WHO ARE YORKTOWN LADS?

 

Yorktown Lads is Cameron Lew, Addison Love, and Michael Simmons. They are not your average musical collaboration.  Any of the three are more than capable of working on their own or in their own bands, and have in the past.  But the idea was to create something other, something better, something greater than the sum of its parts.  Hopefully, they have succeeded with this new collection of 14 songs. 

 

Mr. Simmons is probably the best known of the three, having been in many bands over the last 20 years, most notably as one of the lead singers of sparkle*jets u.k. whom he is still actively involved with. They had a successful run of albums and performances before starting work at a performing arts high school program ten years ago, where Simmons eventually began a teaching career. He's seen many talented young people in all that time, but found a special musical connection with Addison and Cameron as they came up through the ranks.

 

Coming from a musical family, Addison has been performing his whole life and has been playing professionally on a regular basis for the past few years, as well as fronting his own original band. A prolific songwriter and contributor of most of the lead guitar work on the album, his material is informed by the pure pop sounds of the Beatles, with the same taught lyrics and catchy melodies of his musical forbears.

 

Cameron's main passion is filmmaking (he's enrolled as a film major at Chapman College) and has been creating amazing media most of his life. He knows how to play all the usual rock instruments and just recently started writing and recording his own songs. His great contributions to the album are some of his first compositions. He adds a completely different stylistic approach with his love of musical textures and emerging trends. His bass playing is very much in the McCartney style.

 

Simmons throws into the ring his various levels of expertise. His songwriting is (or was) very similar to Addison's, yet being over 20 years their senior, his songs bring a touch of maturity to the party. He supplied most of the drumming and quite a bit of the more raucous guitar parts, as are his signature. He also presided over most of the engineering and mixing, though all three 'drove the bus' from time to time throughout the entire process.

 

But how and why did the Yorktown Lads come about? In short, Simmons heard and understood the type of music the other two were making. They were all three cut of the same cloth. They didn't need each other, but the idea was that if the three combined their efforts into one project, it could be something really special. Something greater than the sum of its parts. Something people would be abuzz about. Something they'd remember fondly wherever the music takes them later on.

 

"Songs About Girls and Other Disasters" was great fun to make and delivers on its premise.

 

But beyond just making recordings, throwing them up on Soundcloud or iTunes or YouTube... they wanted from the onset to make a real PRODUCT.  A physical manifestation of rock & roll.  A good old-fashioned Long Playing record. They were able to make this happen via a Kickstarter campaign in August of 2014.  Six months later, the LP’s are finally here and available for mass consumption.  Pressed in audiophile quality 180 gram translucent red vinyl at the Music Industry (formerly Sony) manufacturing facility in Holland, the records sound as good as they look.  Each LP also comes with Digital Download codes for use on any devices, or for those people who don’t have turntables (yet).