NewTown’s start to recording world was quite unconventional. While most new bands will first record a project together, reach the promoters, then tour to sell their album, NewTown tried a reversed approach. They toured and played for three years in different parts of the country, honed their craft, find themselves as a musical band, before launching a record. In December 2011, NewTown released their first single to radio from their self-titled album NewTown and shot their first music video to introduce the song, the upcoming CD, and themselves as a band to a wider bluegrass audience.
In December 2012, the husband-and-wife duo had their first personnel loss when their mandolin player, James Kee announced that he was leaving the group to focus on his landscaping business. After a series of auditions, he was replaced by Clint Hurd.
In 2013, Newtown signed with Crossroads Music’s Pisgah Ridge Records and had Moore Bass Entertainment to help represent them for live bookings. For their first album with Crossroads, the group tried a crowd-sourcing approach, but instead of working with one of the popular online crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter or GoFundMe, NewTown offered an opportunity for fans to pre-purchased their music prior to its official release. To help fund their CD, the band offered 10 options for their fans ranging from $10 for song download and a signed photo, a video shout-out, a chance to shave Jr William’s hair, to a $10,000 private house concert. The album, Time Machine, was released in October with ten tracks. Most of them are originals – six were written by the band’s guitarist, C.J. Cain, and one cover music from master songwriter Guy Clark’s Dublin Blues sang by Penn.
2015 was a year of big changes for NewTown. The husband-and-wife grassers welcomed their first child in January. After a few months, the band’s original bass player Terry Poirier has left the band and was replaced temporarily by Tony Mowell. In mid-2015, after working with fill-in bass players for some time, Travis Anderson joined the group. Another major change was when their longtime guitarist CJ Cain, who also penned many original songs for the band, decided to leave the group. In an interview, Cain thanked his bandmates for the ten years he spent with the band “I thank all of the members of NewTown for helping me make so many musical memories.”
NewTown released another album in 2016 which was the first album with their recently-revised lineup, which includes Hayes Griffin on guitar (lives in Grand Rapids), Travis Anderson on bass (lives in Knoxville), and Mitchell Cannon on mandolin (lives in Burnsville, N.C.). The band collaborated with fellow-Kentuckian Tyler Childers who have four songs cut. Harlan Road is composed of eleven tracks and also prominent in the album was Americana songstress Sarah Siskind who wrote one song for the group. The band’s mandolin player, Cannon, missed some of the promotional shows for Harlan Road when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer at the age of 23. He was able to record some songs with the group for their new album before he had undergone surgery and chemotherapy.
To promote Harlan Road, the husband and wife duo was also featured on the pilot episode of Nashville Insider, a tv program aired on multiple cable and satellite platforms hosted by a Nashville performer and a former contestant on The Amazing Race on CBS, Caroline Cutbirth Hobby. They were featured alongside Carrie Underwood and Brett Eldridge. The feature was a promotion for their CD released in July 2016.
Post written by Jeff Mortimer, contributing writer at TechCrunch and CreditGlory, where his latest post on the Amazon Prime Rewards has been gaining some steam!
