In honor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday, Bandshee recently shared their latest single, “The Long Road.” The song also serves as the title track of a new album from the band, due out on January 31st, 2025. Catch the new single below, and read more from Bandshee.
The deep lore behind title track “The Long Road”:
“I was reading a lot of Robert Burns at the time and was also into classical guitar. I learned this arrangement of Auld Lang Syne and from that wrote the base part for the Long Road verses. I’d always wanted to adapt Burns’ final poem (song?) “O, Wert Thou in the Cold Blast” to modern english and put it to song myself, and that’s the basis for the first verse of lyrics. The phrase “old grey messenger” had been hanging around my notebook for a while, and it reminded me of Gandalf, and when I thought about it, Samwise Gamgee’s story, everything he did and went through, how he did shelter Frodo in many ways, reminded me a lot of the cold blast, so it just naturally transformed into Sam’s song. An amalgam of two concepts, I suppose, but it really made sense to me. I guess it still does.” -Bandshee
The Long Road is the first studio album from Bandshee in their hard rock incarnation. A collection of songs that stemmed from a common love of Lord of the Rings, it is a fuzzy, riff-driven rock escapade. The album began as a concept project based on Lord of the Rings and Led Zeppelin IV. The project evolved through the band’s exploration of heavier sounds and arrangements until most of the original tracks written about LOTR were dropped in favor of heavier tunes dealing with current, rather heavy issues. Of note, “19 Lashes” is about wealth disparity, “Heavy on Main” was written in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor by the Louisville police and the subsequent protests in Louisville, KY. “Witch Wizard” is about transphobia and gender identity in modern America. The album represents a sonic paradigm shift for a band that began very much rooted in classic rock, acoustic “singer-songwriter” and jazz.
Bandshee is based out of Louisville, KY, but plays regularly in Cincinnati, OH and Lexington, KY. We’ve toured through Ohio and Pennsylvania and recently extended our tendrils into Wisconsin for the Ride of the Living Dead.
Bandshee is:
Romana Bereneth – Vocals, guitar
Stephen K. Phillips – Guitar
Mac McCammon – Bass
Chris Miller – Drums
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