New Album: Roll and Go

Fuck you pandemic, the Dreadnoughts are still here.

Our first album was a Flogging-Molly-ish thing with sea shanties. The second was a klezmer gypsy-ish thing with sea shanties. The third added polka and ciderpunk and Goran Bregovic-inspired eurotrash. Then there was an EP with weird French Mazurkas and hardcore punk. The fourth was entirely about the First World War. The fifth was entirely shanties and songs of the sea. You know what? At a certain point it’s time to stop innovating all the damn time and just sit back and play the stuff you play. And so we did:

Roll and Go is a ‘throwback’ album, featuring most or all of the styles and moods we’ve explored in the past. But with, you know, new songs. Wild idea, huh? you can just write new songs in the genres you already play. Why didn’t anyone tell us this?

Fun fact about the first recording before it was “Legends Never Die”. We printed 50 CDs on our computers and filled the jewel cases with crappy black and white printoff versions of the cover that said “Roll and Go”. Those must be worth millions by now!

Anyway, we are sorry that it is going to take so long to release this whole album. There is a massive vinyl shortage/backup that is Adele’s fault, and the plant is working their butts off making them, but these days you have to release an album with vinyl and they just won’t be ready until June. Sorry! The compromise is that you’ll get to hear a few select tracks before the official release. Hope this is OK? Well, you have no bloody choice, do ya?

Writing and Recording

Now, writing this album was extremely hard: I was raising a brand new baby… in New York… starting March 2020. Uh… yeah. Kid was born literally during the first week of the pandemic in one of the epicenters. Imagine trying to write and record demos of ciderpunk madness in a one-bedroom NYC apartment with a new infant when you’re not allowed to go outside. Uh… yeah.

(By the way, if you want to HEAR some of those demos… become a paid subscriber, they’ll be on here soon!)

Oh, and recording this album? Yeah. Wow. Sadly we had to replace our bass player at the last minute. Our drummer, the Stupid Swedish Bastard, is in Vancouver, the mandolin player and producer Fuzznuts lives in London, our fiddler Seamus O’Flanahan is in Edmonton, AB. I’m in NY city, where we recorded in the middle of a bunch of travel restrictions and pandemic requirements.

And since we had no time, we recorded with no practice. None. Zero. I just wrote some demos, sent them along to the guys, and hoped that they learned them. They basically did, but Jesus, an album with no practice…?

Oh and we had five different guest musicians, recording in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Vancouver, and Bristol, UK.

Oh and Fuzznuts had to play bouzouki on the album and he’s never even played one before. Here is a transcript of that conversation:

Me: Fuzznuts, learn how to play the bouzouki.
Fuzznuts: OK.

And he did. This thing was a teetering mess that could have gone off the rails in a million different ways. But it didn’t. We think? Hooray?

The Stupid Damn Pandemic

Also, we swore up and down on social media that we wouldn’t be one of “those bands” that wrote a bunch of songs about the pandemic. How utterly boring could you possibly get? But the extreme isolation and personal loss that everyone is now sick of hearing about was impossible to escape. As mentioned, Cider Holiday is basically an extended fantasy about dragging people to the West Country, UK and showing them all the magnificent ways there are to get completely blitzed on farmhouse cider. Vicki’s Polka is a tribute to that 65+ generation of polka dancers who were unfairly decimated by the pandemic. The title track, Roll and Go, is about comeradeship in the face of danger. And lots of other songs are angry, defiant celebrations of revelry and rebellion in the face of the all-encompassing dark clouds that continue to swirl around so many of us. The album could have been called Fuck You, Pandemic, The Dreadnoughts are Still Here. Actually, now that I look at that title, I’m thinking it might have been better than Roll and Go:

Fig 1: Much better.

SWEET. Oh well, too late to change it. Put it on the Pile Of Regrets, along with the time one of us accidentally whizzed on a cat in Poland.