The Insomniacs Sign with Piedmont Talent!
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Winner of the Blues Blast Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album!
The Insomniacs seemed to literally explode onto the scene out of nowhere in 2007 as a fully formed and functional unit delighting audiences with their joyous, yet highly contagious musical sound and irresistible sense of swing. Their self-produced debut release “Left Coast Blues”, recorded in the living room of bassist Dean Mueller’s house, was quickly snatched up and issued on Delta Groove Music, hitting a peak position of No. 5 on the national Living Blues radio charts. Critical praise and industry recognition from the blues community soon followed garnering the band a 2008 Blues Music Award nomination for Best New Artist Debut, as well as a 2007 Muddy Award presented by the Cascade Blues Association for Best Contemporary Blues Act. They play vintage instruments and channel a blues style from the 1950s, but there is a distinct new cyberspace bent to Delta Groove’s blues award winning quartet, The Insomniacs. These musicians who have quickly jumped into the top tier of clubs tour endless highways in a beat up van, babying a gut-string upright, the 1951 Fender “Nocaster” guitar, the 1964 Framus Star Bass and their Magnatone and Ampeg tube amps. But, they fill the long drives between gigs surfing the web on wireless laptops, looking at the MySpace and Facebook friends lists of the clubs down the road, and personally emailing blues fans to get them to listen to the band and come to the show. As a result, they get hundreds of plays per day on MySpace, a site usually focused on alternative, pop and hip-hop music. And they’ve enrolled a whole new generation of first-time young blues fans, as well as older ones who recognize the roots of their music.
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