{"id":6150,"date":"2017-04-02T19:56:07","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T00:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/garyhayescountry.com\/?p=6150"},"modified":"2023-09-03T21:15:46","modified_gmt":"2023-09-03T21:15:46","slug":"bj-barham-announces-the-great-48-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyhayescountry.com\/?p=6150","title":{"rendered":"BJ Barham Announces The Great 48 Tour."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

American Aquarium member BJ Barham<\/a> has announced his Great 48 Tour which includes 51 shows in 56 days covering all 48 continental states, a feat not many artists can possibly boast. His debut solo release Rockingham made my honorable mentions list for 2016 and is a truly good addition to your collection.<\/p>\n

It means some very personal thing to him as a person and deal with tragedies he dealt with and wrote the entire record in a short period of time. The out pour of  concern from American Aquarium fans for them under the terrorist attacks paved the way for him to write this album.<\/p>\n

I’m going to go ahead and print this from his own website:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
B.J. Barham was a long way from home when the tragedy happened.<\/p>\n

On November 13, 2015, the singer-songwriter\u2014raised in a small North Carolina town called Reidsville\u2014was in the middle of his fourth European tour with American Aquarium, the rising alt-country act he\u2019d led for nearly a decade. They were in Belgium, less than two hours from Paris, when bad news began to arrive: a series of terrorist attacks, including one in a rock club, had left more than 100 dead. Family members, friends, and the fans American Aquarium had amassed from so many years on the road immediately reached out, making sure the band had been far away.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe onslaught of text messages, voicemails and everything that came in the next day sparked something in me,\u201d Barham remembers. \u201cIn the next two days, the entire record was written.\u201d<\/p>\n

The record he\u2019s talking about is Rockingham, Barham\u2019s remarkable and intensely personal solo debut. Not long after the wave of well wishes had passed, Barham found himself piecing together composites of people he\u2019d known since childhood, of those folks and places who had impacted his life in fundamental ways. He sang into his cell phone and scribbled in notebooks, stealing away for quiet moments in order to put the melodies and characters floating through his mind into song.<\/p>\n

The shock of the moment and the distance from home seemed to give Barham a crucial perspective on the moments and circumstances that had helped shape him. Wolves, American Aquarium\u2019s much-lauded 2015 breakthrough, had contained Barham\u2019s most honest, vulnerable statements to date. But these songs took the next step, allowing Barham to share stories about those around him. In \u201cO\u2019Lover,\u201d he portrays a hard-working farmer forced to make some desperate decisions to support the ones he loves. In \u201cReidsville,\u201d named for the place he\u2019d called his home until relocating to North Carolina\u2019s capital, he immortalized beautiful, sweet, doomed souls, stuck in love in the sort of small towns that are disintegrating all across America. You needn\u2019t have been to Reidsville to recognize these elegantly written, expertly realized protagonists.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first record I\u2019ve ever made that\u2019s not autobiographical\u2014it\u2019s fictional narrative in a very real place,\u201d Barham says. \u201cThese songs are human condition stories set in my hometown, Reidsville.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barham made these songs his new priority. Not long after he returned stateside, he asked Bradley Cook, the musician and mentor who had co-produced Wolves, to hear them. By afternoon\u2019s end, they had hatched the plan to make Rockingham. Two months later, on January 31, Barham returned from another American Aquarium tour.<\/p>\n

On Monday, he and the band he\u2019d built to record Rockingham\u2014himself, Cook, Cook\u2019s brother and multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook, drummer Kyle Keegan, American Aquarium standbys Ryan Johnson and Whit Wright\u2014met for the first time. On Tuesday and Wednesday, they rehearsed. And on Thursday and Friday, they cut all eight songs at Durham\u2019s Overdub Lane. They mixed the results over the weekend, between the sold-out hometown shows and various festivities of American Aquarium\u2019s annual pilgrimage, Roadtrip to Raleigh. Cialis<\/a> The whirlwind kept the songs simple and the recordings human, reflecting a reality much bigger and less perfect than the vacuum of a recording studio.<\/p>\n

These tunes, after all, didn\u2019t need much tampering. Rockingham puts its scenes and scenarios front and center, the beautiful grain and twang of Barham\u2019s voice bringing it all to life. He limns lifelong romance and instantaneous tragedy during the paradoxically heartbreaking, heart-mending \u201cUnfortunate Kind\u201d and details the disappointments and dreams of the blue-collar laborer with \u201cAmerican Tobacco Company.\u201d With its acoustic guitars and pealing organs, ragged vocals and rugged characters, Rockingham is a stunning, personal portrait of small-town America, easily identifiable and familiar.<\/p>\n

For the album\u2019s sole autobiographical moment, Barham, now happily married and sober, penned a letter of sound advice and Southern attitude to his daughter-to-be, \u201cMadeline.\u201d It\u2019s too personal to fall under a roots-rock purview, too singular to be swallowed by a larger situation. Like all of Rockingham, it\u2019s not the sound of Barham stepping away from American Aquarium but instead stepping confidently into the thoughts, stories, and feelings of his own thirty years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is just an outlet for a songwriter. It\u2019s me being able to do something different. This is like people who love their jobs, picking up hobbies,\u201d says Barham, \u201cThis is an exercise for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Aquarium member BJ Barham has announced his Great 48 Tour which includes 51 shows in 56 days covering all 48 continental states, a feat not many artists can possibly boast. His debut solo release Rockingham made my honorable mentions list for 2016 and is a truly good addition to your collection. It means some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":23791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t