The Tater Blog

Posts Tagged ‘MP3s’

poster

And so… circular! The latest Tater CD menagerie is finally here! They came in on Monday, along with new posters, download cards and shiny new display units! The stickers arrived today, so the UPS guy is very aware of us at this point!

Hope to have them in all the online locations as soon as possible – they’ve already shipped off to CD Baby and Amazon, and DigStation will have it up very soon for download as well. If you want a CD copy and just can’t wait until it wanders online, contact me and I’ll work out how to get it to you. It’ll have to be check or Paypal at this point, as I don’t have a way to take credit cards outside of the usual channels (like CD Baby).

Theresa Pollak Awards for Excellence in the Arts

I don’t think this has made it to the blog yet – The Taters won this year as Best Ensemble (and I don’t think it has anything to do with our wardrobe. Although, with Greg’s shirts…?). Here’s a bit about the prize, from the Richmond magazine website:

Richmond magazine invites you to celebrate the artists whose words, fine art, music, choreography, acting, directing, film and photography enrich the cultural life of our regions. Since 1998, readers have been asked to nominate artists to the panel of selectors, made up of former honorees and arts leaders, who then choose the honorees for recognition with the Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts at our awards ceremony in October.

It was a huge surprise to us, since we had no idea we were even up for a nomination. There’s a write-up in the October issue of Richmond Magazine, which is on the stands now, and you can also read about it on the Richmondmagazine.com website. And while we’re at it, here’s a bit more about Theresa Pollak. Thanks to all who nominated us, whoever you may be!

or rather, one fine evening was had on Saturday, at the 5th (6th? 8th?) annual TaterSons Christmas Party show in Ashland. We’ve been doing these shows for sometime now with our Tater pals from up the road apiece, the Grandsons, and it gets more fun each year. At several points in the evening there were 4 or 5 Taters, 4 Grandsons, and I could swear I saw at least a few ladies dancing, and a lord or two a’ leaping on stage (or maybe that was just Harry. It gives us a chance at least once a year to pull out the stops on most of the Christmas songs we know, and a few that we don’t -- would you expect any less from a Taters show? Some of the best parts are trying new arrangements on the fly and having them work!

Here’s an example -- Greg was riffing around on guitar with “I Can’t Turn You Loose” as we were about to start a song, and Chris (from the Grandsons) picked up on it, so Silver Bells turned into a most unique rendition! Take a listen -- Silver Bells

We hope to be having some of the Grandsons on the new CD, doing some horn parts, and after this show I’m especially excited about the prospect. As a lot of you know, there were on several cuts on our live CD Just One Night, and that was a blast as well.

Thanks to all who came out and making it a fine, fine evening. I’ll leave you with this for now (no, we didn’t actually do this song, but in the future…?)

One of these days we’ll finish a Christmas album (maybe after we finish the current album… focus… focus…), but for now we do have 2 songs up for sale on a Taters MP3 page, as well as several free downloads. Still testing out a few ways to handle the free downloads, including Box.net, so let us know what you think.

In the meantime, you can also listen to the song for free on MySpace  – go to http://www.myspace.com/tatermusic add “My First Christmas” to your MySpace playlists as well!

CDs, that is. An interesing post on Wired’s blog about the sale of portable CD players, which is up 50% from last year in the UK. They cite price and ease of use as a few of the reasons why some people are going back to this technology.  In Taterland, we’re always trying to keep an eye out for ways to get our music into as many hands (and heads) as possible, so this is at least one argument in favour of continuing to press CDs. As with most bands, we’re seeing a growth over the last few years in our digital download sales, and we’ll certain keep making those available, as well as any new media that comes along (haven’t gotten started on the Taters Blu-ray yet!), but I don’t see those little shiny discs going away in the near future. Now, as for other formats… ?