Here’s to a great 2012 – Cheers – Cin Cin – Prost – Opa – Hopper

Will be my first time in the capitol and my first time to this epic party I’ve heard about but never experienced. Looking forward to a week of jammin’ with new friends and drinking. I hear you have to start drinking the week before to prepare your liver for this thing…

Here is a list of my shows while there:

4/11 rendezvous 9pm
4/12 centennial hall 8pm
4/12 rendezvous 9pm
4/14 the hangar 8pm
4/17 the Alaskan 9pm

Check this link for details and tickets.

http://www.albertarosetheatre.com/?p=2819

If all goes well we should be playing in Bend on Thurs as well.

http://www.ticketfly.com/tickets/event-details/?tfly_event_id=26731

Additionally, tickets are for sale directly through the band (no processing fees) and stay tuned for some giveaways leading up to the show.

I spent some time home for the holidays jamming with my friends / band mates up there, and of course visiting with family. After the holidays I came back to Idaho and read the novel Dune  by Frank Hebert and prepared for a little trip to Mexico, from which I just returned. It was quite an adventure for me, since I speak little to no Spanish and we traveled around to various locations: Merida, where I had been invited to play a friends wedding, Progresso a laid back port town where I had some fine seafood and met a new friend, and finally one night in Cancun where the music played into the wee hours down the block from the hostel we were staying.

Being a musician, songwriter and touring entertainer – I have many plans for for 2011 and I know more will present themselves as time continues to march forth. For one, we have a show next Wednesday at The Reef with a great up and coming band called Jonathan Tyler & The Northern Lights which you should check out.

In February I leave for a short string of dates in WY, UT, and CO with my friend Jeff Crosby and members of his band The Refugees/Equaleyes. Then we return to Boise for a show at one of the bigger venues in Idaho – The Knitting Factory – that is a sort of a benefit as well to raise funds for Idaho-down a summertime festival that Equaleyes and promoter To Entertain U (Seth Brown) are a part of. If you didn’t already know, Crosby is quite a shredder and has joined us on stage for gigs before towards the end of last year so I’m looking forward to more collaboration and guitar playing with that cat…plus we got Daniel Blumenfield aka HAWK who is quite the piano player, and Fabulous Will the drummer. Those dates with those guys are going to be a big jam sesh. I’m heading up to McCall at the end of the month to get a few rehearsals in before we take off.

I am in the process of finalizing dates for the recording of “Grand Ole Hopry” here in Idaho and lining up the players. I can’t tell you much about this record except that you will have a chance to contribute, support and funding the record via Kickstater…more on that to come.  This will be a country record I’ve been talking about for some time now…the songs are already pretty much picked out and the players are all coming together to cut this sucker live in a cabin to analog tape. I’m also working on having a short film made of the recording process that I might be able to get out to a limited amount of you via DVD in the mail.

My goal is to have the country record in the can and out by summertime, whereupon I hope to dive right into a ROCK AND ROLL record that is also pretty much written and ready to rumble. Lots of songs we play live that haven’t been recording will be on this record like “Dreams Are All I Have”, “Your Full Attention”, “Wolf Eyes” – songs that people already know well and we haven’t even put them out. I’m excited about both releases and hope I can get it together enough to get these both done in a timely fashion.

In licensing news “Places You Go” from Reverse Odyssey is going to be on a forthcoming Transworld Snowboarding DVD “These Days”.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Anchorage, AK – Alaskan singer-songwriter and rock and roll band leader Matt Hopper has songs appearing in two films this weekend at the Anchorage International Film Festival.

“Denali”, a track from Hopper’s current release “Jersey Finger”, is featured prominently in Alex Stein’s “M.U.S.H.” a documentary on the Iditarod, at the soft start of the festival in Anchorage.

“Stein approached me at a small gig in Los Angeles and was particularly interested in Denali, a song I had written about Alaska,” Hopper says. “I really enjoyed the documentary and loved seeing my song used during the Iditarod start…there is a clip that shows the Sunshine Plaza. I played a show in there once back in the day.”

The other film, a comedy by Bryant Mainord titled The Beekeepers, is one of 7 Alaskan based films appearing at the festival and features a track off Hopper’s last record “Reverse Odyssey”.

“Bryant had me in one of his first films set in a library when I was in college,” states Hopper. “It was low budget comedy from a local boy…I hope the new film BEEKEEPERS is a step forward and from the looks of the trailer I think it is.”

Matt Hopper is an American Troubadour with rock and roll in his veins, a weathered voice and blues hands. Though currently based out of Boise, Idaho he cut his teeth on the Alaskan music scene. Hopper has released six albums, both solo and with his band The Roman Candles.

For more information on these films, please visit the following links:
http://mushthemovie.com/ – official website of the documentary
http://anchorage.slated.com/2010/films/mush_alexstein_anchorage2010 – official MUSH page from AIFF
http://anchorage.slated.com/2010/films/thebeekeepers_bryantmainord_anchorage2010 – official BEEKEEPERS page from AIFF
http://community.adn.com/node/154007 – a clip from Anchorage Daily New’s Play Blog about Beekeepers

http://www.anchoragefilmfestival.org/

For more info on Matt Hopper & The Roman Candles visit www.matthopper.com

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