The duo Yellow #6, named for a soda ingredient, started in February when area songwriter Thom Beals, who played bass in hard rock bands years ago, befriended Black Weather Shaman's Armand Ignelzi. Both band members are into Radiohead as well as bluegrass greats like Doc Watson and Bill Monroe, which explains why some songs like "Hunter" start off with electronic noises and clapping drumbeats and then drop into a bit of countrified acoustic guitar. Others like "Icecaps" explore noisy weirdness all the way through, while tunes like "Uptight" exhibit bluegrass traits consistently.
The Yellow #6 project is Beals' first attempt at lyric writing, and he went straight for social commentary. The song "6:30 a.m." is about aggressive males who go out at night looking to break some heads. Though it's sung in first person, the speaker's perspective is one that Beals loathes rather than endorses. "Hunter" is a follow-up to that tune in which the character in "6:30 a.m." faces the consequences of his behavior and, as Beals puts it, starts to think, "Oh shit! The cops are coming to get me. I'm having some realizations." In a live setting, the multi-instrumentalists swap out instruments and use their own prerecorded samples to fill out the sound. Beals plans to take Yellow #6 demo recordings into the studio eventually, "unless someone's interested in helping a poor hand."
