Daisy House - Emma In The Morning

I had the great pleasure of reviewing Doug Hammond of Daisy House last year, and this time I am talking to his daughter Tatiana about her background and about the band’s beautiful new album, Beaus and Arrows. It’s a departure from their first album’s folk rock in that it introduces music hall stylings and pure pop that could have come straight from the 1960s. It is nice to see the band stretch their wings, and I wish them the best in achieving the recognition they so richly deserve.

What is your earliest musical memory? Do you have any vocal training? Because the clarity of your voice is simply superb.

First of all, thank you. It’s definitely improved on this second album. I’d never recorded anything before the first. I think the sound of my voice owes a lot to the ladies I’ve sung along with over the years, like Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny, Chrissie Hynde, Mary Hopkin, Vashti, Feisty (Leslie Feist, ha), Mama Cass, and Marianne Faithfull. All of them are truly superb singers and my Dad’s given me tips like making sure to pronounce lyrics clearly, and breath control. My most important vocal training has come out of our relationship; it’s always been my Dad’s keen ear, his funny analogies, and our shared musical references that kept me going when it was hard for me in the beginning. When I get behind the mic, we basically start speaking in hilarious code to each other. Earliest memory? If you grow up with my Dad, music transcends memory. ;) He made a mix tape for nap time for me when I was little that had Sebadoh, Talk Talk, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Clannad, and Joni Mitchell on it - all mellow stuff. So I suppose “New Grass” is my earliest memory, either that or “This Frog” by Kermit ;)

What has been your involvement in the creative process with respect to songwriting and instrumentation on this new record? I saw the video where it looks like you are playing guitar and piano.

My Dad and I have collaborated on lyrics for some of the newer songs. Lots of the songs from the second album were based on things I was experiencing at the time. He knew if he turned my anecdotes into songs, I could own them when I sang. We’ve got a new co-written song called “Battle Days” which is a sweet, “I’ll follow the sun”/Leonard Cohen/Beatles-y ballad, with half the lyrics in French, which I’ve studied for 7 years now. In the video for “Raise High The Roof Beam Carpenter,” I sat down at that piano and accidentally blonked out that chord while the camera was rolling so Dad threw it on the album track. He writes and plays almost everything you hear, like 90% of it, and I interpret what he writes. I intend to write a bit more of my own going forward, but he’s been doing this since he was 10. It might take me a little while to catch up to him.

Have you and your Dad played out live with Chris since the first album was released?

Chris Stiles was a high school friend of my Dad’s and they hooked up after decades, and jammed a bit for old time’s sake. Chris had those opening chords for “Ready To Go”, and Dad, who’d been kicking around the idea of a freak-folk song collection, went home and finished it off in a Fairport Convention style for me to sing, which I’d never done before at that point. Chris and Daddy worked like that for about half the 1st album; a few chords from Chris, Daddy finishing it off. Pretty soon we had a whole album, but Chris wasn’t able to commit much time to it from the very beginning; he’s had a full time job and family to deal with, and since music is just a hobby for him, he basically bowed out. Dad and I have done about 17 shows “unplugged” locally and been invited to do some pretty amazing shows in the UK; like a 500 year old Royal Observatory! But until I graduate in May, touring is problematic. Once I graduate, look out!

What are your favorite tracks on the new album? What was the hardest song to record?

I like them all, but I get visibly giddy when I listen to “Time to Make Up For;” the instruments are so playful. I love the majesty of “Beaus and Arrows,” and the string arrangement my Dad came up with for it is amazing. I also love the melody and lyrics to “Why do you Dive so Deep in Beauty.” My Dad sings that one, and when I hear it my soul smiles. Hardest to record? Probably “Woman From Walkern,” I have allergies and they always hit when I’m back home. “Woman” was sung through a handful of tissues! I also really, really like “Raise High The Roof Beam Carpenter”, which my Dad wrote when he was 21. He likes to say, “I had to wait 30 years for another 21 year old to sing it properly”. “In Between Girl” was written in about 15 minutes while we were recording my vocals on something else. We love Sixties pop music in general; that’s a favorite and Dad wrote “Time To Make Up For” about me and my boyfriend. A sweet song.

Do you only work on Daisy House when you’re home on school vacation, or do you have ideas you communicate with Doug as they come to mind?

No, we’re always swapping song ideas and Youtube videos. My musical education never ends, and I don’t think we’ve had more than three conversations in the last few years that didn’t at least touch on music. We talk all the time about it, even when I’ve been away overseas.

What has been your biggest influence musically and artistically?

The Sixties (and the folkies, also present in the Seventies). I love the sounds of the Sixties. I love the enthusiasm and the freedom they had to be playful and innovative that I hear in things like Sandy Denny and Joni Mitchell especially, but also in Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Merry Go Round, The Association, The Left Banke etc. I like the fact that experimentation was more ubiquitous in pop culture. Creativity and “weirdness” and “music for music sake” seemed to be more encouraged back then by record labels. I think that creativity is coming back today, though. I think there are a lot of people turning away from over-commodified music, and a renewed search for what feels more like “authentic art and expression.”

Do film and literature ever come into play as an influence? It appears so since your song “Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenter” is a J.D. Salinger title.

Definitely. “Raise High” is an old song of my Dad’s. It’s his nod to Dylan. We like to give our songs lots of richness, so if any art form inspires us, some of it’s mojo will go into our work. Folk tales are also a really good starting point for cool spooky things. So the Child Ballads and other old stories are inspiration for a lot of our folkier numbers (“Two Sisters,” “Why do you Dive”, “Emma”, “The Woman From Walkern”, “Beaus And Arrows”). Most of them have either a folk tale feel or were adapted. You may also notice we reference Cain and Abel in “Beaus and Arrows,” which is possibly one of my favorite songs on the album, and definitely our richest, in terms of its epic sound and story. The Bible, like folk tales, has big sin, big mystery, and big poetry in it. There’s nothing out of bounds for what we do.

Besides conquering the world, what would you like to see happen with Daisy House?

More radio. More press. More shows. More videos. When I think of Daisy House “conquering the world,” I think of our songs reaching across the world and I imagine people I’ve never met smiling the way I do when I hear these songs. I also think it would be nice to have the opportunity to inspire kids coming up, the way I’ve been inspired, to explore wit and creativity, rather than accepting conformity to a standard that tells girls they have to get breast implants and tattoos and be “transgressive” or something like that. I’d like our music to remind people that you don’t have to get things “perfect”, that the boundaries of life and self-expression are much wider than currently understood.

What can fans look forward to with upcoming musical works?

I think after the first album, we had come up with a solid folk-rock template, so we developed that theme a bit further on “Beaus And Arrows”. We had a lot of fun playing with hybrid folk/pop themes, so there’s “molten-folk” as my Dad calls it on “What’s Your Time Bought?”, 60’s folk go-go on “In Between Girl”, Baroque-folk… you get the idea. We really enjoyed making the pop stuff on B&A so I think we may be ready to drop our “El Camino”. I’d rather become the first “Daisy House”, instead of the next Mumford, and do for Folk-Rock/60’s Pop what the Black Keys did for blues-rock and the White Stripes did for mid-Sixties British invasion/Garage rock. We go to sources like they did, but it’s a slightly different vein of forgotten greatness that we mine that translates to modern kids as something fresh. Daisy House is generous music, and very old school at heart. Who knows? It might even be revolutionary.

From: http://active-listener.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-chat-with-in-between-girl-tatiana.html

Buckethead - Spokes for the Wheel of Torment

So Buckethead has someone send us some mp3’s of his new album without any comment or album art. We are struck by the “Spokes” track and instantly visualize animated Hieronymus Bosch in our heads. We scan a few of his paintings in and make a 15 second test animation. A week or so later we drive to Buckethead’s secret headquarters and play him the test. He freaks out and takes us into his recording area, right there on the wall is a huge Hieronymus Bosch poster. Buckethead had been imagining the painting coming to life when he wrote the song. This was one of the most effortless things we had ever done, it felt like it was meant to be. This video was created almost entirely from Hieronymus Bosch paintings with a few extra paintings from Frankensuess. Compare BH’s body to HB’s “Prodigal Son” painting to get an idea of how things worked.  From: https://mindbombfilms.com/projects/buckethead-spokes-wheel-torment/

Buckethead is one of the most bizarre and enigmatic figures in American underground and experimental music since Parliament-Funkadelic birthed their bevy of cosmic characters in the mid-'70s. An accomplished multi-instrumentalist best known for his virtuosic command of the electric guitar, Buckethead is one of the instrument's most recognizable contemporary innovators, his rapid-fire riffing, near-robotic fretwork, and idiosyncratic lead lines combining elements of Yngwie Malmsteen, Adrian Belew, Slayer's Kerry King, P-Funk's Eddie Hazel, and avant-improv artist John Zorn's Scud-attack sax abuse. His first group, the San Francisco-based metal-funk combine the Deli Creeps, were a regional success, but disbanded before they could release anything. Buckethead's solo career has been more productive, thanks mostly to the motivation of Zorn and Bill Laswell, the latter of whom Buckethead has also recorded and toured with in Praxis. Laswell has also produced a number of Buckethead's solo albums (including Dreamatorium and Day of the Robot) and included him on more than a dozen one-off recordings with the likes of Hakim Bey, Bootsy Collins, Anton Fier, Jonas Hellborg, and Bernie Worrell. In addition to releases including 1998's Colma, Buckethead has also contributed soundtrack material to such films as Last Action Hero and Street Fighter. Buckethead returned in 1999 with Monsters and Robots, after which he joined the short-lived re-formation of Guns N' Roses. A steady stream of releases followed into the 21st century ranging from the contemplative Electric Tears to a more electronica/rock hybrid, and collaborations with San Francisco's underground hip-hop scene. In the following decade, he averaged a few releases a year, teaming up with dozens of artists, including Les Claypool, Iggy Pop, and Mike Patton, and in 2008, he collaborated with actor/musician Viggo Mortensen for Pandemonium from American.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/buckethead-mn0000594765#biography

Spirit - Live French TV 1970

If I recall correctly, Spirit got the biggest label push of its career around the time of the band's second album, The Family That Plays Together. Fueled by the Top 30 success of the single, "I've Got A Line On You," the album was prominently featured on every album rack of nearly every store I frequented at the time (including old-line discount retailers like Grand-Way.) Unfortunately for Spirit, the roster at Columbia Records and its affiliate labels in 1968-69 was HUGE! With high-powered, high-profile acts like Simon & Garfunkel; Chicago; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Bob Dylan; etc, all demanding label attention, I think if you didn't have a hit single burning up the charts, you tended to fall off the CBS radar. As great and innovative as Spirit was musically, CBS never seemed to find a way to push them over the top to that mega-stardom-success level that other label acts achieved. To their credit, CBS did stick by the band and retained Spirit on the company's own Epic label through the "Feedback" album (after the original Ode distribution deal ended in late 1970.) Without question, Spirit is one of my favorite '60s bands and there is no denying they should have been more successful.

I think people who weren't around in the 60's and 70's have a hard time understanding how competitive and evolutionary pop music became, how music marketing was at that time. Throw in the dynamics of keeping a band together amidst a lack of money and you can see why the era unfolded as it did. These were the adolescent years of pop music - it was growing too fast to keep it’s attention focused on anything but a few key artists. There was a 'leading edge' of 'current' sound. Just one year could make a difference as to whether your sound was 'dated', whether you would get billed for a show, or recorded, or given airplay. There were only so many radio stations and so much time in a given month/year. Crowd this finite amount of time with the exponentially increasing sophistication of pop music, the numbers of artists and albums coming out, and its easy to see why a lot of great artists got shunted to the B and C tiers. It didn't necessarily have to do with talent.  If you decided to have a rockabilly revival band in 1969 you were a goner. There would be no one stepping up with money to market you or your sound. If you decided to do this within the last twenty years or so - you could make a solid paying career out of it. As for Spirit - I remember them getting decent radio airplay around the turn of the 70's. The song Mr. Skin off of Dr. Sardonicus was a 'top 40' type radio hit in 1972. So it’s not like they were unknown. They, like a lot of other great bands then, just didn't get the same exposure as the biggies.

From: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/why-wasnt-the-group-spirit-a-bigger-success.187989/

 

Tim Hart & Maddy Prior - Bring Us In Good Ale

In 1969, Ashley Hutchings was keen to leave Fairport Convention, the group he had founded with Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol and others. Fairport had just made Liege and Lief, an album of traditional songs performed by a rock band, which is regarded 25 years later as “seminal” in it’s fusion of two diverse musical styles. Hutchings knew little of traditional folk music until he began researching the songs on Liege and Lief at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, when he became aware of the unique value of the EFDSS as a resource with details of thousands of traditional folk songs. Previously favouring American Music (Bob Dylan, etc.), Hutchings was instantly hooked on traditional music, but it became clear that the majority of Fairport regarded Liege and Lief as a one-off project, and were not prepared to commit themselves to further pursue that direction in the immediate future despite the acclaim which greeted the album—vocalist Sandy Denny, who had known about traditional material for several years, particularly preferred to pursue her own original songs rather than follow the traditional route. As a result, Hutchings left the band, after a discussion with Hart & Prior in which he found them kindred spirits, as Hart recalled: “At Keele Folk Festival, we all sat around and got annoyed by the fact that electric input to folk music was coming from the rock side rather than from the folk side. We had a long discussion one night, Dave & Toni Arthur and Maddy & I and Ashley, then Maddy & I gave Ashley a lift back to London and we got talking further. At the time, Ashley was trying to form a band with Sweeney’s Men, and we were good friends of theirs and knew they were about to split up. As Sweeney’s Men collapsed, Andy Irvine and Johnny Moynihan left to go solo, and that left Terry and Gay Woods, who joined with Ashley and Maddy & I, and decided to form a band. It was a fairly sort of vague thing, really.” That “vague thing” became Steeleye Span, and between 1969 and 1978, the group released eleven albums, several of which reached the UK chart; Hart & Prior were the only members of the band to feature on all eleven. Some of these albums have been reissued on CD by BGO records. In the early 1970s, Hart & Prior were given the opportunity to make another LP, Summer Solstice, as a duo while still fronting Steeleye: “We were more than happy—it wasn’t a restriction, it was a chance to make a record with a proper record company. Maddy & I were still working as a duo at that time and had a live repertoire to which we were adding new material all the time, so we just recorded our current repertoire, but we did it in 8 track or 16 track studio then, which was quite an advantage—we were able to do overdubs and put strings on it and all sorts of exotic things, and cover up our mistakes. There are lots of mistakes on those first two albums—when Maddy & I got our words tangled, the producer said ‘Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, what’s the next track?’, so we carried on.”  From: https://mainlynorfolk.info/steeleye.span/records/timhart.html

Cheer-Accident - Like Something To Resemble

Emerging from the incredibly diverse crucible of music that is Chicago, Cheer-Accident embodies and re-affirms the “promises made” by previous generations of progressive rock, post-punk, and post rock bands — the creation of a thoroughly new rock-based music. There are bands with pretty melodies, bands that rock, bands that dazzle with exalted technique, bands that make you laugh, and bands aiming to perplex even the most intrepid listener. Cheer-Accident is all those things and more, truly a band for the 21st century. Cheer-Accident wrap creativeness inside an inviting enigma of honeyed vocals, harmonious pop melody, and thorny dissonance. They have the rare ability to synthesize and juxtapose pure pop, thundering rock, and avant-garde complexity and ambiguity, intuition and intellect, sweetness and sarcasm, to create a stunning signature sound.

When I was five years old (or maybe younger; I know I had not yet made it to kindergarten), my favorite activity was to bop around to Herb Alpert's rendition of "Zorba The Greek." You know the part of the song where everything stops, there's a brief silence, then it starts back up, slowly and quietly? Well, from there, it just builds and builds and builds in volume and intensity, the tempo making it’s way from slower-than-adagio to faster-than-fast high octane über-polka in the course of sixty seconds... and I would work my five-year-old self into a frenzy, racing around the ottoman in the living room, faster and faster, matching the song's energy, and finally, collapsing into ecstatic oblivion at the song's conclusion (at 4 minutes and 25 seconds).
By the time I'd reached that aforementioned age, my parents had acquired five of his albums, all of which I listened to voraciously. Herb was my guy. I was obsessed. He's the reason I started playing trumpet in 6th Grade and drumming (or, rather, cereal boxing) well before that, probably before I'd learned how to walk. When I'd entered junior high, and found myself in the school band, I'd managed to track down almost every one of those thirteen original Tijuana Brass albums that came out in the '60s. Most of these I'd found in the "easy listening" section at the record store, where I'd noticed another familiar name that would consistently pop up: Burt Bacharach. I'd become enamored with him as well, initially by learning that he had written an impressive number of songs that Herb would go on to record, but also because he had achieved ubiquity on the airwaves, via artists such as The Carpenters, BJ Thomas, and (most notably and prolifically) Dionne Warwick.
Fast forward three decades later to this scenario: Phil Bonnet (our guitarist for the entirety of the '90s) and I are talking at Solid Sound (the studio in Hoffman Estates, IL where he'd become quite beloved, engineering a multitude of local bands from Chicago and its nearby suburbs), as we take a break from recording the basic tracks for "Salad Days" (along with Jeff Libersher and Dylan Posa) on Sunday, January 31st, 1999. Phil is very excited to have recently gotten his hands on the Burt Bacharach box set, and we are listening to it in the control room. As we sit there together, blissing out to the sublime strains of "Our Day Will Come," he looks over at me and says, "I never use this word, but he's a... (pause)... (sheepishly)... genius."
But Phil was not merely "our guitarist" or "our engineer" - he was also a dear, dear friend. He and I lived together (in Streamwood, then Palatine) from the fall of 1990 to the summer of 1992, and we became very close during this time period. Sometimes eerily close. On one summer day in 1991, after we'd been living together for over half a year, I had decided to cut off all of my long hair. Phil came home that night after a lengthy studio session and, as he walked through the front door, we just looked at each other in shocked silence: he, too, had cut off all of his long hair. On another day that same summer, we tooled around Streamwood in his Suzuki Sidekick, cranking my Herb Alpert mixtape. Did that Sidekick have a sun roof, or can I still feel the sun's warmth on my face and arms because that moment unlocked one of my earliest and fondest memories: riding in my mom's Galaxy 500 convertible, listening to "Whipped Cream & Other Delights" on her car's 8-track player?
How perfect was it that Phil and I were in a dissonant/abrasive/aggressive rock band together, and yet our strongest convergence was in the area of "easy listening?" Indeed all four members of this '90s incarnation of Cheer-Accident shared a deep passion for this music, and there were murmurs of dedicating an entire album to this genre, starting in the mid-'90s. These murmurs grew louder and more insistent (accompanied by serious demos being recorded by all involved), and by early '99, there were specific plans being made to record this selection of songs - just in time for Phil's sudden and devastating death on Tuesday, Februrary 2nd, 1999.
And now, one year after Burt's death and 25 years after Phil's death, we have unlocked this treasure chest of heartfelt songs (three of which have the latter's stamp on them), and Cuneiform Records has taken on the noble task of availing them to the public. Pandemically recorded by one Steve Albini (whose name is virtually synonymous with "easy listening") at his charmed studio, Electrical Audio in Chicago, this is surely our most severe example of "delayed gratification" to date. I know that "severity" and "easy listening" do not exactly go hand in hand, but we always have had a rather BachAssarach way of doing things. Thank You For (Easily) Listening. -- Thymme Jones / Cheer-Accident.  From: http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/bandshtml/cheeraccident.html

Sarah McLachlan - The Path of Thorns (Terms)

Discovered in her teens fronting a new wave band in Halifax, Sarah McLachlan (who subsequently relocated to Vancouver, on Canada’s other coast) quickly evolved into one of the most captivating voices in pop music, yet another vital figure in Canada’s rich legacy of innovative singer/songwriters. Equally adept on piano and guitar (credit years of classical training on both), McLachlan’s primary instrument on Touch is her sweet, reedy voice, reminiscent of Sinéad O’Connor but unfamiliar with stridency. Although she was only 20 at the time, the album shows her to be a songwriter of promising lyrical insight. Only the haunting “Ben’s Song” and the single “Vox” (included on CD in original and extended remix form) boast the compelling hooks that distinguish her subsequent work, but Touch is an impressive debut.
The album made McLachlan a star in Canada; not surprisingly, the transitional Solace reflects a mood of lost innocence. “Black,” “Mercy” and “Lost” are as melancholy as their titles suggest, and only a lighthearted cover of Donovan’s “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” injects any cheerfulness. Atmospherically framed by producer Pierre Marchand (who would repeat the role on her next two studio albums), Solace is graced with thoughtful arrangements, sensitive playing and, most important, melodies that equal McLachlan’s sharpening skills as a lyricist. The first four cuts — “Drawn to the Rhythm,” “Into the Fire,” “The Path of Thorns (Terms)” and “I Will Not Forget You” — are outstanding. (The limited-edition seven-song Live, containing concert versions of material from Solace and Touch as well as “Back Door Man,” was released only in Canada.)
Even the cover of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy — a photo of the artist gazing happily into the camera, where previously she had averted her eyes — signals McLachlan’s growing confidence and aesthetic maturation. After touring for over a year, McLachlan had visited Cambodia and Thailand to narrate a video documentary. Exploring the emotions generated by those experiences, the twelve songs of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy are less self-indulgent, boasting a new sense of objectivity that increases the emotional impact. “All the fear has left me now/I’m not frightened anymore” she announces on the title track. “Hold On” confronts mortality, while “Ice” meditates on addiction. The jazzy “Ice Cream” balances the pervasive darkness with light.  From: https://trouserpress.com/reviews/sarah-mclachlan/

Cadillac Sky - You Again

Me: The band went from traditional bluegrass to a hodgepodge of genres, what led to this change?

Cadillac Sky’s Bryan Simpson: simply becoming more comfortable with who we are and more confident. We just realized after playing a little while together that we were the ones who were gonna have to live with the music we made on a nightly basis and we wanted to truly be excited about the music..so we just sort of stopped doing so much editing and naturally we started to create music that was a blend of all the stuff we listened to that inspired us…there was no big plan really, we just wanted to keep ourselves interested.

Me: How did the band start?

Bryan:I basically met Matt at a benefit concert we were playing separately  and we talked about the possibility of doing something together. I had some songs, he had that banjo, and we both had a desire to do anything besides get a real job. Day after we met we got together and played a little more at my mother-in law’s house which was located in between the two of us - and C-Sky was born…for better or worse.

Me: When did David Mayfield join?

Bryan: Like Sept 2008 I think. Feels like he was always a part of the band. I don’t remember much pre- Mayfield.

Me: Who did he replace?

Bryan: Mike Jump

Me: What did he bring to the dynamic?

Bryan: Confidence. A sort of frenetic energy. A wealth of talent.

Me: What was the highest moment in the band?

Bryan: there were a lot of them. One, for me, was this little non-descript club in Des Moines, IA in like early 2010 we played on a Tuesday night. Our show was supposed to start at midnight. All day at this club they had speed-metal shows, death metal whatever…and so we pulled up and the place is packed with Metal Fest attendees - I remember we went on after Cattle Decapitation - and their show ran long. After we got there we found out we weren’t going to get to soundcheck until midnight and then there was also gonna be a band open for us that we didn’t know about, and I just figured that this was gonna be THE show - the one where its just us and the guy waiting to sweep up after us. We didn’t go on till like 1:30 and somehow, by the grace of God, there was this group of about 75 people that were at the show with an unbridled enthusiasm. They lived and breathed every song. and were crazy kind to us, and that’s when I knew - man, this thing has spread bigger than I ever dreamed it would.

Me: When did you guys become such good friends with Mumford and Sons?

Bryan: Telluride 2010.

Me: What was it like recording with Dan Auerbach (Black Keys)?

Bryan: Easy. Laid back.

Me: When making Letters of the Deep, did you know the immensity of the album?

Bryan: No. Still don’t. I knew we were making something that we liked- finally.

Me: You do most of the singing. Do you also do most of the writing?

Bryan: I wrote about 75% of the material. But once David joined the band we had another writer in the band - a great one in fact - and so me and him wrote some together, and then, you know, honestly, once you place a song in the hands of Matt, Ross, and Andy they change and become something new. So everybody sort of wrote all the songs we did - one thing that was cool, is that, unintentionally, every member had a song on Letters.

Me: When did you decide to leave?

Bryan: Telluride 2010.

Me: When Levi Lowery took your place, were any new songs written? If so were there plans for a new album?

Bryan: I think they had plans for a new album.

Me: What caused the band to realize it was time to end?

Bryan: It never ended - just stopped for a while. “On Hiatus” remember? I’m not sure why really - I wasn’t around…

Me: What is everyone else doing now?

Bryan: Ross is playing with Mumford and Sons, Matt is doing sessions, spending time with his little girl, and playing on the road with an artist on Arista; Brent Anderson. Andy is teaching - being a dad to his two little girls - and David is leading the Parade around.

From: https://folkthisblog.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/cadillac-skys-bryan-simpson-interview/