Available March 16 -
The second album from our favorite author/ songwriter/ musician and his band!
TINY PILOT
Michael Perry and the Long Beds
Amble Down Records
www.ambledown.com
MSRP $11.99
UPC 8-97714-00205-1
“country folk,” “folk-twang,” and/or Americana music — take your pick!
Mike’s website: www.sneezingcow.com
LISTEN:
Download the first single off TINY PILOT:
“Somewhere South of Sunday” (mp3)
Featured on our Twin Cities Live WHAT TO READ NEXT book segment on June 7!
Michael Perry and his band of Long Beds write songs that range from boot-stomping country to roughneck folk balladS. Like Perry’s Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award-winning books COOP and TRUCK, these songs are populated by characters drawn straight from rural and small-town America.
Many of Mike’s songs have direct connections to COOP, TRUCK, and his other books POPULATION 485 and OFF MAIN STREET.
Find out which song ties in with which book!
“You sound just like Gordon Lightfoot, only zippier!”
– that nice lady at the benefit concert in Mike’s old high school gym,
New Auburn, WI“Mike Perry is a storyteller like the one namers, Waylon and Willie. Stir in the Long Beds and you have a recipe for success. TINY PILOT delivers a truckload of tunes that’ll stick with you for the long haul.”
– Jerry Bilek, Monkey See, Monkey Read,Northfield, MN“TINY PILOT is full of heart, humor, and hurt. Equally talented in stand-up comedy, performing music, and writing about life in the middle of the country, Michael Perry is the triple crown, winning for audiences in the Midwest and beyond!”
– Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books, Wichita, KS
Like so many before him, Michael Perry learned to sing in church. Then a Waylon Jennings 8-track got him hooked on boogety-boogety. This combination yielded the mix of straight-up twang and churchly harmonies found in his music. Perry began writing songs in the early 1990s during long nights when he was struggling to survive on prose. (And as we know now, he’s surviving just fine in that regard, having become a bestselling author both in the Midwest and nationally!)
“I was raised by farmers and preachers and tough country women, and I suppose my songs reflect that,” says Perry. “Then again, certain wisdoms are available only from whistlers, frauds, and sinners, so I try to slide them a line or two as well.”
Buy this new CD from your favorite locally owned and operated Midwest independent bookseller!
Click here for the directory of our member bookstores
MBA BOOKSELLER INFORMATION
Booksellers — Earn up to $100 in rebates from MBA for promoting TINY PILOT!
Midwest Connections rebate form for TINY PILOT (PDF) – available now!
TINY PILOT is available directly though Amble Down Records. To order, please contact Kyle Frenette at kyle@ambledown.com or via phone at 612.670.8710. For more information contact kyle@ambledown.com (UPC: 8-97714-00205-1; MSRP $11.99, release date March 16, 2010). Be sure to contact Amble Down for more information about this title.
Michael Perry and the Long Beds will be featured performers at the MBA Spring Meeting in Minneapolis on Saturday, March 6. They’ll play at set at the Authors Reception in the early evening.
If you are interested in scheduling an interview or event with Michael Perry and the Long Beds, please contact Mike’s assistant Alissa Freeberg, 612-987-2204, alissasneezingcow@gmail.com.
MBA and Amble Down Records would love to have your comments and reviews for this music CD. Please send them to us so we can share your endorsements with your fellow MBA booksellers and with your customers!
DOWNLOADS
- Full-color poster (PDF)
- Full-color flyer (PDF)
- Full-color shelf-talker (PDF)
- Mike’s music related to his books (PDF)
- Mike’s bio (PDF)
- Press release (PDF)
- Amble Down Records sell sheet (PDF)
- CD photo (JPG)
- Band photo #1 (JPG)
- this is the photo the band likes best - Band photo #2 (JPG)
- Band photo #3 (JPG)
- Band photo #4 (JPG)
- Midwest Connections rebate form for TINY PILOT (PDF) – available now!
- Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials
ABOUT MICHAEL PERRY, THE LONG BEDS & THEIR ALBUM
“First time I ever heard Waylon Jennings,” says Michael Perry, “was on an 8-track tape in a four-wheel drive truck doing sixty miles an hour down a Wyoming hay meadow. We were running late for Bible study.” The songs on Tiny Pilot (Perry’s latest musical release with his band the Long Beds) are a direct reflection of that experience. Ranging from straight-up twang to churchly harmonies and populated by characters drawn straight from rural and small-town America, they launch from places like the overpass outside Perry’s beloved hometown of New Auburn, Wisconsin (population currently 562), a gospel service in a granary, and the kitchen floor of a woman about to drop a world of hurt on her drunken husband. “I was raised by farmers and preachers and tough country women, and I suppose my songs reflect that,” says Perry. “Then again, certain wisdoms are available only from whistlers, frauds, and sinners, so I try to slide them a line or two as well.”
Raised in a church so austere that hymns were sung with no choir, no accompaniment, and no church (the congregation met in a farmhouse and sat on straight-backed wooden chairs) Perry and his brother learned to sit side-by-side and work out harmonies on the fly. Those Sunday mornings instilled in Perry a love of singing “clear and pure” that can be heard throughout Tiny Pilot – most especially on the songs, “842 Miles,” “If They Give You Wings,” and “Sweet Edge of Time.” Conversely, anyone introduced to Ol’ Waylon by means of a four-wheeling 8-track is bound to shoot for some boogety-boogety now and then, as Perry and the Long Beds do on “Undone,” “Somewhere South of Sunday,” and (in a respectful nod to Ol’ Hoss himself) “After Waymore’s Blues.”
Perry began writing songs in the early 1990s during long nights when he was struggling to survive on prose (he is the author of four books: Population 485, Truck, Off Main Street, and Coop). With no arts background (he has a nursing degree) he found himself drawn especially to the work of poets and singer/songwriters. (In interviews Perry tends to list his greatest literary influences as Dylan Thomas and Steve Earle – and not necessarily in that order.) “I remember writing late one night and hearing a Kevin Welch song with the line, ‘I whiskey’d up my coffee cup… sittin’ here tryin’ not to call you up,’” says Perry, “and I was floored by the rhythm and the story in that single line…” He began writing songs as a way to break up all-night typing sessions, and eventually he had enough of them that a musician friend invited him to play a coffee shop. “I’m not saying I was nervous, but I ripped out a sixty-minute set list in thirty-two minutes flat,” says Perry. By 2004, he had begun recruiting Long Beds. In 2006, he released his first album, Headwinded.
While the music made by Perry and the Long Beds has been variously described as ‘country folk,’ ‘roughneck folk,’ ‘folk-twang,’ and Americana, they prefer the description given by an audience member after a benefit concert in Perry’s old high school gym: “You sound just like Gordon Lightfoot… only zippier!” Nice – but there are limits. “Zippy or not,” says Perry, “when ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ comes on the radio, we sit down, shut up, and listen.”
Michael Perry resides with his family on a small farm in rural Wisconsin.
