It’s been a great week for Windsor, Ontario rockers The Tea Party. The band has held steady in the Top 5 on the Canadian Active Rock charts in the #4 position with their latest single Black River. They join fellow Windsorites The Blue Stones who remain firmly in the #2 slot with their latest release Black Holes (Solid Ground).
Black River is the band’s first single since 2014 and was released on the heels of the 25th anniversary of their double platinum album Splendor Solis, which was released in 1993.
“We wrote this one about three years ago,” Jeff Burrows told 519 of the new song. “In those three years we’ve written about 14 songs, but it’s very difficult to get together to write songs because of our proximity – I’m here in Windsor, Stuart’s in Vancouver and Jeff’s on the east coast of Australia. It’s usually after an Australian tour that we’ll stick around for 10 days and hub out at Jeff’s place to write there. It always goes quite well, but we were never in a hurry to release anything.”
When The Tea Party readied the song for release, Burrows said the band planned on releasing it independently, rather than on a big label. Warner Brothers picked up the song once they heard it and it’s just gone up the charts since its release.
“We couldn’t be more grateful,” Burrows added. “It’s a new time with new management and a great young team of people around us who love the band and our work ethic.”
The band heads out on the road with a 35-date tour of North America beginning March 16 in Kingston at the Grand Theatre and ends in Los Angeles at the legendary Roxy Theatre in Hollywood on May 18. The highlight of the tour is a stop at The Colosseum in Caesars Windsor on April 18 where they headline the 5,000-seat award-winning venue in their hometown.
Toronto and Waterloo fans were given an advance opportunity to hear some new music for the first time in four years when they played a small run of sold-out dates in late December.
Black River is the first of a couple new releases expected from the band in the near future, including an EP to coincide with the tour.
“We chose not to do albums anymore because it’s a lot of work and not a lot of people buy albums anymore,” he said. “For us getting together to write a whole album – which we’d like to make one piece -just takes too much time and geographically it just doesn’t work. Whereas an EP works. We can work on five songs that are planned together, so the EP will be very fluid, fun and rockin’. The other nine songs we have are going to be on other EP’s that we’re working on that will also be fluid within themselves. The second month into the tour another single will be released and then the first EP comes out.”
Keeping watching The Tea Party and their 2019 trip up the Canadian rock charts and see the band on tour at a city near you.
The Tea Party Black River Tour Dates:
- March 16 – Kingston, ON – Grand Theatre
- March 19 – Moncton, NB – Tide and Boar Ballroom
- March 20 – Charlottetown, PEI – PEI Brewing Company
- March 21 – Halifax, NS – The Marquee
- March 25 – Ottawa, ON – Algonquin Commons
- March 26 – Sudbury, ON – The Caruso Club
- March 27 – Sault Ste. Marie, ON – The Machine Shop
- March 29 – Guelph, ON – River Run Centre
- March 30 – St. Catharines, ON – First Ontario Performing Arts Centre
- April 1 – London, ON – The Music Hall
- April 2 – Hamilton, ON – First Ontario Concert Hall
- April 3 – Oakville, ON – Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts
- April 5 – Buffalo, NY – The Town Ballroom
- April 6 – Buffalo, NY – The Town Ballroom
- April 8 – Belleville, ON – Empire Theatre
- April 10 – St. Eustache, QC – Le Zénith Promutuel Assurance
- April 12 – Montreal, QC – MTelus
- April 13 – Quebec City, QC – Imperial Bell
- April 16 – Peterborough, ON – The Venue
- April 17 – Oshawa, ON – Music Hall
- April 18 – Windsor, ON – The Colosseum at Caesars Windsor
- April 24 – Winnipeg, MB – Club Regent Event Centre
- April 25 – Regina, SK – Casino Regina
- April 26 – Saskatoon, SK – Coors Event Centre
- April 27 – Grande Prairie, AB – Better Than Fred’s
- April 30 – Cranbrook, BC – Key City Theatre
- May 3 – Calgary, AB – Grey Eagle Event Centre
- May 4 – Edmonton, AB – River Cree Casino
- May 6 – Kamloops, BC – Sagebrush Theatre
- May 7 – Kelowna, BC – Kelowna Community Theatre
- May 10 – Vancouver, BC – The Commodore Ballroom
- May 11 – Victoria, BC – Distrikt
- May 12 – Nanaimo, BC – The Port Theatre
- May 14 – Seattle, WA – Neptune
- May 17 – San Francisco, CA – Slim’s
- May 18 – Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy
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