Who are THE FOGHORNS?
It’s 2022, and it’s been quite a couple years. While we spent 10 years as the Ballard bar band, known for very late long gigs at Conor Byrne Pub, Sunset and aTractor Tavern, the two years following Covid were quiet. Representative of the recent events, we released our first acoustic album, Turn to the Moon.
Before this acoustic album, we’ve been known as an eight-piece band, consisting of a four-part choir made up of local songwriters, a bass clarinetist, a Taiko drummer turned blues drummer, a bassist, and whatever Bart Cameron is.
This live video from our Seattle CD release made at 1:20 AM is a sample of our behavior the last few years:
The current lineup is as follows: Bart Cameron, Jason Kopec, Lauren Trew, Ken Nottingham, Colin J Nelson, Casey Ruff, Paul Beaudry,Matthew Ploszaj. Kristjan Oli Petursson (Kopur) is in the band but can only play with us when we’re in Iceland. Peter Colclasure is in the band but can only play when we can afford to fly him from his new home in California.
Here’s our history
Anti-folkers The Foghorns began in 2001 with Bart Cameron bringing songs written in Wisconsin to Brooklyn New York for various strange performances, mainly with the help of Brooklyn bluegrass band The Cobble Hillbillies. The band released two albums in New York.
When Bart moved to Iceland in 2003 as a Fulbright Fellow, he revamped the band and toured Iceland using the moniker. In Iceland, Bart released a bucket and guitar folk album, So Sober. The band, still with bucket percussion, performed across Iceland including performing twice at Iceland Airwaves, at Innipukinn, and more than a 100 other performances across the island.
(The photo above is what the band looked like performing with a bucket in Iceland in 2004.)
In 2006, Bart moved to Seattle, Washington. The Foghorns were eventually reformed. With Katie and Rich Quigley, they recorded A Diamond as Big as the Motel Six in 2009. The tour that supported that CD took the band to Iceland, England, Scotland, Denmark and Sweden, along with a 42-stop cross country US tour. During their Glasgow performance, they were compared favorable to Liz Fuller’s bosoms, which seems positive.
In 2011, The Foghorns released their seventh full length CD, To the Stars on the Wings of a Pig, their first full-length LP on vinyl (thanks to Knick Knack Records). Seattle music magazine Reverb Monthly’s Chris Kornelis said, “Pig is one of the most substantially listenable local albums of the year; easy to access, and hard to put down. It’s soothing and comforting in the right ways, without being excessive or cheap. Its subtleties – hints of organ and accordion — are smooth, but smart. Easy listening doesn’t have to mean easily forgotten.”
In 2013, The Foghorns released “Ain’t I a Man,” a single featured in the Huffington Post and described as follows (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edward-m-weinman/aint-i-a-man_b_4234421.html) :
“[The Foghorns] takes on the ‘look at me’ America where our most precious, intimate moments are rendered irrelevant, unless photos are posted on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Thankfully, [their] music has the humility to make it seem like everything’s going to be okay. Listen to The Foghorns and momentarily believe that a decent job is at hand, sexual intimacy lingers just around the corner and movies starring a brooding, indifferent teenager portraying a vampire will cease to exist.”
Here’s the video for Ain’t I a Man, which was KEXP’s January 1, 2016 song of the day: http://blog.kexp.org/2016/01/01/song-of-the-day-the-foghorns-aint-i-a-man/
The Foghorns released The Sun’s Gotta Shine… in 2015. A second part of that project, …On a Dog’s Ass Sometimes, was released in 2017.
The Foghorns are a Knick Knack Records and Groove-o-matic Records recording artist.
Contact is thefoghorns at gmail.com or through www.facebook.com/thefoghorns