After a great summer of festivals and travel we came home in early September to rest, practice and write.
On the evening of September 11th after 4 long days of Colorado rain I was told of a flood warning for Boulder County via a text from a friend. I had a hard time taking it very seriously but around 11:30pm I went out my studio back door to take a look at the river behind our house and noticed it was nearly full from all the rain. I still had doubts it would flood and reach our house. I went back inside and came back out a half hour later to find waters rushing in our back door. I immediately woke up Enion, our son Aesop and our dog Tabla, got them into our van and grabbed as many musical instruments and recording gear as I could.
Within 20 minutes the waters were getting to high to keep opening doors to get in and out with stuff without it being very hard to close the doors again. When we pulled away from our home at 12:30am the waters were up to my knees and well above the bottom of our Sprinter van. We got out but over the course of the next 4 days the waters went up to nearly 7 feet high in our house and studio and left between 3 to 4 feet of mud throughout our entire house and studio. The river blew through entire walls and fairly well destroyed our house and recording studio. 2 levies had broken up river to exacerbate the issue.
We had a wonderful tour booked for just a week later in the state of Chihuahua Mexico. This was a great experience that we’d do again in a heart beat. The audiences were wonderful and receptive and much of Mexico had just been hit by floods too so there was camaraderie for us on our losses also. It was hard to be in Mexico so far from our recently lost home and we had to spend most moments we had with wifi to be communicating over the matter though the trip was also a welcome attempted distraction for us. It was a lot of fun.
Immediately after returning from Mexico we flew to Virginia to play Watermelon Park Festival which is one of my favorites, where we had Sam Grisman join us on bass and of course Ross Martin holding the guitar chair. The folks that run Watermelon Park Festival are wonderful folks and some of my best childhood friends. They are also GREAT musicians. You can hear them with their band Furnace Mountain Band.
We also just had a performance with Elephant Revival to a sold out house at the Boulder Theater. The performance felt powerful and full of emotion and zeal from the band and the audience. This show was a very uplifting experience for us!
We’ve been staying with friends here in Lyons, Colorado and getting ready to record a new CD. We have lots of new material for it and are anxious to record the music. We have lots of fresh material to write about too. 🙂 We plan on recording this winter and will be touring as much as possible this spring and summer and the following fall. This will be our own FLOOD RELIEF TOUR.
If you’d like to help us in our recovery from having lost our home, studio and much of our possessions you can come to our shows this spring, buy our CD’s from our website or donate money to a donation page Anne Tiller (my sister) set up which is http://www.gofundme.com/4ckk64 You can also send donations directly via PayPal to us. Our PayPal address is taarka@taarka.com It’s the same as our business email address.
We are so thankful to all of our great friends that have already helped in one way or another be it donations or helping to dig out some of our possessions from our house. We can’t thank you enough! We’ve been very moved, though we have a very long way to go still. We will likely have to build an entirely new house and we’re still not sure if we can even legally build on the land we own now because it’s in the “flood way” versus the flood plain. So, we will see you out on the musical highway! Thank you all and much love! – David Tiller
