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Jazz Weekly features Burning the Bigtop Down
October 7, 2021

Recorded 20 years ago, this album features singer and guitarist Mike Younger teamed with classic rockers like The Band’s Levon Helm/g along with Luther Dickenson/g, Sppner Oldham/key, Jim Dickenson/p, David Hood/b, a horn section and rotating guest team on this mix of rootsy originals. Younger himself has a voice similar [...]

Americana Highways Reviews Mike Younger’s “Burning the Big Top Down”
August 25, 2021

Mike Younger – Burning the Big Top Down This 9-track LP was “lost” & fortunately reclaimed by Nova Scotia-native Mike Younger 20-years later. I always question what the word “lost” means. If you add up all the “lost” LPs I get the impression record companies are disorganized. Maybe a better [...]

Glide Magazine: Mike Younger Completes Album with Levon Helm and Jim Dickinson 20 Years Later with “Burning the Bigtop Down” (ALBUM REVIEW)
August 25, 2021

Persistence pays off. Singer-songwriter Mike Younger began this project now titled, Burning the Bigtop Down, in January of 2001, over 20 years ago. The original tracks, the same nine Younger originals represented herein, were recorded alongside the departed icons Levon Helm and Jim Dickinson. For reasons which remain inexplicable to [...]

Nashville Scene: Mike Younger’s New Album Is a Triumph, Two Decades in the Making
August 18, 2021

“It just put me on this trajectory of having left behind a pound of flesh in Memphis for the last 20 years,” says Nashville singer and songwriter Mike Younger, speaking about his new album Burning the Bigtop Down. He’s not exaggerating: The making of Burning the Bigtop Down is the [...]

All About Jazz features “Burning The Bigtop Down” to their Summer 2021 Spotlights
August 18, 2021

The backstory of an album is oftentimes more interesting that the record itself, but that’s definitely not the case with Burning The Bigtop Down. Mike Younger was in the studio collaborating with the late legends Levon Helm and Jim Dickinson back in 2001 when his label went defunct, but he [...]

WITH THE GHOSTS OF LEVON HELM AND JIM DICKINSON LOOKING ON:

MIKE YOUNGER TRIUMPHS OVER ADVERSITY  TO RECLAIM AND COMPLETE HIS LOST ALBUM SOME 20 YEARS LATER

 

BURNING THE BIGTOP DOWN
OUT AUGUST 27, 2021

 

“No-shit poetic realism with a tendency to museum qualities…” – Rodney Crowell

When an artist takes on their chosen medium, they don’t know how long it will take to complete their art, for there is a process. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine Chapel and 16 years for Ernest Hemingway to write his masterpiece, The Old Man And The Sea. Led Zeppelin only took 30 hours to record their breakthrough album, Led Zeppelin I – great art knows no concept of time, and sometimes, neither does the artist.

Mike Younger, a renegade troubadour and poet of roots music, knows the feeling. “On January 15, 2001, we began cutting the first tracks for the record that would come to define me, break me, and resurrect me over the next 20 years.”

SEE THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE!