11 years in, I (Ken Bethea, lead guitarist ) still can’t quite believe what I’ve been doing with my life.

We just finished recording our sixth album, Drag It Up. It’s the first for our new label, New West Records. After tinkering with our limits on the previous five releases, I think we’ve settled in with what we do best on Drag It Up - solid writing and performances, with enough bells and whistles to make things interesting. It reminds me of our earlier recordings, we mix bluegrass, surf, country, rock, folk and some good old-fashioned psychedelia.

We started the recording on a frozen February day in Woodstock, N.Y. at Dreamland Studios, a 19th century country church, full of stained glass and ghosts. We finished up in sunny San Diego at producer Mark Neill’s vintage studio, four of us stomping, screaming and picking guitars into one microphone. Mark is a hard-core recording traditionalist, far removed from today’s digital world. After working with modern technology on our previous three studio trips, we found old school 8-track recording both refreshing and challenging.

During the course of the project, we broke a $6000.00 microphone and my poor old classical guitar. We ate New York barbecue twice and would go back again. I played guitar with a pencil and both Rhett and I tried to play some bass (we failed). We stood in a giant echo-ey church and stared at each other. We stood in a tiny 8x8 room and stared at each other. We sang about satellites, stars, moonlight, cavities, death, cheating, Texas, friendship, parenthood, God and storms.