Red Abbott in Popular Mechanics

The article has aged well over a couple years, and it’s still a gas hear the “evolution of the song” (Dutchess County) on the nerdy website of the nerd magazine of nerds.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/4235905

Key paragraphs:

Technologically, they knew the band could work (indie-electronica band The Postal Service tried something similar using standard mail in 2003), but they weren’t sure how to merge the collaborative process with their new Internet-based production style. “We didn’t just want something where Chip wrote a whole 3-minute guitar and vocal song and Joe and I just played backup on it,” Brown says. “We wanted to be a band.”

Unless you’re aiming for a low-fi sound, don’t skimp on the microphones. Bert Brown and his band use the Shure SM57 ($170). This basic, professional-grade mic is good for vocals as well as for acoustic instruments.

Greyshield at the Space Gallery

Here are some photos of Greyshield performing at the Factory Portland launch event at Space Gallery in Portland, Maine, July 23, 2010. All photos by Stephen Quirk of Factory Portland.

Circa 1997

Broken Treehouse is not really a record label, it’s not a performing group and it’s not an artist’s collective.  There is far too little motivation behind the whole thing to tie it to such illustrious terms.

Three young friends played a lot of music in various groups over several years, and one afternoon, lazily played some (pretty awful) music together.  This event was dubbed “Broken Treehouse.”  In the years since that afternoon (which really shouldn’t have been remembered as anything significant), the friends have done other things with music that they like to think are much more significant than the original effort of that afternoon.

The name, though, stuck around and has been freely associated with the configurations of people and creative projects connected to the three friends.  This website represents that association.  Here you’ll find links out to those projects — the artists, albums and groups that can justifiably be wholly referred to as part of the Broken Treehouse network.

Thanks for coming by, and please do what you can to spread the word about the music this leads you to, should you enjoy it enough to feel compelled to do so.