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Hot Buttered Rum - Something Beautiful
Twenty years in and the Butter's still churning steady! From Hot Buttered Rum's first rowdy Northern California house parties and backcountry trips, it's been clear this is a group of guys with something to sing about, something to chase after, something to keep them going through the long highway miles between their hundreds of nationwide club dates and festival slots. Two tremendous decades of these "somethings" have led Hot Buttered Rum to their latest contribution, Something Beautiful. Recorded and written in the hills the band has loved since their earliest days, Hot Buttered Rum stayed close to home in all respects on their latest album. With special appearances by fellow Californians Holly Bowling on piano, Barry Sless on steel guitar and California state champion Alex Sharps on fiddle, Something finds the band in rare form, loose and inspired in the way folks can be when they truly love making music together.
Something Beautiful Track Listing:
1. Another Man's Song
2. Highway Sign
3. Something Beautiful
4. Good One Gone
5. What Do I Know
6. The Trial of John Walker Lindh
7. Lay Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor
8. Well-Oiled Machine
9. Church is Where You Make It
10. Dovetail Joint
Hot Buttered Rum is:
Erik Yates – Vocals, Banjo, Dobro
Nat Keefe – Vocals, Guitars
Bryan Horne – Upright Basses, Vocals
James Stafford – Drums, Mandolin, Vocals
Guest Musicians:
Alex Sharps - Fiddle
Holly Bowling - Piano on Track 4
Barry Sless - Pedal Steel on Track 6
Hot Buttered Rum - Lonesome Panoramic
For nearly two decades, Hot Buttered Rum has attracted a truly multi-generational audience across the States with their high energy and fun-loving performances that showcase their stunning instrumental and vocal ingenuity. Hot Buttered Rum is excited to independently release Lonesome Panoramic, their sixth studio album, on July 20, 2018.
“Lonesome Panoramic is the result of different thematic and stylistic threads that Butter has been chasing over the years: driving uptempo stringband tunes, layers of dark lonesome drum grooves, letting things go, and embracing what we have,” says HBR’s Nat Keefe.
The band’s two vocalists and songwriters, guitarist Nat Keefe and multi-instrumentalist Erik Yates (mainly 5-string banjo, also resonator and acoustic guitars), take turns leading each of the 13 well-crafted originals on the album. Rounding out the band, Bryan Horne delivers, in true athletic form, his talents on upright bass along with charismatic fiddler and harmony vocalist Zebulon Bowles and drummer/percussionist/mandolinist James Stafford, providing a warm and solid rhythmic foundation.
Self-produced, Lonesome Panoramic was recorded at Panoramic House Studio in Stinson Beach, CA, along the Panoramic Highway. With majestic views of the western Marin County coastline, it is a landmark destination studio built with recycled materials in the‘60s and renovated and upgraded into a studio in 2013. The studio has been host to several big-name indie bands, including My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, and Thee Oh Sees. Lonesome Panoramic was engineered by Robert Cheek (Band of Horses, The Chris Robinson Brotherhood), mixed by Zebulon Bowles, and mastered by David Little.
Yates says, "Making music on the Panoramic Highway carried a lot with it for me. It's one of the roads I grew up driving, towards the ocean, the mountain, the woods, and, eventually, back home again. I hope some of these tunes can do the same for the listener."
Much of Hot Buttered Rum’s music is inspired by the northern California landscape and Lonesome Panoramic conveys a broad range of what Hot Buttered Rum offers. The album kicks off with a pair of buoyant bluegrass tunes, opening with their more traditional lineup of guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, with Stafford forgoing the drums for mandolin. They change the pace a bit on the third track, “Country Tunes & Love Songs,” adding in drums for this mid-tempo Americana rocker; it is one of a few songs on the album where Yates trades his banjo for the Dobro; another is “Treasure Island Blues.” Peaceful and reflective, “How Short the Song” is performed as a trio with velvety string arrangements, while “When that Lonesome Feeling Comes” is a more lively ragtime boogie gospel.
Rooted in the trajectory of west coast bluegrass, Hot Buttered Rum began in San Francisco in 1999 after Keefe, Yates, and Horne connected through backcountry trip in the High Sierras; they added drums in 2008 and have since progressed into upbeat improvisational mix of song-oriented string music with a groove that interplays between bluegrass, folk, rock, and country. Their years of touring have given the band the chance to work and play with an extensive cross-section of musicians including Phil Lesh, Chris Thile, Kyle Hollingsworth, Brett Dennen, and Robert Earl Keen, to name a few, as well as being named “The Official Bluegrass Band of the San Francisco Giants.”
With Lonesome Panoramic, Hot Buttered Rum wades the full width of the river from the shoals to the deep waters with a passionate, laid back attitude and they are thrilled to share this new album with the world.
Lonesome Panoramic Track Listing
1. You Can Tell 2:11 (Yates)
2. Sittin’ Here Alone 3:14 (Keefe)
3. Country Tunes & Love Songs (ft. The Coffis Bros.) 4:29 (Keefe, K Coffis, J Coffis)
4. How Short the Song 3:27 (Yates)
5. Treasure Island Blues 4:46 (Yates)
6. Never Got Married 2:50 (Keefe)
7. Spirits Still Come (ft. Rainbow Girls) 4:54 (Keefe)
8. Sleeping Giants 5:04 (Yates)
9. Leaving Dallas 4:31 (Keefe)
10. When that Lonesome Feeling Comes 4:07 (Yates)
11. Mighty Fine 4:25 (Keefe)
12. The One that Everybody Knows 8:04 (Yates)
13. The Deep End (ft. ALO) 4:55 (Keefe, Yates, Lebowitz, Gill)
Hot Buttered Rum is:
Zebulon Bowles - fiddle (all), backup vocals (2,8,10,13), Pacific Ocean (7)
Bryan Horne - upright bass (all)
Nat Keefe - acoustic guitar (all but 4), lead vocals (2,3,6,7,9,11,13), backup vocals (8,10)
James Stafford - drums and percussion (3,5,6,7,8,10,11,12,12), mandolin (1,2,9)
Erik Yates - 5-string banjo (1,2,6,8,9,10,11,12,13), lead vocals (1,5,8,10,12,13), acoustic guitar (4), resophonic guitar (3,5,7), backup vocals (2)
Guest Musicians:
Jamie Coffis - vocals (3)
Kellen Coffis - vocals (3)
Rainbow Girls: Erin Chapin, Caitlin Gowdey, Vanessa May - backup vocals (7,13)
Dan Lebowitz (ALO) - electric guitar & vocals (13)
Zach Gill (ALO) - vocals (13)
Hot Buttered Rum – The Kite and the Key: Part 1
“This EP was an exercise in letting go. We went in thinking we were going to record a few down-tempo acoustic tunes, the kind you’d hear us playing for an acoustic encore, or on somebody’s porch. Tim steered us in a different direction, went for some of the darker outliers among the twenty or so songs we sent him and pushed us to make what you now have before you, a kind of meeting place for our highs and lows. I think it’s some of the best music we’ve made so far.”– Erik Yates
Recorded: July 13-17, 2015
Mixed: October 19 & 20, 2015
Recorded and mixed at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco, CA
Nat Keefe: guitars, vocals
Erik Yates: banjo, guitar, dobro, lap steel, piano, vocals
Bryan Horne: upright bass
Zebulon Bowles: 5-string violin, piano, vocals
Lucas Carlton: drums, percussion
Tim Carbone: vocals
Produced by Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth
Mixed by Tim Carbone & Hot Buttered Rum
Engineered and Mixed by Jacob Winik
Mastered by Jeff Lipton at Peerless Mastering, Boston, MA
Assistant Mastering Engineer: Maria Rice
EP Artwork & Design: Pumpernickel
1. Weary Ways
2. I Wanna Know
3. Maybe I Just Feel That Way
4. First Rodeo
5. So Much
6. You Be the Fiddle
Available for download/listening here:
iTunes
CD Baby
Spotify
Hot Buttered Rum – The Kite and the Key: Part 2
“Ralph Stanley is an inspiration to me on so many levels. My dad has a dozen of his albums on vinyl and I grew up listening to these on Sunday mornings, his lonesome mountain tones contrasting with my warm suburban Californian childhood. Out of all the bluegrass music founding fathers, his is the sound that makes my hair stand up on end. There’s the driving groove, and the soulful, tuneful way the songs are put together. It was a pleasure to have to listen though hundreds of Stanley tunes and a struggle to decide which to record with HBR.
“I’ve always wanted to do a straight-ahead bluegrass album. This 3-EP project was our opportunity, and Erik and I jumped on it with fervor. Sally Van Meter was the obvious choice to produce us and our first call. Sally worked with us a lot on how to sing this music. There’s a fine line between imitating the Southern accent of Ralph and Carter (we’re all from the Bay Area!) but also singing the tunes “right” with the correct inflection and intonation. We learned a lot. I’m pleased with where we got with this, it feels real to me.
“We did this as a stringband, with no drums, and had old pal David Thom come play mandolin. HBR began as a stringband, so it was exciting to return to this format and get our chops up. Even with drums, we always try to be informed by what we’ve learned as a stringband. Every instrument has to groove and fill a small part of the fabric of sound.
“Ralph’s story is as inspiring as his sounds, as I recently read in his autobiography. He was the shy brother of the Stanley Brothers. His older brother Carter could fill a room with his personality, but Ralph was more back-of-the-beat. They were a hard-touring stringband throughout the 50s and 60s. Carter died in 1966 and Ralph had to set out on his own, and eventually found his biggest success with “O Death” and the “O Brother Where Art Thou?” soundtrack and tour in 2002. He finally found the success he deserves, but it was a long, hard-fought struggle with years of uncertainty and grueling work. I find inspiration in this story for my own efforts in music. Ralph kept doing the music that inspired him and wasn’t influenced by trends, and eventually the world came to him.” — Nat Keefe
“There were so many reasons to let the music of Dr. Ralph Stanley do its work on us, as players and listeners and lovers of all things lonesome. It was an easy choice. Stanley’s tone, taste and timing, as both a player and a singer, have been a defining force in bluegrass music since the music emerged in the 40s. And he’s still gigging! I’ll be thanking my stars if I have half his longevity. I think there’s something in him that won’t quit, that never has, a kind of rawness that chills me every time I hear it. He’s a hero of mine, and I’m glad to’ve been able to play both some of his best- and lesser-known numbers with this band. David, Sally and Laurie were great guides on this journey, and Jacob’s analog engineering was flawless.
“In my ideal world, Hot Buttered Rum would do a trad EP every year or two to keep us honest, get us not only listening more keenly to what the founding fathers of this music did but trying to record that sound, to go all the way through it and see what we bring out the other side. Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Doc Watson, Reno & Smiley . . . I’d love to go right down the list! For now, Dr. Ralph it is, and if we never get the chance to try something like this again, I’ll’ve been glad to’ve done it once in my life, to walk into a studio with an archtop Gibson banjo and try and pick and sing like Ralph Stanley. Damn. Falling short has never been so rewarding . . .” — Erik Yates
“The Kite And The Key- Part 2 is one of those wonderful recordings where you will come to know the Bluegrass roots that Hot Buttered Rum relied upon for inspiration for their more progressive musical leanings that have now brought them full circle with their music. As the second of a three-disk project, HBR brings home for me and for all listeners what Bluegrass music- real Bluegrass- is. With such strong commitment to the Stanley Brothers recordings of nearly 60 years ago, Hot Buttered Rum give the old songs a new spirit, playing with such passion to keeping it real in the mountain style of bluegrass so exemplified by the Stanley Brothers themselves.” — Sally Van Meter
Recorded: Sept 11-14
Mixed: December 2-3
Recorded and mixed at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco, CA
Nat Keefe: guitars, vocals
Erik Yates: banjo, vocals
Bryan Horne: upright bass
Zebulon Bowles: 5-string violin, vocals
David Thom: mandolin, vocals
Produced by Sally Van Meter
Engineered and Mixed by Jacob Winik
Mastered by Jeff Lipton at Peerless Mastering, Boston, MA
Assistant Mastering Engineer: Maria Rice
EP Artwork & Design: Pumpernickel
1. Pig in a Pen
2. Ramshackle Shack on the Hill
3. A Lonesome Night
4. How Mountain Girls Can Love
5. Red Wicked Wine
6. Uncloudy Day
Available for download/listening here:
iTunes
CD Baby
Spotify
Hot Buttered Rum – The Kite and the Key: Part 3
“These are the songs we want to play at a late-night festival set. There are a few road-tested tunes here that we’ve had a lot of fun with over the years. I think about all the different ways we’ve played Desert Rat and Entangled! They’ve gone so many places. The challenge here was to bottle that energy in a more concise studio arrangement. Kyle had us do a bunch of free improvisation in the studio, with him at the keys calling out ideas. I think that put us in the right mode to bright a light energy to these tunes.”
“Desert Rat comes from reading Edward Abbey’s books ” Desert Solitaire” and “The Monkey Wrench Gang”. In Monkey Wrench, the character Hayduke is freshly back from Vietnam and seeing the back end of the military-industrial complex destroying his beloved Utah desert. He takes matters into his own hands. I wrote this after my dad challenged me to write something from someone else’s voice.
“Entangled comes from conversations I had with two friends who got wrapped up in heroin. So easy to entangle, so painful to unwind! I related their experience to an old girlfriend’s (less-destructive) drama.” — Nat
“I can’t decide whether I like Kyle Hollingsworth better for his skills as a producer, a keyboard player, or a human being. He’s damn good at all three. He pushed us on this installment to be spontaneous in ways we normally reserve for the middle of a second set, by either nudging us from the control booth or hustling down into the tracking room to show us what he was thinking with a Wurlitzer or a piano, then staying there while we finished it.” — Erik
“Working with Hot Buttered Rum was so great. From creation to inspiration we were all on the same page, plus digging into that true analog sound and recording process was a refreshing experience. The analog approach brought out the best in both of us. I’m psyched to have had a chance to meld minds with these guys.” — Kyle Hollingsworth
1. Cherry Lake
2. Music's Been Good to Me
3. Desert Rat
4. Great Many Things
5. Entangled
6. Middle Country Stars
7. House On the Hill
Available for download/listening here:
iTunes
CD Baby
Spotify
Hot Buttered Rum (2014)
Produced by Steve Berlin of Los Lobos
2. Let the Love Come Through Me
3. Blackberry Pie
4. Another City
5. The Love You Gave Away
6. What Old Woman
8. The Crest
9. Mountain Song
10. Diamonds in the Wind
11. Every Side of the Coin
12. Doctor's Daughter
Live in the Sierra (2012)
Recorded live on tour in 2012
2. Squall
3. Way Back When
4. Blue Moon Stars
5. Banished Set
6. Beyond the Sky
7. Ramblin' Girl
9. Like the French
10. Loretta
11. Cody
12. Where the Streets Have No Name
13. Desert Rat
14. Lovelight
Limbs Akimbo (2010)
Produced by Tim Bluhm (Mother Hips), and features guest appearances by Jackie Greene, Zach Gill, and others.
2. Something New
3. Beneath the Blossoms
4. A Great Many Things
5. Brokedown
6. Sexy Bakery Girl
8. Turning the Wheel
9. Honkytonk Tequila
10. Summertime Gal
11. Limbs Akimbo
The Olive Sessions, Vol. 1 (2008)
2. Bit By Bit
3. Day Trader
4. Right Between Your Eyes
Live in the Northeast (2007)
Recorded live on Hot Buttered Rum's Northeast Tour 2006.
2. Limbo in Lovelock
3. Desert Rat
4. Return Someday
5. Cumberland Blues
6. Metrosexual
8. California Snow & Rain
9. Spider
10. Queen Elizabeth
11. Honey Bee
12. You Make Me Feel Like Dancing
Well-Oiled Machine (2006)
Produced by Mike Marshall, engineered by Decibel Dave Dennison and Josh Osmond.
2. Guns or Butter
3. Idaho Pines
4. Poison Oak
5. Waterpocket Fold
6. Always Be the Moon
8. Waiting For a Squall
9. Butch & Peggy
10. Sweet Honey Fountain
11. Wedding Day
In These Parts (2004)
Recorded in the hills of Fairfax by veteran sound engineer Decibel Dave Dennison (Garcia/Grisman projects).
2. Flask, Alas!
3. Evolution
4. Old Dangerfield
5. I've Let Go
7. Horseshoe
8. Reckless Tex
9. Immaculate Rain
10. In These Parts
Live at the Freight & Salvage (2002)
Recorded live at Berkeley's premiere acoustic music venue on August 6, 2002.
2. Elephant Hunting Song
3. Red-Haired Boy
4. String's Breath
5. The Trial of John Walker Lindh
6. Norwegian Wood
8. Naked Blue
9. Red Clay Halo
10. The Crest
11. Dolphin
12. I Saw the Light
Girl Thursday
In the winter of 2011-12, Nat lead a trip to Ghana with musicians from Elephant Revival, Big Light, Huckle & HBR. After ten days learning from Ghanaian music and dance masters, this crew headed to an Accra recording studio and recorded this album with their new Ghanaian friends. There are several tunes familiar to HBR fans; the music has elements of bluegrass and highlife music. Pick up a copy at your next HBR show, or order one here now.
1. Swing and Sway
2. Like the French
3. Bells Under Waves
4. Every Stone We Lay
5. Shape the Stone
7. What To Do
8. Limbs Akimbo
9. Friday Night
Nat Keefe Concert Carnival
In December 2006, guitarist Nat Keefe put together a multi-media variety show with musicians from the Mother Hips, ALO, New Monsoon, the Peter Rowan/Tony Rice Quartet, Everyone Orchestra, and HBR. These talented musicians mixed with film, circus arts, and West African dance to create a unique night of entertainment that was enjoyed by an enthusiastic full house.
Sound engineer Josh Osmond recorded the preformance and mixed it to studio-quality perfection. The CD features several notable collaborations, including "Brokedown" by Tim Bluhm/Nat Keefe.
2. Every Stone We Lay
3. Emmylou
4. Bliss Monkeys
5. Honkytonk Tequila
6. Walker
7. Brokedown
8. La Poblanita
10. Be Kind Boys
11. Eucalyptus Wood
12. Promiscuous Proboscis
13. Improvisation
14. Every Stone We Lay reprise
15. Dolphin
Music for Ordinary Motion
Music for Ordinary Motion is Nat Keefe's college senior composition project, and captures Keefe's expansive and inclusive notion of music. The CD includes a symphony orchestra movement, a string trio, music for modern dance, an a Capella piece, the earliest studio work of Hot Buttered Rum (not available anywhere else!), a guitar/flute duet, a setting of an e.e. cummings poem for female voice, baritone sax, and piano, songs for guitar and voice, and much more. This is a must for the serious fan of Hot Buttered Rum.
2. La Poblanita
3. Spouting Violets
4. Bassmaster
5. Five Ways to Cross the Street
i) clean as Key Soap
6. Long Slow Distance
7. The Crest
8. ii) with dysentery
10. This Is What Democracy Looks Like
11. iii) cool as Daddy Lumba
12. Rumi
13. iv) in the rain
14. v) with the wrong trousers
15. Twelve String Trio
16. Green Drop
Ghana boko paa 1999
Ghana boko paa 1999 was recorded and produced by Nat Keefe during a five-month trip to Ghana, West Africa. Keefe traveled to the far corners of Ghana to present a diverse selection of traditional and modern music, from the virtuosic xylophone of Rallio Kapakpul, to the groovy dance music of the Muwuli Borborbor Band, to proverbs sung on the famous "talking drum." It should be noted that Ghana boko paa 1999 features some of the last recordings of palmwine highlife guitarist T.O. Jazz before he passed. It was lessons with Jazz that inspired Nat Keefe to cowrite "Limbs Akimbo," the title track of Hot Buttered Rum's new album. Ghana boko paa 1999 also feature's Keefe's early experiments with electronic music, "Water" and "Elmina Dungeons."
2. Kpanlogo
3. Bewaa Medley
4. Sogtaa
5. Water
6. Kolo Mashi
7. Oboatia Komfo
9. Hot Highlife
10. The Zonglo Beats
11. If You Have Millet and Don't Share, You Will Die
12. Elmina Dungeons
13. Goodbye
The Sleeping Giants
Like their home in Oakland, CA, the music of The Sleeping Giants is rolling hills and towering steel; It swings for the gut when you’re dancing and pats you on your back when you’re blue.Singer and primary songwriter Erik Yates brought the Giants together in 2011 on a lark. Yates fell in love with the sound of the pedal steel guitar, and wanted to frame some of his newer songs with the instrument. Keyboardist Jeff Coleman (Big Light), bassist Mark Murphy (Huckle) and drummer Lucas Carlton (HBR) -- a trio of friends who have played together for a decade (most recently in Izabella) -- turned up to help, but as fate would have it, the pedal steel player was busy, so the guys called on Chris Haugen (Melvin Seals, Poor Man’s Whiskey) to fill the spot with his tasty Telecaster & lap steel playing.
A fresh batch of tunes from Yates, Haugen's new guitar tones, and that dank West Oakland rehearsal studio proved a potent mix, and the ‘country band’ phase lasted around twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five. By the end of that first rehearsal, a rock band was born.
This band can push, pull, bend, and bruise with the best of them -- there's no shortage of raw talent, refined skill, and youthful energy between them -- but listening to these songs, it's not just the decades of musical experience one hears, but all the glorious, messy living that's accompanied it. That familiar mix of love, joy, fear, and heartbreak that defines us all.
Their debut release might get filed under Americana, Indie Folk, or even (gasp!) Country Rock, but it's all just Rock & Roll. It's an Oakland potluck, where banjo, steel guitar, and gritty rock organ come together like beef ribs and kale salad. It's all good, and you're always welcome.
2. Button
3. Diamonds in the Wind
4. Let It Fall
6. 13th Avenue Blues
7. She Spent the Night
Campfire Singalong (Kid's album)
Hot Buttered Rum joins Orange Sherbet around a virtual campfire to bring this collection of classic songs that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has roasted marshmallows and watched the flames dance in a fire pit. This collaboration creates rich layers of song and tradition, and it was truly a group effort. Campfire Sing-Along is steeped in the rich sounds of American Roots music, while managing to create a new sound for the campfire sing-along.
2. Ram Sam Sam
3. Crawdad
4. One Man Band
5. Down By The Bay
6. I Love the Mountains
7. Marshmallow
8. Froggy
9. Down By The Banks
10. Frog Went A-Courtin'
11. Make New Friends
12. Bit By Bit
14. She'll Be Comin' Round The Mountain
15. Uncle Sean
16. Sky In Me
17. Skin & Bones
18. Barges
19. Down By The Old Mill Stream
20. My Paddle/Canoe Song
21. Down By The Riverside
22. Hey Ho, Nobody Home!
23. Mr. Moon
24. Shenandoah
