Our 2021 Christmas song, A Coal Country Christmas, is in the hopper and coming down the pike on November 23rd! Follow us on Spotify or Facebook for notifications on release day.
Have you heard our podcast Making it Small in Music yet? Every month we sit down with an amateur or local pro for a heart-to-heart about what makes being a small, unknown musician so amazing!
Michael Snyder-Barker and Chris Broski formed the Barker & Broski project in 2018 to focus on creating original music. Mike's lyrics have been described as a combination of Frank Zappa and Dr. Seuss, and Chris is happy to follow those words to the strange and wondrous places the music takes him.
Mike has loved music since the beginning of time and wanted to channel energies productively. Barker uses words for a living a veritable “wordsmith” and the lyrics started flowing like a river.
Chris Broski has been annoying people with guitar for most of his life, and after 40 years he’s starting to sound OK. He’d be content to just strum, but because they can’t afford a bassist he brings fingerstyle guitar to the music of Barker & Broski.
When Michael Snyder-Barker and Chris Broski formed the Barker & Broski project in 2018, a main goal was to make original music. And by original I really mean original. Check out these whimsical and eccentric albums:
November of 2019 was the release their debut album. It contained their now staple songs Generica, Dystopian Waltz, Old Man in the Mirror. The country parody Don't make our Love Like a Drive-by Shooting expanded into the 5-song suite "The Ballad of Billy Bob".
In February of 2021 Barker & Broski released their second album. It not only included more quirky songs like Surf Zombie and Battle of the Ides of March, but added more stories to the Billy Bob universe. This time it was a prequel to the previous album's story that explored Billy Bob's father and the circumstances of his birth and subsequent curse.
Every holiday season since 2019, B&B celebrate by releasing a Christmas single. In 2019 it was the silly yet sentimental "Dollar- Store Christmas". If you find bad bootleg and knock-off toys amusing, you will enjoy the cavalcade of fake merchandise on display in the accompanying video.
2020 gave us another Christmas story. (We love stories!) This time about a boy asking his dad "Why doesn't Santa give me any presents?" His father passes along the family legend of how an ancestor shot one of Santa's Reindeer in the song December 24, 1829.
Our upcoming song, sure to become a caroling standard, is called "A Coal Country Christmas" and was born from the world of Billy Bob. Sung by Billy Bob, Sr. it is his plea for his wife not leave. Yes, this one isn't hardly silly at all! We'll see how well that works when it is released on November 23rd, 2021. Follow us on Spotify or Facebook to be notified on release day!