We try to throw a few monkey wrenches into each show. You can always expect upbeat bluegrass with furious banjo & mandolin, blues-rock tunes featuring electric guitar and harmonica, tear-in-your beer acoustic sing-alongs; but always a few surprises. Perhaps...

• • Bluegrass covers of Sublime, Pink Floyd, and AC/DC?
• • A reggae/mariachi song sung in Spanish?
• • A folk ballad about the Incredible Hulk?

Yes, Yes, and Yes. You never know what Mad Bread is going to do next. But you know it’s going to be a good time.

by Adam & Mike

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A lot of folks ask me about the "electric banjo" that I use on a number of songs, such as "Morning Commute" and "Back to Bite You" and a few others. Most people don't know that such an instrument exist, but believe it or not, there are a variety of electric banjos out there.

The model I play is a Gold Tone EBM electric banjo played through a Fender Blues Junior amplifier. The thing looks more like an electric guitar than a acoustic banjo most people would recognize. The instrument is a "real" banjo with a head, bridge, and hollow sound chamber inside (this means it can be played acoustically, though the volume is significantly lower than most banjos.) Like an electric guitar, there are 2 pickups on the banjo, one humbucker and one single coil.

I typically use this instrument on some of our more "progressive" or "experimental" songs where the bright, rapid-fire notes of my acoustic banjo may not fit. The electric offers me a very different tone and longer sustain on notes. Another feature is the ability to alter the sound using effects pedals such as a wah-wah, phaser, flanger, etc. I'm still tinkering with the sound, but one day I hope to incorporate some "psychedelic banjo" on select songs in future performances and albums.

by Adam

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A lot of people have asked if “The Captain’s Lament” is supposed to be about the Civil War, so I thought I would write a little bit about how the images that appear in the song relate to its narrative. In part because of the strong perspective voice of the captain, the song at first gives the impression that it is grounded in a particular time, and a particular war. This impression is probably strengthened in the minds of most listeners by the song’s composition and arrangement, which are steeped in folk idioms. Folk music suggests to the listener that they are about to hear a story, with more concrete elements of character, setting, and plot than in most pop music.

Admittedly, a lot of the images and artifacts that make appearances in the song are borrowed from the Civil War era. The image of an officer on a horse in the first line is one (“I don’t want to sit astride my ivory horse in the rear any more”). The ambulance train mentioned in the first verse (“Anyone who thinks that you get used to it after a little while, hasn’t seen the ambulance train that stretches miles and miles”) is another. Even the captain’s archaic manner of speech, (“I felt the pain of their mortal wounds even as they were my own”) probably does more to evoke the nineteenth century than any of the specific images or references.

But if you listen closely, there are a few distinct references that make it impossible for the song to be grounded in the Civil War. In fact, these references make it impossible for one to take the song’s narrative too literally. For one thing, there is a line that mentions to Idaho (“They write letters to their folks in Illinois and Idaho”), which was an unorganized territory during the Civil War, and not part of the United States until fully three decades after the war ended. Another veiled hint that the song is not fixed in the Civil War era comes in the second verse when the captain quotes Richard Nixon (“Back home the politicians speak of peace with honor in our time”). “Peace in our time with honor” are famous words from Nixon’s his famous speech in which he defended the escalation of the war in Vietnam by claiming the mandate of the so-called “silent majority” of Americans who approved of his policy.

I have always resisted characterizing “The Captain’s Lament” as a song “about” the Civil War, because that reading assumes that the narrative can be trapped in a specific point in time. Instead, I tried to explore some of the universal characteristics of war, and to make broader statements it, by assembling a set of artifacts that are irreducible to any specific place in time. Call it purposeful anachronism: the juxtaposition of images that share a common theme but do not fit together into a specific context.

It was not my intention for the song to be historical. If it was, then I could easily be criticized for accidentally being unhistorical, or factually inaccurate. Instead, the song is purposefully ahistorical, outside of or unrelated to history.

by Nate

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Well, we're from Chicago and proud enough of it to put it front and center with everything we do. See the heading of this website, or the first song of our CD. The Flint brothers and Joel have called Chicago their home for their entire lives. Well, Joel is from Skokie. But he was always within a stone's throw of the city limits. Mike and Carl are both transplants who came to the Windy City and found a home they could be proud of.

As for the twist, it comes from the surprises we always try to have in store at shows. Whether we are covering non-traditional songs in a bluegrass format - or not being afraid to deconstruct a tune in the middle of the song, like the Gemini you can always expect the unexpected. At our album release party, the audience was treated to a funk bass solo in the middle of Deep Elem Blues. Getting shot by purists is a constant fear of ours.

by Mike

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