2007 and The Blue Ribbon Tea Company

A very busy year has come to a close with our first performance at Spokane's First Night celebration, downtown on New Year' s Eve.   We played two sets at 10 and 11 Oclock on a very cold night. Now, early in January of 2008, we are looking forward to doing some recording for another album.  This last year we released Storyteller 2, a set of my songs that we are very proud of, but sales have been very slow.  Meanwhile we hear that the recording industry is going through a painful time and cd sales have plummeted everywhere.  Some bands have experimented with offering free downloads to their fans of whole albums, and then offered cd's of the same albums for sale later.  Results are not yet in on that.

Just like a line from one of Dave McRae's songs "Road Watlz" I'm keeping my daytime job so we don't necessarily eat off of cd sales, but we are thinking about how to approach the whole music business in the coming year.  One thing we will do is create some wma song files and have links to them on the website so people can listen and download.  We are going to do that with new recordings, and probably unfinished recordings, to let folks listen as we go along in trying to complete the next project or two. 

Kathy and I have been very active in promoting the "Brick and Mortar Concert Series" at The Empyrean in Spokane, a monthly concert featuring  3 or more songwriters.  We are also getting to work on a project recording a small album for our friend Bill Wylie a storyteller, songwriter and author. The rest of the Winter will not be slow times for us in any case.  In this last year we have turned to more Old Time music, digging up songs from the past, very fun to play, and often very entertaining to contemporary audiences.  At the same time we have been writing quite heavily including a song on the Sunshine Mine disaster of 1972 in the Silver Valley of Idaho, and some songs based on old newspaper accounts and obituaries.

This last year we have played twice in Montana and over 20 shows in Washington which for BRTC is a very busy year. We are currently  looking for 2008 bookings and hope to get some vacation kinds of traveling in as well when all this snow and ice finally melts off and disappears. Anyway, for those of you who have followed us and supported us, thanks for a very good year and if you see us on the street, say Hi!

Bill Kostelec