Hey there folks,
I started a music page on facebook for those of you interested.
It's more likely that I'll be posting random places I'm playing, photos, etc.. there.
I'm currently in upstate NY in the process of mixing my next record
which will hopefully be available this fall.
You'll find the facebook link here:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/pages/Gill-Landry/206677060127?ref=s

See you down the road,
Gill

Carrot beet celery ginger juice! Lots of water! It’s 2:16a.m.. Changing every moment. I can hear an angelic choir in the flushing toilet. I’m stumbling on the universe in the comfort of my rented home, thinking too much. Scratching the surface and finding a frightened animal hiding from sweet surrender!!

I met Pete Seeger a couple weeks ago and he told a proverb I’ve been thinking about and I’m going to misquote him terribly but it had something to do with us using Arab numerals, the number 1000 in particular representing your life “the 1= your health, the first 0 = your home and dreams, the second 0 = your wealth and accomplishments, the third 0= your reputation” then he said “take away the 1 and what do you got?..... Three big zeros! So take care of yourself!”
The man was born in 1919, he turns 90 this year!! I felt like I'd followed him into battle once or twice ten thousand years ago, a beautiful human specimen!

Howdy folks,
I just finished recording a new album of my songs with the Felice Brothers in an upstate NY chicken coop they gracefully converted into a studio. It’s got some great guest musicians including them and other friends of mine like Jolie Holland and Sam Parton singing, a dirtbag boys choir, horns, keys, drums, strings of all sizes and function, some usual suspects, and a good collection of songs if I can say so myself!?! I hope to have it out later this year!!

-Meanwhile-

I’m on the road playing Banjo/Dobro with Old Crow Medicine Show again this year and it’s been a great one so far! This month we’re hitting the Southeast with the Felice Brothers opening the shows from Tennessee to Florida to New Orleans & back.
I’m also really looking forward to our Australia and New Zealand tour in March! I’m going to take a holiday down there for a few weeks afterwards, mostly in New Zealand. If there’s any New Zealanders or Aussies out there with info on must see’s and do’s please let me know!

Here’s a list of the dates:

February 2009
Thursday 5 | Freedom Hall, Johnson City, TN
Friday 6 | The Millenium Center, Winston-Salem, NC
Saturday 7 | Tivoli Theatre, Chattanooga, TN
Sunday 8 | North Charleston Performing Arts Center, SC
Tuesday 10 | The Venue, Gainesville, FL
Wednesday 11 | Tampa Theatre, Tampa, FL
Friday 13 | House of Blues-New Orleans, New Orleans, LA
Saturday 14 | The Lyric Oxford, Oxford, MS
Sunday 15 | Minglewood Hall, Memphis, TN

March 2009
Wed 4 | Kings Arms, Auckland, New Zealand
Thu 5 | San Francisco Bathhouse, Wellington, New Zealand
Sat 7 | CMC Rocks the Snowy's, Thredbo, Australia
Sun 8 | Golden Plains Festival, Meredith, Australia
Wed 11 | The Zoo, Brisbane, Australia
Thu 12 | The Metro Theatre, Sydney, Australia
Fri 13 | The Forum, Melbourne, Australia
Sat 14 | Mossvale Music Festival, Meeniyan, Australia

See you down the road!-
Gill

It has been for a while but I've had some people writing me about it
and thought this might make it a little easier for those interested yet not inclined to ask.

Hey Folks,

The Ballad of Lawless Soirez is being released today in Europe on Nettwerk.

And I hope all you folks across the pond buy it so I can bring you another one,

it's that simple.

See you down the road....

 

Miracle Road

I just took a drive back to my hometown Lake Charles, LA from Nashville, TN where I am currently sweating at 2am. I left town on the Natchez Trace (an amazing road) and it reminded me of a time a few years back when me and a friend of mine were taking the exact same trip in an old 1972 Volkswagen transporter I had.

I've gone through more vehicles than year's I've been alive. We used to buy cars out of tow yards for $75, then get a few bucks together and head out of town to see how far they'd go. My favorite was the Thunder-chicken which I believe was an old Chevette. My friend Sam painted a chicken across the hood with flaming wings like a Thunderbird and we drove it from the Northwest down to Las Vegas and up through the Utah/Idaho wilderness and back sold it for $150 and I think the damn things still running. But anyhow, in all this time I've owned two of the exact same make, model, year and color Volkswagens. 1972 Burnt Orange Volkswagen Transporters. I only bring this up because it has it's own story. I bought my first one from Volkswagen John an eccentric, mumbling, mechanic up in Mountlake Terrace, WA, I think I still owe him a few hundred for it. He gave me this advice.

Volkswagen John- "What are you going to do when you get there?"
Me – "Huh?"
Volkswagen John- "The same damn thing you're doing the whole way there,.. take it easy!"

I took that bus and drove it down to Eugene, OR, which brings me to the next bus…
6 years later…
I had just come back from France for love which I came to find out is just chemicals, but anyway, I found myself homeless and broke living in Sam's dirt floor garage at the onset of a rainy Oregon winter. I got a couple of my boys together and we hit the streets fringing some local festival and I drummed up $300. Sam told me he found a bus I could buy for $300 which I saw as Club Med compared to my current digs. As it turns out it was being sold by the girlfriend of a guy who died dancing at a party the same week that I first arrived in town in my other bus and it had stayed parked in that yard a few blocks from where we lived for 6 years until I came along and bought it. I had to go the funeral home and get the guys death certificate to get the title.
This bus became the bane of my existence,.! It almost cut off my thumb, left me stading by the side of the road or pushing it down the side of the road enough times that I should have surrendered but I found myself again and again huddled in that engine compartment cursing and bleeding. This story is about one of those times with the first bus and how the spirits intervened.

The Natchez Trace is 444 miles of two lane highway through Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi starting in Nashville and ending in Natchez. There's no traffic at night you can drive 100 miles almost and not pass another car. The long northern leg of it goes through no towns and see's no crossroads pretty much until you get to Tupelo and south of Tupelo it's the same. Anyhow, it was a beautiful night and we were clicking away at 55 miles an hour when -POW- the engine died and out went the lights. I coasted to the side of the road (it has no shoulder to cry on) and it doesn't take me all of 30 seconds to realize the trouble we're in. Not only is there almost no chance of finding an auto parts store that will carry anything for a vintage Volkwagen in rural Mississippi, there's a good chance there's not a mechanic that will work on it either. They always say the same thing-

Asshole Mechanic - "Hee, Haw, this is one of them old hippy buses. You know what you need? "
Me – "No, What?"
Asshole Mechanic – "Take this thing to the dump! Haw, Haw…"

We had no cell phones, fuck cell phones anyway they had no towers. It must have been 3 in the morning and we hadn't seen a car in hours when down the road came a Fastback pulling a Karman Ghia . Out of the car steps an old, one armed man, with a long white beard named Ezekiel! Turns out the points had fried and without delay he crawls into the engine compartment and changes the points with one arm!!! I spent several years afterwards struggling to change them with two arms and a friend. Anyhow, the odds of anyone with a white beard and a biblical name driving a vintage Volkswagen through Mississippi at three in the morning on a weeknight are "?" in a million, don't know, depends how often Ezekiel drives down that road but I chalked it up to a miracle and recall it as an example of the empyrean functioning of the world outside the cloud of the modern devices which rob synchronicities and operate as cosmic gyps. So to say if we had cell phones there would be no story just the story of a phone call. I've gone back to a land line and candles. Too many people making plans by computer light these days, I'll take candlelight any day, but here I find myself writing to I know not who in front of a computer (the hypocrisy!!!). I wrote all this mostly because I wanted to say fuck cell phones-

Some folks have been wondering what I've been up to, why I don't have any shows etc... Right now I'm in the H block of this vast temporary apartment complex filled with Nickelodeon kids and other would-be child actors who spend their time talking a freakish kind of shop around a pool that I swear is the water supply to this place in Los Angeles where I'm working on a record with Old Crow Medicine Show. I've been holding off dates to do this recording project with them and so far it's been great, it's being produced by Don Was (a great guy and producer to some of my favorite artists) at the old Charlie Chaplin lot in West Hollywood. After this there's another project I'm really excited to be a part of, I'll be recording with Sheah Askins (otherwise known as Shenandoah Sassafras) and members of the Yard Dogs Road Show making a record of songs she wrote in San Francisco. I'm working on a new record of my own as well soon as I get the time and I hope to have it available for release this fall. I've got lot's of new songs I've been working on that I'm looking forward to releasing. I'll be touring this year on and off with Old Crow and I'll be doing my own shows to boot along the way. I'm also currently putting a picture book of short stories together with photo's I've taken over the years and stories to match, no timeline on this but I'm really enjoying the process. Hope your all enjoying your days they're precious and numbered. Take care of yourself and I hope to see you down the road. -Gill

I am driving to Los Angeles.

Lee Marvin came in through a second door and charged down menacing, carpeted hallways under a glass sun. There were no prayers on his lips. The blistering wind that came from his mouth was violent and ignorant, vomiting up from the dark corners of his mind like a drunken midget. Haughty outlaws were riding metallic mouthed railroads, sliding sleek over silver crossties in calico clamdiggers. There were soundless fevers on earless mailmen carrying hatboxs made for plaid hairpieces outside a 2 story flat in some English quarantine with cops straight out of "Planet of the Apes" (the good one with Charlton Heston). Under the spackled sheetrock ceilings of some military dungeon my best friend and I found ourselves in prison in what must have been Bangkok, Louisiana. There were asian vampires biting negligee outside a Volkswagen graveyard near a Cajun daiquiri stand. I made a lot of promises to a lot of strangers and we ended up getting released some ten years later and drove down to South America somewhere, I think it was the jungle mission district of San Francisco, Bolivia from the looks of it, Zebu was there. We were looking for a carnival in cat sweaters near some nuclear vault.