Things are all fired-up at the Spin.com "Artist of the Year" contest and it's on to Round 4 amigos....Hats off to The Trews and their dedicated fans for making round three a spirited match-up. Once again, THANKS to each and every one of you who took the time to vote for us and to get us this far. Your ferocity at the polls is something to behold! Bonne chance to The Rewinds, our Round 4 opponents. Voting begins on Feb. 26th at 9 AM. EST. so take a breather, spend some time with your loved ones, stretch them fingers and prepare for battle. CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

AND! Check out www.myspace.com/samrobertsband to hear and read about this week's featured rare, old track. This week, a return to the Northstar EP with Sunny Lemon Tina....

Lastly, here's a note from our friends at the Bonnaroo Festival...
Get your tickets for Bonnaroo 2007

Don't miss your chance to see Sam Roberts Band and all of the other incredible bands perform live June 14th-17th from this year's Bonnaroo Festival!

Tickets can be purchased exclusively at www.bonnaroo.com beginning February 23rd. But they're going fast as each year'sfestival has sold out quickly, so CLICK HERE
to get yours now.

On to Round 3 of the Spin.com Artist of the Year (International) ballot. Thanks for the all-out voting assault which has helped us to get this far. Let see how far this train will take us... Thanks again, and did we mention to VOTE!!!
CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

WE'RE GOING TO BONNAROO!

The lineup has been announced today and we are thrilled to be a part of Bonnaroo 2007!

Here is the press release, check out the lineup! As of this point we are not sure of which day we will be performing, but more details will be coming as we get closer to the date.

Superfly Productions and A.C. Entertainment are proud to announce the
initial lineup for the 2007 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. The sixth
annual four-day camping and music festival will be held on June 14-17 on the
same beautiful 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, 60 miles south of
Nashville. A full list of confirmed acts follows, and more will be announced
in the coming weeks. The final Bonnaroo 2007 lineup will total over 100
bands and 20 comedians performing on 13 stages over four days. Tickets go on
sale exclusively through www.bonnaroo.com on Friday, February 23rd at 12:00
PM EST.

Artist Lineup:

The Police
Tool
Widespread Panic
The White Stripes
Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals
Wilco
The Flaming Lips
Manu Chao
The String Cheese Incident
Franz Ferdinand
Bob Weir & Ratdog
Damien Rice
Ween
Gov’t Mule
Ziggy Marley & the Melody Makers
The Decemberists
Kings of Leon
Michael Franti & Spearhead
Wolfmother
Regina Spektor
The Black Keys
Galactic
DJ Shadow
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Spoon
Keller Williams (WMD’s)
Sasha & John Digweed
STS9
Old Crow Medicine Show
The Hold Steady
Lily Allen
North Mississippi Allstars
Fountains Of Wayne
Hot Tuna
Feist
Hot Chip
John Butler Trio
Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys
Aesop Rock
The Richard Thompson Band
Dierks Bentley
James Blood Ulmer
Xavier Rudd
Gogol Bordello
Junior Brown
Tortoise
T-Bone Burnett
Mavis Staples
Clutch
Cold War Kids
Dr. Dog
Paolo Nutini
Brazilian Girls
RX Bandits
The Nightwatchman
The Slip
Girl Talk
Railroad Earth
Martha Wainwright
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Annuals
Tea Leaf Green
Sam Roberts Band
Elvis Perkins in Dearland
Charlie Louvin
Sonya Kitchell
Mute Math
Apollo Sunshine
Uncle Earl
The National
The Little Ones
Ryan Shaw

Comedians:
Lewis Black & Friends
Dave Attell
David Cross

More acts will be announced in the coming weeks.

Allow me, if you will, to vault ahead to the year 2000. We have spent the past two weeks wallowing in the 90's and I feel like it's time for a break. Now, this sudden move away from the Northstar Ep before its completion is inspired, in part, by Bob Dylan's book Chronicles Volume 1. In it, you imagine he is just about to get into the nitty gritty of his rise to stardom - his first few classic albums, what was he thinking when he wrote Highway 61 Revisited, Freewheelin'... before you know it, you're in New Orleans in the mid 80's hearing about how Oh Mercy! came into being. So here we are, the year 1999 and the demise of Northstar following one of the worst gigs I hope to ever play. The venue - "Vox" - in downtown Toronto. The crowd - unsympathetic, uninterested, unimpressed. The band - completely lost, dragging-on a version of a song called "Sweet Love" (in my top five worst attempts of all time) for a very uncomfortable amount of time. The result - ten years of music-making and comraderie disintergrates. It was a blow unlike any other I had ever experienced. It was more than just a band breaking up, it was a loss of identity. But maybe it was what needed to happen, maybe it was the catalyst for a shift in our creative direction and a better future. After four months or so, I couldn't take it anymore... I called up Eric Fares and asked if he thought we could start something new, something different. "It would make my heart full of joy," he responded, and we decided to see if George Donoso would sit in on drums. He recorded 17 tracks in a couple of hours, laying the rhythmic foundation for what would become the album "Brother Down." For the next few months, Eric and I went in every day to work on it, recording on the ever-popular 12 track Beta machine. As for the sound quality, our mantra was "it is what it is." It was more about trying things with songs I'd never tried before. This week's song, "Got Soul (But No Money)" was, for me anyway, a big departure from my usual approach to writing. A drum machine for the love of god... We never performed it, in fact, outside of a few close friends, no one had ever heard it. Years later, however, my compadre K-os asked me collaborate on song with him. He came up to Montreal on a cold winter's day and we headed to the studio with no particular plan. I played him a few odds and ends and he latched on to this song. I spent the day recording vocals and guitars, remodelling the original, all the while K-os slept on the sofa. Eight or nine hours later, it was done. My collaborator woke up, looking very refreshed and said "don't worry, I'm going to flip that shit..." Nothing I'd ever done had been flipped before, so I waited with great interest and some fear for his take on it. The finished product is a song I love, but never expected, called "Dirty Water," on K-os 2nd album Joyful Rebellion. See you next week when we dig up another dirty little secret together...

Well well well, looks like someone advanced to Round Two of Spin.com's Artist of the Year contest! We'd like to extend a heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to vote for us! And with that, let the voting continue... This week finds us up against the band Mew. If you have a few spare moments, come vote for us at http://www.spin.com/artistoftheyear/international

This week's episode of our ongoing MySpace special series of old and rare tracks (myspace.com/samrobertsband) takes us back to the Northstar Ep sessions and the record's opening track, Diagnosis: Evil. Now we've already been through a bit about the recording sessions themselves so I thought I'd give you a little background as to how this particular song came together. We had an instrumental track which we simply called "the Kick-Ass Opener." Now, whether or not it, in fact, kicked any ass, or was ever the opening song of a show is highly debatable. What it really needed was a theme, a storyline which would lift it out of obscurity and onwards into infamy. Two key ingredients came together which helped give the song the shape you hear today. The first involves three University students and a film project. We, the band, showed up to jam one evening, at our rehersal room on St-Antoine Blvd. behind the Molson/Bell Centre, only to find that the space had been transformed into the otherworldy set of a student-film project. There were cheap props everywhere - lab-coats and tin-foil "space-age" mechanisms, old tv's, maybe even one of those early Donkey Kong mini-arcade games (I'm seeing it now, but it may not have ever been there) - all of it coming together to create a disturbing and confusing landscape.  The film-makers were David Gillespie (see Chemical City album/press photos), Colin Sangster (to whom this track is dedicated) and none other than our very own David Spencer (manager of the band, under many names, from 1996-present). Gillespie had bribed us into using the space in exchange for a free photo shoot - the pictures from that shoot still exist and show us trying desperately to re-create Sloan's classic "One Chord To Another" album cover. The film was entitled, you guessed it, Diagnosis: Evil. This was the team that also brought you the classic film "Angry Waiter",  for which we were all almost arrested by the MUC Police for playing on the street with toy guns. For whatever reason, the idea of writing a title track to this student film seemed like a great idea. The other guiding light was the mid-90's penchant for the conspiracy theory. This strain of cynicism was highly appealing to many of us at the time and we applied it to anything from JFK, to alien abduction (Friday night was X-Files night until we could no longer follow the plot), to Canada's losing to the U.S. in the finals at the Hockey World Cup in 96. And so the song took on the form you hear today. Enjoy it for this week, until we open the dusty old broom-cupboard once again...

You might remember that a few months ago we were made the Artist of the Month on Spin.com and because of the efforts of every one of you that graded us and flooded the Spin site with nice comments, we have found ourselves in the running to be the Spin.com ARTIST OF THE YEAR!!!

Now, we ask for your help once again! We find ourselves sitting in a dim corner of the 32-band field. We're under "International" and in this first round, we're up against The Subways. You can help us advance to the next round by going to www.Spin.com/artistoftheyear/

You can vote as much as you like!

Oh, and drop in this week to our Myspace profile, we'll be posting the next song in our ongoing series of old, rare, unreleased, hard to find stuff!

That's all for the moment amigos! Wish us luck...

With Much Love,
The Band