Cracker's long awaited album, tour dates

Cracker’s Berkeley To Bakersfield will be released Dec. 9 via 429 Records. The band's tenth studio effort is a double-album that traverses two different sides of the California landscape – the northern Bay area and further down-state in Bakersfield.

Despite being less than a five-hour drive from city to city, musically, these two regions couldn’t be further apart from one another. In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, a harder-edged style of rock music emerged from the Bay area, while Bakersfield is renowned for its own iconic twangy country music popularized, most famously, by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

 

Yet despite these differences, they are both elements that Cracker’s two co-founders, David Lowery and Johnny Hickman, have embraced to some degree on nearly every one of their studio albums over the last two decades. On Berkeley To Bakersfield, however, instead of integrating these two genres together within one disc, they’ve neatly compartmentalized them onto their own respective regionally-titled LPs.

As Lowery explains, “On the Berkeley disc the band is the original Cracker lineup - Davey Faragher, Michael Urbano, Johnny and myself. This is the first time this lineup has recorded together in almost 20 years. We began recording this album at East Bay Recorders in Berkeley, CA. For this reason we chose to stylistically focus this disc on the music we most associate with the East Bay: Punk and Garage with some funky undertones. To further match our sense of place we often took an overtly political tone in the lyrics."

“This Bakersfield disc represents the ‘California country’ side of the band. Throughout the band’s 24-year history we’ve dabbled in Country and Americana but this time we wanted to pay homage to the particular strain of country and country-rock music that emerges from the inland valleys of California.”

Cracker has been described as a lot of things over the years: alt-rock, Americana, insurgent-country, and have even had the terms punk and classic-rock thrown at them. Lowery and Hickman have amassed ten studio albums, multiple gold records, thousands of live performances, hit songs that are still in current radio rotation around the globe ("Low," "Euro-Trash Girl,” "Get Off This" and “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out With Me”) and a worldwide fan base - that despite the major sea-changes within the music industry - continues to grow each year. 

Tour Dates:

Nov. 28 Skipper's Smokehouse - Tampa FL
Nov. 29 The Earl - Atlanta GA
Nov. 30 The Earl - Atlanta GA (Sunday Matinee)
Dec. 2 Magic Bag - Ferndale MI
Dec. 3 Majestic Theater - Madison, WI
Dec. 4 Varsity Theater - Minneapolis, MN
Dec. 5 Old Town School Of Folk - Chicago IL
Dec. 6 Duck Room - St Louis MO
Dec. 27 The Independent - San Francisco CA (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Dec. 28 The Independent - San Francisco CA (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Dec. 29 Lobero Theatre - Santa Barbara CA (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Dec. 30 Belly Up Tavern - Solana Beach CA (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Dec. 31 New Years Eve Party @ Soiled Dove - Denver CO (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Jan. 2 Cat's Cradle - Carrboro, NC
Jan. 3 City Winery - Nashville, TN
Jan. 14 9:30 Club - Washington DC (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Jan. 15 Lee's Palace - Toronto, ONT (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Jan. 16 Middle East Downstairs - Cambridge, MA (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Jan. 17 World Cafe Live - Philadelphia PA (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)
Jan. 18 B.B. King Blues Club - NYC (w/ Camper Van Beethoven)