The Witnesses

The Witnesses first came together as a band a few years back when the five musicians from Brooklyn rented an upstate farm known locally as The Rotten House. That's where they learned to sing together, practicing their harmonies while they pulled roots out of the dirt and jammed in the barn each night till the moon went down. Now, after a year that saw them tour the UK with Mick Jones of the Clash and the US with the notorious Bad Wizard (and playing a wedding gig at which Lou Reed was the minister) The Witnesses have gone back to their beginning, returning to the farm in that town in the mountains where it all started. Only this time, they hauled up a van load of vintage recording gear and transformed the big barn into the setting for the follow up to 2004's Tunnel Vision. Green Acres? More like Red Rum. "Wow, very Texas chain-saw massacre," said one visitor upon arriving at the farm. And so, in the cold spring of 2005, with spiders crawling on the mic stands, pigeons shitting on the sound board and coyotes screaming in the hills, The Witnesses spent two weeks of dark nights in the barn pulling the roots of rock'n'roll out of the dirt and making Black Eyes and White Lies, their second full length album.