And now presenting a brand spankin' new site for fiddler Casey Driessen! If you've never heard of Casey, I'm honored to introduce you to this kickass fiddler. I got to know Casey in Nashville when I was playing banjo around town and he stood out immediately as a special musician and artist. His deep knowledge of traditional fiddle music combined with mind-blowing extended techniques allow Casey to bridge the past and the future of fiddle. I am not alone in appreciating Casey's talents, as he has been called on to perform with numerous impressive artists including Béla Fleck, Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, and Steve Earle.

Casey and I collaboratively dreamed up a new site that would help to spread the word about his latest self-released record, Oog, which comes out today, Tuesday, May 12, as well as share photos, show dates, and news. Casey handled the bulk of the design and all of the content and I made sure to push him into using all the latest and greatest social media tools!

If you'll permit me to get geeky for a moment, here are some cool features on the new caseydriessen.com:

- built on the excellent WordPress blog software so Casey can run the show and create and manage all the content

- for the photo galleries, we're dynamically pulling in Casey's Flickr tags to create grouped sets which are then displayed in an all-ajax interface

- the home page (or "brainpage" as i like to call it) features a spiffy ajax effect that pulls in all kinds of content from around the web including show dates from Artistdata, tweets from Twitter, images from Flickr, videos from YouTube, and post titles and custom pages from WordPress which are displayed in thought bubbles

- all flash widgets are either open source or free for use from music selling services like RawRip

- the videos pages pull in RSS feeds from YouTube favorites and uploaded videos

- blog comments are handled by Disqus

I highly recommend checking out the new record, which features some amazing musicians including drummer and percussionist Matt Chaimberlain (Tori Amos, David Bowie...) and bassist Viktor Krauss (Lyle Lovvette, Bill Frisell...) Here's a little sample of Casey in action...enjoy!

Visit http://caseydriessen.com for much more.