You can download and posters for the first leg of our summer tour here:

eurotour poster smaller

Eurotour poster large straight up

The poster mentions a pre-sale store that will be up within the next week or so via Pledge Music.  You can purchase the new album and other extras there.  If you wanted to participate in the Kickstarter and missed the boat some of the offers that people liked will return…

These posters feature a photograph taken on a banana plantation in Columbia by Stephen Ferry, a photographer based in Bogotá whose pictures will be featured on the cover of the new album.  (The picture on the posters also happens to remind me of a picture I took in Venice CA for an old album.) Stephen was a student of my father’s and the brother of one of my favorite babysitters growing up.  His books are great: I Am Rich Potosi: The Mountain That Eats Men, about the mountain that financed the Spanish Empire thanks to unmatched deposits of silver and centuries of enslavement of indigenous workers.   It features a foreword by the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose Open Veins of Latin America and Memory of Fire Trilogy were one of the sources I used for the songs on this record.  Galeano also wrote one of the greatest books about sports of all time  – Football in Sun and Shadow.

Stephen’s second book Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict treats a more recent history, that of the ongoing 20th-21st conflict in Colombia.  The last verse of the title track of our new record, El Pulpo, refers to the 1928 Banana Massacre in Colombia in a larger narrative about the United Fruit Company and its more recent reincarnation, Chiquita.  This massacre is famously fictionalized in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Here’s a talk from Stephen: