Following in the footsteps of the great Southern bands from Georgia---Alabama meets The Band

14 MP3 Songs
COUNTRY: Country Rock, COUNTRY: Country Folk



Details:
The Lost Trailers are a new band that has earned success the old-fashioned way: they write great songs, they all sing and play, and they out-work other bands by taking their music straight to the people. The Trailers spent most of the last three years on the road-having their trailer, loaded with all of their equipment, stolen not just once but twice (hence the band name), playing to audiences that might have been just a handful of people at first, but grew into several dozen and then a couple hundred with each successive visit.

"We love the road," says Geoffrey Stokes Nielson, the Atlanta-based band's co-founder along with Ryder Lee. "I think everyone in the band knows how important it is for us to connect face-to-face with an audience and win them over. That's our great strength, so Ryder and I felt that we had to get out and start touring America from the get-go, just like all the artists that we're influenced by: country acts like Willie Nelson and Alabama, rock acts like the Allman Brothers and Bruce Springsteen, and our contemporaries like Pat Green and Los Lonely Boys."

"It's really like a family," Lee says. "We play hard, we party hard, we fight hard- everything is done to an extreme. But no matter what happens on the road, we're all in the same family. We stay at each others' houses and we eat at these huge tables and everybody's laughing and having fun, and I think that feel comes across in the music as well."

Family had more than a little to do with the maturity in Nielson's songwriting, which has a directness that he shares with many of the writers he admires. "When we got in trouble growing up our punishment was to write about why we did what we did, so I was writing a lot at a young age. And if it wasn't brutally honest, straight from the heart, we would have to write it over and over again-and that's probably where the honesty in the songs comes from."

While the Nielson brothers grew up in Albany, Georgia, the band was essentially born in Nashville, where Nielson and Lee were both looking to start a band and pursue a music career. They were songwriting, doing song demos, and playing the clubs on Elliston Place.

"Nashville is a tough place," Lee says, "but we got a lot out of it, and it allowed us to learn how to play and write songs, because we were constantly surrounded by amazing musicians."

"We want to create songs that make people feel," Nielson says, "to go through all of the emotions, because that's what makes us human. With our albums, and in our live shows, we want to bring that feel, that soul, to everyone who hears our songs. That's why we do this."