The TinyRadars team is thrilled to announce the arrival of Brooklyn's Mail the Horse as the 3rd member of our roster!
Nurturing our music scene locally has always been a top priority for TinyRadars, so it may seem antithetical that we’ve decided to release a record from a band based in Brooklyn. We have come to think about geography in a similar way as to how we think about our releases. Every record we put out comes in two formats: vinyl and digital. Vinyl is all about place. As a physical medium it can only exist in one place at a time. Vinyl is like our music scene at home; our venues and our local artists and our house shows and our fliers and our experiences sharing space together. Digital is all about disregarding the physical limitations of place. It can exist everywhere at the same time; the thread that ties together the shows at King St. Manor to the shows at the Toadstool to shows happening in basements across America. It’s like our language, and our connections and our sense of knowing that even in other places there are people who care about the things we do and want to support the things we support. Digital is family. Vinyl is the home you put it in.
Mail the Horse is part of our family. The process of releasing their upcoming record is something of a grand experiment for us. The trust and forgiveness that comes with years of friendship has been a crucial part of making this a reality. We are learning as we go and the Horsies have been willing to let us fumble through the process. When we first met Mail The Horse they were known as AMPM and based out of sea coastal New Hampshire. We became fast friends and were outspoken critics of their decision to relocate the band to New York, shortly thereafter. But the move, name change and line-up tweaking that occurred over that next couple of years has brought a new richness to their music. While their sound has clear folk and country roots in the vein of Bob Dylan and The Band, there is also a rougher, modern, edge heard in the strained vocals of Michael Hesslein and balanced by the sometimes sloppy drawl of Donny Amidon's songs. What has always been most striking to us about them is an indescribable timeless quality to their songwriting; that thing that exists in the work of all the greats that is just so hard to put a finger on. The songs that have been coming out of Gates Motel (the Brooklyn apt. where they write and record) are heartbreaking narratives of loss and acceptance, musical interpretations of dimly lit photos of New York City landscapes, the kind only an outsider could take.
Mail the Horse’s new LP, Great Kills, will be out this summer. If you’re in the area you can catch them at the Thing in The Spring this weekend.