First and foremost, we wanted to make sure that you knew that we have new music up on Spotify (or whatever streaming service you use!). All the music from Lay Around That Shack and Song on the Times is now available for your listening pleasure! It’s under the title Recollections Revolutions, and if you’re wondering what’s up with that, read on:
Depending on how closely you follow Windborne’s social media, you may have heard the exciting news that we were named #1 Artist and #2 Album on the Folk Radio DJ Chart for December 2019, ahead of some impressive names!
We are so proud of this, and that news alone would be worth sharing, but there’s also a pretty interesting story behind what got us here. You may be thinking, “When did you come out with an album called Recollections | REVOLUTIONS, and why didn’t I hear about it?!” Well, we’re glad you asked. 🙂
No, you haven’t accidentally missed a big new album release. What happened was this: back in October, we were at Folk Alliance Region Midwest (FARM), which is a regional conference for people in the music industry that brings together artists, promoters, venues, festivals, DJs, and other people who work in music. We attended the New England regional conference (NERFA) last year, and we’re headed to the big international gathering (Folk Alliance International, or FAI) in a week.
At FARM, we connected with Kari Estrin, who is a music promoter and consultant. We got chatting with her about how to raise Windborne’s profile going into FAI and get noticed among the 3000 attendees, and she suggested running a radio promotion campaign in December and January. With the right release strategy and followup, the hope was that we would make it onto the radio charts and have that accolade (and the attending buzz) going into FAI.
However, we were in the middle of tour, didn’t have a new album, and had no way of putting one together in time (this was late October, and in order to reach DJs in time for December play, CDs needed to be in the mail well before Thanksgiving). Kari’s brilliant suggestion was to re-release our last two albums, Lay Around That Shack and Song on the Times, as a special double album with a new name. That way, DJs would have a wide array of options for songs to play, from classic singalongs to pieces with a topical message.
That launched us into what were probably the craziest three weeks of touring we’ve ever done. In addition to performing concerts almost every night from Minneapolis to Pittsburgh, we were also brainstorming a new name, writing copy (so much writing!), finding an artist to do our CD cover, whipping together graphic design, finding and editing photos, compiling audio, signing up for ASCAP (which means we now have our own record label! Wand’ring Feet Records, at your service) and learning about all the accompanying info that makes for effective CD release for radio.
We settled on Recollections | REVOLUTIONS as our title because we loved how the two albums were reflected in that duality. Recollections (ie Lay Around That Shack) represents our roots in American and English folk traditions–it’s an album that has always felt like a harkening back to the music we were raised with. Revolutions (ie Song on the Times) was an obvious choice, with songs of social struggle from the past, sung for today. We dreamed up an album cover that visually represented this duality, with a spinning wheel and a gear joined together by a Windborne banner, and we enlisted the fabulous artist Charon Henning to help us bring that vision into reality. We even came up with a new tagline: old songs, bold harmony
Besides designing the CD and packaging, we had to write a One Sheet (a single page document that describes Windborne, highlights a handful of songs, and generally makes us sound amazing and important), as well as a Track Card. This is what we came to refer to as the “wine tasting notes” for our songs. Each song needed a musical description as well as a content description, which felt equal parts fun and ridiculous to write. Choice examples from our Track Card include:
Slave to Time: Sparse open chords and simple refrain bely the complexity of these intertwining melodic lines in Dorian mode – Inspired by the crisis of climate change, Lynn and Will wrote this song as a call to action with the refrain, “Do not be a slave to time.”
Going Across the Sea: Starting with gentle bass melody and banjo duet ending with an anthemic a capella finish, the song is by turns sweet and spirited, – This enchanting tune is an audience favorite, with its classic story of far-away love and beautiful harmonies that interweave to create a fitting finale for the album.
Did we nail it, or did we nail it?! 🙂 We’ve attached the full One Sheet and Track Card, if you’re interested in reading more. We also created a new page on our website to be digital liner notes for the CDs.
So… we did all that while also on the road, and got everything sent off by the pre-Thanksgiving deadline! Throughout December, we’ve been delighted to see DJs playing our music, and in the end, it did exactly what we hoped, coming in as #1 Artist and #2 Album (behind a holiday compilation album that apparently always gets #1 in December because it’s December).
If you like graphs, you’re in luck! Jeremy set up some fancy tracking software so we could see which songs were most popular, and to our surprise, the winner is:
Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night!
We’ll see what the in-person impact of all this turns out to be when we head off to FAI next week, but we wanted to share that wild ride with you!
