Spring 2007 Performers

Last Train Home
with Caleb Stine & the Brakemen
Friday, January 26

Last Train Home got its start in D.C. in 1997, but in 2003 lead singer and chief songwriter Eric Brace moved to Nashville to reinforce the band's reputation as one of the up-and-coming outfits in the alternative-country scene. The Nashville Scene welcomed him by proclaiming that Last Train Home “plays warm, smart, occasionally cosmic American music steeped in the verities of Roger Miller, Stephen Foster, Jimmy Webb and Willis Alan Ramsey. More reserved than ravaged, Last Train Home's smoldering passion gives lie to the nicotine-and-whiskey-soaked yawp of most alt-country-come-latelies.” With members now scattered around Tennessee, Maryland and Virginia, the root-rock band spent much of 2006 touring the East Coast, the Midwest and Germany as well as finishing up their latest full-length album, due in February. The band will preview the new songs at their January show at the Roots Café. In the midst of all that activity, four members of Last Train Home (Brace, keyboardist Jen Gunderman, drummer Martin Lynds and bassist J. Carson Gray) joined bluegrass legends Mike Aulridge (of the Seldom Scene) and Jimmy Gaudreau (of the Tony Rice Unit) as a new acoustic band called the Skylighters to record a new album, The Skylighters.

 

Discography:
Last Train Home (Adult Swim, 1997)
True North (Adult Swim, 1999)
Holiday Limited (Adult Swim, 2000)
Travelogue (Adult Swim, 2001)
Tributaries (Adult Swim, 2002)
Time and Water (Adult Swim, 2003)
Bound Away (Adult Swim, 2005)
The Skylighters (Red Beet, 2006)

www.lasttrainhome.com

photo by Dan Stack

Joining the new wave of Americana revivalists such as the Old Crow Medicine Show and the Be Good Tanyas is the Baltimore quartet, Caleb Stine & the Brakemen, featuring Stine on acoustic guitar, Burke Sampson on electric guitar, Andy Stack on upright bass and E.J. Shaull-Thompson on drums. "A brakeman is the guy who couples the cars on the train," Stine told the Baltimore City Paper in 2006. "I think as soon as you start talking about trains you’re alluding to a mythic America. You’re instantly talking about the kind of America that’s in the songs we’re playing." The quartet titled their debut album “October 29th," because they recorded the entire thing in Hampden’s Trinity Reformed Church on that date in 2005. As the Urbanite commented, “Stine’s songs have a prominent sense of place to go with their southern, Son Volt-ish twang.”

Discography:
October 29th (2005)

www.calebstine.com