One last look at The Local Strangers 1.0 – Katrina + Melisa, we’ll miss ya! (photo by 254mochacharlie)

We have also introduced two new members into the band! It was with a fond farewell that we bid adieu to our wonderful bass player, Melisa Holman, as she moves to North Carolina and our charismatic keyboard player, Katrina Charles, as she focuses on her solo career. We are sad to see them go, but are so lucky to have two new players that are masters of their craft. Our new keyboard player Daniel Walker, is a man of many talents. Not only does he play keys, but also Rhodes, Hammond B3 and accordion. He is sure to bring some awesome news sounds to the band. Our new bass player Ethan Sobotta is a classically trained musician who is a recent transplant from the Midwest. We are so excited for you to meet these new players and hear what incredible musicians they are!

It’s been a busy summer of recording, touring, planning, and rehearsing which, combined with limited studio access, has made this album take quite a bit longer than we expected.  We decided it was better to take a little longer perfecting the record than to rush it. We are so excited with the way the music has tuned out and are so happy that we took the extra time to complete it. It is currently in the process of being mixed and mastered and we are looking at sending it off for printing in the next couple of weeks.

Mark your calendars for November 9th! That is the date of our CD release party at the beautiful Columbia City Theater here in Seattle with tickets going on sale very soon.

We cannot thank you all enough for your support.

Cheers,
Aubrey & Matt

Jeff Kuhr teaches film and video production at Lawrence High School.  He is also a big fan of indie music and an avid follower of Seattle music blog Sound on the Sound.  After seeing their 2010 Doe Bay Sessions, Jeff became a big fan of The Head and the Heart around the time of their first nationwide tour.  After the show in Lawrence (which happened to be across the street from his house), Jeff asked the band to come play in his classroom the next day.  They obliged, and the first Classroom Session was born – with the students filming, editing, and asking all the questions.  Since then, Room 125 Productions has created eight sessions with great acts including Damien Jurado, Bryan John Appleby, Kelli Schaefer, Nathaniel Rateliff, and Drew Grow & the Pastors’ Wives.

Upon hearing of our Midwest tour plans, Jeff asked us to come through and do a session, and we are so glad that we made the trek!  The students were wonderful, their questions insightful, and combined with the show Jeff set up for us the night before, Lawrence was one of our best experiences on the tour.

All four videos from our Classroom Session are below.  Please be sure to connect with LHS Room 125 on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

“Hunted by Ghosts” and committing to collaboration:

“For Fear of Losing” and developing our sound and aesthetic:

“Devil and a Stiff Drink” and balancing music, work, and life:

“Give Up the Ghost,” prefaced with a story and followed by thoughts on building community around music:

One year ago today we played our first show together.  

We’d met and started collaborating a few weeks before, and the opportunity of a Tuesday night show at the Skylark suddenly presented us with urgent tasks:  Pick a band name, build a setlist, and try to get some friends out to the show.  In the process of preparing for that show, jamming quickly became rehearsing. Then shooting-the-shit became planning.

And we loved it.

So as the two of us stepped up to that leopard-print stage, propped ourselves up on barstools, and sang our first six songs and a few covers, there were already plans in the works.  Studio time was booked and photographers contacted. Ideas and aesthetics were bubbling up to the surface.  We were already deeply inspired both by the music we were starting to create and the ambitious journey that we were beginning.

In one year that journey has already taken us further than we could have hoped and surrounded us with more love and care than we knew was possible.  

We have been able to share our music in extraordinary ways.  Some almost unreal highlights include:

- Creating a beautiful music video with Tim OHara
- A sold-out CD release show at the Columbia City Theater with Andrew Vait and The Elderly
- Touring 3,500 miles up and down the West Coast
- Playing a Sunday afternoon set at Doe Bay Fest, singing to the San Juan Islands.
- Rowdy crowds singing our words back to us at shows – especially our tour homecoming at the Tractor Tavern
- Playing on the Marty Reimer Podcast
- KBCS 91.3 in-Studio appearance on The Outskirts with Scott Farley
- Countless Sunday night open-mics at Conor Byrne

The most significant things from the past year, however, are the endlessly generous and supportive people we have met.

Let’s start with the wonderful people in our band – Katrina Charles, Melisa Holman and Justin Howard. Their creativity, talent, energy, and big hearts have made every show so much more fun and every practice so rewarding.  A year ago we hadn’t met any of them, and now it’s hard to think of daily life without them.

Then there are the folks who made our debut EP possible with their talents, time, and tireless dedication.  Our producer/engineer Yevgeniy “Eugene” Frid and amazing musicians like Bradley Carter, Andrew Joslyn, and Josh Lava believed in what we were doing before we even knew what it was.  Then Brandon Busch and Kory Kruckenberg made it sound amazing with their mixing and mastering skills.

Most importantly, we want to thank the friends, fans, and family who have shared this year with us.  Especially those in Seattle and on the road.  Through the exceptional Seattle music community fans have become friends, friends have become fans, and we’ve all started to feel like family.  You know who you are.  Even while on tour, thousands of miles from home, we felt connected to Seattle; proud to represent it, and part of something much bigger.

We are so excited to share year #2 with all of you.  If it’s anything like the first, we’re in for a real treat.

So much love and thanks,

Matt & Aubrey
The Local Strangers

I finished writing “All Along” in the fall of 2005.  Simple, sad, and sweet, it was one of those songs that developed over a long period of time and the sum of many experiences and perspectives, as opposed to one particular event.  My band at the time didn’t really know what to do with it, and neither did I in that upbeat-rock context.  We moved forward on another slow song I’d written, “Up to You”, and “All Along” was left to the wayside.

Fast-forward 5 years.  Aubrey and I had been playing together for a couple months and found that neither of us were excited to play our previous bands’ material moving forward.  In that romp through the back catalog, however, I rediscovered “All Along” and immediately thought of Aubrey singing it.  I had been taking a few guitar lessons at Dusty Strings in Fremont to enhance my finger-picking, so that kind of guitar arrangement was on my brain.  I arpeggiated the guitar line, making the sloppy, frantic chords into more elegant phrases, and worked with my guitar teacher on some of the runs and fills.  That teacher was Bradley Carter, who would later add banjo to our record and play in the band!

photo by Morgen Schuler

I played the new version for Aubrey and was sure she would love it.  From the first time she sang it back to me I knew this was what the song had always wanted.  She could make my least favorite lyrics become my favorite part of the song, just in the way she phrased it.  When we recorded it for the EP, just guitar and her vocal, this was the song our friends and family always noted first.

The simple guitar/vocal tracks sounded so good we were wary to add any other instrumentation to it, but our engineer and producer, Yevgeniy “Eugene” Frid, pressed and pressed that he knew the perfect person for the song: “The Fiddle.”  That turned out to be Andrew Joslyn ( Handful of Luvin’, Macklemore, Passenger String Quartet).  Andrew took a personal, inspired interest in the song – adding the entire string section with a combination of instinct, improvisation, and meticulous orchestration.  The result is something more advanced and special than we could have imagined.

I guess what I’m trying to say here, and why I want to tell this story that may be very, very boring to most people, is that this experience has taught me a lot about both perspective and collaboration.  The best things in life are never achieved alone, and the openness to work with others – especially when it comes to art and music – exponentially expands the possibility of something amazing.  It’s cheesy as hell, but I’m sticking to it.  Especially on a sunny day in Seattle.

Thank you all for everything,

-Matt-

We are VERY excited to announce the release of our debut record on Friday June 10^th at the beautiful Columbia City Theater. We are thrilled to showcase this milestone as a part of the first ever Seattlest Music Presents show alongside two other great bands we adore: Andrew Vait (also releasing a CD that night) and The Elderly. We are also planning to have a FULL BAND backing us up by then! To say we are excited is a bit of an understatement!

This is the big one. All of our hard work over the last few months has led up to this one special evening. It is a huge opportunity for us to make a big splash and we will need your help to do it.  Please mark that calendar RIGHT NOW and help us get the word out!

We are working on several other exciting projects leading up to the release, including new videos and collaborations. If you haven’t already found us on Facebook, make sure you connect with us so you don’t miss out on anything! We also have a couple of Seattle shows coming up before the June 10^th release: April 14^th at Egan’s Ballard Jam House and May 8th at The Sunset Tavern.  But for today, this is all we can think about:

Seattlest Music Presents:
Friday, June 10 @ Columbia City Theater
Andrew Vait (CD Release)
The Local Strangers (CD Release)
The Elderly

Thank you SO much for your support,

Aubrey & Matt

The Local Strangers

-Matt-