The Getaway Drivers: Press

"Local music thrives when people get restless, confronting and challenging trends, letting ideas flare up and burn out in a natural and erratic way.  That said, even a town like Madison needs it's reliable comforts, and The Getaway Drivers offer some, consistently writing solid alt-country songs that suit both the mellow and the curious.  Bob Manor's songwriting and his vocal harmonies with fiddler-mandolin player Sheila Shigley certainly keep the band rooted in familiar ground in "The Truth is Where It's Always Been", a five song EP for release at this show.  The energetic hooks of "Honey On A Razor" and "Beale Street" mesh nicely with simple, tense guitar figures and arrangements that also switch in such elements as cello and dulicmer."  [Mandolin]

Lots of songs tell stories, but few tell them quite as well as the tune "Salt, Blue & Bone" by The Getaway Drivers.

The song, from the group's about-to-be-released EP The Truth is Where it's Always Been, tells the tale of a Nantucket woman whose lover has gone on a whaling voyage. It's the early 1800s, long before GPS and most modern medicine, so this could easily be her beau's final trip.

What's more, though Nantucket's located in the Atlantic Ocean, sailors like hers had to travel to the Pacific to find the breed of whales they hoped to catch. This process could easily take several years, says band leader Bob Manor, who got the idea for the song by reading Nathanial Philbrick's Heart of the Sea.

"This left the island with a lot of lonely women, which is where this song comes in," he says. "If you read the history, a lot of times these couples would get pregnant before the voyage, in case the father did not come back. When he did come back, he came home to a 2-, 3- or 4-year-old child, not knowing for sure if a baby had been born at all."

But that's not all: The prospect of losing one's man to the sea led some women to be tempted by the townies who remained. As Manor explains, "Sometimes the sailors would come back to children that looked suspiciously like someone else in town."

In other words, the woman who's the focus of the song has a ton on her mind. Through the sweet vocals of singer/fiddler Sheila Shigley, she laments to her faraway fellow: "Four years have gone by / Baby's sweet sighs, and you've never heard them / When will you come home? / 'Cause I'm cold, cold as a stone."

The song swings and sways gently, like a cradle, doubling as a lullaby for the character's young child. Warm vocal harmonies and duets between the fiddle and cello also suggest an Irish mountain tune, though it's actually based on a sea shanty. By the end of the track, you're just as likely to feel haunted by longing as rocked to sleep.

"A sea shanty's a very old-fashioned type of tune, and a tune one could envision being written at the time," says Manor. "Sheila's experience with Celtic music came in handy here, and she did a beautiful job writing the melody line and portraying both the lyrical and musical sentiments in the song."

An MP3 of "Salt, Blue & Bone" is available in the related files section at right. More music by the Getaway Drivers is available on their MySpace page. The band will play a release party for The Truth is Where it's Always Been at the High Noon Saloon on Friday, January 8.

The A.V. Club's MAMAs shortlist:  "The Shape Shifters:  A glance at the list of MAMA nominations finds The Getaway Drivers in the country, folk/Americana, rock and pop catagories, with three different nods for song of the year.  The rootsy group, led by Bob Manor, shows off a diversity of styles, moods and influences, from stomping rock to delicate folk.  The laid-back happy-hour rocker "Oh Trudy" shows off Manor's gruff voice and crowd-pleasing attitude, while the graceful ballad "Won't Ask Why" spotlights the vocals of fiddler Sheila Shigley." 

Singer/songwriter Bob Manor moves easily from amiable folk-rock to foreboding alt-country on the Getaway Drivers’ varied new Americana CD. His best performance comes on “Billy,” the fated tale of a young man who finally comes to terms with his decadent Daddy. He sounds sufficiently down-home on several tracks (see the John Prine-style “Bottle & Suitcase” and the Dylan-brushed “Mystified”), and many of his performances are amiable enough. But on “Billy” he adds some flinty reality to his grim narrative by employing a gravel-throated vocal style that fits hand-in-glove with its gray-toned vibe. Manor also scores points with “Shame,” a loping folk-rocker that borrows its beat and some of its moody ambience from Neal Diamond’s “Solitary Man.”

While the Getaway Drivers often follow Manor’s lead, some of the most balanced performances come on songs sung by fiddler Sheila Shigley, a veteran of the local Celtic music scene. Thanks to her bandmates’ spare work on mandolin and cello and her own shimmering vocals, the country-folk love song “Stay” wouldn’t sound out of place on Americana radio wedged between some Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris.

But the Getaway Drivers are clearly onto something. Once they find the right balance of their boy-girl vocals, they could find themselves making inroads into a much larger market.

Madison Music Project -- Bob Manor & the Getaway Drivers
Kristian Knutsen on Monday 11/06/2006 3:32 pm , (1) Recommendation

Backed by a close-knit band dubbed the Getaway Drivers, singer-songwriter Bob Manor offers an alt-country-ish mix of acoustic rock and folk in both his records and live performances. Americana, as the terminology goes. Performing on average about once per month, the group has been busy lately with shows related to tomorrow's mid-term elections.

More about Manor and his drivers are detailed in their registry biography:

If you like rockin Americana with a touch of alt country twang you very well might fall in love with this band. Gritty enough to be authentic, Bob Manor writes honest -- from the hip -- songs and The Getaway Drivers bring them to life as each requires - be it a hard driving rock tune or a tender ballad.

Bob Manor is Bob Manor. He plays guitar, writes the songs and sings.

The Getaway Drivers, meanwhile, consists of Manor, Ellie Erickson (guitars), Steve Pingry (cello, guitar), and Ken Keeley (Bass), along with assistance from Peter Fee (drums), Gail Campbell (drums), and Sheila Shigley (vocals, violin, cello).

In 2005, Manor unveiled his latest solo album, Ghosts of Yesterday. Released by Uvulittle Records, the album is a suite of original songs featuring the acoustic guitar, bass, drums, piano and mandolin. Its stand-out track, "The Sweetness," won Best Americana Song at the 2006 Madison Area Music Award, while the album was also nominated for best Folk/Americana release at this year's MAMAs. Meanwhile, a review of the song "Stuck," the ninth track on the album, is described by one reviewer as a "a pleasant tune about the doldrums of life in a small town."

Ghosts was preceded by That Gospel Line, Manor's 2004 album featuring "old time country gospel" and recorded with the Americana band Tin Ceiling. Manor explains more of his background in that album's promotional notes:

As a kid I attended an old country church on a dirt road in Northern Wisconsin, and got my start on piano and vocals there. Recently my parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. I thought it was time give them something back for all the love and support they have given me over the years. I dedicated "That Gospel Line" to them and to the people in the church I grew up in.
Manor and the Getaway Drivers are now working on a follow-up album to Ghosts of Yesterday.

The band's MySpace page features three songs from that album. They are: "The Sweetness," "Wrecking Ball, and "John Baker's Toil," along with samples of other songs. Other information, including a list of previous shows, photos, and reviews are available at bobmanor.com.

Bob Manor & the Getaway Drivers perform at many benefit concerts, such as one in late July for the teen self-injury documentary by Wendy Schneider titled CUT. Their performance in that show was described as "really cookin' (as per usual)" by their friend Pam Barrett of the Motor Primitives. The last week has been no different.

On Monday, Oct 30, Manor and the Drivers played the High Noon Saloon at a benefit for Fair Wisconsin, the state-wide group organizing against the proposed amendment to Wisconsin's constitution that would ban same-sex marriage and civil unions. Featuring appearances from elected officials like Russ Feingold speaking against the amendment, the show was praised on the band's blog:


The audience of freethinkers, dignitaries and fellow musicians had sat transfixed in the dusky saloon as The Getaway Drivers scorched through songs of fire and ice, love and loss, sweetness and destruction, the stage transformed into a whirlwind of flesh, steel, weathered wood and determination.
The band will be at it again on Tuesday night, when they will be playing an Election Night returns gathering at the High Noon Saloon. The show starts at 6 p.m., and the cover is $5, as the band gets things going for a night of TV and drinking, be it is sorrow or celebration.

The stately country-pop piano that animates the verses of "Fast Driver" is something of a ruse. It's so easygoing (think Bruce Hornsby-style mellow) that at first it seems to work against an otherwise edgy tune that concerns a hit-and-run lover and the confused dude she left behind.

But Bob Manor -- chief vocalist and songwriter of The Getaway Drivers -- knows what he's doing in this track from their new self-titled album. Those pleasant keyboard figures set up the song's urgent chorus about as well as anything could. It's the fuse that smolders before Manor's controlled explosion of confusion, regret and emotion. Consequently, when he sings "She left her red dress under my bed/And she disappeared," you don't just get a love 'em and leave 'em trope, you get a sense of a starry-eyed lover in free fall.

Simply put, it's quite a trick. Not to mention a strong indication that Manor and the Drivers plan on busting out well beyond the alt-country ghetto in which they currently linger.

A MP3 of the track is available in the related downloads at right. More music by The Getaway Drivers can be found on their MySpace page.