Released in 2008, vs. The Great American Cities was the band’s second full-length album, following the dual-release Eps What Loneliness Can Do to You and Honest to God in 2007. This album features a more subdued tone, and features a new version of the song “A Small House in the City”, originally featured on their first album Your Love Has Made Everything Beautiful, which would become one of the band’s staples. The original iTunes version of this album also featured five additional bonus tracks, one of which was a companion song to the song “Schedule (II)” from What Loneliness Can Do to You, one of which was performed in their eventual Live in Marion, IN album, and two being covers. Like all of the XRA releases, it was unavailable from most stores for a number of years, before finally being rereleased in 2019.
\"Meanwhile, Rodeo Ruby Love continued to be one of our most consistent and hardest working bands. They’d been touring regularly, Zack never stopped writing songs, and we began to get more and more confident investing more of our money in their releases. This felt like it would be a big one for all of us. We returned to my home studio to record this album. I remember these sessions being a lot of fun, and while the studio had it’s drawbacks, this felt like the first session where we were able to use the space’s limitations to our creative advantage. Or anyway, to turn them into strengths. In particular, I remember recording Zack’s acoustic guitar with him standing in the center of an empty room, about six feet from a matched stereo pair of microphones, and how that solved a problem for us regarding fitting the choppy, rhythmic, acoustic guitars in the mix AND keeping their energy high. Minutiae, I guess, but it felt like a revelation at the time. This was also the first time we’d ever recorded more material than we needed for a record and left some songs on “the cutting room floor”, as the saying goes.\"
I am in no way affiliated with Rodeo Ruby Love. This channel is simply a passion project, as they have been one of my favorite bands for a long time now. Much of their work was not available/very hard to find on major markets (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, etc.), so I am doing this to help spread their amazing music around and keep their music available in case it is ever removed again. Rodeo Ruby Love appears under the Pentimento Music Label.
