Album Notes

Ultimately, change is inevitable. In the five years that Baltimorebased June Star has been around, several members came and went as the oft-playing band shared the stage with such acts as The Silos, Slobberbone,The V-Roys, Marah, Last Train Home and The Damnations. A break was in order. In the winter of 2002 June Star took a year-long hiatus and entered Phase Studios, attempting to follow up Telegraph, the band's critically acclaimed third CD.The resulting disc, Sugarbird, will not disappoint those taken with a distinctive sound that was described by the All Music Guide as "a satisfying blend of atmospheric twang, hard-driving humbucker folk, and 'Wayfaring Stranger' bluegrass."The forthcoming disc is slated for free download or Web purchase from cafepress.com. June Star leader and founding member Andrew Grimm, who continues to churn out desperate songs of love and loss, was joined in the studio by Ryan Finnerin on bass and Jeff Trueman on drums along with jack-of-all-instruments Tim Bracken.The session's layered instruments and vocals along with Grimm's solid songwriting produced the most ambitious and satisfying June Star CD to date. The songs of Sugarbird continue to explore the theme central to Grimm's storytelling-the heart and what makes it break.The opening lines of the first track, "Shaked"-"The elements you mine/are sistered to this cause"-launch the listener into an all too familiar world of questions and Grimm bravely attempts to supply answers. "Sugarbird," the title track, suggests that truth and healing occur in surviving: "picked up and shook,/by the roots/you held off another day." As the album progresses, Grimm continues to grapple with soured relationships, be they between a father and son or a man and his lover. In a departure from alternative country, the jazz-tinged "Baltimore" is a gut wrenching personal reflection on playing dead-end gigs in Charm City bands, a pursuit even the writer's own father dismisses. In "Way Down," Grimm addresses the freedom that results from finally severing a pairing that has gone disastrously wrong