Album Notes

One listen to the songs here and it will be obvious that Cropchecker is not your run of the mill band out clamoring aimlessly for poontang, power, and poserdom.

And while some might say the audience for the themes this rocking four-piece band explores (often rural, spiritual, and working class in nature) is limited, we know and believe there are plenty of people who are looking for and will respond to songs that aren't just the equivalent of a piece of canned band taffy.

Valhalla Ballroom is true Americana, and it's an album. Yeah, we know it's a CD, but it's an album at heart, a throwback, and it only lacks a cover as big as a pizza box or one listen from you to prove it. The songs speak to each other, and one listen through the tracks shows the texture of this music also contains the same hardscrabble fiber of our vast land: rock, blues, gospel, country, city, home, church, work.

Just like kindergarten, let's keep it simple: Cropchecker wants to connect the dots-- to connect the blue and red staters, the hay makers and daytraders, the wild-for-whiskey houseframers and dead-at-night waitress, the what-color-should-my-hair-be-today teenager and the sitting-in-a-pickup-eating-lunch field laborer.

Cropchecker does so not by evoking some mystical, New Agey doggerel or fake-your-groove-thing noodleing, but instead by sharing the one thing even the poorest lady on the bus can produce herself: stories.

Stories, stories, stories.

From the oil platform worker of "Wish I Was In Dallas" to the black man searching the physical world for the divine "Ain't Found Heaven Yet (But Heaven Is My Home)". From the rowdy roughneck who is a kitten on beer but finds himself in one comic, hard-liquor disaster after another ("Only Happens When I'm Drinking Whiskey"), to the woman who has lost her child and can't open her eyes again without help to the beauty of this land ("See The Mountain"), it is through the inner-rhythms and intersections of stories and sound that Cropchecker hopes to connect.

Cropchecker has made an album affordable and accessible for all, and this band hopes to share its hopes and visions, its early mornings and late late nights, through Valhalla Ballroom.

As one factory worker from northern Ohio wrote after attending the CD release party for this band: "The album is amazing. All the effort you must have put into it really shows. There is more meaning in a single stanza from "Silver and Gold" than there is in some entire days of programming on MTV, MTV2 and VH1 combined. Cropchecker, you guys have heart."

Now, indie music fans, please give the songs a listen, order a CD to arrive in your mailbox soon, and decide for yourself.