Rico LighthouseGoing along in the same vein as yesterday’s americana expert Bill Mallonee, our offering today is The Lighthouse Band.  I found this very indie americana gypsy band only a few weeks ago and I only have three lo-fi songs that I downloaded off their MySpace, but I’m digging their hippy ways.

The Lighthouse Band is Rico and Bethra Lighthouse and “Heidi vest, Rachel Lotz, and Nate Eperson. Past Present and Future: Danny Hesser, Nick Wichman, Joshua Digiorgio, Tamima White, Shelemiah, Sherry Baker, Tim Lotz, Lazarus, Antonio Vogel, Brian Fletchner, Tyler and Britta Hentschel, Malorie Ridgnal, Charity Hulderman, Jeremy Siegrist, Glenn Willis and others we forgot and / or have not met yet,” as stated on their MySpace page.

They’re intensely devoted to God.  They travel the world and play “gypsy” music.  They love creation and try to live environmentally responsibly.  They dig organic foods and that whole lifestyle.  They remind me of hippies.  And they’ve got some ties to Christian anarchists.  There’s more to the band, too, but I couldn’t fit the other adjectives in my title.

The Lighthouse Band is an interesting group of people.  Both Rico and Bethra have played music and spoken at the Christian indie music festival Tomfest in Washington.  This year, Bethra did a talk entitled “Sewing with Recycled Materials,” to give you an idea of their style.

Besides Tomfest, I think Rico and Bethra were the main guys behind The Soul of Creation Fest.  The festival was full of folk bands, gypsy bands, worship music, and tons of discussions and seminars with names like “Finding God in Nature,” “Cooking with Peasant Foods,” “Knitting,” “Preserving Food with Whey and Water,” “Primitive Living Skills,” “Orphans in Africa,” “Water Reclamation,” and “Wild Bees and Beekeeping.”  I could keep on listing forever, but you get the idea.

The Lighthouse Band is very devoted to the idea of community and they call themselves “a group of interdependent artists, writers, poets, philosophers, painters, and thinkers” on their website.  They’re pretty involved with Aimee Wilson of The Porchfront Factory and The Psalters.

I’m not sure exactly how into Christian anarchy the group is, but they link to at least two different groups on their website, Chrsitian Anarchy and Jesus Radicals.  Interesting info anyway.

So what do they sound like musically?  Pretty much what you’d expect from a Christian gypsy environmentalist organic hippy anarchist group.  Just download the songs and find out for yourself, dangit.  I can’t say they’re one of my favorite bands, but they’re a fun group to have in the music library, and you just might like this commie music more than me.  (Some people have a hard time knowing when I’m joking and when I’m serious.  This would be a time when I’m joking.  I don’t think they’re communists in any way.)

So enjoy these two songs, and download more at their MySpace:

Prayer of the Humble
Do a Few Things

Website: www.thelighthouseband.com
MySpace: www.myspace.com/thelighthouseband

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