Promiseland BBQ is the recording project of West Virginia-born, Pasadena, CA-based songwriter Ross Weidman. Back in October, Weidman released Murder In The Friendly City, an album based around his parents’ hometown of Wheeling, WV—nicknamed the ‘Friendly City’—which examines what has changed and what has stayed the same in blue collar Appalachia, and how it feels to live and die in such a place. Populated by Irish, Lebanese and Greek immigrants who worked the steel mills, Wheeling was a town divided. “The city was cut into thirds,” as Weidman explains. “The wealthy and protestant lived north of Wheeling Creek, while the poor and catholic lived south of the creek and on Wheeling Island,” the latter plumb in the middle of the Ohio River and home to the mob-run Wheeling Downs Racetrack.
This meditation on the past and present was honed to an edge by a period of intense personal trauma, with Weidman writing the album as his mother slowly succumbed to illness and passed away. “On January 24th, 2022, my mother died after six years of battling breast and brain cancer,” Weidman says. “For two months from Thanksgiving onward I watched my mother fade away. I watched her take her last breath at home with my father, brothers, and sister.” Closer ‘I Remember Your Name’ confronts this head on, written in memory of his mother but serving to capture the mood of a record both celebrating and mourning what once was.