My musical wish comes true!

The oddest thing happened the other day.  For a very long time I have been wondering if there was a band out there that wrote a type of music that does for the north was southern rock does for the south.  Some band that could evoke vivid images of the region and have songs about the legends of the north and about growing up here.  Specifically, I hoped there was a band that sung about my home state in that way.  Lo, and behold, I hear about a band called the Great Lakes Myth Society.  This is exactly what I was looking for.  I feel so strongly about this bad right now, that this entire post is going to become one gigantic online press kit for them by the time I'm done.

The following is their official "bio" from their myspace:

Michigan-based “Northern Rock” collective the Great Lakes Myth Society declared itself a proper entity on January 1st 2004. The group’s previous incarnation as the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love yielded two critically-lauded albums (1999’s “The Legende of Jeb Minor” and 2001’s “H.O.M.E.S.”) for the Brooklyn, New York indie label The Telegraph Company and successful appearances at New York City’s Knitting Factory, CMJ, SXSW and Boston’s NEMO Festival, but by 2002 the amicable departure of violinist and native New Zealander Elisabeth Auchinvole and the record company’s untimely financial collapse had left the band with two gaping holes in its side and a mammoth completed record with no home. Rather than fold up their maps and head inward, longtime friends Timothy Monger (accordion, guitar & vocals), James Monger (guitar & vocals), Gregory McIntosh (guitar & vocals), Scott McClintock (bass & vocals) and Fido Kennington (drums & vocals) adorned themselves in the most affordable black suits available and took to the stage under a new banner. The Great Lakes Myth Society’s eponymous debut, an alternately brooding and nostalgic blend of muscular English folk-rock, pine-kissed Northern Americana and Midwest grit was released in April 2005 on the Boston-based label Stop, Pop & Roll. The band hit the road, and within weeks the GLMS had broken into the CMJ Top 100 and appeared on both the CNN website and NPR’s All Things Considered.
In the spring of 2006, the band inked a deal with Southeast Michigan-based publishing house, record label, web developer and video/television production company Quack!Media and began work on a new record. The resulting “Compass Rose Bouquet”, a phrase described by James Monger as a “dangerously colorful metaphor for summer in the North”, views the region through a much broader lens than the one used to oversee the band’s previous offering. In this episode, ghosts of dead high school friends drift along the sidewalks of your hometown in a parade of smoke (“Midwest Main Street”), ravens scour the Massachusetts turnpike for half-finished beers (“Eastern Birds”), fleets of black flies arrive overnight with detailed maps to the holes in your screens {“Days of Apple Pie”} and petite girls in summer dresses, with legs still white from winter eagerly sign the lease to the apartment you’ve lived in for the whole of your twenties (“Heydays”). Scott McClintock muses “the self-titled debut was indeed quite a darkly cloaked affair; smoky with soot and stained with lamp oil. “Compass Rose Bouquet” manages to mix that bare-branched-midnight-orchard vibe with some (gasp) sunshine and greenery...only there's probably a dead body under all the lawn clippings”. A combination of boots hitting the stage, brakes on the highway and rain on your roof, “Compass Rose Bouquet” arrived on July 10, 2007, followed by a limited edition single in March 2008.

And here they are live:



Seriously, they have become members of my top 10 band list now.

Here's my (so far) favorite song, called Isabella County, 1992.

There's a crack in the road
And a scar that runs down through
a vaudevillian stage and a bear in a cage
It's an Indian summer
And the tapwater's brown sand
'cause the lamprey are crammed
'neath the Chippewa Dam

When friends come to town
They say, "What were you thinking? Come home!"
And I tell them I am home

I didn't come for the scenery
I didn't come for the grades
I didn't come for the roar of the stadium
No I came from the grave, boys
And wiped off the frown of a dreary hometown

Now I'm walking through history
And this history's mine, now I'm drunk all the time
Yeah, it's Monday and the townies are wasted

Last day in December
And the world is a white line of unshoveled cars,
'cause you can walk to the bars

In a town where the drinkers are plowed like the roads
In a heap 'round their breakfasts in yesterday's clothes
Sweetheart, this city has beautiful, beautiful snow
Beautiful, beautiful snow
Beautiful, beautiful snow


If you like them as much as I do, let me know!