Berkeley to Bakersfield

Kicking off 2015 in swashbuckling style, Cracker will be releasing their tenth studio effort, entitled Berkeley To Bakersfield, on the Freeworld division of North London indie imprint Floating World, on Monday, January 19th. It's a double-album that finds this uniquely American band traversing two different sides of the California landscape - the northern Bay area and further down-state in Bakersfield. With founding members David Lowery and Johnny Hickman anchoring the project, they've brought in a host of musicians to help out, including putting together the original Cracker lineup for the Berkeley side (see credits below). Berkeley to Bakersfield was recorded by Drew Vandenberg.Despite being less than a five-hour drive from city to city, musically, these two regions couldn't be further apart from one another. In the late '70s and '80s a harder-edged style of rock music emerged from the Bay area, while Bakersfield is renowned for it's own iconic twangy country music popularized, most famously, by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard in the '60s and '70s. Yet despite these differences, they are both elements that Cracker's two cofounders, David Lowery and Johnny Hickman, have embraced to some degree on nearly every one of their studio albums over the last two decades.