Grifters & Shills

The story of our now-traditional set closer began in the pandemic, some time after we started doing our “Thursday Happy Hour” livestream. For those who didn’t catch it, the format of the livestream was that we’d make a drink on camera at 5:30pm on Thursday, then play about half an hour of songs afterward–it was a nice way to celebrate happy hour with friends in the “virtual” realm. 

During this time, John was in the midst of finishing his degree in Mathematics, and was pushing himself very hard both in his…

One of the defining moments during the writing of this album was the day that we got the call in April 2021 that our friend Duane Mark (Mark Davenport)…

This album is largely a snapshot of 2020–2021, a period when we had a lot of time to stare at the studio walls and decide how we really wanted to go about this whole Grifters & Shills endeavor. A lot of wonderful people inspired us during that time, joined us as we embarked on new experiments and welcomed us as we all started emerging back out and around each other. This record is for you all.

The Ferguson, Stoll, and Cox families, Sam and Kim Barker, Jennifer "JT" Holland, Michael Helfenstein, Willy T.…

Now for a look back at where this album came from. The story of it began just a few months before the world shut down in 2020. The first song started finding its feet as we moved into a new house and started rebuilding our studio, still riding the high of our last album release. Pandemic and lockdown kicked off before we’d even finished unpacking and derailed all the many grand plans we’d had in place for 2020.

Art follows life follows art, as it goes. We thought the shutdown would last two months, but as it…

Welcome to the release of this new album, and thank you for being here with us for the ride! Over the next couple of months, we’ll be releasing some background about the songs, the inspiration behind them, and interesting stories from the studio as we recorded them. 

This week, we are excited to debut the album art! Our extremely talented friend, Dan Torres, created this artwork, inspired by themes in the songs. After sitting with the lyrics and our ever evolving draft recordings, Dan took to the thrift…

Hello friends,  

In case you haven't heard, our year-end shows are THIS WEEKEND! We've got a very special treat for y'all - our good friends Rock Bottom String Band and Brightwire are joining us on both of these shows:  

Friday Dec. 17th, 8:30pm: Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe 

Saturday Dec. 18th, 8:30pm: Dan Electro's  

Both of these shows are clothing drives as well, as we've done in years past! Clean out your closet, bring a bag of clothes to donate, and we will collect everything and take it Star of Hope…

A long time ago, in a practice room not far away, we started our musical journey together. We met in a band called Blue Funk, which was a full band project. We quickly realized that the two of us shared something special--call it chemistry, call it fate, call it whatever you like. The bottom line is that we stumbled on that thing that you always hope to find. We met through music, and got to know each other through music. So feeling very fortunate to have found each other, we decided to start a project as…

This month, we’re officially unveiling the artwork for “Pretty Little Secrets” (though many of you have probably glimpsed it on social media by this point, or we just couldn’t wait and gave you a copy already). We adore this design. It’s the second time we’ve worked with an artist to conceptualize an album, and we just couldn’t be happier. One, because the design is phenomenal, and two, because there is no kinder, more talented soul we could have had the pleasure of working with. 

We were very fortunate to…

We’ve talked at length about the technical setup of our tiny little DIY studio in a previous post, and we’ve talked about how we wrote the songs that have now become an album. Our little DIY studio is now down the street from us, because just about the time we finished recording, we moved. So this month we’ll look back at how it went, recording at our old home. What was cool about it? What was not cool about it? And what kind of instruments did we use? 

‘Pretty Little Secrets’ was recorded in the front…

“What have you guys been up to?” 
It’s the commonest of questions when we get the chance to reconnect with fans and friends. And for the last almost-eight months, our commonest answer has been, “Working on the album.” Our very favorite album to date, mind you, but we realize that we may sound a bit like—forgive the pun—a broken record. 

There’s unmatched joy in creating things, and we find this in a lot of areas outside of just making music. We’ve been up to a lot of other things that we often skip over in…