Kind words from our influences:
"My favorite band right now is Backyard Tire Fire and they sometimes remind me of early Wilco, Sonvolt and Flaming Lips. And they unabashedly name check both Wayne Coyne and Tom Petty in song. They are my earworm the last few months."
- Johnny Hickman, Cracker
"It takes a pretty special band to rivet the attention of everyone in my band, and BTF certainly are. Great songs, great playing and great guys. I'm really looking forward to the recording sessions- they've come up with another amazing batch of songs. In my opinion they are one of America's best young bands"
- Steve Berlin, Los Lobos
The Places We Lived makes best of 2008 lists:
Safety
Break blog
Stereo
Pills (spanish blog)
Culture
Belly blog
Glide
Magazine
TO
Snob blog
Shotgun
Knowledge blog
Strangers
Almanac (Glide Magazine) - Best Song
JamBase.com
Saints
Don't Bother blog
No
Depression (Andy Moore's list)
More from the Press about The Places We Lived:
"The Places We Lived is a record that more closely resembles Neil Young's '70s masterpieces...with its honest feelings and longing for home that are brought to life with a storyteller’s touch and a guitar god’s muscle. "
- Paste Magazine - Tim Newby
"The Places We Lived certainly captivates the essence of a journey. It is almost like a lifetime of happenings all crammed into one on a fantastic record. Raw, emotional and thorough. Backyard Tire Fire have the ability to seize your feelings and portray them in even the simplest of lyrical form. "
- Altsounds.com
"The Places We Lived is inventive, intelligent, genre-crossing good fun, Backyard Tire Fire is a band defiantly swimming against the raging current of cookie-cutter corporate rock and alt-country bands. "
- Rev. Blurt Magazine - Keith A Gordon
"The release of last year’s highly acclaimed, Vagabonds and Hooligans - an alt-country-indie rocker - left the musical world salivating for more of Backyard Tire Fire’s boisterous-guitar take on Americana. The release of the intensely gorgeous The Places We Lived early this year should help satiate that hunger and further cement their claim to greatness. "
- HonestTune.com
"Yes, they still rock, but six-string open-field wailing is no longer the BTF’s primary objective. Instead, Anderson has decided to reinvent himself as the premiere Pop Balladeer of America’s Heartland. The perfect primer for a group that truly is one of rock’s best kept secrets."
- PopMatters.com
"BTF is ripe for wider discovery, perhaps the next in line behind other recently anointed working artists like The Hold Steady, Alejandro Escovedo, the Truckers and My Morning Jacket. The music is all there on Places, and a great trail of tunes lays behind it."
- JamBase - Sir Dennis Cook
"Instead of being just another collection of guitar driven, middle of the road rock music full of stolen riffs from some of the worst excesses of the 1970's, these guys know how to write and arrange songs and understand what melody means."
- BlogCritics.org - Richard Marcus
"The bluesy piano romps are just as good as the rock anthems -- lovelorn with yearning nostalgia but coupled with straight-up Southern-fried noise -- Highly recommended."
- Can You See The Sunset
"Take everything you love about Patterson Hood’s emotional grit, The Old 97s classic barnburner footstompers, and the spirit Whiskeytown had when Ryan still had something to prove, and you’ve already got a good sense of what the band is about: It’s Midwestern Americana at it’s slice-of-hard-life best."
- Berkeley Place
"Backyard Tire Fire's exposed new sounds and ideas and shaped a record that is completely different from anything we've heard from them before...they've grown more than should be possible a few short months since they were offering up a collection of acoustic ditties."
- Hero Hill
"Note to the World, if your tired of the same refurbished, drivel that continually makes the air waves, this is your door way to walk through the mundane and into the vividness of raw but polished Americana. There are ordinary story tellers who write lyrics and then their are master narrators, who make you believe what they are saying like you were there with them when they wrote the song."
- Ozone and Shadow Blog
""In an era in which we have drowned ourselves in ridiculously over-produced computer music in which the noise is more important than the band, it is refreshing to see a band like Backyard Tire Fire emerge on the scene. With chorus-loving songs that bounce over bluesy folk rock, Backyard Tire Fire makes music that is truly…fun. ."
- Amplifier Magazine - Pat Moran
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