“I always liked the image in my mind of the Irish ending up in East Texas and being so damned lonely that country music came out of them,” says Tanner. Perhaps that sentiment was sown when Tanner was a Swedish transplant in Southern California. In any event … and lest he remain in a continued fit of isolation … shortly after his return to the Twin Cities in 1994, Patrik formed The Faraway Men. With outlaws Mark Juenemann on bass and Brandon Fjetland on drums & hambone, they released 1997’s Done Broke Down and 1998’s Sparks Would Fly. The band was a perfect vehicle for Tanner to express his fondness for great songsmith-storytellers like Gram Parsons, George Jones and Elvis Costello while spinning his own unique tales of love-gone-bad with both swagger and soul. While hailed by some critics as torchbearers of the “alt-country” genre, the band actually sought to take a more reverential approach to classic C&W roots – one that defied expectations of either alt-country’s urban hipster twang or the Nashvillian bubblegum that continues to dominate today’s country scene. As PULSE of the Twin Cities exclaimed, “if this is country, then country just got unbelievably cool.”