So Derek will be playing a one-hour show at The Rutledge in Nashville on the 3rd of July. I’ll be there if I have to sleep in my car to hold my place in line. [Actually, I'll just go eat at the Mexican place next door. I've been to The Rutledge many a time at this point.]

Matt Conner of Stereo Subversion recently interviewed Derek on a whole range of issues ranging from Noisetrade to his next album. Here’s what Derek had to say regarding the latter:

It’s pretty early on and, as usual, I’ve got pages and pages of ideas. It’s hard to say exactly where it’s going. I have a couple strong ideas, but I’m almost afraid to say because you never know once you get in and start. I thought Mockingbird was going to be full of different stuff. I intended that to be a record about art and politics and the combination of the two and it ended up just being about politics. [Laughs] There’s only one song about art on that record and it’s totally out of place.

Right now, if I had to give it broad strokes, I would say it’s going to be a record about race and sexuality – those are the big issues right now, but that’s what has been squarely in my line of sight for the last couple of years.

You can read the whole interview here.

If you’ve looked at the front of [derekwebb.net] in the last week, you’ve seen stuff about the Art * Music * Justice Tour. That tour will have:

• Sara Groves
• Brandon Heath
• Charlie Peacock
• Derek Webb
• Sandra McCracken

For a little on the show, we talked to David McCollum:

As to this tour, the general concept of the night will be in support of IJM and Food for the Hungry, it will feature Sara as an emcee or sorts; then each of the artists will have their own time on stage to walk through their experiences in relation to the social justice and poverty issues addressed by each organization.

Dates are being booked from 18 Sep 2008 – 26 Oct 2008. A number of shows are already booked, but there are still slots available. The man to contact for booking is Bryan Myers of Creative Artists Agency.

If you want a banner for your Web site to support the tour, snag one. You’ll want to fix the URL to point at the Art * Music * Justice tour page on MySpace.

… or so Derek said at the show last night.

You should enjoy it.

1. Hey, want to hear what Derek’s solo sets with Caedmon’s sounded like on this tour? We’ve got a recording from the Dyersburg show for you to check out.
2. Many folks have asked us, “Is this the last hurrah of Derek with Caedmon’s Call?” I think the best answer for that is, “We don’t know, but I don’t think they know, either.” All I know is that they looked like they were having a heck of a lot of fun playing music together, and we all know that Caedmon’s just doesn’t play that many shows anymore. If you ask me to put a prediction down in print and sign my name to it, I’d bet on both another record and another full tour. As to whether Derek will play with the band any more this year, who knows? When we know, though, we’ll tell ya. Cool? Cool.

Yeah, you heard us.

AmpersandEP.com.

Go forth and pre-order.

Some of y’all complained about the size of the cover art we had for The Ampersand EP, and well … now we’ve got the final deal. Click on the image above to see the full-size image we’ve got. This should be big enough for you to see, although it’s a JPG and has compression artifacts and all that. We’re sure that the final product will look even slicker in print, but also that the tired/grainy look is purposeful—I mean, Rhodes is still very new in the WebbCracken family, and these folks … well, they’re probably not sleepin’ much, eh?

Rumor has it that the disc is now mastered…

Coming to a CD player near you… The Ampersand EP

It looks like pre-orders will be taken starting on Valentine’s Day. The physical record will come out in March or April. You will, however, get the full digital download as soon as you pre-order. Derek and Sandra will be out playing shows together to promote once the pre-order starts. Derek told me that they consider Valentine’s Day to be the actual release date for the EP

We here at dw.net are very excited for this release and I, for one, am very glad Watch Your Mouth has found a home and am excited to see what Sandra can add to it! Stay tuned to dw.net for more updates!

Derek and Mike did a two-part interview. I’ll copy from the email he sent me to describe it, because I’m lazy:

There are 3 parts to this interview (only 2 are up). The first part is general info (noisetrade, new albums…etc) while the other two have to do with questions that were submitted by .com board users. I have no problem with folks listening to those but they may not be as interesting to them. You can download them and upload elsewhere if you prefer, it’s whatever you want. At 32 minutes the first part is a bit long but there is a lot of good info in there. I hope this is OK.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And because it’s funny … Can You Spot Derek Webb? It’s “Where’s Waldo?” but with a short, bald man.

The folks at Dryve Management have posted a video blog made during the current “Ringing Bell Tour”. There are a few dates left so be sure you check it out if you can. So here it is… The Ringing Blog Pt. 1