Grant Farm

Boulder, Colorado-based Cosmic Americana band Grant Farm has entertained a growing fan base on the nation's club and festival scene since its founding in 2009 by vocalist and National Flatpicking Guitar Champion Tyler Grant.

Built on the fundamentals of love, family, and music, the band is a sure bet for fans of high-energy, authentic artists as diverse as Sturgill Simpson, Tedeschi Trucks Band and Phish. Comprised of zany, creative and highly musical comrades, Grant Farm members include Grant (aka "The Champ"), Adrian "Ace" Engfer (bass and vocals), Sean "Magic" Macaulay (drums) and Kevin "Money" McHugh (keyboards and vocals).

Daniel Mescher of Colorado Public Radio dubbed Grant Farm "some of the ablest musicians not only in the state of Colorado, but in the nation." Members' prior experience includes playing with groups like The Emmitt-Nershi Band, Donovan Frankenreiter and Hot Soup. Collectively, they had also shared stages with notable artists Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Tim O'Brien, Tony Rice, Keller Williams, Jon Oates and the like and with notable groups The String Cheese Incident, Greensky Bluegrass, Yonder Mountain String Band and The Infamous Stringdusters.

The band's latest release, Kiss the Ground (Summer 2016), represents its first full-length concept album and its third album of original music. Speaking to the struggles we all face as working people, Kiss the Ground sends a positive message while acknowledging real hardship in a society that expects far too much. "We think of this as our ode to the working people," says Grant, whose song, "Get in Line," discusses the high price we pay for things we want in life. Kiss the Ground explores real and mythological connections to the human struggle and pays homage to the "Working Class Hero," an archetype famously described by John Lennon.
Previous Grant Farm albums include a 2012 self-titled debut and a 2014 follow up, Plowin' Time, which reached #2 on JamBand Radio Charts and charted on Americana Radio. In 2014, the band also released the Meeting on the Mountain EP, an inspired collaboration with the group Fruition.

The band has also created the acclaimed Meeting on the Mountain LIVE, a collaborative, live webcast concert experience featuring Grant Farm as the house band and Tyler Grant as host. To date, episodes have featured Dave Bruzza of Greensky Bluegrass, Bill Nershi of String Cheese Incident, Todd Sheaffer of Railroad Earth, The Dead Winter Carpenters and other guests.

Like a "traveling Gypsy family," Grant Farm enjoys their life of touring, writing and adventuring together as they share their music up and down the North American roots music line.

Website:

http://www.grantfarm.net/

Mexican Gunfight

Seasoned & soulful songcraft

Mexican Gunfight is a rock band with a big and easy notion of what "rock" can do. Stylistic influences abound: blues grit, country lyricism, the soulfulness of gospel, a jam thrown in ... even tinges of Latin and jazz dot their sonic landscape. But the Gunfight doesn't lay claim to being a blues, country or gospel act ... they're really just a rock band.

The band's instinctive ability to play seamlessly together is perhaps one of the first things to impress, and betrays the band's experience: Mexican Gunfight's personnel have wandered the U.S. tour routes together for nearly a quarter century, in a half-dozen different outfits, thousands of shows and in hundreds of venues (not to mention a variety of interesting vehicles). Perhaps most notably, their incarnation as The Renegade Saints got regional acclaim and national attention back in the early '90s, but even then they were too rockin' to be a jam band, and definitely too free-form to be grunge.

Since that time the members of Mexican Gunfight -- individually and collectively -- have been notable fixtures in the NW music scene; there's a high probability that you have seen at least one of them playing at a bar, club, theater or festival over the last several years.

The Gunfight pays homage to acts as diverse as Neil Young, Hothouse Flowers, Willie Nelson, Santana, Glen Campbell and Little Feat while offering just as much stylistic variety in its originals. They borrow songs from their "ancestral" incarnations, including the Saints but also Kerosene Dream, The Strangers, Dixon, Tremor Guild and Nine Days Wonder. (Bassist Dave Coey -- a prolific songster in all of his bands since the '80s -- has recently popped out a few new tunes that the band quickly worked over live a few times and brought into the studio.)

The spirit behind Mexican Gunfight's music is - simply put - to consider everything fair game and have a blast rocking it up.

Al Toribio, guitar and vocals
Dave Coey, bass and vocals
Ned Failing, drums and vocals
Mike Walker, piano and organ

Official site:

http://www.mexicangunfight.com/

Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/mexicangunfight