Strike Nine is "Sleep Tight, Evangeline": Who are the Whiskey Shambles and what could this mean?

Some lucky super-Strikers were able to meet "Robert Galbraith" in person (in his J.K. Rowling persona, of course!) and got a sneak peek at the title of Strike Book #9:  

To say this title is a surprise is an understatement.  Sleep Tight, Evangeline is the title of a song by a relatively obscure American band, the Whiskey Shambles, whose repertoire is described as 

Hollering tales of murder, debauchery and long dark Saturday nights of the soul. Stripped raw, bruised and cracking a bloody, split-lip grin, the Shambles deliver a loud, belligerent style of demonic hill-stompblues that almost... but not quite, betrays an air of subtle sophistication lingering just around the edges.  "Rough garage rock & dirty basement blues that kicks you right in the gut bucket."

This hardly sounds like a soundtrack for a Cupid and Psyche story.  More on the group, and the song, below. 

The Whiskey Shambles are a four-person band that seems to perform mostly in the mid-Atlantic states.  Recent shows have been in Ohio. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Two of the band sometimes perform independently as the Whiskey Shambles Duo.  Though "Sleep Tight Evangeline" was originally recorded in 2014, it was also the title of their most recently released album. 

And by "relatively obscure" I mean this:  

• No Wikipedia entry.
• Twitter account hasn't been updated since 2018. 
• The Whiskey Shambles Youtube channel has (as of this morning) 99 subscribers and the Whiskey Shambles Duo 28. 
• According to the website, tickets to their Album premiere event could be had for $5 and the CD for only $5 more. 
• The most current information about them seems to be on their Facebook page, where they have a respectable 6K followers. 

This is not Blue Oyster Cult level fame, who, by comparison, has 725K Facebook followers and an average ticket cost of $122.  I will be very interested to know how Mr. Galbraith learned this band existed. 

The lyrics of "Sleep Tight, Evangeline" do not offer much solace to anyone hoping for a happier, more upbeat story of the Strellacott union:

I live the closest dreams, when I’m lying broken, and done for. I live the closest dreams, when I’m dying, choking, and dead for . . . Sleep tight, Evangeline. I’ll see you in my dreams When I’m lying broken, and done for. Sleep tight, Evangeline. I’ll be there in your dreams When I’m dying, choking, and dead for You

It also seems unlikely that his band has a large enough lyrical repertoire to provide epigraphs for a full Strike novel.  They have released two albums, one in 2014 and one in 2025, plus some extended plays of their live performances. They seem to do as many covers of other artists as they do their own songs. 

One interesting tidbit:  Whiskey Shambles, like Strike, seems fond of Tom Waits music, and appeared at a couple of tribute performances for him in August 2025. And it seems this fondness pre-dated any agreement that their song title could be co-opted for use in a Strike novel. Here is a seasonally appropriate performance of the Whiskey Shambles Duo doing Waits' "Blue Valentine" which was posted to Youtube back in 2019. 

Kurt Schreyer has also suggested that Longfellow's epic poem, Evangeline, might also be relevant to the book, and a possible epigraph source.  Although, the tragic ending of that saga doesn't exactly fit the Cupid and Psyche vibe, either. 

In any case, we have a title and how cool that it was revealed to some super-fans first!  I am sure Strikefans.com will be telling us more about the meeting with the author soon.  

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