tag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:/blogs/latest-news?p=3Latest News2018-12-13T14:40:50-08:00The Scarlet Locomotivefalsetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/48400872017-09-06T20:34:50-07:002021-09-25T10:29:52-07:002017<p>Hey everyone! Thanks for sticking by the Scarlet Locomotive train (sorry ) ;) and waiting as Arielle worked her heart and soul this summer on the farm, and Ted went to Africa with his dear family! We are grateful for you and happy to be approaching fall and having time to spend with new music, and getting back on stage. Check back often for show updates and we can't wait to see you!</p>
<p>Truly,</p>
<p>Ted and Arielle </p>
<p>The Scarlet Locomotive</p>The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/44099152016-10-07T18:59:49-07:002022-01-07T03:44:50-08:00Fall is upon us!We are so happy to be back to this season, with local shows and working on new material and maybe just maybe music in a movie.... stay tuned! ;) The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/40990702016-03-21T18:33:04-07:002021-09-14T14:11:29-07:00Music videos and Film Festivals!<p>Here is our newest video for your enjoyment! Filmed in Skagit and Whatcom Counties by the wonderful Jim Round. </p>
<p><iframe class="justify_inline" data-video-type="youtube" data-video-id="vC4LCvMIj0M" data-video-thumb-url="http://img.youtube.com/vi/vC4LCvMIj0M/0.jpg" type="text/html" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vC4LCvMIj0M?rel=0&wmode=transparent&enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" height="200" width="320" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe></p>Alos, we are excited and happy to announce that we will be performing at the first Annual Bellingham Music and Film Festival April 1st, at Make.Shift, in Bellingham, WA. The evening will kick off a weekend full of concerts and film screenings, and both of our music videos will be included in these showings.
<p>https://filmfreeway.com/festival/BellinghamMusicFilmFestival<br><br>Enjoy, and we will be seeing you soon!<br> </p>The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/40550852016-02-22T19:44:43-08:002021-10-20T13:00:43-07:00Catching upBoy oh boy! It's been way too long since we've sat down and taken a moment to update everyone here in this blog space. Thank you for sticking with us and waiting to see what we have been up to! And let me tell you, it's been a wonderful fall and winter here. Coming off of our second Midwest tour, we were inspired to share our new tunes and travel joy with our local audiences and were rewarded with great shows in Bellingham, Wa and the Skagit Valley.<br><br>We then finished our debut album and went back to the Midwest to release it at SPACE in Evanston, IL and play a run of shows with the wonderful and talented Jodee Lewis. Rose Music Hall in Columbus, MO was a highlight to note, and if you ever have a chance to go there you must, and do say hi to Charlie for us. It was a great few weeks and we came back again ready to be with our families and local venues. <br><br>January 2016 found us sharing the stage with the likes of The Lowest Pair, Ben Hunter, Caleb Klauder and Reeb Willms, The Lil' Smokies , and more, and this coming April we are honored to open for Loudon Wainwright III. It's been a great season and we are excited for the things to come. We promise to keep you posted, and can't wait to see you out there.<br><br>Arielle<br>:) <br>(Ted says hi of course) The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/38190612015-08-13T21:52:14-07:002022-03-04T02:54:37-08:00Our Debut Album is Out. A Few Words on the Process We recorded all ten songs at the home of Scott Weiss, who works as a sound engineer at Pure Audio in Seattle during the week and changes into his SuperAudioman costume on weekends. The man’s got a nice house, very mid-century modern, very airy, with wooden floors and hipster couches that were often tipped on end for sound buffering. Sometimes Scott would come out of the sound room and move my guitar mic one inch to the left. He’d tell Ari not to wear a squeaky coat. He’d come back to me and shove a cushion under my butt to raise my guitar a smidge.<br> Typically we tracked guitar, bass, and vocals “live” and then overdubbed fiddle, harmonica, mandolin, and pedal steel. Most sessions worked like this: Ari, Ted, and Sander would be arranged in a large triangle in the living room—me hunched with my guitar in a thicket of microphones, Sander with his standup bass positioned over a blue “X” taped to the floor, and Ari in the corner on the fluffy rug.<br> We’d do about three takes of a song and then adjourn to the listening room to see if there was a clear winner, to see if we needed to go back and try something different. Maybe we liked the bass best on Take #1 and the vocal performance best on Take #3. Scott would later swap out bits and pieces here and there. A flubbed guitar run. A flat vocal line.<br> After the basic tracks were in the can and given a little TLC by SuperAudioMan, we overdubbed the fancy stuff. What you hear on the album is invariably the single best overall take with bits and pieces of other attempts (i.e. the vocals for “Whiskey Makes Me Mean” are all from take #5, with the exception of <em>one line</em> grabbed from take #2). Hopefully, the music playing on the speakers of your ’72 Buick Skylark—as you careen down the highway in escape of the latest tsunami, or cruise languidly home from The Cabin Tavern at 1:00 a.m.—feels spontaneous yet refined. Enjoy.The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/33615442014-12-04T14:44:41-08:002014-12-04T14:44:41-08:00December and the New Year!Well we are so excited for the last few months we've had and the next few ahead! Just wanted to let everyone know we'll be heading into the studio in January to do some serious recording, and there is not one but two! music videos to be released this Spring! Check out our Facebook page for all the updates and details as we progress. Here's wishing everyone a Holiday season filled with beauty. <br>Arielle and TedThe Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/32294802014-10-12T20:59:27-07:002022-06-02T06:44:44-07:00Floating in SPACE It’s hard not to feel cool when we breeze into Evanston SPACE for a Sunday night October show, past the hostess and through the doors that say “MUSICIANS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT,” knowing the sign has applied to the likes of Greg Brown, The Cowboy Junkies, Suzanne Vega, and Robyn Hitchcock.<br> Arielle leads me into the largest, most badass green room ever. There is a kitchenette with a refrigerator full of beer, photos of famous people on the walls, a vintage stereo stocked with hundreds of LPs, hipster chairs covered in turquoise upholstery, and two seating areas where musicians can chill out or warm up their voices. The area is large enough for a floor hockey match. The private bathroom lacks graffiti and smells sweetly of Meyer’s Soap. Back in the main room, the south wall is a patchwork of peeling paint that instantly conjures up photo shoots, and in fact, the sound man confirms this.<br> “Everybody uses that background for photos,” he says.<br> Ari and I crack open beers and run through a few tunes.<br> Her Uncle Dave walks in, long tall Dave dressed in jeans and his customary black leather coat. He’s a partner at the club and a renowned Chicago blues man who looks like he could have played left end in high school. We’re both Bears fans, and I know that today he watched the same pathetic second half meltdown that I did. We haven’t been happy since 1986. I sputter something about the game, meaning to commiserate with Dave, but he shouts me down before I can finish.<br> “Don’t. Don’t. I don’t want to talk about it!”<br> For some reason I can’t let it go. I try again.<br> He closes his eyes, puts up a hand, and booms, “I don’t want to talk about it!”<br> Passing from the green room into the recording studio, I misread the spine of a large book, thinking it says, “The Sons of Bob Dylan.” The recording room has a little stage at one end, vintage amps, a piano, a standup bass, all arranged upon various Persian rugs. A handsaw hanging on the wall lends a honky-tonk feel to an otherwise bluesy scene. Through another door we hit the control room with its giant sound board and stacks of monitor speakers. There’s an end table made of a banjo head, a red leather couch decorated with zebra cushions. This is not only the nicest back stage area we’ve ever conquered; it’s the coolest. We must let ourselves feel cool so as to quell the nerves and play to our potential. A good vocalist has to be a little Narcissistic. Yeah, let it ride. Enjoy this. Feel cool.<br> But I’m nervous and peeing every fifteen minutes, having dedicated myself to hydration all day. I’m paranoid that only a fraction of the people I’ve emailed and Facebooked will show up. The theater is dark and cool, full of empty chairs. What if only forty people show up? It’s the same feeling you have before a party, after you’ve bought fifteen pounds of shrimp. What if nobody comes?<br> Sound check is a breeze, what with only two instruments and a top notch sound man running state-of-the-art gear. It feels good to play. I try to keep in mind the advice we’ve been given from our friend, Scott, a sound engineer in Seattle: “You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be great.”<br> Back in the green room, I realize I’ve left my wallet and the set list back at the house. I’ve already let Arielle down, and we haven’t even played a song yet. I text my wife, Julie, asking her to please, please bring these items. The cool thing is I won’t really need my wallet because the venue is connected to an upscale pizzeria called The Union, and the fridge is full of beer. Being from Bellingham, we order a kale salad and pizzas made with red pepper and arugula.<br> Then I have to pee again.<br> Ari cranks away on the fiddle, the notes traveling across the polished concrete floor. She takes out her phone and enlists a very pregnant member of the Jodee Lewis band to snatch photos of us in front of the patchy wall.<br> Alas, the lighting is better outside, and as it turns out, even the backside walls by the garbage bins are cool: stucco painted vermillion and cream. Eric, the sound man, is out there smoking a cigarette, and of course, he’s a cool-looking dude with hipster glasses and a keen sense of composition. He blows smoke and snaps some pics. Ari always looks good. I’m hoping for angles that hide my thinning hair.<br> I grew up seven blocks from this venue. The place used to be a clothing store called <em>Khakis</em> or <em>The Khaki Store</em>, or something like that. I can’t get over the fact that my childhood home is only seven blocks away. I love this fact beyond reason, which is why it’s the first thing I say when I hit the stage.<br> “No secrets,” I say. “Everybody knows me. Here’s a tune called ‘Pitchfork Blues.’”<br> Nervous for the first four songs, I botch a chord or two, but only for an instant, and soon the songs are rolling out of our bodies. Thank God I don’t mangle any lyrics or screw up arrangements. The audience is a blur of human shapes and tables and chairs. The place is packed. When stage lights beam in from the ceiling, a singer sees the whole rather than the parts, that dim warm gestalt that is a seated crowd in a venue built for close listening. This feels very “MTV Unplugged.” Not much in life feels better than a big applause at the end of a song that we wrote—a fully realized work that started as noodling on guitar.<br> Between songs, Ari cracks people up with talk about how our home of Bellingham is beyond kale and on to kohlrabi. I suggest that by that logic kale is a gateway green. On the next song I’m conscious that my hamstrings are tight, my throat clenched. Just play through it. I’ve done this a hundred times. Find that place of calm. I fancy myself an athlete in these moments, trying to be aggressive but breezy, trying not to make mistakes but play loose. After the show, a friend tells me this is bullshit. <br> “An athlete isn’t trying to speak truth,” she says. “A singer is after the truth.”<br> Well. Cool. Thanks for making me feel cool.<br> Other nights will come and go when the audience is only six people, or sixteen, whatever, but this “now” is the place to be. I lean my guitar three inches from the microphone on the treble side of the sound hole, and the monitor speakers are so clear I can play with dynamics. I love to sit back and let Ari sing. All I have to do is hold things down on guitar. She is solid, working the microphone, projecting, singing with passion. There’s a dude in the front row wearing a tweed hat, bopping his head, and for some reason I think it’s my high school buddy, Marcus, only Marcus would never wear such a hat. (Later, the man will turn out to be Steafán Hanvey, a sweet guy and wonderful musician from Belfast, who’ll introduce himself and give me a copy of his CD). The crowd is a dark pool that listens intimately and sends back energy in a way that’s like a dialogue between the blind and the unblind.<br> Saliva gathers in the holes of my harmonica. My hands are too tight on the chords. Loosen up.<br> Before long we’re in a groove and the songs tumble out on their own. “Mountain Medicine” leads into “Angeline the Baker” which leads into “Whiskey Makes Me Mean.” Not much feels better. I’m playing for my wife and daughter and mother and brother, my cousins and second cousins, my best buddies from high school—all stoked and hanging on every lyric. Every lick off the fiddle. Ari’s 85-year-old grandmother is here, her quivering head bowed seemingly as if to hear the music better. Musician friends from Ari’s Chicago days are here, too. We couldn’t possibly ask for a better crowd.<br> Afterwards, I’m clapped on the back by strangers and old friends and old neighbors. Dave flashes an easy smile and says, "Nice job." I just want a beer. Ari is flush with excitement. The line at the bar is too long, so I rush back into the green room and reluctantly grab a <em>Dos Equis</em>, thinking, <em>John Oates. I bet this is what John Oates drank when he played here in 2013</em>. I try to remember if Oates was the blond guy or the dude with the curly black locks. I take another sip of beer. I want more.The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/32276572014-10-10T18:43:11-07:002022-05-09T04:15:48-07:00Chicago, we'll see you again soonOh man. We had such a ball at SPACE in Evanston, IL. What a night we shared with Jodee Lewis and her kickin' band. A huge thank you to everyone who came to support us and spend a cozy evening listening to music. We wouldn't be doing this without you, and for that we are grateful. Next up we'll be at Hattie's Hat in Ballard, WA, and then into the studio to do some serious recording. <br>It's going to be a great Winter, and we're so glad to have you along.<br><br>www.jodeelewis.com<br>www.evanstonspace.com<br><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/133331/76a8588409ce24495fd7509dd621cda3b76a6083/original/scarlo1.jpg?1412991547" class="size_l justify_center border_" />The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/31219892014-08-04T14:28:33-07:002014-08-04T14:36:12-07:00After the HoneymoonThanks to all who showed up at the Honeymoon Saturday night. The intimate setting gave us a chance to meet some great new folks. Hopefully, "Whiskey Makes Me Mean" and "Kill the Wine" didn't dampen your enthusiasm for that tasty mead, be it raspberry or rhubarb.<br><br>To each and every one of you, we appreciate your careful listening, humor, and enthusiasm. Let's meet again soon.<br><br>Ted and ArielleThe Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/31007372014-07-26T16:41:20-07:002014-07-26T16:41:20-07:00A quick hello Hi everyone!<br>We had a great show last night at The Green Frog with our friends from Seattle, Vaudeville Etiquette. They rock and we had a ball. Thanks to all who came out! <br><br>In case you missed us yesterday, we will be at The Honey Moon this coming Saturday August 2nd at 8:30pm. :) <br><br>Hope everyone has been enjoying this beautiful summer, we are grateful to share our music with you.<br>See ya'll soon!<br>Arielle and Ted<br><br><object cotype="cs" id="SILOBFWOBJECTID" style="width: 0px; height: 0px; display: block;" type="cosymantecnisbfw"></object>The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/30048072014-06-09T22:24:41-07:002014-06-09T22:30:39-07:00Summertime!Hi Friends!<br>I'm back from China and Ted and I are busy at work with new tunes and summer shows. We can't wait to see you and catch up! While we wait for the strawberry pie to cool, here is a tune to spend the evening with. See ya soon!<br><object cotype="cs" id="SILOBFWOBJECTID" style="width: 0px; height: 0px; display: block;" type="cosymantecnisbfw"></object>2:45The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/28709972014-04-14T19:36:28-07:002014-04-21T20:46:35-07:00Another new tune for youOur next track from the latest recording session! Mountain Medicine, written by Ted, while he was teaching in Beijing, China. Many thanks for listening!<br><object cotype="cs" id="SILOBFWOBJECTID" style="width: 0px; height: 0px; display: block;" type="cosymantecnisbfw"></object>3:49The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/28338452014-03-31T18:50:59-07:002022-05-10T03:56:24-07:00Recording continues<br>Hi friends! We've been back in the studio getting tracks down, and we have a new one today. Called "Whiskey Makes Me Mean", written by Ted, fiddled by Ari, and we are excited to share it with you. Find it here, and download for free on our Bandcamp site. More to come this week!<br><object cotype="cs" id="SILOBFWOBJECTID" style="width: 0px; height: 0px; display: block;" type="cosymantecnisbfw"></object>3:44The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/27234792014-03-10T20:58:53-07:002020-08-28T19:37:12-07:00BeginningTed and Arielle (that's us!) love to play music together. This summer we decided it was time to share our work with more than just our families, and thus, The Scarlet Locomotive was born. It's a journey we've been waiting for. Thank you for being along for the ride.<object cotype="cs" id="SILOBFWOBJECTID" style="width: 0px; height: 0px; display: block;" type="cosymantecnisbfw"></object>The Scarlet Locomotivetag:www.scarletlocomotive.com,2005:Post/27234782014-03-10T20:57:23-07:002014-03-31T18:53:18-07:00The Scarlo Name<br> For a good two weeks we scoured poems, dictionaries, songs, road signs, plant books, and the messy terrain of our gray matter, hoping to find a name for the band. We wanted something like <em>Iron and Wine </em>that sounded both feminine and masculine. We sent each other text messages several times a day, like two high school kids trying to think of a name for their club. We gave each other total veto power. We bounced ideas off mothers and wives: <em>WonderBlue, Opie’s Kitchen, Buffalo Alice.</em> Moderately clever phrases popped up on our cell phones, only to be deleted.<br>“The good is the enemy of the great,” we told ourselves. “We don’t settle for anything we don’t love.”<br> I’d been listening to Gillian Welch’s album “The Harrow and the Harvest,” with its lead track “Scarlet Town.” Ari was reading Ginsberg. At some point in that calendar year I must have played the board game Clue with my daughter. How else to explain the text I sent to Ari? “<em>Miss Scarlet in the Kitchen with a Fiddle</em>,” to which she replied that she kind of, sort of loved it. But “kind of, sort of” wasn’t good enough. Too old-timey. Too hoedown for our music.<br> Then Ari came across the phrase “sunflower locomotive” in a Ginsberg poem, and one night before rehearsing she asked me what I thought.<br> “Damn,” I said. “That’s close. I like the word <em>locomotive</em>.”<object cotype="cs" id="SILOBFWOBJECTID" style="width: 0px; height: 0px; display: block;" type="cosymantecnisbfw"></object>The Scarlet Locomotive