If you can’t tell by the pictures, we, uh, got along pretty well with Susan and Tim of BARK!
We fell in love with Tim and Susan when we met them. Well, we’d already fallen in love with their music but meeting them it felt like, “oh, yeah, our friends are here.”
I love their sound and the lyrics (and graphics) on this album really spoke to me. When Teri first told me the line up of this show I couldn’t believe how perfect it was! Rod Picott will start out the night, then Bark! will do a set and then back up RB Morris on his set, along with Greg Horne who some of you might remember played with RB last time he was at our house.
I. Can’t. Wait.
Bark! played our last house concert before the shutdown, Valentine’s Day, 2020. They were supposed to have played a show with David Olney the night before in Nashville, but he was already gone. They did do a great version of an Olney song at our house, James Robinson I think it was.
from Bark-Loud.com
In 2014 Tim Lee and Susan Bauer Lee begat Bark, a product of the melding of two keenly honed, fiercely independent musical minds focused on carving out a 21st century niche situated somewhere between garage rock, punk rock, power pop, The Cramps, The Feelies, The B52s, R. L. Burnside, and the Delta blues.
During the Eighties, Tim was part of the DIY indie-rock scene in America as a founding member of the Windbreakers, and a touring sideman with Let’s Active, Marti Jones, and Swimming Pool Q’s. The WBs released five albums and several EPs, and Tim recorded three solo albums, but by the end of the decade a festering discontent with the business of making music lurked behind the artful celebration, which ultimately compelled Lee to take a hiatus for most of the Nineties.
Come the turn of the millennium, Tim’s musical itch returned, this time with an infectious twist. One auspiciously bright Saturday morning, Susan popped out of bed declaring that she wanted to learn how to play bass. By that very afternoon, she was plucking around on her very own pawn shop bass guitar. Within six months, Susan was on stage, having well and truly joined the fray.
Thence came the Tim Lee 3 with you-know-who on guitar and bass and Chris Bratta eventually settling into the drum seat. Widely praised for their stripped down, no-nonsense-except-when-necessary approach to songwriting and performing, the TL3 carried forth for a decade, releasing five full-length studio sessions, a couple of live albums and an EP, accompanied, as usual, by side projects, guest appearances, and a steady gigging schedule.
And, now there is Bark. Just the two of them, Tim and Susan, guitar and drums, doing their thing. Adequately armed and expertly seasoned, Bark is poised for the next chapter in an unfinished tome about two committed, uncompromising musicians who love their art and craft almost as much as they love each other.