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For Immediate Release

SHAKE THE DUST

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Phil Lomac: acoustic guitar, vocals
Craig Hanks: electric guitars
Bob Simyon: drums
Chris Liberti: bass

 

with guests

 

Sean O’Shields: pedal steel
Jason Atkins: keyboards

 

“We’ve all been through some difficult times,” singer-songwriter Phil Lomac says. “How
do we all wake up from a long slumber?”

 

For Lomac, the answer was putting together a new band. In an era that’s split everybody up, he
valued making music together with other human beings—even if they had to wear masks while
doing it—and playing the type of music that makes people want to get vaccinated just so they
can gather in crowds and dance again. Shake the Dust took its name from one of Lomac’s
songs—and it’s no accident that the lyrics of that song are about reconnecting with an old
friend.

 

Shake the Dust is a quartet based in Charlotte, NC, where Lomac moved when he was 17 (after
spending his teen years in Germany). While the band’s music is rooted in the FM country-rock
sound of the 1970s, Lomac has always drawn on a broad range of influences: he learned to play
guitar from a John Denver songbook, but his first album was by Jimi Hendrix. He says, “The
eclecticism is what’s interesting to me. We play traditional instruments, but we’re not recording
them traditionally.”

 

Lomac has been praised for his “persuasive melodies, precise instrumentation and coherent
rhythms” in The Huffington Post, while For Folk’s Sake praised his album Northern Cities
Southern Stars as “a sonic gut-punch of sheer alternative rock, indie pop, and rootsy folk
goodness all wrapped into one.”

 

Shake the Dust, the debut five-song EP by Shake the Dust, was recorded at Old House Recording
Studio in Charlotte, over five days of sessions split between February and May 2021. It was
produced by the band, engineered by Chris Garges, mixed by Kenny McWilliams at Archer
Avenues Studio, and mastered by Dave Harris at Studio B. If you can’t make it to North Carolina
to hear Shake the Dust play live, it sounds best played loud in a car, cruising down the highway,
looking for adventure with an old friend.

 

Phil Lomac on the songs on Shake the Dust:

 

“Fresh Paint”

 

“This was the one song I wrote some time ago. But when we were rehearsing the song, we
started changing it up, and it was darker and faster—all of a sudden, it clicked. It has a really
long outro: that’s an organic thing that happened when we started playing it live.”

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“Shake the Dust”

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“A short and sweet country-rock number. What elevated the sound was Sean’s pedal-steel part.
It’s about that friend of yours who’s been through a lot and needs your permission to come
back into your life.”

 

“Climbing Ladders”

 

“I wrote this song while visiting my father-in-law: his office has some guitars, and when I was
playing one of them, I found this chord progression. Sometimes you sing nonsense words and
then an actual idea starts forming, like ‘What’s important in this life?’”

 

“Sixes and Sevens”

 

“Craig had written this song and played it out with other bands, but it was a little heavy and
hard for me to sing. I asked his permission: ‘Do you mind if I rework some of the lyrics?’ In the
outro, Bob started playing double-time on the drums: that’s totally a ‘70s FM thing.”

 

“White Dress”

 

“My favorite track. I wrote this during the pandemic, and the lyrics were definitely affected by
the pandemic. It could be a country song, but it has this shadow. Everybody in the band
contributed to the arrangement. It was a democratic process: let’s figure this out together.”

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Release Date: Oct 12th, 2021 

Distribution: Available on all major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora and many more

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UPC 198002170118

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© 2021 by Shake the Dust Music

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