Bang your Herd!

Songband and food go together - it's an established fact. Here's a case in point:

In Extremo is a German medieval metal band that's been around for thirty years (basically since the medieval times). Their drummer, Specki T.D., is passionate about making food, and has the web-based cooking show to prove it. The name is Herdbanger, a pun on headbanger (Herd is the German word for stove). 

In Extremo live shot

Specki invites musicians on his show to make music to make and something to eat with him. Songband was asked to come to one of the tapings to accompany the guest singers for one episode. The guests were Micha Rhein (singer of the band In Extremo), and Joey Kelly from The Kelly Family, a music group famous in Europe since the 70s.

              Songband and Specki at Herdbanger shoot

We had a great time playing their recent song "Aus Leben Gemacht" with them all, and it was a pleasure because they're very talented musicians, and so it all went very smoothly. Things got loud - these guys rock!

Songband on Herdbanger with Specki, Joey, and Micha

How it was determined that Songband in its accordion and banjo formation should be the instrumentalists on the show is unclear. Maybe because Specki plays in the group In Extremo, which is a medieval metal band that uses historical instruments like the hurdy-gurdy, hammered dulcimer, and the shawm, he was open to our quirky duo as collaborators. In any case, we had a great time recording the show, and the whole crew was friendly and totally pro. 

Songband at Kochschule Kochbox shooting Herdbanger

Now it's available for all to see! Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSY9OW6Xa_g

P.S. Joey even gave us a cassette of his family band!

The Kelly Family cassette

Hope you're all doing well. We love hearing from you on social media, so don't be strangers!

All the love,

Ethan and Elisabeth

BIRTHDAY P-P-PARTY!

It’s Elisabeth’s birthday on Sunday and you’re invited!

When: Sunday, May 16, from 5-8pm (Berlin time) (11am-2pm Eastern time, for instance)

Where: https://www.twitch.tv/songband

What: Songband live stream birthday party! We’re going to play some tunes, probably a lot of them. You can chat with us and interact in other ways, too! We’d be so happy to see you there. It’s free!

We’ve been doing twice-weekly streams for a little over a month now, sometimes with piano and guitar and vocals, sometimes with accordion and banjo instrumentals. It’s always a lot of fun playing our tunes and meeting new people. There’s a lot going on on Twitch - you can make requests, chat with us and with other people watching us, do various digital things we barely understand, give us tips (we do understand this! <3). “Follow” us (click on the heart icon), and you’ll get a notification when we’re going live. We’re still finding our way with all the tech (we think of it as Twitch homework), but it’s coming along.

As always, we’re pretty proud of our song list. And we love to play together.

It would be great to see some old friends in this new virtual space!

2020 World Detour, part 2 (late summer)

Hey there friends, family, and other folks!

Because of corona, we still haven't been out gigging in public. Instead, like so many others, we've turned to technology to try and bridge the gap. Unfortunately, we're not the most techknowledgey people.

After some attempts at streaming, we admitted defeat. We decided that Lis's slow internet was our enemy. We may return to the fight again, but in the meantime, we recorded some videos. Apparently, everything has to be a video now (thanks, MTV). We got some requests, and are happy to have been able to fulfill those (you can find them on our YouTube - like and subscribe, yo!).

We even somehow managed to appear in the stream of our friend Randy Miller, helping out on the Ballad of the Persistent Virus.

We also made a new friend, because we haven't seen much of our real friends lately. She joined Ethan for a rendition of Speak Low by Kurt Weill, who once lived in Berlin. Maybe in the very room we recorded in - who's to say?! (Please don't look it up - we like the mystery.)

We finally looked at our website on a smart phone, and noticed it looked all messed up there, so we tweaked it so maybe it looks (slightly) better on a phone now.

Oh, and we've got a job. We go out on walks at night and make recordings of bats for science. We're trying to find where they're living so that those places can be protected. They're fascinating little critters! We haven't incorporated them into our music making yet, but this guy has:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/arts/music/bats-field-works-ultrasonic.html

Please stay in touch - we miss you all!

- Elisabeth and Ethan