Ron Cooke of KTAL LP, the community radio station in Las Cruces, has managed to turn the Old-Time Pharmaceuticals album release performance into a full, one-hour radio show! It’ll be broadcast from 2:00-3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20, as part of the KTAL “In the Spotlight” series, and then it’ll be in the KTAL archive for on-demand play for two weeks. Live streaming will be at https://www.lccommunityradio.org/listen.html.

Recording, mixing, and mastering is finished for OTP album #2, Sing a Little Too Loud and Long, and the album is scheduled for an October 31 release!

We’ve aimed to bottle the spirit of a harvest-time jam session in a hay barn with this one: expect some more playful songs and arrangements, themes flitting across transition and reflection, and of course a few spook tales.

Here’s the welcoming track, “Sing a Little Too Loud and Long”:

We look forward to sharing the rest of the album with you soon!

Pat, like so many parents of toddlers, has been sick for about the last year straight–and to reduce the amount of hacking you hear on the next album, we’re shifting the release date to fall 2024. We’ll make sure the final album is worth the wait, and in the meanwhile, you’ll get to hear more singles as they come together. More soon!

Thanks to KTAL Community Radio, all five of the Old-Time Pharmaceuticals got to perform and broadcast live from the Las Cruces Farmers and Crafts Market this autumnal Saturday morning! We had a world of fun bringing music to the joyous bustle of the market, and if you want to join in, you can listen to a rebroadcast of the pop-up tent revival at https://www.lccommunityradio.org/archives/live-from-the-market-guest-musicians-old-time-pharmaceuticals.

Happy fall, everybody! While we’re putting together the next full album, Sing a Little Too Loud and Long, here’s a teaser track from our early recording sessions: “The Sidheóg.”

Across almost all cultures, the simultaneously beneficent and brutal powers of nature have been, at one point or another, represented as nature gods or spirits—fickle and powerful, beautiful and dangerous. The Middle East has the jinn; Greece has the daimones; Scandinavia, the huldre; Japan, the kami; Ireland . . . well, Ireland has the sidhe, or sidheóg. All of these mythologized beings facilitate reverence and terror in the face of a dually nurturing and hostile reality, which struck Pat as a natural source for a song: so, here’s “The Sidheóg.”

The Old-Time Pharmaceuticals have three newly official additions to our base ingredients! Coming soon to new shows and at least one new album, we have

• Jim Carlile on bass, mandolin, guitar, and vocals;
• Stephanie Hanusa on flute; and
• Spencer Taylor on bodhrán and pennywhistle.

We really look forward to vibrating your eardrums as a full band.

We’re excited to share that work on the second Old-Time Pharmaceuticals album is underway! For the next collection of songs, we’ll be bottling the spirit of a harvest-time jam session in a hay barn, with a goodly set of folktales and ghost stories thrown into the mix. The tentative release date is late summer/early fall 2023, and as more details firm up, we’ll keep you posted!

The UK Songwriting Contest results are in, and the folk finalist section is crammed full of great songs! Some of our favorites are Scott Cook’s “Say Can You See” (https://www.scottcook.net/tunes), which deservedly won the category; “Alaska,” by Anna Renae (https://soundcloud.com/annarenaemusic/alaska); and “Errand Lasses and Buffer Girls,” by Pamela Ward and Paul Cherrington (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlgDymg_KzI). If you’re in the mood for some more fantastic folk music, check ‘em out!  

(Old-Time Pharmaceuticals song “Joan and Victor Jara” is also in the finalist mix, but you’ve already heard that one, right?)

Contentedly filled with holiday chocolates and the last of the canned goods from the pandemic’s beginning, we bear glad tidings as 2020 sputters to a close: Roots & Honey has now spent five straight months on the Folk Alliance International Radio Charts, including a brief peek, gopher-like, into the top 40! It’s been an honor to keep company for so long with so many of our musical heroes, especially if we ignore the dates they released their albums.

Our deepest thanks go out to the surprisingly large number of folk DJs willing to open an unsolicited package stamped “Old-Time Pharmaceuticals.”

Roots & Honey reached #43 on the Folk Alliance International Radio Charts for July 2020! It’s an honor (and a little surreal) to be keeping company with folks like Gillian Welch, Indigo Girls, and Yo-Yo Ma.

July 2020