The Greencards are a trio of young pickers on the borders of bluegrass music playing what might appropriately be termed Americana music, or as I read on one site “underground folk with a bluegrass influence.” Two of the three, Warner and Young, are Australian while the third member, McLoughlin, is English. The three first met in Austin, TX at a recording session and the music was there from that moment on. They’ve been around for several years now and have released two previous albums. Currently on the verge of releasing their third, they’ve announced a promotional endeavor that includes the gifting of a Collings MT (A style) mandolin and a video iPod.

The new recording is titled Viridian and much of the instrumental magic on the project comes from the able fingers of mandolinist Kim Warner. Kim plays a Collings mandolin much of the time, though he also plays a Gilchrist at times. Based on Kim’s association with Collings this seems like a great way to promote the new recording.

Viridian consists of 12 tracks, many written or co-written by the band members. The disc also features special guests Bryan Sutton, Larry Attamanuik, Jedd Hughes, Andrea Zonn, Viktor Krauss, Doug Lancio, and Chris Carmichael. For the most part this isn’t a bluegrass album, but if you like Americana and bluegrass related acoustic music centered around vocals and mandolin, then this is an album you’ll want to check out. I will point out one particular tune that, even minus the banjo, is a great driving bluegrass tune. Lonesome Side Of Town was written by Kim Warner and Jerry Salley, and could very well be a tune you’ll hear in jam sessions not long after the albums release.

Viridian will be released on Dualtone records with a street date of March 6, 2007. Pre-orders are being accepted at this time from CDBaby.com.

The band is currently running an email promotion through their Myspace page in which the winner will receive a new Collings MT (A style) mandolin, courtesy of Collings. The promotion is a “Tell A Friend” kind of thing where you enter your name and email address, as well as the email addresses of your friends. The promotion entry page states that you are forwarding the page to a friend when you do this.

Those who forward this page to the most people will be eligible to receive prizes.

The wording of the page suggests your friends will receive an email with a link to the page so they can enter themselves, and one would hope that is all the marketing that will be done without their permission.

Prizes in the promotion include the mandolin mentioned above for 1st place. 2nd place is a video ipod, 3rd place is tickets to a show, and five 4th place winners will be given an autographed poster and copy of the new cd. All winners will be selected April 2nd.

Here’s a nice group of photos from the Exhibit Hall.

Photos by Dave Carney © 2006

Lawson and Reno	Bull Harman	Dan Miller	Herschel Sizemore
The Huber Booth	Katy Daly	Bill Keith	Sewell and Leftwich
Reid and Baucom	Merriam and Bush	Ronnie Reno	Richard Gelardin
Danny Roberts	Roland White	The Smiths	Eberle and Vorndick

We made mention of the launch of Fretboard Journal late last year, when the inaugural issue was set to be published. We have just received word that their third edition is being mailed now to subscribers, with a publication date of August 1.

The 8/06 issue will feature an interview with Wade Mainer, a seminal banjo pioneer who merged old time and early three finger styles, and a detailed interview with Bill Collings of Collings Guitars. The cover story is one on Nashville songwriter Guy Clark, and the new issue also includes a report on Loar Fest West (which we mentioned earlier as well).

The editors like to describe this publication as a coffee-table style magazine, and focus much of their attention to providing a visually entertaining presentation along with the text content of each issue. They proudly point out that the magazine is published on archival quality paper, and full color is used throughout. They make no stylistic distinctions, and intend to simply cover acoustic music and the instruments used to create it.

Subscription details can be found on their site.

I added some new photos to the header of the website yesterday. They rotate randomly every time the page is loaded. The photos that are now in the rotation were all taken here at my studio, either by myself or my good friend Dave Carney. Here’s some info about the instruments that are now included in the rotation.

• Collings D2H - owned by myself
• Huber Lancaster - owned by John Lawless
• Triggs Mandolin - owned by Dan Miller
• fiddle - owned by Ron Stewart

Now I just need to find a dobro and bass to photograph!