Trampled By Turtles Electric Ballroom, London - November 16, 2018 New

Trampled By Turtles

Electric Ballroom, London - November 16, 2018

New Album: Life Is Good On The Open Road - Out Now

"This is older, wiser, looser, tighter" - MOJO
"A tour-de-force of screaming fiddles and driving banjos" **** - Songlines
"'Life Is Good On The Open Road' is the sound of the band's newfound liberation" - Sun

The celebrated Minnesota sextet, Trampled By Turtles are set to return with their long-awaited new album Life Is Good On The Open Road, set for UK commercial release on November 16, 2018, due for release via Thirty Tigers. After an indefinite hiatus, the band are returning with their first album in four years following previous Billboard-charting records which have included three No.1s on the Bluegrass and Folk charts. Having toured with the likes of Hiss Golden Messenger and Deer Tick previously, the band will support the release of the new album with a show at London's Electric Ballroom on November 16, 2018.

In the immortal words of Tom Petty, “You belong somewhere you feel free.” For the Duluth, Minnesota group, finding that freedom meant taking a risky approach; rather than continuing relentlessly with a band that had been successfully touring, writing, and recording together for 15 years, they pulled the brakes. This brought a standstill to a career that had seen multiple Billboard-charting records, two appearances on ‘The David Letterman Show’, and performances at major festivals including Coachella, Bonnarroo and Lollapalooza. The six musicians who make up Trampled by Turtles — Dave Simonett, Tim Saxhaug, Dave Carroll, Erik Berry, Ryan Young, and Eamonn McLain — would then go a year without being in the same room and by the time they convened at banjo player, Dave Carroll’s cabin in October 2017, there was a pressing question on everyone’s minds: Would the magic that first united them around rapid-fire string music in the early 2000s still remain? Would they still feel like a band? 

Their meeting at the cabin came at an unusually emotional time. It was the day that the country learned about the tragic mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival, and the day that one of the group’s shared musical heroes, Tom Petty, passed away. “We started cracking beers and hanging out, and all of a sudden it was like, holy shit,” Simonett recalls. “So we went down by the lake and brought a speaker and a bottle of whiskey, and just sat and listened to like six Tom Petty records straight.” Within an hour of converging at the cabin ideas were passed around. By the second day of their retreat,Trampled went live on Facebook with a performance of Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers,” and by the end of the week, they were already workshopping a handful of new songs that Simonett had written.

Tracking for their new album was completed in just six days at Pachyderm, Cannon Falls, Minnesota, with the band self-producing the album with engineer, Nick Tveitbakk and recording live to tape. Life is Good on the Open Road is the sound of newfound liberation for the group, now unshackled from any feelings of caution of claustrophobia.

The band weave instrumentation together throughout this latest effort, forging a bed of sound for Simonett’s expressive voice to work atop of. Each song narrates its own story, telling tales of nights gone wrong to love that’s been lost and dreams that still need pursuing, and the group shifts in unison from tender ballads to raucous barn-burners, sometimes in the same song. Simonett’s lyrics, which have grown ever sharper over the years, occasionally rise up to generate emotion fervour: “I’ve been moving logs just to keep the fire burning / My voice is gone but the band wants to play,” he sighs on “Right Back Where We Started,” while the title track offers pure poetry: “Run so fast through the fields in May / I forgot what I had to say / I’ve never been through a harder day / Than the one that left your ghost here.” 

As the band prepares to swing back into action, perhaps there’s no better line to summarise their return than on that title track, “Life is Good on the Open Road”: “The light inside you comes and goes / But it never really goes out.” 

EU Tour Dates
Nov 3 - Take Root Festival, Groningen, NL | https://bit.ly/2H3uNdz
Nov 4 - Paradiso Noord, Amsterdam, NL | https://bit.ly/2H52POy
Nov 5 - Nochtwache, Hamburg, DE | https://bit.ly/2EPkcx2
Nov 7 - Hotel Cecil, Copenhagen, DK | https://bit.ly/2JPCXnH
Nov 8 - John Dee, Oslo, NO | https://bit.ly/2HsNR4p
Nov 9 - Tryckhallen, Falkenberg, SE | https://bit.ly/2ESKMVQ
Nov 10 - Kulturkvarteret, Kristianstad, SE | https://bit.ly/2EQzamw
Nov 11 - Folk o Rock, Malmo, SE | https://bit.ly/2qERHgn
Nov 13 - Nalen, Stockholm, SE | https://bit.ly/2qBhZRu
Nov 14 - Pustervik, Gothenburg, SE | https://bit.ly/2EOJfQF
Nov 16 - Electric Ballroom, London, UK | https://bit.ly/2ERx6dO