Description
Chuck Mead “Free State Serenade” Digital Download.
Plowboy Records is pleased to announce the release of Chuck Mead’s new record Free State Serenade. Available as a 180g vinyl LP with a download card with two bonus tracks/CD with two bonus tracks & as a 12 track digital album. A wild ride of hillbilly blues and honky-tonk, Mead, best known for his work as frontman for BR549, wrote the album based on the stories, legends, crimes and lonesome open roads of his childhood and formative years in Kansas. Recorded with his longtime band The Grassy Knoll Boys, Free State Serenade was co-produced with Joe Pisapia (k.d. lang, Ben Folds Five) and features special guests BR549’s Don Herron and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Critter Fuqua.
Free State Serenade jumps from jaunty mountain airs like “Neosho Valley Sue,” with BR5-49’s Don Herron lending his fiddle to what Mead calls a “coming of age ditty,” to “Sittin’ On Top Of The Bottom” – a whip-smart ode to “Sittin’ On Top Of The World.” Reaching into the dark lore of Kansas history, “The Devil By Their Side” is a chugging rock n’ roll number about William Quantrill’s murderous 1863 Civil War raid on Lawrence, Kansas.
Mead co-founded three-time GRAMMY nominated alternative country band BR549, who have released seven full-length LPs since the early 1990’s and won a Country Music Association Award for Best Overseas Touring Act. He is also Music Director for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Million Dollar Quartet. Currently receiving high accolades for its Las Vegas and touring troupes, Million Dollar Quartet recently set a new milestone by breaking Chicago’s record for longest-running musical. Mead has released two solo albums, Journeyman’s Wager and Back At The Quonset Hut, with his band The Grassy Knoll Boys.
Track List:
01. Knee Deep In The Wakarusa River
02. The Devil By Their Side
03. Neosho Valley Sue
04. On A Slow Train Through Arkansas
05. Little Ivy
06. Evil Wind
07. Ten Light Years Away
08. Reno County Girl
09. A Short Goodbye
10. The Light Of Day
11. Ain’t Nothing Like The Love A Woman
(bonus track)
12. Sittin’ On Top Of The Bottom (bonus track)
