Full Review Track Listings

01.	Chicken Wire
02.	Wild Ponies	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
03.	I Was An Oak Tree
04.	Reckon I Did
05.	New Moon Rise	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
06.	Dungarees Overalls	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
07.	Fathers Day
08.	White Oak Wood
09.	Scuppernong
10.	Cackalack

"Cackalack's songs are dirt road visits with the neighbors outside your car window." -Tim O'Brien

"Sly, subversive and able to say more in two words than most other people can say in a novel, Byrd is clearly one of the tent poles of contemporary folk music. He sounds like he’s straight from the back porch but he’s taken a long, hard look at life and knows how to bring it into focus. Basically recorded in one six hour take, this album is going to set your ears on fire, even if you aren’t a folkie. Hot stuff." -Chris Spector, Midwest Record.

What is Cackalack?

Esse Quam Videri. “To be, rather than to seem.” The only one of the original thirteen states without a motto, in 1893 North Carolina finally adopted one that implies, “We don’t need a motto. We Are.”

Jonathan Byrd is a seventh generation North Carolinian. "Cackalacky" is vernacular poetry for "Carolina." Cackalack was recorded live in a converted garage on a sunny afternoon in Toronto, Ontario with no headphones, no listenbacks, no separation, and no overdubs. Recorded by gold and platinum record-producing Ken Whiteley, and accompanied by Canadian super-pickers from The Foggy Hogtown Boys and Creaking Tree String Quartet, Cackalack is Byrd's homeland manifesto. Having recently made WFMT Midnight Special host Rich Warren's "50 Most Significant Songwriters of the Past 50 Years", a list which includes giants like Bob Dylan, John Prine, and Joni Mitchell, Jonathan approaches his work on Cackalack with the most ordinary of materials: Chicken wire. Concrete. Roofing tacks. He takes us to real, everyday places. The Outer Banks, where wild ponies still run. Rockwell, where Byrd sings a song to his father's ashes. And 95 South, a great river of humanity that brings us rolling back south from a hard tour.
Cackalack is non-fiction, in other words. Lived-in songs, recorded live by an all-acoustic cast in an afternoon. Being, rather than seeming. Byrd's best work to date. Lyrics enclosed.