The Big Cats
The Big Cats are an American rock band from Little Rock, Arkansas. They formed in 1993 when Burt Taggart, Colin Brooks, and Josh Bentley, who came from local punk bands, teamed up with Shannon Yarbrough in 1994. The band shifted from punk to a more early rock and roll sound.
Their first live show happened at a New Year’s Eve party on December 31, 1993. In 1994, Shannon Yarbrough joined the group. In 1996, Bentley moved to Nashville, and Jason White (from Pinhead Gunpowder) moved back from California to Arkansas to join the band. They toured the Midwest and Northeast and thought about moving, but they couldn’t agree on where to go, so the band broke up.
Afterwards, Taggart, Brooks, and Yarbrough moved to Brooklyn for a while, while White returned to Berkeley and played with Green Day. On May 7, 2000, Yarbrough died in a car accident. The surviving members held a tribute show the next Christmas.
In Fayetteville, Arkansas, they recorded a two-song single in 2000 on their new label, Max Recordings. Those songs, plus unreleased material from the 1990s, were released in 2002 as the compilation Worrisome Blues.
In 2006, White and Brooks started coming back to Little Rock to work on a new Big Cats album with producer Barry Poynter. That album, On Tomorrow, received mixed reviews. Critics described it as timeless jangly pop from the South, blending old-school sounds with a fresh feel.
Starting in 2010, the band worked on 25 demos Taggart had written. They planned a two-part release. The first half, The Ancient Art Of Leaving: High & Low, came out on December 13, 2011, and the second half, The Ancient Art Of Leaving: Two Parts, followed on November 6, 2012. A limited 3xLP vinyl version of the whole project was announced for the same release date as the second part.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:00 (CET).