Ernie Halter also has an ongoing cover video series on YouTube.com (http://www.youtube.com/erniehalter), popular with his fans who submit requests on an ongoing basis. It was this, as much as Halter’s penchant for performing covers during his live shows, that prompted him to include three covers on the album: “Just Friends” (Musiq Soulchild), “Pretty Girl” (David Ryan Harris – a song that Halter wishes he had written himself and calls it “the most beautiful song ever”), and “Cyclone” (Baby Bash). Halter explains: “‘Cyclone’ is a hip-hop song, you hear it in clubs, and it’s not the kind of song you’d hear an acoustic songwriter singing. I basically flipped it – added some chords and arrangements that weren’t there, rather than just trying to copy it. There’s no skill in that. Incidentally, I noticed it was getting a lot of traffic on YouTube. One night, I was looking on MySpace and Baby Bash had written me a message there just to tell me he dug it. And I found out later that a radio station in Phoenix had picked up the song and had put it in rotation. People were telling me they heard it on the radio. I just decided have some fun with it.”
For an artist four albums, one dvd, a handful of live records into his career, having had songs placed in several prime time TV shows, (including the critically acclaimed ABC series, Brothers and Sisters and NBC’s Friday Night Lights) and having shared the stage with everyone from *NSYNC to Marc Anthony, Joss Stone to Chris Whitley, you would think Tony Lucca might be a household name by now. Instead, Lucca manages to stroll casually under the radar, patient though persistent and seemingly content with his place in today’s ever-evolving music business.
The formation of The Band of Heathens is as natural and organic as the music they create. In early spring 2006, the three principle songwriters, Colin Brooks, Ed Jurdi and Gordy Quist, were sharing the bill every Wednesday night at the venerable Austin club Momo’s. Originally, it started as each songwriter performing his own set. But in a short time they started sharing the stage equally and collaborating on each other’s songs, with bassist Seth Whitney as the anchor of the rhythm section. The Wednesday night series was billed as “The Good Time Supper Club.” Largely improvised and unrehearsed, the shows quickly gained in popularity and word spread throughout Austin that if you wanted live music on Wednesday night, Momo’s was the place to be.