Stories from the dark side of life from the Blue Collar Ph.D. This is the work of a master storyteller with an earthy presentation reminiscent of Woody Guthrie but with the urban cleverness of John Prine.

11 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Modern Folk, FOLK: Political



Details:
The Blue Ribbon Tea Company presents Storyteller 2: And He Descended Into Hell, 11 originals by Bill Kostelec. Though it's a line from the Apostles' Creed, "And He Descended Into Hell" is all about the workaday world of today, addressing contemporary issues with subtlety and bite. Descending into hell is sliding into the abyss, wandering deeper and deeper into an unknown darkness. Hell here is not about fiery punishment but about the cold of aloneness and abandonment, thus Jesus cries out "Eli Eli lama sabachtani, My God My God why have you abandoned me?" and a nameless man stares into the faceless TV in his lonely apartment. That's the kind of Hell Bill Kostelec writes about.

What we strive for in BRTC is excellent songwriting. Being a good songwriter is in part dependent on being a good listener. All of us are storytellers at one time or another. Bill is a good listener. There are real people here in these stories. Real people are the most interesting.

This album is kind of dark in mood. The one love song is "Song for Kathy" and it's an instrumental, a guitar solo that evokes both the joy and the pain of love, very moody and emotional. More common here is the drug addict stumbling down the sidewalk, the painful loneliness of unhappy adolescence, the bitter tale of racism and its implications in a look at my old neighborhood during the tumultuous 1960's, or the real life mining disaster of January 4th, 2006 at the Sago mine in West Virginia. You can find lyrics to all the songs at our website at HTTP://theblueribbonteacompany.com, on the Storyteller 2 page. As songwriters, we owe a lot to the work of Woody Guthrie and John Prine; to Woody in his claiming the folk tradition for the work of social reform and social action, and John Prine for his approach to storytelling and his ability to transform mundane events into wonderful lyrics. To both of them as well we owe something for our sense of musical style. While Storyteller 2 is a fairly dark album, it may be surprising that both Bill and Kathy Kostelec also write children's music and that is of course consistent with our affection for the songs of Woody Guthrie.

The Blue Ribbon Tea Company as a band is not bound to a traditional acoustic folk sound nor to old time musical styles. Some of our own "roots" after all, are in 60's rock and roll and we sometimes we play with electric guitar and electric bass, and often slip into a blues mode. We do a fair share of vocal harmonies and Kathy does what we refer to as her "woo woo voice" as a background musical isntrument. Bill's voice ranges from a dark and gritty whisper to a piercing high tenor, and sometimes in the same song.

We have a deep commitment to songwriting, and to presenting our original works in both recordings and at shows. The quality of songwriting is what we're most proud of.