Led by Dave Simonett, a founding member of the progressive bluegrass outfit Trampled by Turtles, Dead Man Winter produces a robust, deeply felt strain of indie rock tinted with Americana. The group Trampled by Turtles first assembled in Duluth, Minnesota in 2003 as a side project shared among Simonett and his fellow players. When Simonett began shaping material that called for greater force than Trampled by Turtles typically supplied, he naturally assembled a separate band to deliver it. The project’s debut arrived in 2011 with Bright Lights, an album Simonett described as his rock & roll outlet and that also included fiddler Ryan Young and bassist Tim Saxhaug, both Trampled by Turtles colleagues. In October 2016 Trampled by Turtles declared an indefinite pause while Simonett confronted the aftermath of a difficult divorce. He channeled the resulting time into songs that mirrored the upheavals in his personal life and professional path, and those pieces formed the core of Dead Man Winter’s follow-up record. The refreshed lineup—Simonett on guitar and vocals, Erik Koskinen on guitar, Tim Saxhaug on bass, Bryan Nichols on piano, and J.T. Bates on drums—spent a week at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota laying down Furnace, which appeared in January 2017. Shortly afterward the band scheduled a North American tour supporting the album, set to run from February through April 2017.
