With thoughtful lyrics, a focused guitar and a deeply northern perspective (“…summer came early but I know it won’t stay…”), “Long Cold Nights”, by Eric Rhame, is an intimate look into the life of an artist.
As snow piles up against a big oak door, Eric’s songs stoke a fireplace deep within a favorite smoky bar, his music and stories warming those Long Cold Minnesota nights.
Steaming cups of coffee, a nip or three of whiskey, bailing a guitar out of the pawn shop when work is available, playing an old rusty 12-string... Eric writes about what he knows.  Singing wonderful, clever tunes about the Northwoods.
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Back before I was alt or Americana anything, I was a folk singer. I traveled in a beat up Chevy station wagon with a mattress in the back, my guitars, a handfull of clothes, some battered, coffee-stained songbooks and not much else. I went from place to place, tried to grab a gig at a coffee house, a church, or maybe a Sunday afternoon at a tavern that would let me play for tips, a beer, a sandwich, a bed, a place to wash my clothes (or myself)...whatever. 

I wasn't alone. There were quite a few of us wandering 95, 40, Highway 17, Route 1, the A1A... 

We met up now and then, traded songs, smoke and lies about "how great it was going." Mostly we traded cassettes. TDK, Maxell, Phillips, some Radio Shack. All were loaded with what was then called folk music. Not the high level stuff. Not Dylan or Prine or whatever. Everybody had the "official" releases by the big boys. These tapes had names scribbled on them like Stan and Garnet Rogers out of Canada...Tom Rush, early Lightfoot, Eric Andersen, Bill Staines...maybe some Planxty or Ralph McTell from over the pond. The guys that were sort of below the radar but still quite a few steps up the ladder from us. Somebody might have scrounged a gig at a folk festival they were on, and got a tape and copied it for a friend, and that guy copied it, and on and on... 

Finding a new tape and saying to your friends, "You gotta hear this one," was something we all lived for. We listened and learned and added the tunes to our songlines. 

It was our "alternative" music. It was a secret language. It was the music of stoned midnight carrides, of working in corners and cheap red wine-fueled trysts in rooms lit by scented candles with gypsy dressed hippie girls we'd never see again. Very acoustic and so very far from the mainstream it was pretty much landlocked. 

I hadn't thought about that kind of music in many a year. 

Then I heard Eric Rhame's new CD Long Cold Nights. 

I was instantly transported back to a place in my heart that I thought I had left behind forever. From the opener of Spider John to the closer Destinations, I was spellbound. Held fast by a voice that was alternately rough and smooth, but always honest. Delighted by lyrics that talked of pawning guitars and patchwork quilts and woodfires and a way of life that is all but gone... 

And the music...an honest to God twelve-string guitar dressed up with just enough slide and harmonica and a soul-stirring cello to bring the songs to life and never step on the stories. Wonderful, evocative melodies and tight, handcrafted songs. This is a labor of love. 

You can hear the love of what he is doing in every note of Eric's music. 

If you were sitting next to me in my old wagon right now, and we were working our way south through a hot summer night, looking for a town that might let us play a few tunes, I'd twist one up, dig out a cassette with "e.Rhame" scrawled on the white shell, put it in the deck and say, "Ya gotta hear this one."
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