Here's a photo from a recent performance in Camden, Maine. We played there again on Saturday, July 3rd as part of the annual "Music By the Sea" event in Harbor Park. Upcoming July appearances include Blue Hill and Brunswick - you can check out our schedule page here.

We're way overdue for an update! The musical Muellers are alive, well and holed up in Maine! After several years of touring, we are staying put in our home state, playing selected dates as we pursue some other interests. We've added a couple of dates to the calendar and have several dates pending, so please check back if you are in need of some pickin' and grinnin'.

Here's a little bit of what's going on with the family... Tom, while not playing guitar and singing in our band, is a world-class pipe organist on a mission--namely, he's presenting in concert everything that J.S. Bach wrote for the pipe organ, somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 pieces of music. He performed the first concert in January and is scheduled to achieve his goal (approximately 18 concerts) in October. You can read about him here. The younger Muellers are enjoying time home with serious piano study, something that had fallen by the wayside when we were on the road a lot. And while much of what we are doing is musical, Bob, 19, is training for a trans-USA unicycle ride! Here's a couple of links if you want to learn more about Bob's unicycling: www.onewheelrolling.com www.youtube.com/1wheelrolling

Thank you so much for supporting our family!

Hi everyone,

We hope that you are enjoying the summer! It's been one of the wettest, coolest summers on record (at least in our neck of the woods), but that hasn't stopped us from playing as much as possible!

I've just added a couple of new August dates to the calendar, so check it out and see if we'll be playing near you in the next few months. We'd love to see you at a show.

Tom M.

We are still sorting through the pictures from our last road jaunt, but here's a few standouts that I've discovered so far.

Hanging out before a gig at the KASU bluegrass series in Paragould, Arkansas.

Karen and Tom waiting outside the aquarium at the Omaha Zoo during one of our off days in Nebraska.

Warming up a couple of songs while waiting for a soundcheck.

Tastee Treet! This little restaurant in South Dakota is a local favorite that has been around forever.

Laurah and Tom with Danny, one of the staff musicians at Silver Dollar City.

Laurah, Sarah, and Tom, standing outside our favorite barbecue restaurant/gas station/gun shop in southeastern Missouri.

The album is done!

After a winter of late nights in the studio and 2 a.m. doughnut-and-coffee runs, our fourth album, The Muellers, will be available tomorrow. It features a bunch of originals and a couple of standards run through our tangy musical sensibilities.

Here's the track listing:

1) Drag the River

2) What a Beautiful Day

3) Love Please Come Home

4) Fire

5) Sound of a Lonesome Fiddle

6) Born Again

7) Train to Tennessee

8) Cold Hard Light

9) Bury Me Beneath the Willow

10) Silver Bells

11) Won't You Come and Sing for Me? 

Come listen to a bunch of new tracks on MySpace and let us know what you think! The album will also be available for purchase on our website within a day or two, and should be on iTunes and other online sites by the end of the month. 

After a successful and fun run at the Florida State festival, we are slowly heading west to our next engagement at the Two Rivers festival in Leakesville, Mississippi. Our grandparents are travelling with us, and with their Camry and our trusty van, we form quite a merry convoy.

Laurah and Grandma

Trying to capture Tom's infamous "something-is-out-of-tune" look

Grandpa and his dream fish.

For some reason, postmodernism has never established a foothold in the family portraiture business.

Hello all,

We are enjoying the sunshine and warm breezes of Florida! It's so different from Maine, especially during the spring (which Mainers euphemistically refer to as "mud season"). Last night we played our first set at the Florida State Bluegrass Festival amid heavy rain and tornado warnings, but we were pleased to see that quite a few people stuck around until the end of the night.

On Saturday, we will be presenting three different workshops for festival attendees. Tom will be presenting two: one on mandolin, and another on harmony singing and songwriting. After our set that afternoon, the entire family will be available for a Q&A session, talking about the nitty-gritty of being a family bluegrass band. We presented a similar workshop last year at Bean Blossom, and I was surprised at how many people it drew.

Hi folks!

A couple of exciting updates today:

First, The Muellers will be opening for Claire Lynch at One Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine, on February 15. Details and tickets are available at http://www.onelongfellowsquare.com/. Tell your friends!

Also, I've just posted a couple of new tracks from the upcoming CD on our Myspace page, so skip on over there and give it a spin. Both tracks are available for free download as well! www.myspace.com/themuellers

BIG NEWS

Two things:

First, the band has taken another lurching step into the 21st century, and now has a band instant messenging account. Add the screenname muellerfamilymus to your contacts, and hit us up. We don't bite--in fact, we'll be glad to hear from you.

Remember, that's:

muellerfamilymus

Second, we now have an account over at flickr.com, one of the internet's premier photoblogging sites. I've uploaded hundreds of pictures from 2008, and we'll be adding many, many more in the next couple of days. We're going to try to get about eight years worth of musical pictures posted, tagged, and captioned. So skip on over to our photostream and check it out!

I've posted a few new pictures that our friend Jeff Pouland took at the Rex Theater in Galax, Virginia. You can check out some of his amazing photography work at http://www.jeffpoulandphotography.com/.

Now that we have a couple of weeks off, we are taking some time to polish some material that's going to be on the next record, and are learning a couple more songs: one of mine, entitled "Drag the River", an older gospel song called "River of Jordan", and we've been kicking around some ideas of "I'm Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar."

Stay tuned!