Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket and Johnny Quaid Forge New Online Label: Removador Recordings and Solutions


Whether it’s collaborating with his band mates, recording guest vocals, or hand-picking opening acts, My Morning Jacket’s Yim Yames has always radiated a spirit of camaraderie with his fellow musician. Now Yames, along with his cousin and collaborator Johnny Quaid, are launching Removador Recordings and Solutions – an online platform to shine a light on some of the musicians that he admires and would like to share with the world. The label will also help connect the dots between an ever-growing artistic community that Yames is apart of, reflecting his eclectic taste and steadfast passion for music. Below are the details for Removador’s first three releases.

Jan 19 – Cortney Tidwell –“Boys” – Cortney Tidwell blends her boundless imagination and voice to create “Boys.” Her second full-length record, “Boys” leaps triumphantly from style to style, with her voice being the silken thread that holds the album together.

www.removador.com/cortney-tidwell


February 16 – The Ravenna Colt – “Slight Spell” – The Ravenna Colt’s “Slight Spell” is a debut album bursting with an impassioned and dreamlike sentiment. The group, which is helmed by former My Morning Jacket guitarist Johnny Quaid, combines its myriad influences into a dark, spacious plane, highlighting its cosmic yet truly American style.

www.removador.com/the-ravenna-colt


March 16 – Follow The Train – “Mercury” – “Mercury” is a nine-song psychedelic journey into musical space. A potent and volatile mixture that pays tribute to the shoe-gazers of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, “Mercury” proves itself to be a compelling attraction to the ears.

www.removador.com/follow-the-train

Here is an official statement from the company:

The Removador Recordings and Solutions web venture will offer consumers a rich new way of web-based living; specializing in music purchase, production, and facilitation, as well as problem solving, sports, rehab, recreation, vacation planning, vaccinations, ghosts, and social networking. Coming this fall, Removador will also debut
our much talked about new 3-D printer technology, enabling consumers to purchase food and auto parts online, and simply print them out in the comfort of their own home with our new carbon and silicone based 3-D printer. Imagine ordering a few sprigs of broccoli, or needing a new carburetor, and being able to print them out in edible 3-D- all in the comfort of your own home! Anyone who comes to invest in or own a share of the Removador name will not only find some of the coldest music they ain't never heard, they will be provided with a richness of living, and sharply increasing aural dividends for years to come. Removador Recordings and Solutions- some of the coldest music you ain't never heard!

For more information please contact press@removador.com and visit www.removador.com

The Ravenna Colt Biography

In 1902, University of Pennsylvania professor Dennis Magner wrote The Art of Taming and Educating the Horse. In it, Magner describes an interesting case of The Ravenna Colt, a virtually untamable, yet not necessarily barbarous animal.

The Ravenna Colt, in today’s incarnation, is Johnny Quaid
 finally realizing and returning to his troubadour roots. He first 
conceptualized the group’s approach to alternative country more than a 
decade ago. Quaid was well immersed in music, from his own
songwriting and performing, to his work as a recording engineer at Above the Cadillac 
Studios — chops that would serve the young songwriter well.

In 1998 Johnny joined Jim James, a.k.a. Yim Yames, on a project that would change their lives — My Morning Jacket. The group worked feverishly touring and recording and has not slowed down since. Quaid lends his guitar licks and engineering style on the first three albums, The Tennessee Fire, At Dawn, It Still Moves, as well as a barrage of EPs and singles.

Quaid departed from the group amicably at the start of 2004. He left his native Kentucky, headed west to California and worked as a carpenter while keeping a writer’s pen at hand.

He addresses this immediately on “South Of Ohio,” singing “I lost my drawl in California.” It was upon moving back east that Johnny not only picked up where he left off with Above the Cadillac, but also felt it was time to get The Colt running free. 

You hear a myriad of influences in The Colt’s concoction throughout its debut album for Karate Body/Removador Recordings 
Slight Spell. “According to the Matador” combines the Flying Burrito Brothers’ dark, spacious twang with a traditional folk in the vein of Townes Van Zandt and Bob Dylan. The reverberated swamp boogie “Forsake and Combine” evokes southern rock with a delicate, thinking man’s edge. The dreamy and windswept “Loner in Disguise” truly highlights the cosmic in Gram Parson’s description of insurgent country as “cosmic American music.”

Quaid has done well as his own conductor, as the organic, ever-changing Ravenna Colt is a powerful addition to the alternative country canon. The group is now made up of Philip Carlson, J. Brent Stewart, Daniel T. Mohler and Johnny Quaid, though new collaborations and different directions will be the modus operandi for the adventurous collective. 

The Ravenna Colt is a well-interpreted, craftily designed slice of 
Americana that keeps Louisville on the map.



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Cortney Tidwell Biography

“It seems there’s a shortage of girls in my life. It began when I was a child: I was obsessed with music, and rock and roll’s bombarded with boys, but girls weren’t fussed over it so much. So I positioned myself with the boys. They played instruments and talked about rock and roll, and all I wanted to talk about was music. It’s still the same today, boys everywhere I look. I even gave birth to two of them.”

CORTNEY TIDWELL’s debut full length DON’T LET STARS KEEP US TANGLED UP came out of nowhere: its ravishing guitar pyrotechnics, brittle electronic excursions, intimate torch songs and a duet with Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner served as context for TIDWELL’s spectacular vocals and ensured critics adored the record. Since the album’s release in 2006 it’s become something of a word of mouth phenomenon, helped by Ewan Pearson’s stunning remix of the title track (#34 in Pitchfork’s Tracks of 2007, no less) that continues to win fans amongst the dance community. TIDWELL’s also toured with Silver Jews and Andrew Bird, played shows with Martha Wainwright and Grizzly Bear, and collaborated with Fink for his Sideshow project. Now she’s back with BOYS, her long awaited second album and her first for Europe’s City Slang Records, and after two years in the studio the woman described as “Nashville’s own Little Sparrow” (an undisguised reference to Edith Piaf) has eclipsed her opening set with nonchalant bravado.

TIDWELL comes from a country music background: her mother, Connie Eaton, had a brief brush with fame in the 1970s, and her father, like TIDWELL’s husband (and co-producer) Todd, works in one of Nashville’s prestigious Music Row establishments. Growing up in the heart of Music City she spent her childhood years in her bedroom, avoiding the painful breakup of her parents’ marriage by listening to a wide variety of music, headphones clamped to her ears. Swearing she would never follow the footsteps of her mother, whose brief taste of success also unleashed a series of psychological problems, she eventually succumbed to music’s lure, beginning by booking bands for a local pizza restaurant. This, however, came to a notorious end when an evening of punk rock ended in a riot that had to be broken up by police, and although she briefly formed a punk rock act of her own with another girlfriend, she eventually fell to making music alone, combining the various country influences around which she’d grown up with the music she’d discovered for herself.

BOYS is the product of this history: it owes as much to Depeche Mode and Joy Division as it does to Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash, and as much, if not more, to Great Britain as to The Grand Ole Opry. It’s an unlikely and unworldly mix, flowing effortlessly from Solid State’s immaculate equilibrium to the krautrock-inspired Seventeen Horses, and from the John Hughes-esque nostalgia of So We Sing to the homespun R&B-influenced Bad News. There’s also the starry-eyed majesty of Palace and the touching innocence of Oh, China, while the archly titled Being Crosby – a duet with Jim James of My Morning Jacket, whose immediate acceptance of her invitation to work together “was a dream come true” – sounds like Joni Mitchell and David Crosby calling to one another across Laurel Canyon. Watusii, on the other hand, offers an icy sparkle that hides a pumping heart and a hook that could land an oil tanker, and Oh, Suicide is so devastating, almost traumatic, that it succeeds, with one simple sleight of hand, in not only breaking your heart but also sending you straight back to the album’s start once again.

Were it not proof that TIDWELL is blessed with a magical voice, a boundless imagination and the desire to create something that stands the test of time, BOYS might appear to be a record that’s so ambitious as to be foolish. The boys in her band – Ryan Norris (guitars, synths, and the album’s third co-producer), Scott Martin (drums) and William Tyler (guitars), also known as production team Hands Off Cuba, all members of Lambchop – leap recklessly but triumphantly from style to style, their work embellished further by a larger pool of talented and trusted local musicians. Amidst it all, however, TIDWELL’s voice is the silken thread holding the album together: athletic and graceful, as capable of immaculate innocence as banshee wails, it’s equipped with an irrefutable ability to strike right to the heart. Combined with her uncanny knack for melody and her strongest set of songs to date, BOYS confirms that TIDWELL is as comfortable with her own defiantly feminine side as she is with the boys who inspired her. Just don’t mistake her for one of them, even if she can beat them at their own game.

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Follow The Train Biography

Follow The Train began as the solo project of Dennis Sheridan in Spring of 2004 and has since weathered several transformations.

Initially providing a low-key and atmospheric experience that paid tribute to the great shoe-gazers of the late 80s and early 90s, Follow the Train enjoyed pockets of marginal success with the aid of exploits such as their self-released ep, the great disturbance; full-length from Darla Records, a breath of sigh; two consecutive years showcasing at SXSW and a handful of tour dates.

After shuffling through a rotating cast of characters, Follow the Train’s most recent ensemble, composed of James Hewett (drums), Mike Sabo (guitars), Brandon Jones (percussion and raw energy), Carlos Ramos (bass) and David Cronin (keyboards), imploded into the production of Mercury, a nine song, full-length, space-maddening, psychedelic, operatic brain-cookie. Mercury was produced over the span of a year – a time when several of its unusual members underwent significant life changes and used the record as a means to capture the intensity of their respective experiences. The songs, pre-filtered through long-time friend, Yim Yames, and processed by production mastermind, Kevin Ratterman, speak for themselves. Listeners are taken on a thick and epic rock n’ roll journey to the closest planet to our Sun and back home again.

Removador Recordings and Solutions will release Mercury in the coming months. Follow the Train currently exists as a beast that can be awakened as needed and will never go away no matter what iteration it manifests itself in – much like Godzilla. In the meantime, Dennis Sheridan and Carlos Ramos have teamed up with former FTT drummer, Andy Hurt as Creature Island.