Events

Come to Freddy’s Bar & Backroom on the third Wednesday of each month for our Humans Against Music karaoke spectacular. H.A.M. karaoke is your chance to dredge up your favorite A.M. memories and more — and win shockingly mediocre prizes. No teleprompter at this one — the lyrics are on paper, and your cue is Mr. Tokyo Rosenberg, giving you meaningful gazes and occasional sign language accompaniment.

“Destroying music one song at a time is not our goal — it’s only coincidental.” 

Occasional grand prize: Krakus Canned Ham — three pounds of porcine glory packed in a protective aspic layer!
Our song selection exceeds 1,000 voiceless tracks, and we add more each month. Ask for a copy of our song catalog. Requests for songs we don’t already have are welcome anytime. New songs will be added to our catalog in the month after the request is received.

“The Bourbon Express are as good as it gets in hard honky tonk” -New York Music Daily.

The din of daily life in New York City can have the effect of obscuring hard work so that labors of love seem to appear out of nowhere. Country band Bourbon Express and producer Eric “Roscoe” Ambel (Steve Earle, Joan Jett) took their time recording the band’s debut studio album, Cry About It Later, behind the well-insulated walls of Cowboy Technical Services Recording Rig in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

While actual days in the studio amounted to about two weeks, there were many stops and starts along the way due to busy schedules and financial hurdles. “We wrestled with the idea of launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund at least part of the process, but ultimately felt that we’d rather do it ourselves and have a finished product to offer people before asking for money.” Singer-songwriter Katie Curley laughs and adds, “That meant that my husband (guitarist Brendan Curley) and I each took second jobs and ate ramen more often than we would have liked for about a year.”

Katie and Brendan met at a bar called A Bar in 2011 where they discovered that they were not only from the same part of the country–Washington State, the town of Home and city of Tacoma, to be exact–but that they shared an uncannily similar taste in music. “I didn’t believe him when he told me that he liked all the country musicians I liked. We were in Brooklyn in the twenty-first century comparing notes on Kitty Wells and Ernest Tubb, and I thought he was just trying to pick me up, so I didn’t return his call,” says Katie. A few weeks later, however, she found herself in a pickle when she was invited to perform at the now defunct Rodeo Bar and she didn’t have a band. She remembered her fleeting companion’s words at the bar, “I could add any number of instruments to your sound,” and sent him a message asking if he would be interested in the gig. After a few years of playing in various band configurations, the couple, now married, formed Bourbon Express with vocalist Sarah Kinsey.

With a new record out and new venues and players on tap, their record may be titled Cry About It Later, but the horizon for Bourbon Express looks anything but sad. After one of their final mixing sessions at Cowboy Technical, Katie and Brendan revisited A Bar, located near the studio, for the first time since their initial encounter there. They recalled the night they met and swapped versions of events. Two whiskies appeared at their fingertips, and they commenced a toast: To Bourbon Express!

Rootstime calls Cry About It Later “simply gold,” and No Depression writes that “There are some people who still like their music rooted as deep as possible in this country’s musical history and archives. Why? Because it’s authentic. And this is what Bourbon Express actually offers its listeners.”

bourbonexpress.com