We are so excited to share The Ark stage with these two lovely duos. Jenny & Robin Bienemann hail from Chicagoland. By turns hilarious and heartfelt, this cutting-edge acoustic duo melds original and traditional music with an elegant hint of jazz.  Robin’s wild guitar stylings harken back to the earliest forms of jazz, blues and country guitar. Jenny’s voice and guitar playing evokes comparisons to Joni Mitchell and Ricki Lee Jones. Both write songs that are celebrations of modern life in all of its wonderful, strange and hilarious beauty, garnering airplay on National Public Radio, Dr. Demento, and The Midnight Special.

Ruth and Max Bloomquist celebrate 45 years of performing their style of Acoustic Americana, with roots in Folk, Bluegrass, and traditional Country music. Ruth is well known for her songwriting as well as her striking alto voice. She was a winner of Merlefest’s Chris Austin Song Writing competition in 2003 with her gospel number, By The River. The pair’s 2010 CD release, Turn Back a Page reached No. 5 on the Folk DJ Airplay Chart with 4 songs in the top 100 for that year. A Youtube video featuring Michigan Girl, a track from that CD, has been viewed over 395,000 times. The pair has toured in southern France nearly every year since 2008. A live CD was released in 2012 and a Christmas EP in 2015. The couple released their sixth full length CD, On A Canvas Painted Blue, in October 2017. 

As always, we’ll swap songs, collaborate and have a great time!

So what’s up with this new CD? You still have it as a Pre-sale on your website. Didn’t you just have a CD release concert? Can I get a copy now? Is it available on itunes or spotify?

Geez… so many questions. So here’s the short answer. Yes and No.

Yes, you can buy a copy here. https://annieandrodcapps.com/product/wtf-presale/

We have them in hand and will gladly mail you a copy. Digital download will be available here shortly. But the usual major online retailers won’t be selling the full album just yet.

And here’s why. We’re embarking on a major publicity and radio push coming up here in September and October in hopes of reaching a much wider audience. The OFFICIAL release date is September 6. From now until then we’re working with a couple of well-respected publicity professionals (Art Menius Consulting and Geraint Jones of https://www.gpromopr.com/) who will be putting “When They Fall” into the hands of dozens of major media outlets throughout the U.S., UK, Ireland and Europe in hopes of garnering some nice reviews and radio spins.

Then in September our radio promoter, Kari Estrin (https://kariestrin.com) will be dropping this CD to hundreds of Folk and Americana radio DJs around the world.

Some pre-release tracks have been leaked to a few local stations and media, but in order to maximize the impact, we hold off with the national distribution until that September.

So what can you do? Well, if you don’t already have the CD and want a copy you can always order one from us. If you’re a digital music person, we’d love it if you reserved a copy in advance from itunes/apple music or amazon. That looks good for us. The title track is available for download now and if you buy that one song, they’ll deduct the .99 from the cost of the full record when the time comes.

At some point in the near future we may ask for your help requesting our music on your local station, playing it on Spotify and spreading the word.

We’re so grateful for all the local and regional support we’ve received so far and can’t wait to hear what the rest of world has to say about “When They Fall”.

It’s here!!!! We’re over the moon to have this recording finished and in our hands. A collection of songs that were waiting for the right project to find a home. This was it, we think. There are songs that were written over 10 years ago and performed only once or twice over that time, like “Beautiful Scarecrow” and “Happy New Year”. Some not at all “Build the Fire” and “Myths and Miracles”. Not because we didn’t like them, but sometimes a song fades off our radar in favor of others we like to play more often. Many are more recent and written with this project in mind, like the title track “When They Fall” and “(That would do) Some Good”, “While it Lasted” and “Poor Old Me”.