DULUTH — By the time Sabrina Carpenter's new album, "Short n' Sweet," was released Aug. 23, the Disney Channel alum was already ubiquitous. There were two hit singles from the album, including a chart-topper ("Please Please Please"), and an upcoming arena tour had entirely sold out.
Not to overstate the scant similarities between a pop smash and an LP from Duluth's beloved Americana band Trampled by Turtles, but "Short n' Sweet" is an extreme example of the music industry's increasing push to whip up a frenzy of publicity in advance of an album release. ADVERTISEMENT "I don't want to talk about other bands," said Trampled frontman Dave Simonett, "but for us in the past, I felt like, God, by the time this thing comes out, I'm sick of hearing about it. You know what I mean? So I thought maybe we'd just release something.
It's like, 'We made this thing. Here it is. Listen to it if you want.
'" "This thing," in the case of the band's most recent release, was a five-song EP called "Always Here." It dropped with little fanfare Sept. 20.
At the same time, Simonett's other band, Dead Man Winter, released its own EP, "Always Now." Both releases contained different versions of the same five new songs, in the same order. "I was curious about trying the same group of songs with more than one project," Simonett wrote in his Substack newsletter.
"Instead of trying to write two different versions of each song, I thought I would just play the songs like I had been playing them in my living .
