This is from a stack of partially finished blog entries that, after years of collecting dust, I do not expect to finish.  Unloved fragments, wayward children; the sort of pieces that glow briefly after the spark of a Good Idea, only to fizzle down to stubs by the time you’ve unspooled the first page.  None of them are finished, and some never even made it far enough to describe why I started in the first place. But like any negligent parent, I feel a certain, sullen responsibility for having brought them in to the world, and I don’t want to just let them die quietly in the dark of this hard drive.

☂

There is a chance, however slight, that you have not yet heard of Trampled by Turtles, which is to say that you have not been made aware of the Next Big Thing. More than a few young men with sober looks in irony-free plaid shirts have told me that the Turtles are without a doubt the Next Big Thing. Pulled together from the remains of a few rock/punk projects around the fringes of Duluth back in 2007, their upward trajectory appears to have steepened lately, permeating that crucial lower stratosphere of indie blogs and YouTube fandom to reach a kind of whispered precursor to fame; powerful enough for them to fill a venue weeks in advance and be driven there in a tour bus.

The turtles themselves all look pretty elemental: thick-wristed fiddle creatures risen from the gravel of a truckstop along some frozen stretch of I-35. With the exception of Dave Simonette, their pixielike frontman, these are big guys with rounded shoulders and big hairy beards grown for warmth. Guys who can settle fights without getting off their stool. It's a physical property that comes packaged with certain expectations that can be used to significant effect in concert. When they lumber out on stage, newcomers can be forgiven for a moment of bug-eyed incredulity as these brutes, these fucking lumberjacks serve up some of the cleanest, most energetic bluegrass you have ever heard. The Turtles are fast. Theirs is a style of bluegrass that washed down its amphetamines with a red bull before the show; bluegrass hurtling by in freefall, writhing and twisting across the stage with its eyes all rolled back in to its head and midway through the set it can sound like the devil himself has come up through the floorboards.

Or so I'm told.

Truth is, though I went to my first Trampled by Turtles concert the other night, I still haven't heard what they sound like live. I spent their entire set propped up on a pleather couch near a mini-fridge in the green room, talking with the opening band. I have a friend who was recently pulled on as their bassist, and so after my liquor bracelet had been snapped on, I was ushered around the velvet divider, past the blackshirt security people and in to the green room, which is red.

(The Next Big Thing? The Still Tide. You heard it here first.)