Next Thursday (March 8), Cincinnati rockers Frontier Folk Nebraska will host a combo release party/send-off show at Southgate House Revival. The free show (in the venue’s Lounge) will also feature acclaimed singer/songwriter William Matheny, who the band will be touring with on their way to and from South By Southwest festival showcases in mid-March.
The new release being celebrated is Foolish Frank, a crisp four-song EP being issued through Cincinnati-based Old Flame Records that shows the foursome at the height of their Rock & Roll powers. Foolish Frank is available on cassette and can be pre-ordered now at the group’s Bandcamp page. Preorders (the EP officially releases next Friday) also score the purchaser all of the songs — which includes FFN’s cover of Superchunk’s “Driveway to Driveway,” from the indie rockers 1994 album Foolish (hey, that’s half of the EP’s name!) — instantly for download. (Click the player below for details.)
One of those songs is “Fill Up My Cup,” a classic FFN song that exemplifies everything great about the band — sublime, unpretentious songwriting, soaring, sky-tickling vocals and hooks and a grounded, timeless Rock & Roll candy center. Foolish Frank is taglined with “For all your cruising needs,” and the lyrics on “Cup” put you in the passenger seat of FFN’s touring van as they travel from gig to gig, enduring a rainstorm and listening to Sleepy Jackson on the radio.
“If ‘Fill Up My Cup’’s title had a New York Times bestseller extra long tag the second part would have been, ‘What It’s Like To Drive At Night,’” the group says in a statement about the track. “This band began to feel like the first thing we’d ever done that had a true identity; an identity forged on ever longer drives home in the middle of the night from cities in the Midwest. Trying to balance all aspects of our life as we tried to make people love us. All the details read like a dream that we keep having every time we load up the van.
“It’s who we are. It’s what we do.”
Listen to “Fill Up My Cup” below.
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 7, 2018.
