Bluegrass is notorious for having an extreme dearth of Christmas and holiday songs. The first, and often only one to come to mind, in jam circles and on set lists, is “Christmas Time’s a Comin’” — and deservedly so, it’s simply iconic. It’s true that many bluegrass bands and artists cover Christmas staples from outside the genre frequently and with aplomb, but holiday songs written by, for, and within the bluegrass community have been always hard to come by, that is, until recent decades, when career bluegrass songwriters became the unstoppable phenomenon they are today.
During my career as a banjo picker and the countless hours spent providing background music for holiday soirees, or performing seasonal shows, or even just spicing up a pickin’ party with a little Christmas cheer, I’ve always opted for a tune that fits the Christmas theme purely because of a technicality. Bill Monroe’s “Santa Claus” was named for the town in Indiana, not the jolly, red-suited philanthropist who lives at the North Pole. Its melody doesn’t even marginally reference or imply any sort of intrinsically Christmas-y themes, it’s just a fun, bouncy, chromaticism-filled Monroe tune, once again named after one of his countless destinations. But hey, when you don’t have enough Christmas songs, you have to make do! And “Santa Claus” is always an excellent choice, especially when it’s a recording with Bill Keith kicking it off on the banjo.
Sometimes self-exploration doesn’t yield the answers we seek. For those patient enough to keep prodding, the real truths emerge in the process, rather than the culmination of examining who we are. Kaia Kater learned as much on her third album, Grenades, which stretches across generations, hemispheres, and textures, and left the singer-songwriter “swimming in her own shadow.”
Born in Canada, Kater grew up hearing about her father’s life in Grenada before he fled at age 14 when the United States invaded the small island country in 1983. As a result, a part of her always existed in a land that lay far away. With the banjo as her guiding force on Grenades, Kater strings a tightrope between her Canadian sense of self and her Grenadian heritage, in order to find a balance between those two poles.
Why did it feel like the right time not only to turn inwards, but to seek a connection back through the generations?
I think it was a multitude of things. I’d been two years out of school, and I found I had more time and space. I’d also had more conversations with my dad, and at a certain point he was like, “You’ve got to go back. You can’t keep putting it off. You’ve got to do it.” I came to agree with him. What started this whole thing is last Christmas I interviewed him in the basement of his house about growing up in Grenada and coming to Canada as a refugee.
And at the age of 14.
I know! It’s kind of crazy. I was 24 at the time I was interviewing him, so just to think about where I was at 14 — it’s kind of terrifying to think about becoming an adult that quickly. It’s kind of unbelievable. But he didn’t really talk about it a lot. I think that’s the thing, people do extraordinary things in order to lead very normal lives.
That’s a beautiful way to put it.
Yes, it’s the story of immigration and the story of refugees. I don’t think my dad ever hid his story, but I don’t think he ever thought it was an extraordinary story. He thought it was his path on the way to doing what he wants to.
It’s fantastic, then, that in addition to fitting your own voice into this musical genealogy you were able to include his voice three times on this album.
Those were from those interviews at Christmas. So much of the music and the emotion was born from that conversation that it felt like an imperative for me to include them. They were not only contextualizing the music, but they were also serving as these light posts for a pretty complicated storyline.
You’ve described Grenades as a lifeline to the South, and yet you grew up in the North. North and South have long existed as such stark dichotomies. Do you think, speaking about your identity, reconciliation is possible, or have you come to accept that there will always be a tension?
I do think it’s like being a hyphenated Canadian. I think there’s a certain cognitive dissonance that happens. This album is really great because it’s given me the space and the time to start to talk to more first and second generation Canadians about “What does being Canadian mean?” In comparison to Grenada, which is 95 percent black, Canada is a multi-ethnic place. It is richer for that. We acknowledge the richness that comes with diversity, but I think it also creates these problems of identity.
I have a friend whose parents are Ghanaian. She’s black and she grew up going to a Ghanaian church in Toronto, and then she went back to Ghana after she got her journalism degree. She was faced with this thing of like, “I have Ghanaian roots, but there’s a part of me that…my accent and the words I use are very Canadian.” I feel a little bit all over the place. Even the nature of exploring all these things is how I feel about it, which is like, I haven’t particularly arrived to a conclusion.
Nor should you. That’s the beauty of any creative form—it allows you to keep exploring. Turning to the album itself, you said you wrote the songs across winter and summer?
I started writing this album really in earnest after I’d had that conversation with my dad at Christmas. Then I went to Grenada in April, and obviously it’s very warm and it’s very beautiful, so it did feel, more than the natural course of the seasons in Canada, like I went suddenly from winter — this gray March — to summer. That’s why I feel it as this change between seasons, but also like we’ve been talking about, it’s a change in hemisphere too.
When it came time to stitch those halves together, what was the process like?
I challenged myself to write all original music on this album. I knew that in order to do that, I would have to push myself and get really analytical with my work. Just changing my environment and going to Grenada was a great help because it brought out different words and melodies and expressions. If all the songs were color-coded in my head, and one is blue for winter and yellow for summer, I can see them that way.
Of the arrangements on the entire album the three that most stand out are “Canyonland,” “The Right One,” and “Poets Be Buried.” Speaking of the latter, the beautiful slow-burn brass is exquisite. How did that unfold?
At this point, I should really credit my wonderful producer, Erin Costello. She is an artist herself; she’s actually releasing a record right around the same time as me. Keyboard is her main instrument, so she works mainly in R&B and soul, but she dabbled a lot in electronic music, and has a Master’s in composition. I feel like her musical tastes are really broad, and she really doesn’t shy away from a challenge, which is why I enjoyed working with her. And it’s also nice to be working with a woman.
I was going to say!
So many of them are men, so it’s nice to have a change of energy. She lives in Halifax. We recorded the album in Toronto, and the next day we flew to Halifax with the hard drive and mixed it there. I’d expressed that “Poets Be Buried” needed something more, and so the brass was actually the last musical piece that we added to the entire album before we mixed it. It was amazing. She had these players come in for an afternoon, and she wrote up the parts in 15 minutes. It sounded beautiful. It’s just French horn and trombone.
If you had to define the banjo’s power as an instrument and storyteller, what would it be?
The banjo has a very ancient quality, and I think especially when it’s played percussively like the clawhammer style, it can bring you into this trancelike, dreamlike state. I’ve found that with traditional music a lot, especially in a jam situation. It’s everybody playing the melody and chording all of the time — it’s not solo-based. When you’re in a jam, you get this trancelike quality where you’re playing this A/B pattern 50 or 60 times. I think the banjo lends itself well to this trance of storytelling. It brings me this inner peace that’s pretty indescribable. I think that’s why I was so attracted to it and why I’ve written on it for so many years.
I read that you play two or three banjos, but your grandpa made one for you?
Yeah, I’m looking at it now on my wall.
If we’re talking about generations, and how your new album encompasses all these different stories, that connection to your grandfather brings it to a whole other visceral level.
I hadn’t thought about that; that is a good point. It’s funny, at the risk of sounding too cheesy, it’s been a guiding light in my life. It’s opened the doors to so many things — not only studying in Appalachia, but also writing things that I may have been too scared to say openly. It’s a really beautiful instrument and a powerful one.
In the liner notes, you remark, “Here’s to swimming in your own shadow.” In dealing with your father’s voice and other generations, how did you create the space for your voice in the midst of intertwining these other narratives?
I think I still am. In the same way when we were talking about northern and southern hemispheres, I think that’s an ever-evolving question for me. For a long time, I’ve had an existential anxiety about having two sides to my family who both have very strong people and very strong narratives, and thinking, “Where do I fit in this picture?” That’s why I create albums, so I can give myself the time and space to explore that.
I’ve put Grenades out, and now I’m going to get to know what it’s about. The “swimming in your own shadow” thing is about getting comfortable essentially with being uncomfortable, and with having a lot of conflicting narratives, and trauma that comes from war or from being biracial, or from being a woman in the world, which people are really starting to talk about. It’s my own way of dealing with that. The album is me carving out that space for myself.
Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn — two legends and innovators who’ve brought the humble banjo across four continents and have won over 17 Grammys between them in the process — talk with Z. before their show at UCLA.
For over three decades now Béla has quietly revolutionized how the banjo is played, recorded, and perceived — taking it from of the front porches of Appalachia and into jazz clubs, symphony halls and rock stadiums from his hometown of New York City to Uganda and Tibet and back again.
Meanwhile, Abigail has forged her own unique path. A fiercely intelligent songwriter and activist fluent in Mandarin, she gave up on being a well regarded lawyer in China after a meditation retreat brought her to the realization that the banjo and not the briefcase was her destiny. After meeting at a Nashville square dance (yes, that really happened), Bela and Abigail’s banjo explorations became one. Slowly, they began touring and recording together, and that’s where Z. caught up with them, on a rainy Wednesday on UCLA’s campus in LA.
Featured Songs: “Big Country” and “Over The Divide”
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In Their Words: “We wanted to explore covering material outside of the bluegrass genre, and our bassist Nate suggested Elton John’s classic ‘Rocket Man.’ When we listened to the original recording we loved all the twists and turns in the arrangement, all the effects and quirks that create such a surreal soundscape. We were excited to try to recreate that on our acoustic instruments. When we started playing it live crowds really responded, so we decided we had to make a recording of it. We really hope this video helps the song reach more people who will connect to our version.” — Mile Twelve
On their newest album, Hills And Home, High Fidelity doesn’t “mine” classic, vintage bluegrass aesthetics — musical or otherwise. Instead, they make them from scratch, celebrating traditional bluegrass from long before the advent of its current form (in other words, something decidedly post-Bluegrass Album Band). The result doesn’t end up feeling like a bluegrass analog to the Postmodern Jukebox, though, because it’s not just a role being played or a brand being opted into. What registers as a possibly affected throwback, time capsule, good ol’ days sound is truly just the favorite iteration, the favorite bluegrass style of the band.
The beauty in that simple approach to truly authentic music — authentic to themselves and their personalities as well as the origins of the genre — is that they regale us with forgotten stylistic flourishes and gems of eras prior. On “Follow the Leader” that means not just Don Reno-style banjo picking, it means Don Reno-style banjo picking times two. Jeremy Stephens, perhaps the foremost Reno-style player in his generation, joins National Banjo Champion Kurt Stephenson on an impossibly deft, perfectly synced double banjo rendering of the classic Reno-written instrumental. It combines these all-too-rare, uniquely banjo-rific skills in a package that you’ll go back to over and over and over again — if you have your five string, three finger priorities in order. And you won’t be worn out, you won’t ever find it gratuitously saccharine or caricatural, because it isn’t a trope. It’s High Fidelity.
There’s a beauty in the timelessness of bluegrass. It facilitates spaces where the youngest prodigies and the most traveled, veteran virtuosos intermingle with ease. The genre is young enough that a few of its trailblazers are still among us, and stories of the legendary architects of the form are still told firsthand. The 90-year-old banjo player and recording artist Curtis McPeake is a testament to that timelessness. His career began seventy years ago; in his early days he performed and recorded with Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. He later became the only banjo player to ever be a member of the Grand Ole Opry house band and he was also an in-demand session musician, appearing on records by country stars like George Jones and Melba Montgomery. So the fact that McPeake has been named a recipient of one of 2018’s Distinguished Achievement Awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association should come as no surprise.
But, McPeake will not be accepting the award from retirement — he still picks the banjo as fine as ever, he also buys and sells instruments, and he continues to record and perform. Earlier this year he and his collaborator, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Andy May, released a full-length album, The Good Things (Outweigh the Bad). On its final track, “Leather Britches,” you can hear that same timelessness in McPeake’s duet with Nashville stalwart fiddler Aubrey Haynie. They kick the tune with fiddle and banjo only, showcasing that classic pre-bluegrass format, Haynie fiddling fantastically far and wide while McPeake holds it all together with his three-finger roll, seventy years in the making.
Artist: Courtney Hartman & Taylor Ashton Hometown: Brooklyn, New York Song: “Better” Album:Been on Your Side Release Date: August 31, 2018 Label: Free Dirt Records
In Their Words: “Courtney and I and about 25 other songwriter friends around the world had an email thread going last year where we had a weekly deadline to send in a new song, as an exercise in mutual encouragement to keep in the practice of writing. One week I forgot about it until 1 a.m. on the night of the deadline, and even though I had a gig at 9 a.m. the next morning, I spent a couple hours with my banjo and “Better” came to me. It took a second to arrive at the first line and the rest all sort of fell into place. At some times in my life I’ve been attracted to the idea that you can’t force inspiration, and that it chooses when to strike. But this is an example of a time where if I hadn’t been holding myself to some arbitrary deadline I would definitely have just fallen asleep and never written this song.
The voice in the song is sort of an amalgam of myself and of a lot of people in my life so it feels good to sing it with Courtney — it brings it into a cool middle ground for me, between a specific personal sentiment and a more universal one. And to me it feels good to sing about your personal flaws in harmony with somebody else. I think the chorus is something we all want to cry out at certain times in our lives.” — Taylor Ashton
Artist:The Earls of Leicester Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Long Journey Home” Album:The Earls of Leicester Live at The CMA Theater in The Country Music Hall of Fame Release Date: Sept. 28 Label: Rounder Records
In Their Words: “In the bluegrass canon, the song ‘Long Journey Home’ has appeared under many alternate titles for different artists. Yet I’ve always felt Earl Scruggs’ banjo raised the Flatt and Scruggs version to a higher level. When planning our live record, we wanted to have a few fast tempo songs that we could count on to raise the blood pressure for both the listeners and our own. The tempo and fire that this song brings through Charlie Cushman’s banjo as well as Shawn Camp and Jeff White’s vocals made it an easy choice, and a welcome new entrant into the Earls repertoire.” – Jerry Douglas
Noam Pikelny has a dry delivery only when he’s joking around. But as banjo player in Punch Brothers, his playing is crisp, inventive, and in step with his colleagues. This is especially true on All Ashore, a new release that explores the personal challenges of relationships as well as the growing political divide in America. This year he’s nominated for IBMA Banjo Player of the Year, while his two previous solo albums earned Grammy nominations. His Twitter bio sums it up: “Widely considered the world’s premier color blind banjoist. Punch Brother.”
This interview is the fourth of five installments as the Bluegrass Situation salutes the Artist of the Month: Punch Brothers.
When I was at your show at the Ryman, you were usually turned toward the band but I could never tell if you were singing. Do you sing with the guys on the songs?
I sing on a few things, but not much on this record. I actually don’t think I sing any harmony on this record.
Is that by choice or have they tried to convince you otherwise? Why is that?
Usually, like when I’m singing at all, it’s because we have like five part harmony going on. And I think it has to do with my range. I have the most limited vocal range of anybody in the band. But that was how I was born. I was born that way, it’s not my fault! … And then on the one song I sang on, on the last record, they invited everybody else in the universe to sing on it. On the song “Little Lights” that was on The Phosphorescent Blues. And so I think it essentially the policy that if Noam is allowed to sing, then everybody is allowed to sing. It’s only fair to have a one-hundred person overdub. I can’t hear myself because of all these people.
A couple of you have mentioned what’s going on in the country right now as inspiration. I think it’s on everyone’s mind, but why does it seem like a good inspiration for a song? Like “Jumbo,” for example. Why do you think it lent itself to writing a song?
Well, I think on a more macro level, I think it’s really important to be sticking to your guns. I think a lot of people are demoralized and questioning whether what they’re creating or what they’re doing for a living is valid in times when it seems like a lot of them are under assault. I know for me personally that having an opportunity to make music with musical co-patriots was very crucial. I feel like there’s such division right now in this country. I think people are thriving on families being alienated from each other. You think of the Thanksgiving dinner that becomes so troublesome. Friends are becoming alienated through all kinds of political differences and I feel like our sense of community and our sense of comradery as a whole is kind of under assault.
I think parsing through what’s going on in our lives right now, a solo project can be quite lonely. I think we find strength in working with each other and we have the ability to hone our thoughts with each other around, as far as what’s important to us and what we want to say. For “Jumbo” in particular, why does this make for good music? Or why is this musical inspiration? I ultimately thought that these people are like the protagonists that are Jumbo and his cohorts, they spend most of their time celebrating themselves. And we just wanted to get in on the action and celebrate them as well. So it’s really a celebration, more than anything.
It’s a fun melody if you just listen at the surface level. How’s it going over live? It seems like one that people would be responding to?
I think people are responding to a lot of it. [Playing live] is a huge component of the musical journey of this music. Making a record is obviously the most concrete and typical manifestations of the music. But the journey really is just beginning once that’s finished and we start playing it live, getting audience feedback, and shaping the song for the live experience. We’re flattered that people are enjoying it and starting to know the words.
Gabe that told me that you have a good story from being on Letterman. Do you have a minute to tell that story?
Oh, I’m not sure exactly what he’s referring to. I mean we got to go on Letterman about eight to nine years ago and play with Steve Martin. He announced that he was doing this yearly banjo award – it seems like a long time ago, it was nine years ago now. So, it was one of the more surreal experiences of a lifetime, getting to be up there with Steve Martin and Dave Letterman.
You were the first one to get that award. I remember when that started. Since then, a lot of your peers have been recognized. This sounds like a weird question, but is there like a banjo community or like an instant friendship when you meet another banjo player?
Um, there’s a secret banjo cult that meets in a cave in Horse Mouth, Kentucky, on the third Saturday of every month. And everyone’s totally cloaked and in these robes that are covered in banjo tablature… No, there’s no secret society – or if there is, I haven’t been invited yet which probably makes sense. But I think there’s an instant kinship with anybody else who’s pursuing music as their life’s work. And I think any instrumentalist, you always want to pow-wow and talk about their techniques and who they studied with, so I think there’s an extension in that way.
I wanted to ask you about songwriting collaboration. The way I understand is that everybody wrote the music together and then crafted the stories on top of the music. Is that pretty accurate? What was the process like?
We write the music instrumentally first, as a band, and that’s often with the five of us in the room. Oftentimes, Thile will be kind of singing, just gibberish, or a few words he has stuck in his head that associates with that music. Sometimes, those couple words will become the kernel of the song, and we’ll shape it around that. He often goes off and starts writing lyrics and brings it back for collective input, and we’ll help edit and shape the lyrics.
Sometimes we’ll have late-night discussions over cocktails or a drink, talking about what’s going on in our lives, whether it’s our familial environment or what’s going on in the world right now, and he’ll go off and try to capture that collective thought into a lyric. So it’s always different, but interestingly in Punch Brothers, the lyrics almost always come last. We write placeholder lyrics first, then that’s the final but obviously very crucial element.
Are you a good lyricist? Do you enjoy contributing in that way?
I don’t consider myself a true lyricist. I really do enjoy the process of working with the lyricist. And I feel it’s an effective kind of partnership to them to have Thile leading the charge in that way, but then having this kind of counsel for feedback that can be brutally honest.
You just got married this year right?
Correct. A few months ago.
So this album has a song like “All Ashore,” which is about a relationship falling apart, but then you’re a newlywed. In order to get into a character, do you have to set your personal life out of mind when you perform a song like that? How do you separate the two?
Well, no, I think “All Ashore” isn’t about the collapse. It’s more about the challenges. It’s the struggle and the ups and downs, the ebb and flow, to quote the song itself. But you know, when we get up and play a song like “Molly and Tenbrooks,” which is a racehorse song, I don’t feel like I have to identify personally with the jockeys or the horses … but I think it’s really important to get inside the story of the song and as you perform it, you can really deliver the intent of it.
And so there might be a difference of whoever is the lead singer. You’d have to ask Chris how it’s different, whether it’s sung from the first person, or a narrator, or an actor. All of those roles probably come into play on different material and especially on covers that we do. … I think you can emphasis the story even if you don’t see yourself in that story. That’s the case in music and in real life. I think being an instrumentalist, I’m trying to support the singer by helping him deliver the intent of the song. I make the story more vivid through the way that I play it.
Artist:Lonesome River Band Hometown: Floyd, Virginia Song: “Wreck Of My Heart” Label: Mountain Home Music Company
In Their Words: “It’s a great song with one of the coolest, catchiest melodies I’ve heard in a while. It’s just so different than anything we’ve done in a while, and those songs are hard to find. We shot the video in Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia at a few locations: The Birthplace of Country Music Museum and the Paramount Center for the Arts. We’ve played both those venues before. It was kind of neat to go back there and do something like that. The song is about a woman leaving, so we just kept singing to a woman who kept getting up and going. We all had fun and it shows at the end and when we’re on stage. We’re all just cutting up.” — Brandon Rickman
Photo Credit: Anthony Ladd
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