It’s Issue #3 of the Vile Richard Download Club. This month’s download is Away In a Manger, a track from this year’s Vile Christmas album. The track features Andrew Vanhorn and Emily Fennell on vocals. Vile Christmas 2009 can now be ordered for digital download or postal delivery at http://vilerichard.com Last year’s album sold out very quickly, so this year we’ve updated it with a couple of new tracks and actually made it available on the site for orders etc....
Way back before Andrew joined the band, I (Olaf) recorded an album I called “Lucky Me”. Andrew did pop by to record some vocals on the album and you’ll hear him if you listen carefully here and there. One of the standout tracks on this album is Lazy Eye. To give it some kind of context, let me just say that I was having dinner with a couple I knew from school....
It’s time for our inaugural Download Club posting. The rules are simple. On the 1st of each month, we will post something free for you to download. The item will be available for one week. After that point, it will go offline. To be notified of our monthly downloads, you can either: a) Join the mailing list b) Follow our Twitter feed c) Subscribe to this blog So, let’s go ahead and kick things off....
If you’re in Toronto on Oct 17th, please do stop by Fionn MacCool’s on the Esplanade. We’ll be there from 9:00 pm to 1:30 am playing our tunes plus lots of Country, Rock and Oktoberfest covers. The evening is sponsored by Paulaner Lager. There will be midway games, beer in Steins, girls in dirndls and, of course, Vile Richard. Admission is free. Come on by and say hello! We rarely play Toronto more than once per year, so this is a good chance to come by and hang out....
Over the time that the band has been together, we’ve recorded a lot of musicwhich we’ve never released. What we’d like to do is release some of this music (and other cool stuff) for free on a monthly basis. If you’d like to be a part of our “Download Club”, there will be 2 ways to get the files: Join our mailing list Follow us on Twitter The rules of the download club are simple....
A last minute show has dropped into our laps, so we’re going to pack up our gear and play an evening of cover tunes at the Loyalist Cove Marina in Bath, Ontario. The occasion is the Easter Seals Regatta. We’ll be playing all night: 7 - 11 pm and the set list will be Country and Classic Rock covers. I can’t remember that last time that we played purely covers, so this will be a fun one....
It’s probably a little bit early to be talking Christmas. I mean retail stores haven’t quite got the decorations up yet, but it feels like it might happen any day now. Having said that, we’ve been thinking about Christmas a lot as a band and we’re working on a new and improved Christmas album for 2009. The 2008 project was a lot of fun and we were very, very happy with it, so we figured it would be a great project to try and fill out a little bit more....
Yes, we’ve finally embraced the microblogging phenomenon. It seemed kind of silly at first, but we now see that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you tweet or enjoy reading the occasional tweet, you can now find us at http://twitter.com/vilerichard Tell your friends!
OK, so maybe Coverville isn’t a podcast just for music snobs, but it is one of my favourite sources of musical gems. I don’t really subscribe to a lot of podcasts, but this is one that I listen to fairly regularly and, I must say, a show which has led me to discover a lot of great tunes which I’m not sure I otherwise would have heard. I’m not going to list them off right now, but that’s mostly because I hope to list off a lot of these songs in future....
If you’re in or near Sarnia, ON today (Feb 28th, 2009) you’ll find the band playing at Paddy Flaherty’s between about 9:30 PM and 1 AM. We’ll be playing all night, playing our own songs as well as a bunch of covers that we’ve been playing over the years. If you do stop by, please be sure to say hello! On an unrelated note, I see that there’s a new Depeche Mode video on Youtube....