Tag: acoustic music

Punch Brothers’ Paul Kowert: Musically Driven

Posted on by Editor

Paul Kowert came on board as bassist for the Punch Brother about 10 years ago, stepping into a band of musicians he knew casually but admired greatly. In the following decade, he’s gained even more visibility in the world of acoustic music through his band Hawktail and a gig as bassist for David Rawlings Machine. His versatility is reflected in the list of bassists he cites as influences: Edgar Meyer, Mark Schatz, and Roy Milton “Junior” Huskey. He’s quick to admit that he’s not a lyricist, yet his musical contributions definitely shape the undercurrent of Punch Brothers’ newest album, All Ashore.

This interview is the second of five installments as the Bluegrass Situation salutes the Artist of the Month: Punch Brothers.

I really like the bass line of “Just Look at This Mess.” What do you think that song is about? Tell me what you were hoping to capture in that song.

Well, I might as well cut to the chase here and say that I don’t really engage a whole lot with the lyrics, personally. I listen to them and everything, but in terms of my interaction with the music, I get most of what I need from just getting inside my bandmates’ musical expression. I attach to a feeling that comes with the way that they’re playing and they’re singing. That’s pretty much the extent of it. The songs have a trajectory that can be strictly musical. That’s how I interact with the songs.

That’s interesting, so you’re listening for the feeling. To me, that song seems ominous and disturbing. What kind of feelings did you hear in that song?

That song is divided into three segments that are really contrasting, but at the beginning, I think it’s simple enough to say that I can feel how Thile wants the song to feel, just by the way he’s playing the mandolin and the way he’s manipulating his voice. And you know, the sound of the words is as important as the feeling. And it’s all really the same thing. Like the sibilance and how long he holds on to an “s,” and where he places a hard consonant in the beat. That’s as expressive as anything to me. I latch onto those kinds of things.

If I had to put it into words – which I never have – I wanted it to sit there, like a … well, like a mess on the floor, you know? I mean, that’s not necessarily the meaning, per se, of the storyline necessarily. But he’s saying, “Just look at this mess.” And where he’s placing the mandolin, and the way that melody sounds, and the way he’s singing it…. For me as a bass player, I wanted the bass and the mandolin to kind of combine, to make something that didn’t really have any forward drive. It sits there. So, that’s my response.

I saw you at the Ryman, and I couldn’t help but notice how often you were brought up to the front, in comparison to some bands I see where the bass is always hovering in the back. And I wondered just how much time and thought goes into the staging — you know, where everybody’s going to stand during the songs?

It’s all musically driven. It has to do with how you monitor on stage, which means how you hear your band members and yourself. And the sound coming out of the speakers. That’s what I mean by monitoring. So, putting me in the middle makes the bass sonically accessible to everyone on stage somewhat. But also, it puts me in a position where I can get into the vocal mic. ‘Cause I sing harmony sometimes. And it puts me in a place where I can lock with my two most consistent rhythm counterparts, which are the mandolin and the guitar.

I can always hear Gabe on the fiddle, because he kinda occupies his own sonic space. And the banjo, I just put into my in-ear monitor so I can hear Noam. And sometimes I walk over there to hear him. Like I said, it’s all musically driven. It’s so we can hear each other and play together. And just play the best music that we can play.

You mentioned singing harmony. A lot of people talk about the musicianship, which is excellent, but do you think that vocal blend is also important to the Punch Brothers’ sound and vibe?

It’s something that we focus a lot on because we’re better players than we are singers. During soundcheck, we spend a lot of our time focusing on getting the vocals sounding better, because we need to. That’s just where we need to spend our time. It demands the most of our attention. But that’s because the playing is easier for us. In terms of whether it’s an important part of the sound, yeah, anything with vocals, the vocals suck up a lot of your attention, right?

But also, the way our music is written, the performance of the vocals, the precision, and blend of the vocals is an important factor. …. When you hear multiple voices come together singing, it’s a powerful thing. It’s just the way that across the board. It’s not just the Punch Brothers, it’s everybody who does that. Voices coming together in harmony – that’s a powerful thing.


How did you become interested in playing bass? What drew you to that instrument?

I was in violin, then when I was nine, I wanted to start playing another instrument to participate in the strings program [at] my elementary school. My friends were all starting an instrument for the first time, so I wanted to do that, too. So, I started playing the bass as well as the violin. I was just having more fun playing the bass, so I just stuck with the bass and I put the fiddle down for a while. In recent years, I picked it back up, and I play fiddle music on it now.

Plus, you know, as a young person it was fun for me to play the bass, because I could play in a rock ‘n’ roll band. I could play Paul Simon music or The Beatles on electric bass. And upright bass in a jazz combo, with a trumpet, drum set, and a guitar player or a keyboard player. And that was a social thing, that was fun, and it was musically expressive. I enjoyed playing bass for the collaborative reasons as much as anything.

I know you’ve got Hawktail still, and you’re touring David Rawlings Machine. I can imagine it’s a challenge to balance three different things. Is that hard for you or does it come pretty naturally?

Oh no, it’s hard. But it would be harder for me not to do it. To put it simply, Hawktail affords me a chance to pursue sounds that I really hear. I do more writing for that group myself. It’s instrumental music and I’m primarily an instrumentalist. It gives a chance to really let my instrument be the voice. Simply put, that’s the differentiation.

And playing with Dave and Gillian, these are just people I admire. I really love their music. And it’s a different angle, sort of, on a similar instrumentation. It’s a somewhat similar well of influences in the grand scheme of thing, maybe. You know, they wanted a bass and I’m not going to turn that down!

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Photo: Courtesy of Red Light Management

Punch Brothers’ Gabe Witcher: Finding Narratives

Posted on by Editor

Gabe Witcher, the fiddle player – and some might say secret weapon – in Punch Brothers, has been a performer for nearly his whole life. As a kid, he toured the Southwest playing bluegrass with his family’s band; that’s how he met Chris Thile, forming a musical friendship that has spanned more than three decades. Though his stage presence is low-key, his musicianship is undeniable, playing as joyously or mournfully as a song requires. This is also true on Punch Brothers’ newest album, All Ashore.

In this interview, Witcher kicks off a five-part series as the Bluegrass Situation salutes the Artist of the Month: Punch Brothers.

I love the fiddle part you play on “Three Dots and a Dash.” I was wondering, how much of your music is arranged when you go in to record, or how much of it unfolds by feel when you’re in the studio?

Yeah, this record is a lot different than our previous records. We really had the bare minimum amount of time to get it done. Historically, there is a good deal of improvising on all, throughout our music, and so that’s always spontaneous every time we play – in the studio, out of the studio, whatever. But there is a good deal of highly-arranged stuff as well and historically that stuff would have been written and rehearsed for months leading up to getting into the studio … and we just didn’t have that luxury this time. So, while there’s a good deal of arranged things on the record, it all kind of came together in the studio anyway.

“Three Dots” is a good example where we had the form, we had the melodies, we knew “this is how the arrangement is going to unfold, this is who plays when, this is what the song’s going to do” when we got into the studio and played it a few times – and didn’t like it. So, we put the brakes on recording and went and huddled up in one of the corners of the studio for three or four hours and completely reworked the entire middle section of the song. From post-middle-solo until when the melody returns at the end.

It’s just one of those things: “This isn’t good enough yet, so let’s make it good enough.” When we did, when we finally got something we liked and went back in and recorded it, a lot of that section, I’d say it’s about 50/50 arranged and improvised. Solos are improvised, but we got something that we absolutely loved and that all happened in the moment in the studio. That is a new thing. That has never happened to us before because we had always historically gone in super prepared with, “This is the music, this is what it’s going to be.”

One of the things I love about this record is that what you’re hearing on the record is the first time any of these songs were performed to our satisfaction. You’re getting the excitement of us discovering this music and playing it for the first time. That’s always an exciting thing to hear.

Yeah. So you said bare minimum. What was the timeframe for this?

Oh, let’s see. I think we wrote the record in about four weeks. Not all together. We had three days in October, we had eight days in December and then two weeks in February to get it all situated. Then we recorded it over the course of three weeks in March. And then mixed in April.

The Phosphorescent Blues took almost three years to write. We had the luxury of writing it over the course of three years not work every day, of course. We might have worked twelve weeks total on it, but we had the chance to sit with things and revise, and change, and live with it. This one was more of a “Let’s just get it out.” And I think it worked to our benefit because everything feels super fresh on the record.

I read that you played on the score for Brokeback Mountain and Babel – and they both won the Oscar for best original score. Do you think there’s a cinematic component to Punch Brothers’ arrangements as well?

Yeah, absolutely there is. That’s a comment we get quite frequently. It’s not intentional, but I think everyone is in love with trying to find narratives that can happen instrumentally along with a lyrical narrative. We’re always trying to find textures and new ways to approach presenting musical ideas and finding interesting ways of getting you from point A to point B. I think there’s a definite classical music influence in that regard. Not only is the music supporting the lyrics in a vocal as it would in folk-based or pop music, but the music itself is also helping to create the narratives.

You in particular have a bluegrass background, from playing in your family’s band. How did that prepare you for this experience of touring with Punch Brothers?

Surprisingly enough, doing that is how Chris and I met. We met at a festival called Follows Camp Bluegrass Festival that happened in Southern California. My family would always go up and camp and play and my dad would emcee a lot of the time at that festival. There was a contest and our family band got booked to play it. I think it was the second year or the second time it happened. A 5-year-old Chris Thile just happened to be there that time. As he tells it, he saw me playing onstage with my dad and was like, “Oh my God, that’s so cool. Another kid plays!”

After we got done, we were introduced and immediately became friends. I think we played baseball in the road that ran along the campground, then spent the rest of the time playing tunes with each other. Doing that led directly, a couple decades later, to this band becoming a thing. Of course, you can’t discount the years and years and years spent learning the craft of playing, and playing in an ensemble, and performing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s a unique way to grow up.

The good news is, I got all the … well, not all, but a good portion of the dues-paying out of the way before I even knew I was paying any dues, so by the time I was out of high school I had a level of proficiency as a professional that most people don’t have the luxury of gaining until they are well into their 20s. I was able to hit the ground running. I went to college as well, for music, but I’ve got to say: music was there all along. The only thing that changed was that I finished school. So that went away but the music continued.

You were able to play with Bill Monroe as a kid, too, right?

Yeah, when I was 6, we were at the Strawberry Music Festival. This is the thing that launched the family band. My folks decided that we were going to go up to the Strawberry Music Festival, which at that time happened in Yosemite, California. I had been playing for almost a year at that point. We just went to camp and hang out and check it out. One of the days my dad and I were jamming at the campground, and people wandered around the campground, so people were coming in to listen. Then they’d wander off.

Monroe was playing that night at the festival. He was headlining the show that night and they had gotten him to do a workshop during the day, a mandolin workshop. My dad took me over to that. I didn’t know who that guy was. He was just some old guy up there playing. There were a couple hundred people at this workshop listening to Monroe, and right towards the end, and my dad would probably remember better than I do, but somehow, someone pointed me out and said, “Have you heard this guy play? You should pick a tune with him, Monroe.” And so Monroe got me onstage and he and I played a tune called “Gold Rush.” It’s actually one Byron Berline wrote when he was in Monroe’s band.

So Monroe and I played that tune and I got a pretty cool picture with Monroe afterwards. Then, later that day, probably because of that, the Strawberry folks asked if my dad and I would do what they call a ‘tweener set, where you go up and play two or three songs in between the main stage bands. So, Hot Rize was playing and then New Grass Revival was going to play after that. I think this was the day after Monroe played. So my dad was like, “Yeah, sure! Yeah, we’ll work up three songs.” So he grabbed a bass player and a guitar player and also asked Byron if he would sit in on the solo. And so we got up and played three songs, and Byron came out, and we played “Gold Rush” together. And it was so much fun, my dad said, “Hey, do you want to do this more?” And I said, “Sure!”

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Photo: Courtesy of Red Light Management

David Benedict, ‘The Golden Angle’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

How does that old adage go? The one about “the company we keep” and all that? Based on the roster for his tune, “The Golden Angle,” it would seem mandolinist David Benedict had grown up with this principle as his cardinal rule. The title track of his upcoming album features bassist Missy Raines, the winningest bass player in the history of the International Bluegrass Music Association; Stuart Duncan, perhaps the most prolific fiddler and session player in Nashville and every bluegrass musician’s favorite musician; Wes Corbett, a former Berklee banjo instructor and one of the contemporary five-string’s most clever pickers; and Ross Martin, a flatpicker who impeccably combines the workhorse qualities of bluegrass with a more deft, subtle, jazz-flavored approach.

At the helm in the producer’s chair was another mandolin seer, Matt Flinner, whose fingerprints are found aplenty on the whimsical, Fibonacci-inspired tune. Like Flinner’s compositions, Benedict’s “Angle” is centered on a strong, cyclical melodic idea while it plays out linearly, each of the players listening intently to and building on what’s come before. It simultaneously registers as a danceable breakdown or a new acoustic chamber piece; it’s not better taken as one or the other, rather, its pliancy offers more varied perspectives on the song and its interpreters. Benedict’s voice as a composer and musician is remarkably mature and individualistic, without flirting with becoming too gratuitous — something that cannot be said for many pickers his age. It might be a safe bet to guess that these qualities are also thanks in part to the wildly phenomenal company he keeps, but either way, he should keep doing what he’s doing.

WATCH: Special Consensus, “She Took The Tennessee River”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Special Consensus with Bobby Osborne, Becky Buller, and Josh Williams
Song: “She Took The Tennessee River”
Album: Rivers And Roads
Label: Compass Records Group

Finding Universals: A Conversation with Loreena McKennitt

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Loreena McKennitt is both a Romantic and a pragmatist. During a thirty-year career that began with her busking on the Toronto subway and led to composing a new work for the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian singer-songwriter-producer-historian has dug deep into European musical traditions (the Celts in particular) and has found vivid inspiration in the Romantic poets (Keats and Yeats in particular). Her music strives for a dreamy kind of beauty, often described as ethereal but usually rooted deep in the soil of her native Canada and her ancestral Ireland.

And yet, she admits the impetus behind, Lost Souls, her first album of new material in more than a decade, was largely practical: “The fact that there hadn’t been anything new was becoming a bit conspicuous. We had a number of people writing to ask if I was going to come out with a soothing original ever again.” In addition to writing a handful of new songs, McKennitt pored through her own archives, finding old songs—some written in the late 1980s—that spoke to her. “There were songs I had written along the way that didn’t fit my previous recordings, so I started looking at those songs again. I thought, yes, they’re a bit like lost souls.”

The songs may have disparate origins, but Lost Souls is neither a rarities compilation nor a retrospective. Rather, the album holds together as a larger statement, as one song after another expounds on the implications of its title: loss and yearning, travel and transience both geographic and temporal, even the end of humanity on Earth.

Can you tell me about putting this album together? It doesn’t sound like a bunch of songs you had lying around.

If I look at it objectively, I suppose it makes sense. There are various composers of music who have stayed within a certain realm of their sensibilities. Even if they wrote something years ago, the material itself has the connection to the person who wrote it. Also, we recorded these songs all freshly within the last year, so I was able to bring a lot of the aesthetic and approach of recent recordings to it. And I am blessed with an incredible bank of talented musicians.

What was it like to revisit these songs and engage with them again?

It was interesting going back to previous mindsets. “Ages Past Ages Hence,” I wrote it somewhere around ’89 or ’90. I remember performing it at the Toronto Winter Garden in 1990. It was at a time when I was listening to Kate Bush. I really liked the angular approach she takes on some of her music, so I thought it might be interesting to head in that direction. “The Breaking of the Sword,” I wrote it about a year and a half ago. I was commissioned to write that piece, but I wrote the melody in 2006 or maybe even earlier than that and only put the words to it last year. Those lyrics mean a lot to me and that’s the piece I would say probably connects most to where I am today.

It’s interesting that “Ages Past Ages Hence” is so old. It seems to fulfill the theme of the song to have it waiting around for so long.

When I think of that song, I remember I was living in a rented farmhouse and my writing desk looked out a window into a wooded area. A lot of the trees were quite mature, probably 100 or 150 years old, and I remember many times reflecting on what they had seen during their lives. They were witnesses to whoever lived there and all the human folly in a more general sense over the years. That sentiment connects to my own Celtic history. The Celts had a major connection with trees. They felt that trees perhaps embodied some of their ancestors, as many indigenous people have, and they felt the trees played a special role on this planet. So the fact that I had this Celtic heritage and this connection with trees is probably not surprising. Also, I wanted to be a veterinarian at one point in my life, and if I hadn’t gone into music, I probably would have gone into wildlife conservation or forestry.

These things are all tied together, and then everything comes together in the last song, “Lost Souls,” which was based on a book I read a few years ago by an anthropologist called Ronald Wright. He studied civilizations as one might study the black boxes of aircraft that have gone down, and he observed that over the millennia we as a species have a tendency to get us into progress traps. We might very well be caught in one now. He observed that around the time of the industrial revolution, we went from being concerned about our moral progress to being more interested in our technical progress. He cites the denuding of the landscape on this planet as one of the big progress detriments, because it’s so integral to oxygen and water retention. All of these things go swimming through my mind as I’m stitching together the recording, which becomes a bit like a quilt.

These are songs about travel, which don’t just mention the places but incorporate the music of those places as well. 

I love listening to these various instruments played in their idioms, so part of it is pretty selfish. Secondly, there is the thrill of getting to share that excitement with other people. Bringing in the flamenco player from Málaga gives the music an authenticity that it perhaps wouldn’t have if someone else played that part. So it’s a combination of respect to those cultures and the gratification it gives me to share that with other people as one might share a new recipe with friends.

But it is complex territory. It’s been fresh on my mind because I was listening to an interesting BBC program about the upsides and downsides of selecting music from other cultures and putting it into your own. Some people say, “Hey, that’s our culture. You shouldn’t be taking that.” Other people say, “Wow, I’m going to visit that place and that culture and I’m going to listen to more groups that play flamenco.” I like to think that music is a timeless and international language, and there’s nothing I want to do to damage the distinctiveness of that voice or compromise what I love about, but I love to draw and weave those things into my own music in an honest and meaningful way. I think that manifests itself in “The Breaking of the Sword,” where the military band evokes a very particular feeling, and I felt that nothing but the military band would do.

You debuted that song on Remembrance Day last year. What was the response to it?

There were people who were surprised that I had created a piece like that. But other people were less surprised because they knew my connection to the Canadian military. I’m an honorary colonel of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which in itself is a surprise to people. I was commissioned to write something for the ceremony a year ago, which was at Vimy Ridge in France and commemorates a World War I battle. In the end, the producers decided they wanted me to sing something from [McKennitt’s 1997 album] The Book of Secrets. I was already writing this song, and I thought to myself, if I don’t put it on the recording, it too will become a lost soul. There was a lot of discussion and debate about whether or not it should go on Lost Souls, because it’s not the kind of piece I would have thought to create without being commissioned.

It seems to echo a theme of impossible longing, in particular with this mother wishing for the return of her dead son. It seems like a story that keeps happening and continues to have meaning across every culture.

I think that speaks to what I’m striving for: to come at the concept of lost souls from different directions. “The Breaking of the Sword” is a snapshot of an experience that I think most people who have had someone perish in a military exercise will relate to. I wanted to take great pains not to get trapped in the winning side or the losing side or the right side or the wrong side. Rather, I wanted the song to sit in the simple zone of a family losing a loved one. On one level, it’s about a mother losing a son. But there’s another layer, one that many people may not realize: The military is another kind of family, and it’s a powerful bond amongst those who serve. I’m reminded of that each year when I go down to the cenotaph each year.

I like to think that sense of loss is something that is timeless and universal, which means we shouldn’t get trapped by questions like, “Is it in support of the military? Or is it not?” All of that is another conversation, a very important one for sure, but this was just simply about losing someone who believes they are fighting for the betterment of humanity. It’s about the simplicity of losing someone who defends what they believe in.

Photo credit: Richard Haughton