We were honored this week to be spotlighted with an interview as part of American Songwriter magazine’s “Writer of the Week” feature. Check it out!

The simple gist of it is this: we have been offered an amazing an opportunity, and we are not planning on passing it up. James Williamson, the trailblazing guitarist and songwriter from the legendary band Iggy and The Stooges (Raw Power), has been asked to rejoin Iggy Pop on tour in the next year. James is a friend of ours, and he has asked us to be his sparring partners as he prepares to reclaim his spot in the Stooges. The upshot is that on September 5th in San Jose, at the Blank Club, we will be performing for one night as James Williamson and The Careless Hearts, knocking out one Stooges song after another.

The Stooges helped define the ragged, raw edge of rock ‘n roll in the late sixties and early seventies, paving the road for so much of the punk, metal, and indie music that has followed in the decades since. Though you might not guess it from our original songs, we are all long-time Stooges fans, and this turn of events is so exciting for us that it has pretty well blown our minds. We are pretty sure that anyone who comes to this show is going to leave with a blown mind, too. We’re telling you now so that you can make plans ahead of time, and as soon as tickets go on sale we will let you know more details then, too. We’ve got some work to do in the meantime!

UPDATE: tickets are on sale at Ticketweb now!

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.