There are several prominent CD releases scheduled for the end of March, and we will have profiles on 3 of them over the next few days. But first, we want to highlight an album that hit late last year.

Long Story Short is the seventh record from Barry & Holly Tashian, singers, songwriters and husband-and-wife. They have written and performed together since 1972, working the folk scene and penning songs for artists as varied as Kenny Rogers, Nashville Bluegrass Band, Jody Stecher and Roland White.

Barry even had a brush with fame during the days of Beatlemania as a member of The Remains, a pop/rock group that was hot in New England in the mid 1960s. They appeared several times on US television and even opened once for the Fab Four.

But that was long ago, and now Barry’s music is far more sedate. The new CD retains the duo’s simple acoustic sound, with a bluegrass edge provided by Mike Compton on mandolin, Matt Combs on fiddle, Mike Henderson on resonator guitar, Ross Sermons on bass and Kenny Malone on percussion.

Holly shared a few words about the songs they chose for this CD, and agreed to allow us to present a few audio samples for readers of The Bluegrass Blog.

“Long Story Short was written with Niall Toner, an Irish bluegrasser who often comes to the US to write with others. He’s is so funny that we spend most of our ‘writing’ time laughing and telling stories. On one occasion he told us that a friend of his recently said to him, referring to his wife: ‘I won’t bore you with all the details, but to make a long story short, she’s gone.’

We thought, now there’s a good idea for a song and started to write it, but with all the joke telling, we didn’t get very far. So Barry and I worked on the song for a few months and sent various versions of it to Niall back in Ireland. We finally finished it and his band recorded it on their new album. It wasn’t until we recorded it that we realized that the tag line should be ‘to make a short story long, she’s gone,’ so our version of the song is a little different.

Long Story Short – Listen now:

We also wrote The Promise with Niall. He gave us the melody and asked if we could write the lyrics and make it sound like an old Carter Family song, since he wanted to enter it in a song contest for Carter Family sounding songs.

So we wrote the lyrics, he entered it in the contest, and it didn’t win…but again he recorded it with his Irish bluegrass band first, then we put it on this album. (more…)