Follow The Train - Mercury

Mercury was originally released in 2010 via Jim James of My Morning Jacket's label Removador Remedies and Solutions, however, it was only released via the Removador website. Mercury is the second record from Louisville, KY's Follow the Train, following their debut A Breath of Sigh CD/DIG (Darla).

"Re: Mercury... Not sure if you remember any of this but the whole band had quit at the end of 2006. I had to get an entirely new lineup. We played a bunch of well-received shows (some in Louisville and some on a mini tour we did with My Morning Jacket). We reworked a few existing tunes that were kicking around from the former band lineup and wrote some new ones in the course of a few months. We pushed ourselves to make the record before we were ready.

Jim came to practice a few times to help us tweak some of the arrangements and he was at our first few tracking sessions sitting with Kevin giving us notes. The middle song "Nowhere Night" is guitar player Mike Sabo singing and we all did that sitting on the floor at the funeral home where we tracked (Jim played the banjatar on that one).

Most of the initial tracking was done in the first week but the rest of the nuances took almost a year. There were a lot of nights when Mike recorded guitar when I wasn't even around. He and Kevin worked with Alex Smith (Howell Dawdy and Lydia Burrell) and Ben Sollee (pretty neat cellist/songwriter) to add strings to two of the songs. Brian Schreck played the killer saxophone parts on "Mellwood" (he was in Apollo Sunshine at one point but now he's a pretty well-known music therapist on an international level - Google him). 

When I heard the final product, I'd felt pretty far removed from it even though I wrote the skeleton and the lyrics for most of the songs. But I do think it's really good. The story is all the people who went into making this thing and then it's just sat idle for years. When Jim released it on Removador, there was one press release that went out but it was in 2010 - that time just before Spotify when there was no place to refer people to listen to it and it was only sold as an experiment on a website. I just feel like it deserves a real chance. But still no one may like it. Anyway, that's the story."

-- Dennis Sheridan

Track list:

Follow the Train:

Dennis Sheridan – Guitar, Vocals 
Mike Sabo – Guitar, Piano on "Mellwood" and "Seamless", Vocals on "Nowhere Night"
Dave Cronin – Keys, Vocals, Guitar on "Mellwood"
James Hewett – Drums
Carlos Ramos – Bass, Vocals 
Brandon Jones – Percussion 

Additional Support:

Brian Schreck – Sax on "Mellwood"
Jim James – Banjatar "Nowhere Night"
Alex Smith – string arrangements for "Nowhere Night" and "Movin"
The Ben Sollee Quartet – strings on "Nowhere Night" and "Movin"
Chris Guetig – drums at the end of "Mercury"
Kevin Ratterman – drums at the end of "Mercury"