be more at home sipping martinis while smooth talking Miss Sweden 1955". Indeed, I couldn't agree more.A little bit of research (read: visiting the wikipedia page), revealed that Sixteen Tons was claimed to have been written by Merle Travis, although another man named George S. Davis (who had actually been a coal miner) claimed that he was in fact the true author.The song refers to the truck system in which workers were paid in vouchers redeemable at the company store instead of cash. This system prevented them from saving any money and forced the laborers into debt bondage. We found this all very fascinating, and there's a good possibility that more union music can be heard at TDH shows in the future.Cheers,TR