It has come to my attention that I accidentally excluded a gig from the gig list on the final page of the newsletter... oops! So I will give it a special mention here:

The Toy Hearts will be performing at the first ever 'Bordergrass' festival held over two days in Herefordshire. We will be performing at the evening concert on Friday 30th April. The site of the festival is Hopelands, Weobley's Village Hall, Gadbridge Road, Weobley, HR4 8SN. Tickets are £35.00 for the weekend (£17 for a child aged 12 - 18) or £20.00 per night for the Friday and Saturday night concerts (£10 child) and £5.00 per person per night for camping. Contact the Bordergrass site www.bordergrass.co.uk for tickets.

The Toy Hearts are very pleased to announce that they are now fully endorsed by Bluechip Picks! All three of members of the band use a different pick from the range. Sophia uses the TD60 guitar pick, Hannah uses the 50 mandolin pick and Stewart uses the dobro/reso thumb pick, BCT-reso1M. What the band members love about these picks is that they have the closest consistent tone to using a real shell pick, but they don't wear down in the same way. Gone are the rough edges and so too the need for filing buffing and reshaping picks after each gig.

For more information on all the picks made by Blue chip please visit: www.bluechippick.net

When Sophia Johnson called by The Artist Suite to record a demo for the March edition of the Yamaha Download, we managed to grab 5 minutes with her to get just a little more info...

Easy stuff first - tell us a little more about you and just what you play.

My name's Sophia Johnson and my band is The Toy Hearts. I'd describe my playing style as a mixture of bluegrass and swing - I always describe it as trying to tread a line somewhere between Clarence White and Django Reinhardt. I've been playing for 20 years and instrument-wise use a Martin D28CW steel string, Gitane D500 gypsy jazz guitar and have just got my hands on a Yamaha NTX1200.

What's your history with nylon string guitars?

Hi everyone! Well, it seems to be February already, wow what happened to January?

Our 3rd album recorded in Nashville TN last month is being mastered, and we are very happy to reveal the title; it will be called 'Femme Fatale', which is the name of the song that Bryan Simpson from Cadillac Sky sings on with our Hannah. Continuing in the spooky theme it will have 13 tracks and is a significant move forward for the band in many ways... so expect the unexpected!

We are hoping for a release around May/June, followed by a UK tour and then back across the pond to the US of A. More news and information coming very soon - please check the gig guide to see where we are playing in the mean time - a newsletter is on its way also... so stay tuned folks!

All the hearts x

Hi there folks! Well, we've been in Nashville just over a week now and have been having a brilliant time, as usual, we love this town! Despite our initial nervousness, Ben Surratt our engineer was really welcoming and we settled right into his studio, which is a really great place in Inglewood called The Rec Room (see www.therecroom.com). We tracked the whole of our album (13 songs) in five and a half days. Phew! Now that our parts are done, we thought we'd let you know how it has been going…

Some fantastic things happened in the process of making this record. Firstly we have to mention David 'Beardy' Mayfield, our producer, whom has now been completely adopted into the honorary Johnson Family! He has kept us all smiling throughout and is a great source of inspiration to us - there is no one else we'd rather have producing our record and we know it is more than safe in your capable hands. David, you rock, its Official!

Tonight’s show in Kempten was a complete sell out, hurrah for the bluegrass Jambouree! The venue itself seemed to be some kind of school type facility, but at least there was plenty of space, and as a result lots of strings were changed. We had a close call when the saddle on Beverly’s 1940’s Gibson crumbled when she went to change her strings, but Woody happened to have a spare bone saddle, which he filed with Sophia’s glass nail file and fitted – totally saving the day, go Woody! It was nice to see Big Herbert make an appearance in the audience, and Sophia got her first piece of fan mail – A faxed picture of Django and Stephane and a note to say thanks for the great music last night!

Great show yesterday at the Amerika haus in Munich – I know we speak for all the bands in thanking the promoter Philip for his fantastic culinary skills – we all had a beautiful home made thai/asian type meal; beef and carrots in ginger for the carnivorous and tofu with vegetables for the veggies. Best food so far without a doubt the fresh coriander and thai basil rocked! A shot of Jack Daniels for all before the encore ensured a great end to the show! The Wednesday evening after show party literally reached new heights, when a complete stranger scaled the side of the hotel to reach our balcony. He was eventually ejected, though the partied continued with 2 huge bottles of red wine appearing along with 2 plates of Stollen cake, Yum! We also got to see Mike and Megan's brand new baby Luca on skype, ah the wonders of modern technology.

We had a great show last night in Waldkraiburg – apparently a wealthy German town so we’re hoping we did well on cd sales! Pretty nice hotel, Hannah’s smoking room came in handy and the wifi was free for the first time. The tour is getting more like a school trip each day. We are becoming one big family we have christened the tour: “The no Divas and no Douches tour”! The post gig room parties are great fun although, some hard liquor is probably needed if we are really in the mind to tear things up! We’d all like to wish Graham’s daughter Rosalie a very happy 2nd Birthday for yesterday, we also saw his son Wade on skype, he is totally adorable! The funniest thing about the daily routine is having to get up really early for breakfast, then eating nothing literally all day, until we arrive at the venue where we eat two meals back to back! Within minutes of entering the dressing room the cheese, meat and bread is utterly decimated, then we sound check then we eat again, and we’ve had some pretty good stuff so far – last night’s pasta with salmon and cream was delish! We are currently in Munich in a slightly weird old style hotel, though free wifi 2 days in a row is rather cool!

Well after a sleepy Monday show in Ansbach, which was still lots of fun, even after experiencing one of the smallest dressing rooms of the tour, we are all on the bus again. The average journey seems to be taken around six hours although tomorrow we will have the shortest journey of the tour to our fifth venue…. Hurrah! We are ALL looking forward to sleeping in. Due to German law regarding driving we are required to make half hour stops regularly…. So we are all fast becoming accustomed to German service stations and practically everything they stock…. We all get our 50-cent ready for the loo at least!

Wow, what a weekend! Our first two shows went off to flying start with high energy and plenty of smiles to our audiences who are proving to be very awesome…. Last night we were in Bonn and played in a lovely little venue called Harmonie. Steve had played there before, so we had managed to establish the low down before we arrived. All the bands shared a cool communal dressing room, which was really cool with big tables so everyone can sit round and eat, chat and socialise in general. Everyone played really well and was in high spirits at the end of the show, the crowd were super loud with lots of cheering and clapping, which is always nice. The Toy Hearts were pleased to see Ju We all tried our best to stay up, even if the ibis rooms and bathrooms were very, very small! We crowded into a bedroom and are all enjoying continuing to get to know one another… Sophia was a flake and went early to bed that night… But we forgive her so long as she does not do it two nights in row!

We have our first show under our belts…. Hurrah! We played in lovely venue called ‘Franz K’ last night in Reutlingen and although we were all a little nervous we had a great time and seemed to go down well! We also met some very nice people in the audience who came to say hello at the merchandise booth. Steve did a wonderful job on bass (it was his first ever show with us) and really is an all round great guy as well as an awesome bass player! Our set is 30 minutes long every night and we have been trying to throw in as much new material as possible in preparation for the new album. Carl and Beverly played a brilliant set to open the evening and then the SCR tore it up with the closing set. But without a doubt, the highlight of the evening for us Toy Hizzels was the finale when all three bands got on stage and closed with four songs, plus an encore! Playing and singing with such talented musicians is such an honour… Of course we played some ol’ favourites for the audience to join in on including Monroe’s ‘I’ll Stay Around’, which we sang, ‘Cluck Old Hen’ and ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken’. For our encore the Rangers raced through ‘Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms’, which we all had fun trying to keep up with, although Sophia and dad played killer solos! The night was a triumph and we enjoyed some beers afterwards even if Sophia and Mike were told at 3.30 am to stop playing guitar and to go to bed by the hotel porter.

Day one of the tour and we got picked up by the enormous tour bus at 6.30am (not a musicians favourite hour for rising!) We drove to Frankfurt to pick up The Steep Canyon Rangers and Beverly and Carl, who all made it safely but seem more than a little jet-lagged! At our first stop at the German services we discovered you have to pay 50 cent to use the facilities, this scarily means that if we use the toilets at the services every day we could rack up nearly £40 in Toy hearts toilet stops alone, never mind the other 7 musicians, sound man and driver! (We have since discovered a loo on the bus - this makes much more sense economically!)

Check out the latest Toy Hearts news...

Ahead of the forthcoming Bluegrass Jamboree tour, Hannah was recently interviewed for Germany's biggest Mandolin blog, Doppelstopp.
Check out the interview on their site at doppelstopp.wordpress.com or, if you're German's not so good, click on the title to read the full interview in English.

If you're needing a fix of festive bluegrass, get your self down to the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath, on the 22nd December for a packed programme of festive action headlined by the Toy Hearts, back on home soil (after their German tour) and raring to go! Also appearing, the slinky songstress Vix and the Magnificatz. Nate's away (if you've seen him, please get our phone number off his collar and gives us a call), but the Catz will play... Admission is £5 doors open at 8pm

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The Toy Hearts, sisters Hannah and Sophia Johnson and their father Stewart Johnson, play a mixture of original bluegrass and western swing; carving their own niche between genres and combining elements of traditional ‘Americana’ music with a distinctly European edge. What sets this band apart is their original song-writing, they are perhaps the first band to come from the UK playing an essentially American style of music, who are making an impact in the USA.

Since their debut album in 2006, followed by a second in 2008, this band continues to defy complete categorisation, they are a controversial mix; while their family relationship sets them squarely within the traditional realms of country music, Hannah and Sophia’s sassy look and vivacious delivery brings them bang up to date. The culmination of their work so far to define and hone their distinctive sound, will be the recording of their 3rd album in Nashville, in January 2010, with producer David Mayfield from Cadillac Sky.