red cloud west

ross and jason grew up around lots of classic country and country-rock, but wound up in the '90s listening to lots of hardcore and emo (or at least what emo used to be). they began red cloud in 2002 as a one-off combo playing velvet underground covers in the style of bruce springsteen. from there, we found andrew (also of bad luck city) and jeremy (our first bassist) and wrote a bunch of songs. we learned to lose our loathing of guitar solos. we recorded a self-titled album with the assistance of kerry mcdonald (christie front drive) and eric allen (the apples in stereo). the next couple years are a jumble: we toured with ghost buffalo and planes mistaken for stars, and released a live EP, a studio EP called dragonland (recorded by jeff suther of bright channel), and had a song on the PS2 comp. jeremy left in 2005 and neil (now of planes mistaken for stars and git some) came aboard. things got heavier and weirder, in a good way (at least to us). we opened for lots of bands we like such as devendra banhart, richard buckner, i can lick any sonfobitch in the house, canyon, magnolia electric co, jerk with a bomb (precursor to black mountain), exene cervenka, lucero, and others. in january of 2006, we crashed our van while on tour with san diego's the north atlantic. we lived. after a long break, we came back with a split EP with big timber in december of 2006. we're working in a new album even as we speak. we're not in this band to be cool, to pretend to be cool, to get our asses kissed, or to kiss anyone else's. we want to write songs and share them. we don't have the patience for anything except making music.