Tag: abigail washburn

Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn, ‘If I Could Talk to a Younger Me’

Posted on by Editor

It’s good to be reminded, sometimes, of the important things — the ones we so easily forget. Between the breakfast coffee and the toothbrush before bed, a day can swing by in what seems shorter than a few breaths. It’s a cliché thing that, most memorably, we once needed Ferris Bueller to cement into our brains: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Pop culture has a way of being pretty poignant. Preach, Ferris.

Abigail Washburn and Béla Fleck, two of our modern masters of the banjo who happen to also be married with a child, handle this concept of the fast drip of time more elegantly on “If I Could Talk to a Younger Me,” from their forthcoming LP, Echo in the Valley. Emotive and ethereal, Washburn sends a message out into the universe … to her self, to her offspring, to whomever might tune their ear to her songs. “If I could talk to a younger me, I’d tell me to go slow,” she sings, as the banjo plucks furiously in an instrumental duet. “This time on earth, it moves so fast, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.” These aren’t complicated lyrics cased in metaphor, but a rather simple reminder to take a moment — as Ferris would say — to stop and look around once in a while. And it never hurts, especially if you’re Washburn and Fleck, to do this in a way that makes that time on earth sound just a little bit more beautiful.

Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn to Host the 2017 IBMA Awards

Posted on by Editor

Banjoists Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn are set to the host the International Bluegrass Music Association awards in September. Their presence on stage signals the genre’s expansive growth in recent years, reaching toward the edges in order to better understand the center. It also preempts their second full-length album, Echo in the Valley, due out October 6 on Rounder Records. The follow-up to their 2014 self-titled debut finds the husband-and-wife duo exploring new territory by restricting their creative path: They only used banjos on their latest set of songs, and ensured all recordings could be reproduced live. The resulting conversations they have — a mix of original songs (all co-written for the first time in their career as a duo) and covers of Clarence Ashley and Sarah Ogan Gunning — reveal a quiet muscularity. The limitations, rather than stripping away their imaginative prowess, instead lay fecund ground. If 2017 really is the “Year of the Banjo,” then Béla and Abby are its exciting exemplars, showcasing just how much fun can be had on the edge.

The IBMAs are part of the International Bluegrass Music Association, and will take place in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 28. Tickets can be purchased through the IBMA website.

As a superstar banjo couple, do you have a conjoined nickname like Brangelina?

Béla Fleck: Abba.

I think that one’s already taken.

Abigail Washburn: I don’t think we create those ourselves. You’re going to have to create them.

Leave it to the people — that’s fair. What does it mean to you both that you’re hosting the IBMAs together?

Béla: I’m quite proud. I’ve had a long association with the IBMAs — from the first year when I won the banjo award, then a couple of years ago I did the keynote. For me, as a long-time bluegrass player and a person in that world, I’ve been a little disassociated, and this means I’m not anymore. I’m right in the center of it.

Abby: And for me, it’s an extreme honor. I’ve played music that’s certainly got a lot of bluegrass elements to it — the old-time Appalachian music that I’ve been playing with Uncle Earl for a long time, and the work that Béla and I do — so just to be so deeply included in the community, but also to be on stage in front of those wonderful people who are preserving and passing along this really bright and beautiful piece of American culture and tradition. I’m excited, too, because Béla and I and the folks that are heading up the awards presentation, are brainstorming lots of ideas to be playful and have fun. We’re excited to get to share the playfulness of our couplehood on stage.

Béla: I think we both look for ways to be creative with any situation that we’re involved in. We’re trying to figure out, “Okay, what could we do that would really be fun and really feel good to everybody?” We’ll see what we come with.

It seems like a crowd that appreciates laughter.

Béla: I think part of that is they’re all together. It’s very safe for bluegrass people. Out in life, we can sometimes feel we’re very unusual and odd, but at IBMA, everyone’s together and so everyone understands these subtle jokes about old-time bluegrass people we all love … or Sam Bush’s hair. I think that’s really special.

I know, like any genre, there are some players who get mired down in tradition and don’t want to see things change, but you’ve both pushed those boundaries in really exciting ways.

Béla: I would just say the very fact that we’ve been invited to do it … because I’ve spent a lot of my life outside of the bluegrass world playing other kinds of music, but I always take bluegrass with me. And Abby, you wouldn’t call her a bluegrass artist at her core, but she’s very associated with it. It’s showing that we’re all part of that family. We’re very respectful of the tradition; we just happen to live on the edge of it. But bluegrass is a very wide musical genre these days. We only lose by chopping off the edges. Even Earl Scruggs was excited about swing. I’m hopeful that this is just part of appreciating the fact that you need some outside blood every once in a while. Where would we be without “Polka on the Banjo”?

That’s what makes for such exciting growth. Well, BGS has dubbed 2017 “The Year of the Banjo” because there are so many projects that are either banjo-focused or banjo-inspired. What would you pin to that explosion?

Béla: I’m a little skeptical of those kinds of things. I think people are doing great work every year and, a lot of times, the great strides come gradually along the whole scope of the curve, but then, every once in a while, there’s a moment when everybody shows up at the same time with new stuff and we do make a big jump. In the past, some pretty wonderful things were happening in the dark that might not even be covered, and might be ignored by the world at large, but now there’s enough interest in the banjo that we can really talk about it and build some energy around it.

Going back to your keynote address from 2014, you mentioned how the banjo was almost a hindrance to your early career because of the way people viewed it. It’s gone through its own sea change in terms of popularity.

Béla: I think part of it is we aged away from Deliverance. It’s an old movie and you have to go find it now. When it came out, it was everywhere and the song “Dueling Banjos” was such a huge hit. It sort of cemented that image of what happened in the movie with how people thought about the banjo, which was an unfortunate piece of that whole phenomenon. I saw very gradually a shift from “Squeal like a pig” to “The banjo? That’s cool.”

Abby: I think there have been a lot of people working really hard for a long time, including yourself. I will compliment my husband, at this point. He’s been working for decades trying to show another side of the banjo to people. Now there are a lot of younger groups who have really taken to it because of Béla.

Béla: Well, a lot of other people, too.

Abby: The list goes on. It’s having an impact. The things that younger people see isn’t Deliverance, but the Bill Keiths and the Rhiannon Giddens, and, gosh, Mumford and Sons. Different kinds of people playing the banjo. There’s the most wonderful representation of banjo that’s come from the edges. It’s very cool.

Very much so. Turning to your forthcoming album, you set out limitations about what instruments you could use and recorded songs that could be recreated exactly on stage. Why set such staunch parameters around creating?

Abby: Limitations are actually extremely freeing, when you set the right ones. We really like being able to create a record that can be experienced live by people. And it’s created these new kinds of challenges for us, because we want to learn and grow and spread our wings as a duo, and working on the eccentricities and complexities to develop the nuance of duo performance means that we incorporated some new ideas into what we’re doing.

Béla: My only addition to what Abby said is that it’s awkward when you make a record that you can’t perform live. We wanted the honesty of the music to be very clear. It’s really very sparse duet music, but we’re finding a way to make it sound as big and powerful as we can with just our two instruments. It’s an art of recording that we aspire to do well at, because I love that part of the process myself. I’m a nerd recording-type guy.

I would say that this latest LP is quieter than your debut and yet it’s no less powerful. I kept thinking of musical conversations that ebb and flow so naturally. Has your playing bolstered other forms of communication between you two?

Béla: I would say we have suffered times on this record because we have a lot of stuff to figure out.

Abby: Suffered times, in terms of the fact that we had an infant. This time, we had higher expectations for ourselves, musically, so we took on new challenges that made for a lot of conflict at times.

Béla: Someone would have an idea, and rather than the other person going, “Yes, that’s perfect,” they’d say, “That’s cool, what if we tried this?” You might get your feelings hurt a little bit, but a little time would go by and we’d come back and go, “Okay, how can this be both of us contributing equally to the song?” I think we’re really good in our relationship at taking each other into account, but in the creative process, things are never exactly equal. You gotta fight for your ideas and then you have to find a way to change them to fit what the other person wants.

Abby: We decided we wanted to write the lyrics together, and that was different from the last record.

Béla: So that was hard for both of us, but we got to a place where we’re both very pleased, and that made our relationship stronger.

Photo credit: Jim McGuire 

9 Times Clawhammer Banjo Was ALMOST as Good as Scruggs-Style

Posted on by Editor

Scruggs-style banjo is cooler than clawhammer, like, nearly all of the time … except, perhaps, these nine times when clawhammer came as close to surpassing three-finger’s coolness as it ever has.

Rhiannon Giddens — “Following the North Star”

Like the time Rhiannon pulled clawhammer banjo’s African roots out of the instrument with every string pluck. And those bones! I mean, c’mon.

Bruce Molsky — “Cumberland Gap”

Or the time Bruce Molsky sat on a folding chair, stageside, in the middle of a muddy field, and proceeded to be a badass. As far as solo acts go, he is one of the most entertaining; he entrances audiences with just his voice and an instrument.

Allison de Groot with Jack Devereux and Nic Gareiss — “Black-Eyed Suzie”

Or the time when the core of every string band (fiddle + banjo) was augmented by a percussive dancer and, for a split second, we all forgot that bluegrass is a thing and Scruggs-style is the pinnacle.

Uncle Earl — “The Last Goodbye”

Or any time Abigail Washburn picks up an open-back. Seriously, if your banjo playing stacks up against Béla Fleck’s, you’re working on higher plane. Higher than most three-finger stylists? Maybe …

Adam Hurt — “John Riley the Shepherd”

Then there was the time when we all learned that banjos could be this haunting. Something about a natural-hide, fretless, gourd banjo almost wipes resonator, tone-ringed, flanged banjos clear out of the mind … almost.

Giri & Uma Peters — “The Cuckoo”

Okay, this is actually objectively better than Scruggs-style banjo. Not only because our friend and hero Uma Peters is incredibly young, but she’s also massively talented. Look at that right hand form! This video went viral on Facebook — it has more than 160,000 views currently — and it’s surely because her sweeps are staggering.

Della Mae — “This World Oft Can Be”

There’s also the time Della Mae showed the world (which oft can be a down and lonesome place to be) that clawhammer banjo is, in fact, bluegrass — not just a lesser form of real (aka three-finger) banjo. Yeah. We said it.

Mark Johnson, Emory Lester, Steve Martin — “Forked Deer”

Finally, there was that time Mark Johnson (winner of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo & Bluegrass in 2012) traded solos with Steve Martin on Letterman. We’ll take banjo on national television in any form, three-finger or clawhammer.

Béla Fleck on Playing His Newest Role

Posted on by Editor

Béla Fleck has explored chapter and verse over the course of his tome-length music career, but there remained one role he had yet to play — father. The world’s most inventive banjo player took on that title over three years ago when he and his wife, clawhammer banjo player Abigail Washburn, welcomed their son Juno. Parenthood inevitably shifted innumerable things for both musicians, not least of which included when and how to write music. “It’s all family-motivated,” Fleck explains about his life now. “How do you find the time to be a musician when you’re trying to be the best parent you can be? It was a new structure that I’ve never experienced before.”

It was especially tough at first. Fleck and Washburn received a standard warning from their doctor about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) prior to taking Juno home from the hospital, which left an indelible mark. “All I could think was, ’I’m not letting him out of my sight. I’m going to have my eyes on him 24/7,’” Fleck recounts. “When he slept, I would sit and watch him all night because we were all so spooked.” Composing at home, as opposed to concentrating on duet or band projects requiring his presence elsewhere, became a way to balance fatherhood with the musical identity he’d long inhabited. “That was the beginning of realizing you can get a lot of work done by yourself when you’re with your family,” he says. Fleck took to using naptime and nighttime to work out ideas he quickly captured on a recorder during other points of his day. “Creativity can be like maple sap coming out of a tree,” he says. “If you don’t collect it for a while, and you go back, there’s a whole bunch waiting for you. It really happens that way sometimes.” As a result of his newfound approach, Juno’s influence is everywhere. “Anybody who has kids knows how that works.”

It’s an influence that extends to Fleck’s latest project and second banjo concerto, Juno Concerto. Besides naming the project after his son, Juno’s thumbprint arises thematically throughout each of the three movements. “As a musician, I was trying to be who I was as a father, and I also wanted the music to express some of the ways I was feeling,” Fleck explains. “Some simpler emotions were coming out that I was not expecting to ever feel before I became a parent. I felt more comfortable with letting them be in the music and encouraging them, while still finding ways to be my complicated self in the middle of it.” The end result is cinematically striking, full of sweeping musical phrases and a seamless conversation between banjo and orchestra. “I didn’t expect to be playing over the full orchestra going crazy, but I had to be very aware of creating textures where the banjo could be heard and then creating places where I was either in support of the orchestra or not playing at all so I could be big and not distracting from the orchestra,” he says. “It’s like a David and Goliath heroic kind of thing, but they’re not competing. At their best, they lift each other up.”

If there’s one singular characteristic to Fleck’s career, it’s his willingness — his inclination — to push boundaries. Having recorded as a solo artist, a collaborative partner, and in an array of bands — including the Béla Fleck and the Flecktones — as well as a variety of styles, Fleck takes pleasure in erasing preconceived notions about where his instrument belongs. “I want it to be on the edge and something that hasn’t been done before,” he says about his approach. “That’s the whole reason to play music: expression and exploration.” Thanks to his boldness, Fleck has done much to quell ideas about high and low art. The banjo may have found its most familiar setting in bluegrass, but over the course of his career, Fleck has helped reveal its historical place in early jazz (bringing it up to speed in the modern era), its African lineage, and now its classical possibilities. “I’d prefer to be a wine that matured and got better than a wine that you need to drink when it’s young, because I’m not young anymore,” he laughs. “I’m trying to say something meaningful and trying to get deeper into honest, pure expression as I play music, whatever music I’m playing.”

Fleck composed his first banjo concerto in 2011 after receiving a commission from the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. “It’s a lot of fun when you’re composing. You’re just sort of ordering everyone around on paper,” he says. Appropriately titled The Impostor, it involved a good deal of posturing; Fleck concentrated — thematically and literally — in asserting the banjo’s place alongside more traditional classical instruments. But he didn’t include a true slow piece for the banjo, following a concerto’s typical fast-slow-fast structure. With Juno Concerto, he set out to answer that challenge. “The banjo tends to do things well that are fast and crisp and clear,” he says. “I made a real point of insisting that the banjo could play slow, as hard as it was to do these gaping spaces. It was a challenge.”

Juno Concerto didn’t fill an entire album’s worth of space, so — as he’d done with The Impostor — Fleck set about adding additional string pieces, recording “Griff” and “Quintet for Banjo and Strings: Movement II” with string quartet Brooklyn Rider. He originally composed “Quintet for Banjo and Strings” with Edgar Meyer in the early 1980s, but never got about to recording it. “It’s so good to have something like that to settle the dust of all the craziness of the pieces I like to write,” he says. And since he’s received one more commission to compose a concerto, he anticipates following suit by combining concerto and string pieces for that next album. “I didn’t intend to do the exact same thing, but then I started to think, ‘Well, if I do it three times, it’ll be a set,’” he says. “Three concertos with three string pieces, that becomes interesting.”

For all his experimentation, it might seem that nothing intimidates Fleck anymore. In fact, the bravery he’s developed by inserting himself into myriad musical conversations only comes about after months and months of hard work. “I’ve done so much stuff that, sometimes, I forget how hard I worked on each thing,” he says. “I have a pretty intense work ethic, and then when I’m done, I forget and I go back and listen to the record and go, ‘Oh that sounds pretty good.’ I don’t hear all the blood and guts that went into getting it to that level. But when I start on a new project, I go, ‘Wow, this doesn’t sound very good. Maybe I just don’t have it anymore. Maybe my good years are behind me.’ But I don’t realize that I spent months and months and months working on those projects that, in hindsight, makes them sound easy.”

If there are ever any doubts about his talent diminishing with age, Fleck’s work ethic seems likely to keep things in check, as well as his son. Growing up in a household with two world-renowned musicians means Juno has developed quite the ear. “He doesn’t realize how much he knows about music from being around it so much,” Fleck says. Still, there’s one point on which they continue to disagree. “He always asks me, when I play instrumental songs, ‘When’s the singing going to come in?’” Fleck jokes. “That kind of bothers me because I’ve made a life of trying to make believe that singing doesn’t have to be there for music to be good. I’ll play him a song and he’ll go, ‘Papa, that’s too long.’”

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble: Tearing Down the Wall

Posted on by Editor

Election years are rife with divisive rhetoric, with 2016 perhaps taking the cake — thanks to deeply split parties and a man named Donald Drumpf blathering about building a literal wall between Mexico and the United States — for the most inflammatory, insufferable year yet. It’s during times like these that people often turn to art for comfort, whether through searching for answers in protest music or simply turning up the volume to drown out all of the noise. 

It’s appropriate, then, that Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble just released their latest album, Sing Me Home. It is an eclectic collection of genre-defying songs put together by Ma and his virtuosic group of performers and composers, whose backgrounds span 20 countries. The Ensemble is built on collaboration and cross-cultural conversation, an approach that sees players taking turns leading the group, choosing and arranging songs that either represent their cultural heritage or contain personal significance. The resulting music would best be described as what Ma calls “humanist” more than it could easily fit any genre label or regional attribution.

“What I love about the Ensemble is that there are so many people who can both be part of a group but also can lead a group,” he explains. “The idea is that obviously everyone has such individual personality and identity and voice that you want to celebrate it. Cristina [Pato], for example, is from Galicia in the northern part of Spain. She was a rock musician bagpipe player and played in sort of a girl band as a teenager and then came to the States. She’s learned so much about the cross-cultural references that went back and forth between Spain, Portugal, North and South America, and Africa. She found a way to bring all of her experiences in both Galicia and the United States together. So that’s another wonderful way of her leading us, taking us to a place that is familiar to her and that we were guests and then became participants in.”

Accordingly, listening to Sing Me Home takes you on a sonic trip across the globe, hopping from India to Portugal within the span of a couple minutes. In addition to representing their traditions through song selection, Ensemble members also had the opportunity to choose the album’s impressive roster of guest musicians, which includes Abigail Washburn, Sarah Jarosz, Bill Frisell, Shujaat Khan, and many others.

“[The guest roster] is all chosen by different Ensemble members,” Ma says. “Colin [Jacobsen] loved Martin Hayes, the fiddler, so he initiated that and that was fantastic. In each case it was, I think, friendships. Kayhan [Kalhor] brought the great Indian sitarist Shujaat Khan. They’d been playing together for 45 years and they are like family to one another. So I think friendships, that’s key. Friendships where the trust and the admiration for what somebody does are probably the key ingredients that made all of those relationships work.”

Rhiannon Giddens also guests on the album, adding vocals to a remarkable version of the classic folksong “St. James Infirmary Blues” that the Ensemble arranged after accordion player Michael Ward-Bergeman heard the tune in a London pub, worked through it with a group of Romanian musicians, and ultimately brought it to Silk Road. Giddens, known for both her solo work and as part of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, adds an Appalachian touch, seamlessly bridging the gaps between her own North Carolina upbringing, Ward-Bergeman’s Romanian flourishes, and the cover’s fortuitous origin in a British pub.

“She is so fantastic,” Ma says of Giddens. “I’m so moved by what she does. I don’t know what it is. It’s so strong and so powerful and it’s like she’s giving 100 percent. It’s so authentic. It’s just amazing.”

Even with such a talented group of performers and composers, bringing those seemingly disparate elements together was no easy task. Ensemble member Johnny Gandelsman, who produced the album in addition to playing violin, was able to do exactly that. “Johnny is our heart and soul,” Ma says. “And he actually did put his heart and soul into it. He is so immensely talented. Sometimes, when people have so much talent, you can actually not know how to go about doing it all. But he has such a gift for organizing, for getting everybody lined up, making everything go on time, making guests feel comfortable. It was amazing because we never knew that side existed in him.”

For Ma, making great music is important, but uniting players across cultural lines and providing listeners with global reference points they may not have otherwise are the utmost goals of the Ensemble. In an election year, especially, Ma sees music and culture as invaluable components of civilized society, and as a chief method through which damaging walls between social and cultural groups get torn down.

“It’s not about, ‘We must build a wall.’ It becomes a much more nuanced approach to looking at people, traditions, and, in that context, you can look at socio-political and economic situations,” Ma says. “Without the culture, we get into having a war and not planning for what happens afterward. With the culture, you know what you’re getting into. You think carefully about what to do afterward. When you think about how your friends will react to some information you might bring, you’re careful about the way you say it, the tone. And this is true of everything. I think that’s where cultural knowledge can really help. We may not be able to solve the situation, but at least we can help add nuance to the way certain communications are made.” 

Sing Me Home is nothing if not nuanced, both in its musical performances and its meticulous homage to the home countries of the Ensemble members. That it still manages to balance that attention to detail with a scope that — sonically and socially — encompasses such a diverse range of perspectives is a testament to the talent, vision, and kindness of those involved with the group. Ma’s own assessment of the music is spot on: This is human music (or, let’s be honest, superhuman — we’re talking about Yo-Yo Ma, after all), made for and by people who care deeply for others, regardless of borders or party affiliations. 

“We want to be a society that is actually open, not only to one another, but open humanistically,” Ma says. “We just want to make sure that we’re dealing with humans as three-dimensional people and not just as statistics. So, even though we may not be able to solve the situation, the least we can do is make sure that the dignity of humans is always in everybody’s mind, no matter which sector they’re coming from, in trying to solve a problem. And I think the music does that.”

Lede photo: Kayhan Kalhor and Yo-Yo Ma. Photo by Aykut Usletekin, courtesy of International Izmir Festival

The Producers: Tucker Martine

Posted on by Editor

Tucker Martine had to move as far away from Nashville as he could before he could have a career in music. Just out of high school, he headed to college in Colorado, then kept heading west until he reached water. He settled in Seattle in the ‘90s, when that city was a center for American alternative music. Then he moved down the road to Portland, Oregon, just as that city was becoming a hub for indie rock.

In the 21st, Martine has become a central figure in Portland’s bustling roots music scene, producing national hits by almost every major local artist. He has added a spacy shimmer to almost every album by singer/songwriter Laura Veirs (who happens to be his wife) and, when the Decemberists graduated from a regional indie label to a Capitol Records, they hired Martine to conjure detailed backdrops for their diorama-songs about Russian shapeshifters and Irish gangsters.

Martine anchors the West Coast roots scene so strongly that even non-locals head west to work with him. Abigail Washburn hired him to combine Asian and American folk traditions with indie-rock techniques on her 2011 breakthrough, City of Refuge. More recently, he produced The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket’s darkest and most daring album in years.

While Martine does not thrust any particular aesthetic onto his projects, he has developed a distinctive ambience: a clarity of sound that is both ethereal and earthy, elaborate and direct, engaging but somehow mysterious, as though he’s reluctant for any album to spill all of its secrets on your first listen. Emphasizing the distinct tones of each instrument in the mix, he helps to convey a rich intimacy, as though even an acoustic set can sound like a headphones album. One of his latest projects is also one of the most highly anticipated albums of 2016: a new collaborative record by Neko Case, Laura Veirs, and k.d. lang — out in June on Anti- Records.

At what part of the process did you come in on the case/lang/veirs record?

Shortly after k.d. had sent an email to Neko and Laura asking if they’d be interested in starting a group together — which I think mostly meant making a record together, perhaps doing a tour for the record. I don’t think it’s a band that is going to be a long-term project. k.d. sent an email to them, and Laura and Neko quickly responded with an enthusiastic "Yes," and then they had a little back-and-forth between themselves. Maybe a week later, they cc’d me on the email thread and asked if I’d be up for working on it with them which, of course, I was honored and excited to be roped in, so I said yes.

I think it made a lot of sense — I mean, hopefully, musically it made perfect sense. I had worked with Neko on her last record and, of course, I’ve worked on a lot of records with Laura. I was getting to know k.d. a little bit because she’s a Portland resident now, and she’d done a couple of things at my studio. That brought one common element into a project that maybe, at least on the surface, didn’t appear to have a lot of common elements to start with. I think the process of making that record was about discovering where the common ground was between all of them. And that was really so much of the excitement of that record — and the challenge of it, too.

So figuring out how those pieces fit together becomes part of that process.

I don’t think any of us wanted to make a record that sounded like four tracks that could have been on the next Neko Case record and four songs from the next k.d. lang record, four songs from the Laura Veirs record. They wanted to figure out where all their sensibilities converged and how they could challenge each other to find interesting places outside of their comfort zones. And there was plenty of that, because they’re all used to being the leader, the person who ultimately calls the shots. But this was a bit of a democracy, and the whole dynamic of the group was being discovered while we were in the middle of making the record. It wasn’t like they had discovered some common chemistry beforehand and then thought, "Well, this means we should make a record." I think everybody knew it felt kind of risky. None of us were talking to people about it beforehand, because we were reserving the possibility that maybe it just didn’t quite work. But it did, and it was apparent on the first day that it was going to work. Everyone was pretty thrilled with how it was sounding right out of the gate.

What does your role, then, become for artists who are still finding out how they relate to each other?

There are so many facets of it. Making them all feel comfortable, for one. Assuring each person that their point of view isn’t going to get steamrolled in this mostly democratic process. I’m always looking to find the strength and the uniqueness of the artist, so I’m constantly having conversations with them about what they’re excited about, and checking in with them all the time to make sure they feel like they are being represented. And I would sometimes have to challenge people to maybe not rush to judgment but let it play out a little longer, and listen to the result rather than not try something because the suggestion sounded like a direction they wouldn’t normally take.

I think that’s something that I knew, but never but a fine point on it — that you’re not just overseeing things in the studio; you’re negotiating aspects of the art and trying to usher this person into making the best thing they can or the strongest thing they can.

Absolutely. All three of these ladies have such different working processes. And I had a little insight into what those processes were, in some cases more than their other collaborators did, because I’d spent many weeks in the studio with Neko and made records for years with Laura. I had only done demos with k.d., and she had sung on one of Laura’s records. So it was really just a matter of trying to honor a bit of each of their processes while reminding all of us that this is a new experience and it’s not going to feel like the process of making one of their solo records.

And that was what was exciting about it. Sometimes, when I thought maybe they were reverting to something too safe, I just tried to remind all of us that the exciting part of a collaboration like this is that it pushes us into some places that we wouldn’t normally go. I think most or all artists ultimately do want to get into some territory that feels new to them, so they feel like they’re moving forward and progressing. And I can only guess that k.d. chose Laura and Neko as collaborators because of how different they are from her, yet she still had a lot of admiration for them and their music and, I think, was looking to shake up her own music-making process. And by accepting that invitation, I think Laura and Neko acknowledged that the same thing was true for them.

It does seem like two generations of artists going back and forth.

I think I can speak for myself and Laura and Neko in saying that we’ve all been fans of k.d. for so long, but you have to remind yourself for a minute that, even though she’s this larger-than-life musical figure in our minds, she’s looking for a three-way collaboration between them. They all really got in there and had to fight for some of their ideas — in a healthy way. At the end of the day, each person got a final say in the songs that they were singing lead vocals on.

I had a moment when it was being planned when I wondered what I had to bring to a project for someone like k.d. lang, but she made it really clear that she wanted me to feel comfortable speaking up. I assured them, in the beginning, that I knew it was going to be a challenging record to make, but we weren’t going to call the record done until everybody was happy with it. It gets emotional, at times. It’s tricky to be giving people confidence while at the same time sometimes you’re asking them to be open to trying something new or to just trying to get a better take of it.

You mentioned that k.d. had recently moved to Portland, and I wanted to ask about that. There is certainly a strong roots scene there, and even though you’re from Nashville originally, I feel that you’re at the center of it … or at the very least a prominent figure there.

To me, the Portland community feels like the more immediate version of the larger music community. And a lot of the artists that I’ve been working with the last few years are not from here. Sometimes it’s artists from out of town, but there will be people from Portland who play on the record, or the artist is from Portland and we bring in some people from out of town to play on the record. There is just a ton going on in Portland, and there are some insular scenes — like the old-time music scene, the singer/songwriter scene, the indie rock scene, and all that — but also a lot of those people just overlap and play with each other.

I left Nashville the morning after my high school graduation because, as much as I loved growing up there, I just felt like there was a narrow-mindedness about music and what it could be — all the different ways it could be presented and written and explored. So it was healthy for me to leave at that time. Since then, of course, it’s transformed into something completely different, with all the transplants and musicians of every variety there. I think most of the Nashville scene is, and has always been, transplants. It’s just that they transplanted themselves there to do a specific type of music, where I think a place like Portland draws people — including myself — more for the environment and the lifestyle, and then that informs the music that comes out of it.

I hadn’t thought of Nashville that way. It’s like Portland — a city full of transplants.

Nashville’s a place where people go to make it. For the most part, Portland’s a place where people moved because it was inexpensive and it’s just a great place to live. You can bike or walk anywhere, and it’s gorgeous. You have access to the ocean and the mountains and the rivers. There aren’t a lot of labels and managers and industry stuff here. A lot of times the best music scenes just kind of come out of somewhere that’s affordable for young people to live. And, until recently, that’s been true of Portland.

It also seems like a place where more established musicians end up, like k.d. lang or Peter Buck or Patterson Hood.

If you’re in a position where you feel like you can be based anywhere and still do your work, then you just start looking at where you want to live regardless of what kind of infrastructure that place might have for your chosen field of work. It doesn’t make any sense that I moved away from Nashville and moved to Seattle and started producing records. I mean, to me it makes perfect sense, but people are always asking me why in the world I left Nashville, which is one of the premiere cities in the world for recording studios. But it just felt like a trap to me, at the time. I felt like, if I stayed, my growth would be radically stunted. I think it was the right move. I’ve always thought I might move back someday, because it’s still home to me. I couldn’t be more fond of it, even if it was necessary at that time in my life to be elsewhere and find my own identity outside of the familiar and comfortable.

And it does seem like you’ve developed a signature palette that I don’t hear in Nashville.

My sensibilities don’t seem to overlap a lot with what Nashville’s known for, although I certainly have loved some of the music that’s come out of Nashville. I’m not a fan of overly glossy productions, and certainly Nashville is known for that. But there are countless examples of records that have come out of there that weren’t that way. You had guys like Jack Clement making really interesting, soulful country records, and now you’ve got guys like Dave Cobb, who’s crushing everything he touches. It’s cool to see Nashville having a resurgence, but I feel like I’ve really found the right spot for myself.

But people don’t usually come to me because they’re chasing the latest, hottest sounds or because I have the latest chart toppers. Maybe there’s just some quality in the way the music is translated and presented that speaks to them. To me, my approach is different for every record and every artist; but for somebody less close to it than me, I guess you can hear some continuity — or, as you put it, a sound. And it’s convenient that people like Portland. Someone might be interested in working with me and, when they find out I’m in Portland, they usually get excited about the idea of coming here for a little while.

You mentioned that you approach every project differently, but are there elements that are common from one project to the other …

I really like to be surprised, so I always try to leave some room in the process for some things to happen that surprise all of us. Those often end up being favorite parts of records. I feel like, the longer I’ve done this, the less satisfying it is to just put up some mics and make everything sound perfectly nice, make sure that nothing sticks out, and there’s nothing that could possibly offend anyone. If it came to that, I feel like it would just be time to hang it up. I want to be moved by what’s coming out of the speakers, whatever that means. Sometimes, that means just blowing things up and making it sound ratty and raw. Other times, it means muting everything except for the vocal and the harpsichord.

At the outset, it’s just dictated by whatever the material suggests to me. I try not to take on a project where the songs don’t suggest a lot to me about how they could be presented. You want to leave plenty of room for it to end up going a different direction if something presents itself that is maybe even more interesting than what I imagined. And no record ever ends up sounding like whatever I thought it was going to sound like at the outset. Still, I think it’s important to have some kind of vision as a launching point, or else you’re all just sitting there looking at each other like, “I don’t know — what do you want to do?” Nothing gets done, or what gets done is just lifeless.

Are there any examples that come to mind?

Oh man, it could be anything! You might have an idea of a nice drumbeat for a track, and then you get everything set up and the drummer starts playing some angular, syncopated thing where you can’t even find the one. At that point, you can either say, “No, man, this is like a straight-ahead kind of thing.” Or you could say, “Let’s check this out. And let’s see how the rest of the band responds to that idea.” More often than not, those things end up sticking and being some of my favorite parts.

The song “Down I-5” from the case/lang/veirs record is a good example. The demo was okay, but I think we all knew it needed something — some joie de vivre — and we all had our own vague ideas of what that might be. I had spoken to Glenn Kotche, who was playing drums on that record, and I just told him that it really needed a unique perspective and that the reason he was there to begin with — why Glenn was chosen to be the drummer for that record — was because his default mode is unpredictable. I told him that this was a perfect scenario for him to lean on his instincts. I didn’t want him to try to guess what the singers are expecting to hear, and he just pulled out that wild beat. There was a look of confusion on the faces of the people in the room, but within a minute it had transformed to elation.

So that’s what I mean by surprises. It’s easy to tell people something that’s safe and predictable, and then you can just get it done and check it off the list. But that’s not why I do this. And that’s not why I think most of the people who call me are doing this. I just try to keep myself and the artists honest.

When you were talking about that, one album that came to mind is City of Refuge by Abigail Washburn. Every song seems to have that sense of discovery to it, some new idea to get across.

For that record, we approached every song from scratch. That wasn’t a record where we had a band for five days, pick a song, knock it out, and go to the next one. We would just start with a song, and sometimes the song wasn’t even finished being written, so we would just start with the one thing we knew it needed. Maybe that was Abigail and her banjo. Maybe it was something else. By the time that we tracked that, it suggested the next layer. We really weren’t too concerned with it all sounding like it happened in a short time span with the exact same people set up the same way.

In fact, one thing Abby and I found out was that we both love old Alan Lomax recordings and Folkways stuff, where there might be talking before a song. We approached “Bright Morning Stars” like a field recording. We just went into a church and told a bunch of people to meet us there. Abby showed them the songs, and they’re of course all playing into one mic, which means you can’t fix anything. Other songs, we meticulously put together. We hoped that if we committed to giving each song its own singular treatment, then the variety of production sensibilities would actually be a strength rather than a weakness.

Very often, you start in on the process, and things are pretty ambiguous. You don’t really know what the identity of the record is yet. But gradually, over time, it starts to show you. In that case, once we had enough songs, I started tinkering with the sequence, and once the sequence started making sense, the whole record started making sense. That helps you figure out what the songs do and don’t need, or which songs might transition well into the others, at which point you might add some extra layers to bleed over into each song. That’s the fun of it. You just take the next step and then it shines the light on where to go after that.

It seems like that might be pronounced when you’re working with an artist for the first time, but how do you keep it fresh for somebody like Laura Veirs or the Decemberists, with whom you’ve produced several albums over the years?

It’s unspoken with each artist that you don’t ever want to make the same record twice, even if you loved the last record you made together. With the Decemberists, when it really felt like we needed to shake things up, we went to a barn and just set up some gear out there. That can have a profound effect on the process in a lot of ways, technically and emotionally, for people. The one thing all the best records that I’ve worked on have in common is that we went into them wanting to do something we’d never done before. You do have to be conscious of that, but it’s a very natural thing to make sure that you’re not just rehashing old territory. We always have a dialogue early on about how to approach it in a way that’s unique compared to what we’ve done in the past.

And that starts with the songwriting. I try to be honest with the artists upfront, if I feel like we don’t have the material to make something that’s up to the standard of what we’ve made in the past, or if it just feels like rehashed versions of something we’ve already done. Often, when I hear demos, six of them sound like the bulk of a really strong record, and four or five seem like maybe they don’t fit in. But I do think when the artist really goes to bat for a song that I’m not feeling, it’s important to record it and try it out. About half the time, just on the strengths of their convictions for it, we find a way to get something we all feel is special. So there is a theme here: It’s important to have a vision, it’s important to have convictions for your ideas, but the second you stop being open to other ideas is the moment you stop being a good collaborator. And, for me, producing records is a collaboration.

There is an adrenaline rush when you start a record. It’s like you jump off a cliff into a river. You’re pretty sure everything’s gonna be fine, but you still get a rush the moment you jump, because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. At the start of every record, I’m always a little bit scared, but I’ve learned over the years that that’s a good thing. It always ends up working out, and it never turns into a disaster — no one ever dies, or makes a record that they regret or are embarrassed about. So it’s just that kind of excitement of not having any idea what’s going to happen.

Photo credit: J Quigley

The Natural Course of Things: A Conversation with the Infamous Stringdusters

Posted on by Editor

What do you get when you cross a bunch of roots-minded female singers with a bunch of bluegrass-adjacent male musicians? Why Ladies & Gentlemen, of course the new release from the Infamous Stringdusters which features appearances by Joan Osborne, Lee Ann Womack, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Abigail Washburn, and eight more of the finest voices roots music has to offer. It's the sixth record in nine years for the band — which is comprised of co-founders Chris Pandolfi (banjo) and Andy Hall (dobro), along with Andy Falco (guitar), Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), and Travis Book (bass) — and it showcases why the Stringdusters are considered one of the most innovative groups currently on the circuit.

First off, kudos on some great guests. [Joan] Osborne and [Lee Ann] Womack are two of my all-time favorite voices. So, did you guys just put a bunch of singers' names on a dart board and start throwing? How'd you figure out who you wanted?

Chris Pandolfi: The concept for this thing was two-fold: On the one hand, we wanted to do something different, as far as an album goes, just to mix it up. But a big part of it was also that we had made a lot of great friends along the way and we thought, “Who could we utilize, in terms of special guests?” And this concept evolved out of that — “What if we call on some of these awesome lady singers that we've met over the years?”

As the process started, the list was mainly comprised of people who were more in our community, in our musical scene. But, then, of course, some of those names were not, necessarily, people that we knew before the advent of this project — like Joan Osborne. The list was a combination of the two and, as the material evolved and we were getting a feel for the aesthetic of these different songs, we just did the best we could. Once the list was close to what we thought it would be and we got some confirmations from people, we — along with our producer — just did our best to match up what songs we thought would be best for each lady.

To me, that's one of the awesome successes of this album: It really uses these artists, I think, in a context that works for them. Look at the Joss Stone track or the Lee Ann Womack track … or Celia Woodsmith, who had the perfect voice for that song. All the ladies, in their own ways, brought their thing to the project and I think, in the process, they helped us take these songs and make them something that we couldn't have necessarily done on our own. They helped us make the most of all these unique and different sounds and styles that they have. It really came together that way. Certain people weren't able to do it, and the list filled out from there. But where we ended up, as far as the guests and what songs they were on, I think that's one of the cool successes of the album. The song “Have a Little Faith” was actually written for Joss Stone, with her in mind. I know that.

I was going to ask … considering that the span does run from Joss Stone to Sarah Jarosz, which came first — the singers or the songs? Did you write for specific voices or was that the only one?

Andy Hall: Yes, I believe so. Aside from that, we all write individually or co-write or whatever and bring songs to the band. So we all had songs, individually, that we were ready to bring to the next project. But I think that was the only one that was written for the singer. In other instances, say for Aoife O'Donovan, hearing that song “Run to Heaven,” it sort of reminded us of Crooked Still, just the way that sounded. In that instance, that became clear that would work that way. Each song just triggered a little something … an idea. That was one of the fun, creative parts — who would sound good on what song.

So how'd you figure out that Joss likes a little bluegrass in her soul?

AH: [Laughs] Andy Falco was hired to play in her band for a Rock in Rio festival a number of years ago. That's how that connection came about. Our connection with Joss was one of the things that inspired this record because Joss came to the States, and we opened up for her in Kansas City. She wanted to do a video of us and her playing together, during the day. She sang our song “Fork in the Road” with us backing her up for this video project she was doing, and it just sounded so cool. That was one of the sparks for this project. But that's also how that connection came about.

Interesting. Who was the first to say yes? And who was the biggest long-shot you can't believe you landed?

CP: Hmmm … Who was the first to say yes?

AH: The first person who recorded with us was, I believe, Jen Hartswick who didn't sing, but played trumpet on a number of songs. Then Mary-Chapin Carpenter was the first vocalist to put her track down. She was in Nashville while we were tracking. But, as far as asking, I don't remember.

How free were the reins when it came time to let them do their thing? Was it, “Have at it, gals!”

CP: Our producer was on hand for every session, I think, except for one or two. He did a really great job with this project — Chris Goldsmith — just in terms of staying true to his vision, which a lot of it was sonic, and he got a really cool, consistent sound across the record, although there is a real variety of styles there. I think that vision extended into how these songs would sound best. But, then again, there were cases — Joss is a great example … that track, by design, was made to let her do her thing which is to cut loose and almost improvise a lot of the phrasing. In cases where that would make the music come to life, that's what happened. In other cases, probably Goldsmith had a clearer vision of how it was supposed to sound. To some extent, every song was about letting these ladies do their thing.

The Sara Watkins track jumps to mind. She has such a compelling vocal on there and it's all because she does her thing. There's a moment where she really goes for it, and she's such an awesome singer and performer that the idea of getting her to do her thing, that's the whole point. So, to some extent, I think that was going on with everyone.

Obviously, all the guest vocalists aren't on the road with you, so how are you touring this record?

AH: We have Nicki Bluhm on the road with us for this whole tour and she is really helping. She's singing a lot of the Ladies & Gentleman songs that we do. Sometimes we'll do a few just on our own, but Nicki's on every show for the whole Spring tour so she's singing a lot of it. We also had Della Mae opening for it on a bunch of it, and Celia Woodsmith would come up and sing her song.

It's amazing how you cross paths with musicians on the road and that's, initially, how we made a lot of these contacts. We ran into Aoife O'Donovan — she was in L.A. when we were there recently, so she came and sang with us, and did a Jam in the Van session with us. We've designed part of the tour to have female bands supporting us, so we have Paper Bird coming out to open some shows and, hopefully, they're going to be able to help share some of the vocal duties. We have a lot of guests, but Nicki is anchoring all that.

More broadly speaking, you guys are very invested in being innovators within “bluegrass.” That's often a very subtle thing, though, right? So break it down … what are some of the things you guys do to open it up a bit and set yourselves apart while still honoring the traditions?

CP: One big thing that we're really focused on, consciously, is playing our own original music. The process of crafting original music is the thing that, simultaneously, helps us develop our sound as a band. We have a lot of co-writing going on, but mostly we arrange the music together. And we just try to figure out new ways to make all these instruments go together and distill all the different styles and influences into one sound that makes sense. We're pretty conscious about that.

We're really conscious about our live show. We're pretty committed to making the live experience really different every night. Of course, we're not the first band to ever do that, but we just try really hard to do our own version of that. And our fan base has come to expect a lot of variation and innovation, as far as on a night-to-night basis. They expect to see something different, and we're playing almost three hours a night, so we have to mix it up for our own sakes, too. Those are two big ones: playing our own stuff and focusing on having that live show be something that is really predicated on being different every night.

AH: One thing, specifically, that I know we've worked on a lot in the past few years is that we don't have a mandolin, which a lot of bluegrass-type bands have. The mandolin is a key rhythmic thing. Since we don't have that, we've had to get really creative with how we play rhythm and play rhythms that are not, say, bluegrass. Like on the Ladies & Gentlemen record, there are a lot of songs that don't have a traditional bluegrass beat. We've consciously spent a lot of time developing unique ways to play our instruments that you wouldn't necessarily expect or hear in other string band contexts. Myself being a dobro player, I take a lot of the rhythmic responsibilities, which is not a common thing. Not having a mandolin, we've had to get somewhat innovative with how we create rhythm and play grooves that aren't necessarily bluegrass. To me, that's something unique that we do.

It seems like there has to be a lot of trust between the band and the fans. You have to trust that they're going to follow you wherever you go, musically. And they have to trust that you're not going to do some crazy, way out of left field thing. Do you ever worry about splitting the difference in such a way that you isolate them … or any part of them?

AH: Well, yeah. The scene of traditional bluegrass and, say, the broader music scene that we're playing more in now, there is quite a difference there. We've chosen to be part of a music scene that is broader, where we play in festivals that are not just bluegrass festivals. I think, in that context, it's not quite as strange to have music that is slightly more creative, record to record. A lot of the fans we're appealing to are a little more used to that. But this is the first time we've ever done a record like this that is a very different, specific vision. Sure, you certainly wonder, “What are people going to think?” [Laughs]

CP: And we have, over the course of our career, definitely alienated people. That's part of the natural course of things. What we do is our thing. We decide where the music goes. That's one of the cool upsides of not being in what most people would perceive as a more popular style of music: You're not really beholden to any record label or anything like that. In the grassroots scene, there is some idea that your fans are going to follow you wherever you will go. Obviously, there's an extreme there and there are anomalies to that rule. But, for the most part, we're lucky: We have these great fans who want to check out all the different voices.

I have a side project that involves electronic elements and it's clearly not for the hardcore bluegrass people of the world. But there are plenty of people in our fan base who, though they don't listen to anything like that, they are excited for that to be their introduction to this musical world. I think that's a good glimpse into the way they think. They're like, “We love this band. We want to see what they're going to do. If this particular thing is not my cup of tea, then there's always going to be another album that comes out.” I think they are getting used to the fact that there are a lot of variations between projects and between songs and the live show, so it's almost part of the whole thing. So, for me, I'm not ever too worried that they're not going to dig it. As long as we make music that we believe in, I think our fans will get behind it.

Photo credit: McCormick Photos & Design, LLC

Sierra Hull and the Shortest Way Home

Posted on by Editor

The cover of Sierra Hull’s forthcoming Weighted Mind depicts a small Hull pulling a cart that holds a larger version of herself, thoughts pouring out of what must be one heavy head. It’s a fitting image for the mandolin virtuoso’s third full-length, which was as much pulled forward by Hull’s conviction as it was delayed by her insecurities. Like the art that will adorn its cover, the record is carried by Hull’s increasing confidence, stripping back the additional instrumentation to which she’d grown accustomed and entrusting the bulk of the record to her capable vocals and swift picking.

“I had never really challenged myself in that way,” says Hull. “What if I really did have to cover all the roles in one setting — what does that mean?”

The word “prodigy” has hung over Hull for a decade and, between debuting on the Opry stage by her pre-teen years to being the first bluegrass musician to receive a Presidential Scholarship to Berklee College of Music, she wears the distinction well. But working with other musicians has always been at the core of her craft, and she is effusive about the influence that her family and the bluegrass community have had. After all, her beginnings with the mandolin were sparked by her father’s lifetime affinity for the instrument: Her chance to take it up came along just a year after he began playing, himself, in their hometown of Byrdstown, Tennessee. She credits her self-taught Uncle Junior for early music lessons and recalls many a weekend spent in neighboring Jamestown, Tennessee, jamming with the locals on a community stage.

“A lot of those bands started getting me on stage with them to play. I didn’t even know very much, but I’d chop along and play rhythms,” she says. At 9, she attended her first IBMA event, and it’s there that, one year later, she would meet Ron Block, who passed along Hull’s music to his band mate (and her hero) Alison Krauss.

“The bluegrass world is a very sweet community. Your heroes are more accessible than in some other genres,” says Hull. Krauss, who brought Hull out at a televised Opry performance shortly after Block connected them, has become somewhat of a mentor to Hull, who signed to the same record label — major indie player Rounder Records — at age 13.
“In a kid’s life, a year can feel like five years. Even in a young person’s life, from 19 to 22, 23 — that’s an interesting time period in life,” Hull offers. That added significance of each year for 24-year-old Hull have made the five years since her last record, Daybreak, feel particularly weighty. “There was something different about what I felt I was writing this time around. I knew it would be different just because of the way it came out,” she confesses. Hull was writing songs on the guitar rather than the mandolin, and was wary about “forcing” the latter on them during the recording process. “It wasn’t something that felt like it would lend itself to a bluegrass album, straight ahead.”

It’s not like Hull had the intention to spend half a decade on Weighted Mind: She got into the studio with six tracks to record not long after her last full-length was released.

“I always think back to that quote: ‘The longest way around is the shortest way home.’ That was the case for me with this album,” says Hull. She holed up in RCA Studio A, handling the producer role herself and recording those six songs with renowned engineer Vance Powell. Hull went big on instrumentation, enlisting other musicians to compliment her sound and ending up with a richly layered final product. Ultimately, though, she opted not to release the material. “I think I was running from this idea that I thought everybody had of me,” she says. “Although I still think [the recordings] are really cool — working with Vance, an incredible engineer, they sound really good — something about it just wasn’t 100 percent right. I think, sometimes, you just know that.”

Mixed feedback surrounding the tracks put Hull in a vulnerable place, down on herself and unsure how to do her songs justice without reverting back to the well-worn instrumentals that she was worried had come to define her. Hull leaned on Krauss, talking through her insecurities and toying aloud with the idea of handing off the producer reins. It was Krauss that suggested banjo extraordinaire Béla Fleck for the job.

“There’s nothing, musically, he doesn’t understand,” Hull remembers Krauss saying, noting also that he would make a particularly great vocal producer. A lucky seat in front of Fleck at that year’s IBMAs gave Hull the confidence to reach out about the project and, before long, they were re-working the songs she had recorded already with a new focus.

“It was him that, for the first time, made me think that stripping everything away to just mandolin and voice could be enough,” says Hull. It started with album track “Compass.” Fleck heard the version of her song from the initial sessions and asked her to perform the number with just a mandolin. While the thought terrified her, the result was a “life-changing” one: “I was trying to make a solo record, but covering myself up. If you heard it, it could sound like anything or anybody,” she says. “What better way to know what you really are than to take everything away and leave only you?”

For the most part, that’s what Weighted Mind has become — a celebration of Hull that zeroes in on her truly unique gifts. Much of the record is characterized by impressive solo instrumentals paired with just Hull’s vocals, and stripping things back has allowed her songwriting strengths to shine through, too. “Bluegrass music is very instrumentally and melodically driven. It’s a lot about the picking and the virtuosity of the musician and their solo moment,” she says. Given her background excelling at instrumentals, it’s easy see how she might have gotten caught up there, but instead she shifted her priorities. “This time around I really felt like the lyrics were more important to me than they’ve been on a project.”

On Weighted Mind, “In Between” details the highs and lows that went into the record, touching on Hull’s being “too young to crash, but not to get burned.” Meanwhile, standout track “Black River,” which closes the album and features contributions from Fleck and Krauss along with Abigail Washburn and Rhiannon Giddens, is as much a collaborative high point as it is a mark of Hull’s growth lyrically. Rife with metaphor, the song’s chorus successfully lends a literary quality to mascara-stained tears, and tempered harmonies contrast lyrics that detail the uncontrollable welling of emotions. For all Hull’s qualifiers and warnings that Weighted Mind wouldn’t fit the bluegrass mold, the record is an astonishing celebration of traditional sounds juxtaposed with modern themes.

“Bluegrass has been my home base, my world,” Hull confides. “I’ve found that people’s ideas of bluegrass music fluctuates from Mumford & Sons to Bill Monroe. It’s a little bit of everything, and I think that’s wonderful. If people want to categorize a wide variety of things as bluegrass, I only think that’s healthy for the greater good of the music.”

Weighted Mind is a testament to Hull’s lived experiences and the study of her craft, and it seems prime to pluck Hull from her prodigious roots and place her among the varied contemporaries she admires in the bluegrass community. A confident step, one can only hope it is but the first on her shortest way home.

This post was brought to you by Weber Fine Acoustic Instruments. To shop Sierra's favorite mandolin and more, visit webermandolins.com.

Lede illustration by the fantastically talented Cat Ferraz.

 

Listen to Brittany Howard’s Debut as Thunderbitch

Posted on by Editor

In case you missed it, Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard surprised us all when she dropped the debut album from her new project Thunderbitch. Featuring members of Clear Plastic Masks and Fly Golden Eagle, Thunderbitch is, as the band's bio describes, "Rock and Roll. The end." 

Stream their album at the awesomely named thundabetch.com (you can also purchase your very own copy, should you feel so inclined). You're welcome!

Other Roots Music News:

• Be part of Bela and Abby's banjo mosaic. 

• Kelly Clarkson performed a pretty stellar cover of "Jolene."

• Rolling Stone looks back at Marty Stuart's Badlands. 

• Jim Lauderdale announced the double album Soul Searching, Vol. 1 (Memphis) and Vol. 2 (Nashville).