LAUGHING OUTLAW RECORDS & MANAGEMENT


		EMPIRE BUILDERS Jason Ringenberg $19.95 AUD Customers outside Australia don't pay GST

It has been written that most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us. Jason Ringenberg has nothing to fear. He’s been hailed as an alt-country luminary, creator and aggressive cow-punk perfector, and now a tireless, barnstorming roots punk solo performer and children’s music favorite. Heck, some folks even call him “dad” these days. But when one spends over two decades traversing this old orb, in the trenches of transience where the beer is soaked right into the wood, eschewing the commercial cookie monster for an honest night’s sleep even if it was in the back of a van, it can either go one of two ways: You go utterly butter-lip mad, or you whip out your pen and gain a helluva lot of wisdom. Thankfully Jason chose the latter, which has never been made clearer than with EMPIRE BUILDERS, his first releasing on Laughing Outlaw Records in Australia. Almost elemental in its percussive Nashville bliss, Ringenberg uses the depth of his vision and the dauntlessness of his six-stringer to shuffle-kick the margins of your daddy’s country into the post-modern, the new uncertainties of the American Dream. And with EMPIRE BUILDERS that dream burns with the intensity of a structure fire and is never more resolute than when Jason is on that endless ribbon of tarmac, especially abroad and vulnerable to the various nefarious preconceptions and stereotypes of U.S. progeny. EMPIRE BUILDERS acknowledges the viability, perhaps even the necessity of transience and transcendence in the songwriting process, seeking out the recalcitrant little anomalies beneath America’s bloody soil, articulating the idea that true happiness is sweetest when it’s just a little unsettling or even tinged with sadness. But Jason’s legacy has been many years in the making, continuously cultivating his new efforts, arms spread upward and wide to receive the blazing noonday sun.

And now before you, gentle public, is the culmination of Jason’s past two years in pursuit of the new American sunrise. EMPIRE BUILDERS is Americana, Hosana, trifecta and confection. This is the real new deal, and he will take you down easy so you can taste the grass of the plains, smear the coal of the trains on your face and swoon with all the loving elegance your watering eyes can withstand. EMPIRE BUILDERS has a personal touch rarely witnessed in today’s product-driven marketplace. Nashville pros like George Bradfute and Fats Kaplin lend their seasoned chops to the pulmonary rhythm of Jason’s songwriting throughout, including the heartfelt soliloquy “Half the Man,” a touching and simple tribute to his father, far removed from your typical AOR ballad. Also consider the clarity and poise with which the man offers “She Hung the Moon” or the sardonic, parade-float glib of “New Fashioned Imperialist.” Whether pig-callin’, testifyin’, crooning or eulogizing the Nez Pierce as a whole in “Chief Joseph’s Last Dream,” Jason Ringenberg is a true and glorious voice for these uncertain times. Jason has also chosen EMPIRE BUILDERS as a means by which to divulge the songwriting process by indicating the inspiration for each song and disclosing where it was written. This gives the listener/reader a unique insight and an opportunity to connect the dots themselves. It’s what those literary types call the “objective correlative,” if you will. He gives no answers, instead asking all the necessary questions so we can draw our own conclusions. This is the art of storytelling. The sermon on the beatific, deep, dark wherever. And with it he transcribes how abundant, how magnificent and munificently beautiful American life can be, and how its sometimes sordid past as a free nation continues to inform its society and others to this day.