Author: gingerneebreadhouse
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Cactus Tractor Swims with Dolphins
Well, techically we swam with a string quartet, and technically we weren’t swimming, we were playing music. But in the words of David Bashwiner (now, a very famous personage in Albuquerque*), playing with our string quartet (we don’t technically own them–we just wish we owned them) “is like swimming with dolphins.” According to our bassist…
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Cornelius Rothbury and the AlbuquerquEP
Dear Cactus Tractor Fans (and Future Fans!) We are in the thick of our Kickstarter campaign to make our second album (Lydian Water Songs Pt., II) and we want you to be a part of it! If you join the campaign before April 15th (easy, just turn us in with your taxes!) we will send…
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We’re Making A Second Album! And there are 500 Cactus Tractor eggs to be found before April 30th!
Greetings Cactus Tractor Friends, Family and Aficionados! In the traditional spirit of the Easter/Passover/Spring Equinox season we thought it would be fun to draw on our album with white crayons, dye it bright colors, then hide it in the backs of toilets, under eaves, inside of sewing baskets, in cello cases and light fixtures—all so…
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Archeology of Orson
In the course of planting a garden I came across a lot of stuff that Orson has left scattered about in the backyard (in this case “stuff” is not a euphemism for “scat”). As a creative force in the band, Orson has long been under-recognized. Each of the items below has been carefully chewed, buried,…
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Some Notes on Kerrville
Before beginning our respective summer teaching gigs in messy art, remedial music theory, and stilting, Stef, David and I went to Kerrville Texas to swim in the river, camp and attend the Kerrville Folk Festival’s Songwriter’s School. Due to a flush of torrential balmy Texas rain the only swimming we got in was while we…
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Love and Oppulence
We’d planned to spend Halloween lying low and hiding from the scary members of Cat Distractor but then we had a better idea. We came up with this totally fresh thought: disguises! Why not go out on a limb and wear costumes for Halloween! Unfortunately most of the band weren’t into it. David was flying…
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Birthday Storm Goddess and River Otter
The cacti were separated for the weekend, although we continued to be caught together in the beautiful whirlwind that is our kickstarter campaign. In the style of storm-naming I’ve decided to name our “whirlwind” Millie, in honor of David’s grandmother whose centenarian birthday celebration coincided with our previously humble (now auspiciously sparkly) campaign. You couldn’t…
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Cactus Trailer, Squishing Pears all over Town!
We’ve been incredibly busy this week with the campaign to bring cacti and tractors together at last. Incidentally we met a “real” cactus tractor last night at the source. In this photograph you see Steve operating the cactus tractor, and together they are squashing prickly pears into fuschially teeth-tinting cactus juice. Our proposed tractor doesn’t…
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Space Tractor! The kickstarter campaign begins.
Yesterday we launched our Kickstarter campaign. It was a pretty dramatic event. Birds, a 1st grade artist we know (we’ll be the house band at her upcoming Zendo show later this month—stay tuned)) and I counted down from 3 and yelled “BLASTOFF!” when David (Birds) pushed the “publish” button. Now we can say that we…
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THE THING (and Hinklefinny Duster)!
In a previous post I promised to tell you about THE THING, and shortly you will find out about THE THING, in fact, I plan to remind you about my exciting plan to tell you about THE THING every few words, just so you know that THE THING is out there and that I will…
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Columbia by Cactus Tractor
Cactus Tractor at PotluckCon Yesterday we recorded “Columbia” at PotluckCon in Dusty Wakeman’s pop-up studio in Tucson Arizona in the Mojave suite at a resort… There is all kinds of name dropping and crediting we get to do, so settle in! Samur from Seahorse Sound in L.A. recorded and mixed the session, and Freidl filmed…
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Cactus Tractor Heads to Tucson—and feels first kick from KickStarter Campaign.
This morning 4/7ths of Cactus Tractor headed for Tucson, Arizona to attend an audio and recording conference tastily named PotluckCon. Keeping this in mind we’d packed lots of snacks for the trip (knowing that road-withered fruit and left-over handfuls of trail mix are excellent additions to any food sharing festivity). Stef tries to eat a…
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Cactus Tractor, the Drink!
Recently we had the opportunity to introduce a new cocktail to Albuquerque: Cactus tractor, the drink! Bob and Juliana enjoying Cactus Tractors. This particular cocktail was invented by Randa Duffy in Denver, Colorado during the brief period of time (July 21 – August 10, 2012) that Colorado was engaged in being a part of Yemen.…
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Happy Birthday Mr. Watson
When we asked each other what Mr. Watson would like for his birthday we both said “an original Jackson Pollock painting.” So we set out to make one—since we couldn’t get a hold of Pollock on a Sunday, not to mention Monday was a holiday! Click on the first picture then scroll through to read…
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Ink, Inc.
On the road Sebastian and I came up with an invention, that, like Cactus Tractor, Cat Distractor and many other misheard musings, is sure to make us rich and famous forever. Sebastian’s family has, stored in their garage, a small tea tin containing the remains of much loved family pet named Mushroom (careful readers of…
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Jason Warshof’s Cactus Tractor
We returned to Albuquerque on Friday, quizzed friends about our tour with questions from this blog (Stef won, even though she just sort of skimmed the blog while Bethany studied it in detail all day long), and barely woke up in time to get to our regularly scheduled Saturday morning gig at Tiles of Santa…
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Candid photos from the lives of artists.
When we visited Glenna in Milwaukee, David got put in prison for imitating a raccoon. They just don’t stand for that kind of thing there! However, everyone seemed to be fine with Orson imitating a hopping beaver (look for footage soon)! When we moved Paul Wilhelm out of his Hyde park apartment in Chicago, we…
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Secret Other Blog–Revealed!
Dear Readers, Turns out I have my own secret blog (not anymore!) so I posted something on it today. I would hate for our loyal Cactus Tractor blog followers to miss out on this exciting event so I’ve posted this blog post so you can see that blog post. Just to be on the safe…
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Wait, are you already famous?
In Galesberg, Illinois. –Sitting in the pleasant breeze of a lazy summer window, Earle Grey tea at hand, cicadas and trains syncopating the background sound scape. There are giant red candles massed out across the wide window sill boards next to me. Leafy shadows romantically caress the computer screen in front of me and a…
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A Hot Mess
We’ve been on the road for almost two weeks. Sleeping on a variety of surfaces, bathing in different parts of Lake Michigan, gleaning our water from coffee and rivers, and eating every other day has some interesting results. It feels like I’m at a perpetual 3rd grade slumber party. Everything that is gross is also…
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My Wet Pile of Horrible Everything
Swimming in Lake Michigan, or “the Ocean,” as I’ve become accustomed to calling it has been wonderful. However the Ocean was also indirectly responsible for a harrowing series of events and a string of sleepless nights: starting with the first moment that my head went under water. I came back from the beach with slightly…
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Tin Can and Stink Badger
We left Springfield Illinois yesterday feeling like rock stars because we played a disproportionately large number of shows for the days we had been in town, we made a lot of friends and were recognized virtually everywhere we went, a few people liked us on facebook, and we had been keeping vampire hours (though not…
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Coastal Meandering
You can see (in figure 1) that St. Louis Missouri is located just off the coast of Yemen in the Gulf of Aden. We drove along ol’ highway N-4, then had to off road it for several miles, eventually turning the blow-up bed into a raft, and fording our instruments (and Orson) through whale shark…
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The Best Way to Book Shows is Not to Book Shows.
Booking shows is a lot easier than one would think. When you spend about a month writing fruitless emails to bars and coffee houses all over the country—trying to seem hip, fun and talented, without sounding pompous—you start to get the sneaking suspicion that no one likes you and that it’s actually impossible to get…
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Popsicle Sticks
In complete agreement with the laws of miracle tours, David and I found ourselves surrounded by new friends; smoking cigars and making large ephemeral art projects (respectively). After playing a family-awesome-hipster show with Marty Peercy at his hipster-awesome-family coffee house we were invited to stay with a really awesome hipster family! At some point the…
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Matching Shoes
We got a late start to our tour today because Bashwiner was giving me music lessons. He said he thought it would be a good idea for me to “catch up” to his PhD in music theory before we left, so about four hours later we were ready to go. Our first order of business…