New York, NY (Top40 Charts) "Now listen to me girls and guys, you can't play unless you advertise, you gotta sell something if you want to play. So take your songs and your melodies, and get them up on the TVs. People buy most anything, you just got to give them that song to sing," Blair Crimmins proclaims at the top of the title track from his new album You Gotta Sell Something!. The Atlanta-based Ragtime/Dixieland/Gypsy jazz artist, along with his band The Hookers, will release the album on February 17th via New Rag Records. Their fourth studio record following 2013's Sing-a-Longs, it delivers more of their signature sound of supercharged Ragtime and Swing while also reaching into some new territory with Gospel and Soul. With "You Gotta Sell Something," premiered this morning on Southern Living, Crimmins satirizes the current state of the music industry.
"The inspiration for this song started when I was playing one of my original songs on piano at a bar when one of the patrons walked up to me and asked 'Hey man, did you write this song?'," Crimmins told Southern Living. "He was trying to strike up a conversation with me while I was still playing! There weren't a ton of people in the bar so I just kept playing and said 'Yeah, I wrote it' to which he replied 'This song is so good. It could be in a commercial!'. I just laughed and finished the tune while in my head I was wondering why the measure of a good song is whether it can be placed in an advertisement. 'You Gotta Sell Something' is a funny, maybe slightly sad, satirical song about the way the industry is these days. Like the song says, 'You gotta sell something if you want to play.'"
Blair Crimmins and The Hookers combine a unique blend of 1920's Dixieland jazz, ragtime, swing, gypsy guitar, stride piano, and a New Orleans style horn section that keeps the joint jumping while Crimmins sings in a lyrical style both humorous and sincere. It's a sound that is at once modern and deeply rooted in the past, yet influenced by Crimmins' time as guitarist/frontman for alternative rockers Bishop Don. A multi-instrumentalist and a music academic, Crimmins has claimed in jest to be "possessed by a ghost who makes me play ragtime music."
With the premiere of the lead single "Top of the Class", The Boot raved "Fusing jazz, Dixieland and the blues, Crimmins and the Hookers are known for old-school tunes with a heavy sprinkling of snark."
A growing force in the Southeast US since their inception in 2009, Crimmins and his 7-piece band have played hundreds of shows all over the country and opened for artists such as The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Mumford and Sons. They've released three albums as well as written the musical score for the independent film Old Man Cabbage. Crimmins was the critics pick for Best Songwriter of 2013 by Creative Loafing who raved "If he caters to any genre, it's one that's entirely his own, and that's something a lot of guys with pens and guitars either don't know how to do, or don't have the guts to do." His debut 2010 release The Musical Stylings Of became a college radio sensation on WRAS Atlanta making him the most requested band on the air. His last album Sing-a-Longs went to #21 on the EuroAmerican radio chart and earned him a nomination at The Georgia
Music Awards for Best Jazz Artist.
Track List:
01) You Gotta Sell Something
02) Beautiful Thang
03) Top of the Class
04) I'm Gone
05) Hot Damn!
06) Wandering Joe
07) In The Neighborhood
08) You're a Pain
09) Passed Around
10) Gypsy Lullaby
