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Ripped from Stem to Stern

by Real America

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krotix
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krotix solid alt Americana and really good. I liked 16 horsepower, tarnation, and laura Cantrell. This has a lot o the seafaring type of feel to it and in these trump days.......a sort of call to shore. Favorite track: S.O.S. America.
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about

In the spring of 2014 Real America split the Northwest stem to stern, from Seattle to the Great Salt Lake. In the process, they tore through every page of the Americana songbook—from sea chantey and country ballad to church-choir space jam and high-concept candy rap. Their only form of identification was their signature denim. Their only currency, their melodious wit.

The band embarked on a ghost ship from Ballard harbor and immediately signaled for help. The nation was in trouble. America needed an SOS. Or did somebody need America’s help? Listen to SOS America, and decide for yourself.

Things looked brighter in Portland. The band fed on elk burgers, beer, and old-time American arcade games, before hauling down to Oregon City to fall into the hospitable embrace of the Stuart Ranch. It was there before the roaring fire that they wrote Mother’s Jugs. In honor of mothers. And jugs.

The next day the band burned on to Bend, working out the harmonies to Morning Outside Portland the whole way. They pitched a yurt in the juniper scrub along the bank of the Deschutes and jotted down ideas for Northwest Dirge. The next morning they wrote and recorded Bend in the River of Deschutes inside the yurt, which at that point contained the country’s highest reported level of methane particulate in a domed habitation.

Onto Boise, where Real America made history. Previously a strictly-studio operation, they played their first live show at a downtown honkytonk saloon. The locals feted the singing drifters with whiskey, dancing, and heaps of deracinated Basque food. The band reciprocated the only way they knew how: Real America-style, which consisted of urinating in hot tubs, crashing hotel breakfast conferences, and drinking coffee by the penisful at the Flying M.

After pounding asphalt to Park City, the band laid up for a night of rest in the snowy peaks, lulled by high altitude and low-ABV Utah beer. But the next morning they were in fine form. Fueled on a 10-lb bag of gummy worms, they ripped through Arches and picnicked in a windstorm atop the rocks. Come dusk, in the red-walled valley outside Moab, they came upon a lone RV, which they converted into a stage for a thunderous rap battle: Rootbeer and Donuts. According to local clergy, there was so much caffeine and sucrose in the air, the Mormons in the area inadvertently sinned from sheer contact high.

Upon reaching the end of the road in Salt Lake City, the band worked out The Girl Who Left Skunk River (a sequel to last album’s sleeper hit Skunk River) and laid down rough cuts of their tracks in the living room-cum-all night recording studio in the only place Real America is paid to stay: Embassy Suites. Six days on the road had given the boys seven songs, matching saddle rashes, and only a mild hangover.

The following year, the band brought everything together in Chicago in the rented house of a known con artist. There, with a couple of hound dogs, a snowstorm, and enough weed cookies to turn a Bosnian birthday dinner into an odyssey of the soul, the band beefed up the album with the Great Lake revenge chantey Ripped from Stem to Stern and a pedal-steel and organ cover of Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

So here you have it, America: nine gifts from the road. The road, where Real America lives, where there is always music to be found. Enjoy!

~Real America

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released December 18, 2015

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