Births, Deaths and Marriages

Births, Deaths & Marriages is the second full-length studio album by Australian band 26, released in Australia on 24 May 2008 by Floodboy Records and MGM Distribution.

Contents

• Track listing
• Personnel
• References

With 26’s growing popularity from the success of their first album, The King Must Die, the band toured Australia in 2006 for the release of their single "Friendly Fire", which went on to win the highly regarded 2006 Queensland Song Award for Best Rock Song, as well as being a finalist in The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Awards. The single also received airplay on national youth radio network Triple J and FBI Radio in Sydney. With the release of Births, Deaths & Marriages in 2008 came the track "Aloha", which was featured on the 3 mobile phone website. This led to "Aloha" debuting at #8 on the ARIA Digital Download Charts the following week. That same week, 26 was chosen as one of only forty acts to showcase at Queensland’s 2008 Big Sound Conference, one of the most respected and fastest-growing music business events in the Asia-Pacific region.

The album’s opening track, “A New Beginning”, featured in the season finale of NBC’s Rand Ravich-created police procedural drama series, Life,. The episode aired in the US and Canada to more than 5,000,000 viewers on Wednesday, 8 April 2009, and aired in Australia on Network Ten on 29 April to over 776,000 viewers. The show also aired in an additional 22 countries. As a result, "A New Beginning", along with other selected tracks from 26’s catalogue, went on to receive airplay on numerous US college/alternative/AAA radio stations.

The title of Births, Deaths & Marriages stems from a series of life-changing events which impacted each individual band member in 2007 and shaped the writing of the album: frontman Nick O’Donnell’s second child was born, drummer Iain Wilson’s father died, the band lost a close friend to cancer, and bassist Ross Duckworth got married.