The Sideshow Tragedy - After the Fall (2020)

In the summer of 2018, for the third time in five years, The Sideshow Tragedy’s Nathan Singleton and Jeremy Harrell drove the 1,820 mile sojourn to Kenny Siegal’s Old Soul Studios in Catskill, New York, their truck crammed with the tools of their trade: vintage resonator guitars, pedals and effects boxes, back-bone drum and percussion kits, for starters.

With those first two trips, they were also packing nine original songs primed for tracking and production. But this time around, the duo arrived with just a handful of songs, all in various stages of completion.

Front-man Nathan Singleton said scheduling those sessions was a “deliberate attempt to keep our hand in.” The Sideshow Tragedy’s live show, described by New York Music Daily as “a serious jolt of adrenaline,” was starting to tap their own adrenaline dry. They arrived at Old Soul two exhausted souls, only a few weeks off a European tour. Nathan’s psyche was frayed and his personal life in tatters.

“I was seriously considering quitting,” Nathan says, “but I just called Kenny and told him we had some ideas we wanted to get down and we’ll see where it goes.” The Independent Music Award-winning producer Kenny Siegal (Chris Whitley and Langhorne Slim, among others), was game as The Sideshow Tragedy’s sound and sensibility was always dead center in his wheelhouse.

Their new record After the Fall follows the internationally acclaimed The View From Nowhere (2018), which Laurie Gallardo/KUTX described as: “a gritty, unhinged jolt of blues-rock emerging from the searing wreckage of an apocalyptic frenzy” and Capital (2015) which PopMatters proclaimed was “a strong display of thinkers’ rock and roll.”

Feral ferocity intact, along with some new colors in a funky/pop/rock groove palette that reflects a new mood rising, Singleton says: "This record was born of an emotional hellscape/rollercoaster and my memory of it is foggy in places. We recorded it on and off for a year and a half. During this time, my marriage of 16 years fell apart, ending up in divorce. I lost my mooring; it was an extremely heavy time.”