Sam from Americana Daily posted an insightful (if a bit geographically off) review of Heart’s Delight today. He says, “I wasn’t surprised to learn the album was self-produced or that the legendary Chris Stamey mixed it. While steeped in country-rock tradition, the sound is fresh and modern. I hope these guys catch a break.” Thanks, Sam, us too. Click here to read the whole article.

It’s nice because of the weather, of course. And the proximity to so many swell things: the coast, San Francisco, the mountains, lots of cool people… And it’s nice because some of those cool people are making and selling high-technology, and sometimes they need to associate themselves with other cool things, and sometimes that’s us.

Palm, Inc. has chosen one of our songs for use in the promotion of the new Palm Pre phone, and our website hits have exploded as a result. So to those of you checking us out based on that: thanks for stopping by! The song in question, “Yolo County Line”, is actually available as a free download over on our Sounds page. And if you like the song we’d be very psyched if you checked out more of our music on iTunes, or Amazon, or CD Baby. And please, let us know if you dig what you hear.

If you already know about the web application called Pandora, then you know why we might be excited to now have our music included. If you don’t, it’s definitely worth checking out. The best way to explore it is by clicking on this link to their Careless Hearts Radio channel, where you’ll hear not just our music but lots of other cool music in the same vein, as determined by that crazy digital music voodoo that they do. Enter in any song, or band, or genre that you like, and Pandora actually reads your mind and sends you cool tunes. OK, maybe that last part isn’t true, but we’re still jazzed to have some songs up there.

In this latest entry of the trailblazing Bay Area podcast The Bay Bridged you can hear “Bus To Dallas,” a track from our most recent CD. Check out “The Bay Bridged” here.

Thanks to the eagle eye of Steve from The Slack Jawed Sons of Bitches, we learned something cool about a brand new (and apparently quite musically savvy) smart phone from Palm: turns out it plays Careless Hearts! You can see that the Pre is playing our song “Long Gone Valentine” if you go to the Palm site and click on the “See Gallery” button under the heading Notifications Bar. We also caught wind of the fact that, when demo’d at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, our tune “Yolo County Line” was heard blasting right out of the thing. We’d just like to take this opportunity to thank the folks at Palm for their tasteful endorsement of our band.

According to SuppleWine, a sassy wine / culture/ entertainment website, the most appropriate wine to drink when listening to Careless Hearts is an Australian concoction called Lengs and Cooter Sparkling Red. Who knew? We do know this much: they put a smile on our faces when they described our style as “Wilco-meets-Creedence-over-three-pints”. Check out the full article here.

In the ongoing effort to make our CD Release Party something truly special, Shay Quillen has pitched in a great little article for the San Jose Merc. Dig it here.

We landed on our first ever magazine cover today, with a great little write-up in the Silicon Valley Metro. And we got a terrific review of our new album over at Search For The Last of the Hardcore Troubadours. Feeling pretty good today, we have to admit it.

Our good friend Chris Esparza at Giant Creative is helping us to put on what we’re hoping will be a tremendously good time on Sunday evening, October 19th. To celebrate the release of our second album, “Heart’s Delight,” we’re inviting you to join us at the historic Landmark Ballroom in downtown SJ. (A year to the day earlier we began the recording of the album a mere 100 yards from this very spot, so there is a nice poetic resolution to the timing and location of this thing that strikes us as very apt.)

We’ve decided to do something a bit different for this event. The doors are going to open at 4pm, there will be food, drinks… it’ll be a real party, not just a gig, with all ages not only welcome but accommodated. And since we worked with our pal Müller on the recording of the album, we invited him and his band The Mumlers to play a set as well. (It doesn’t hurt that The Mumlers are great folks and one of San Jose’s very best bands, so we are honored that they accepted our invite.) We want this evening show to be all about friends, neighbors and scenesters mingling for a few hours and enjoying some of the best indie/pop/rock/country/folk music the Bay Area has to offer. We’re going to keep the cost low too, because we want people to have a great night out without busting the bank open to do it. Stay tuned folks, this one’s going to be a doozy.