LISTEN: The Chuck Wagon Gang, “I Will Not Cry Today”

Artist: The Chuck Wagon Gang
Hometown: The current members are pretty scattered, but The Chuck Wagon Gang originated in Fort Worth, Texas
Song: “I Will Not Cry Today”
Album: Come Go With Me
Release Date: June 30, 2023
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “Our main focus for this Chuck Wagon Gang recording was to find new songs. We had received several from writer Tami Pockstellar, who had written ‘Two Gardens’ from our previous project. Tami’s lyrics and melodies capture the freshness we were searching for, and ‘I Will Not Cry Today’ is a perfect example. It was challenging but fun to add this exciting bluegrass-styled song. I really believe these lyrics will be uplifting to listeners because they encourage us to keep pressing on, no matter the situation we find ourselves in.” – Shaye Smith, The Chuck Wagon Gang

“’I Will Not Cry Today’ was a great opportunity to feature The Chuck Wagon Gang as a trio and bring in some bluegrass-styled accompaniment, which the group wanted to feature on this album. The bluegrass world has always had a kinship with the music of the original Chuck Wagon Gang and it was special to be able to blend the two worlds together on this new song for the Gang.” – Jeremy Stephensproducer


Photo Credit: Jared Pyfer

Zoe & Cloyd Made a Traditional Album – But Not the Way You Think

If you were to try to typify bluegrass as being about any one singular thing, that one thing might be family. Not just biological family, but musical family, chosen family, and the way the music survives generation to generation, passed down as a folkway and aural tradition. Often, though not always, this music is a family tradition, passed along family trees like an heirloom or like more typical family businesses.

John Cloyd Miller and Natalya Zoe Weinstein, bluegrass duo and band leaders of Zoe & Cloyd, have made a brand new album that, on the surface, might just seem like a standard bluegrass album paying homage to the folks who came before them, their forefathers. But Songs of Our Grandfathers is so much more complicated and nuanced, wrinkling a format that’s as old as these genres themselves: the tribute album. 

On the new record, released in May on Organic Records, John and Natalya pull songs from the catalogs of their musician grandfathers. Miller’s grandpa, Jim Shumate, was a renowned Western North Carolina fiddler who played a stint in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and can be accurately credited with helping get Earl Scruggs the banjo gig that made him famous. Natalya’s grandfather, David Weinstein, was a working klezmer musician who fled unrest in Russia, moving to the U.S. 

The artful way this pair of musicians and life partners combine the styles of their families, of their youths, and of their present lives together, as touring, professional musicians, feels expansive, rich, and bold, like newgrass that’s never been newgrassed before. But, there’s a timelessness here, a patina, that speaks to the greater tradition this record can lay claim to perpetuating. (Thank goodness.) 

Songs of Our Grandfathers isn’t just nostalgia, heritage, lineage, legacy- and canon-building. It’s not just carrying on tradition for tradition’s sake. It’s effortlessly and wholly bluegrass because it innovates, it complicates, and it challenges its listeners to think outside of preconceived notions of what bluegrass, string band, and old-time music are. Because that’s exactly what bluegrass’s grandfathers, grandmothers, and grandparents were doing as they invented this music. 

We began our phone chat about the new album discussing each of their grandparents and their musical idiosyncrasies.

Can we start by talking about Jim Shumate? His presence is throughout the record and he’s influenced you both, can you tell us a bit about him and his music making? 

John Cloyd Miller: He was born in 1921 in Wilkes County, North Carolina, on a mountain called Chestnut Mountain. He started playing fiddle as a young boy, as a teenager. His older brother Mac, who was 10 years older – the same age as Bill Monroe – got him his first fiddle, which is a fiddle he kept his entire life and we actually have, now. It’s an old Sears & Roebuck Strad copy, but he played some tone into it! His Uncle Erby played fiddle so he heard him a lot growing up and then he got into Arthur Smith and all that kind of stuff. He moved to Hickory when he got older, when he was a young man, and was playing on the radio down there when Bill Monroe heard him and asked him to be in the Blue Grass Boys. That was the time that Stringbean was in the band and Sally Ann Forrester, too.

When Stringbean decided to leave the band and go off with Lew Childre, Bill needed a banjo player and it’s now a pretty well known story that Jim knew a banjo player – he knew Earl Scruggs – and really pushed, begged him really, to audition for Bill. Earl was pretty reluctant to do it, but he did, and the rest is history. Later on, when Flatt & Scruggs broke off [from the Blue Grass Boys], Jim was their first fiddler, as you know. He recorded on their Mercury sessions. But he didn’t like touring, he wasn’t a touring kinda guy at all. He had four kids at home – three at the time, when he was younger, and one later. 

Natalya Zoe Weinstein: He liked Mama’s cookin’. 

[both laugh]

Jim Shumate, L (John Cloyd Miller’s grandfather); David Weinstein, R (Natalya Zoe Weinstein’s grandfather)

JCM: He did! He liked his own bed and grandma’s cooking, for sure. He liked to go up on the mountain. He worked in the furniture industry pretty much his whole life, but he also had his hand in the music. He ran a place called “Cat Square,” kind of a small town sort of Hickory Opry, a music show. He was always playing. I have photos of him through the late ‘40s and through the ‘50s with all sorts of people, Don Reno – all those guys. He made records and he had his own band called Sons of the Carolinas, which had George Shuffler in it and some other guys. He was always playing. He played with Dwight Barker and the Melody Boys; he did some sides with Don Walker, who he played with before he met Bill Monroe. He was always making music. 

After Flatt & Scruggs it was largely regionally, because he wasn’t out touring, but he said people would always come by. Any time guys like Lester and them were in town they would always drive the bus and park it right in the yard. He was always in the music, but his influence was not felt as widely later on, I think because he wasn’t out [touring]. He did come back to recording in the ‘90s and made five cassettes for Heritage Records and those got disseminated kind of regionally. Michael Cleveland cut one of the songs that was on one of those tapes a year or so ago. People know his music, but we enjoy getting his legacy out there a bit more. He’s got such a unique style and certainly was influential. 

He was a great songwriter, too! He was my main musical influence. I heard him play a ton growing up. He was so bluesy and slidey, he was a real master of syncopation, which is something that got ingrained in me. People always forget about his songwriting, but the way I grew up, I always thought that being a musician meant that you sing stuff, you write songs. You pick, too, but you do all of it. It was just part of being musical and I think that came from him as well. 

It makes me think of, well, I talk a lot about how the most “bluegrass” someone can be is being innovative and being themselves, whether that comes across as “traditional bluegrass,” genre-wise or not. 

JCM: That’s really insightful and it’s so true, when you look at those early players – everybody always looks at the first generation and, that’s good, that can be very grounding, but those guys were all unique! They were all unique artists, they had their own styles – sure, they were listening to one another, but Lester Flatt doesn’t sound like Bill Monroe who doesn’t sound like Carter Stanley. They don’t sound like each other!

Natalya, I wanted to ask you about your grandfather, too. If you could tell us a bit about the musical influences that represent him on this record, as well. 

NZW: He passed away when I was fairly young, my dad had me when he was fifty-one, so my grandfather was quite older than me – I think I was eleven when he passed away. [My father and he] had an interesting relationship; he wasn’t always a well-liked man. He escaped a lot of violence and poverty in Russia, so he wasn’t a very kind man and my dad didn’t have a very close relationship with him. I don’t have any audio recordings of his music, I have a couple of audio interviews that my dad and uncle did with him, but I don’t have any recordings of his music. 

My dad was moving a few years back and found all these old music notebooks from my grandfather. He asked me, “Do you want these old, handwritten, junky notebooks?” And I was like, “Yes!! Please give those to me!” [Laughs] That was the source, for me, for my grandfather’s music. I didn’t have one-on-one experiences with him, I didn’t have recordings of him, so these notebooks are really the only link to his music that I have. We have about five or six notebooks that have songs in them – they’re pretty hard to decipher, they’re forty or fifty years old. They have all different kinds of material in them, from klezmer to mambos and tangos even to “Tennessee Waltz,” which shows up in one of them as a jazz standard. He also played some classical music, he didn’t do just one singular thing. Klezmer players were like the wedding band musician of their time, where they had to play a bunch of different styles based on who their audience was. 

JCM: We definitely got a little bit of a sense of who he was from these audio interviews that her uncle and dad had made with him. We got to hear his voice, you know he didn’t speak English very well so it’s mostly in Russian and Yiddish. You get a sense of some of the stuff he saw, in these interviews. You can tell it hardened him. 

NZW: He had a tough life for sure, he struggled a lot and music was really the only thing [he did]. He wasn’t really educated. He talked about how when he came here [to the U.S.] he tried to be a plumber and he tried to be an electrician, but he kept making mistakes. He said, “I couldn’t do anything except play music.” He felt almost like he was stuck with it. He loved it and he was passionate about it, but I got the sense that it was his only option. 

There’s a similar energy from both grandfathers around being musicians, but not just in a traditional touring, “road dog,” sort of lifestyle. 

NZW: You’re right, and they were both kind of skeptical of the past. 

JCM: They both came from very humble beginnings. My grandfather didn’t have any education, either. Natalya’s grandfather, apparently, escaped the Bolshevik revolution on a hay wagon. He was a teenager and they were trying to conscript him into the army to fight – it’s crazy stuff! 

Bluegrass is always considering lineage and tradition and how those things are passed along. One of the things that I think is really interesting about it is there aren’t a lot of marginalized identities represented in the historical record of bluegrass, but there are Jewish identities represented. There’s not a whole lot of representation as you go back through the years, but it’s there. How do you connect the music you’re making, that’s infused with Jewish influences and has that cultural identity, to past Jewish music makers in bluegrass and string bands? You’re clearly thinking about lineage and family with this record, and that’s so bluegrass, but through a different lens with your Jewish identity and the other cultural music styles on the album, too. 

NZW: David Grisman was one of my biggest musical influences early on, he was a big bridge, for me, between my dad – who plays jazz – and the bluegrass connection as well as the Jewish connection. We talk about how this album was inspired by Songs of Our Fathers, the 1995 album by David Grisman and Andy Statman. Andy Statman, who played on the record, is another one – one of the first shows that John and I went to see when we met in Asheville in 2005 or 2006 was to see Andy Statman at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts, which is this tiny little listening room. It was an incredible show, I remember just being blown away. I remember thinking, “Wow! What a cool fusion.”

JCM: That was the first time we heard that fusion with klezmer music. He was also playing clarinet, he was playing mandolin. He is the bridge between these kinds of music. David doesn’t do as much klezmer, but those two guys together for sure. 

NZW: John and I both came into bluegrass through the Grisman/Garcia connection then I kind of worked my way back from there. Someone gave me a burned CD of Bill Monroe and I was like, “Oh my God, what is this!?” [Laughs]

JCM: So many people have stories like that. That Old & In The Way album was such an influential record, it was like the number one selling bluegrass record for a long time. 

NZW: Yeah, the way I got into bluegrass, I was out in Tacoma, Washington, for an anthropology conference in college and somebody at my hotel was like, “I’ve got an extra ticket for Wintergrass, which is happening right next door.” I said, “Okay, cool!” So we go and I saw Old & In The Gray there [Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, Grisman], it was an incredible experience. I didn’t really know what I was seeing at the time, because I was so new to bluegrass, but that was my “Ah ha!” moment. Someone handed me a fiddle and I dunno, I played “Angeline the Baker” and that was it! [Laughs]

JCM: When I first heard Grisman play mandolin, his tone and everything, that was like sinking a hook into me. That’s why I even wanted to play mandolin. I wanted to work on getting tone like that! He was a huge influence on so many of us.

Going back home one time, when I had been living out West or whatever, I was listening to Old & In the Way or something and I asked, “Grandpa, do you know this stuff, like ‘Pig in a Pen,’ and all this?” And he was like, “Oh yeah! I know everything on this record!” And he would play them, and that was so cool to me. I hadn’t quite made the connection before. He asked me, “Who’s playing fiddle on that record?” And I said, “Vassar Clements!” He says, “Oh yeah, that’s a good friend of mine!” I was like, “WHAT!?” 

[both laugh]

JCM: I was just this stupid, deadhead college kid – I mean, I’m still a deadhead – but it really clicked. This is a bridge between grandpa’s world, which had always seemed like something in the past, to my world as a young, coming-of-age musician, realizing, “Oh, it’s all the same stuff!” 

To an uninitiated listener, they might hear your record and they might hear the influences that aren’t “traditional bluegrass” as modern cross-pollinations, as something that’s coming from you both and your generation and your own creativity. But, I really wanted to unpack the lineage of the music, because I can sense even in the playing on this album that colors “outside the lines,” it’s clearly part of this bigger tradition in bluegrass of being a bridge between these kinds of disparate parts. Even this “nontraditional” album you’ve made is based on so much tradition – familial tradition, cultural tradition, musical tradition. 

NZW: I think we wanted to honor those traditions and where these songs came from, but we also wanted to put our own spin on it. We hope our grandfathers would have liked that! 

JCM: [Jim Shumate] was very much a traditional musician, but he was always innovative at the same time. Some of the things he did in the ‘50s were very jazzy, with electric guitars playing with him. And he always loved Natalya’s playing. You know, Natalya came from a classical background and anytime she would play something classical for him– 

NZW: Or a waltz. 

JCM: He just loved to hear her play. They didn’t sound like each other, they had very different styles, but he was always very open and he loved everything. 

NZW: I think he would like [the album]. John’s mom texted us yesterday as she was listening to it and said, “I think grandpa would’ve enjoyed that!” So hopefully our grandparents aren’t rolling over in their graves. 

[Both laugh]


Photo Credit: Sarah Johnston

TIDAL’s Bluegrass: Dolby Atmos Playlist Is Changing the Listening Game

Ask any fan of bluegrass, and part of what inspires their love is the experience of feeling the music.

The reverberations of wood and string. Thick harmony hanging in the air. That magic interplay of creative spirits trading instrumental breaks back and forth without speaking a word. Until now, you could really only get that in a live setting. But with Dolby Atmos, we’re getting closer than ever to capturing it. 

This new spatial audio format is slowly changing the listening experience – and for once, bluegrass music is at the forefront. Labels like Crossroads Music Group – which includes Mountain Home Music Company and Organic Records – are recording and mastering their music with Dolby Atmos, and platforms like TIDAL are fully onboard, adopting it for their “Bluegrass: Dolby Atmos” playlist.

It’s a win-win, really. Fans get that full-bodied, textured-listening experience – and artists love it, too. According to them, bluegrass is particularly well suited to the spatial-audio revolution.

“It’s perfect because of the organic nature of the music,” says Darren Nicholson (formerly of Balsam Range), who is featured on the TIDAL playlist. “It feels like you are standing in the middle of a jam session in the living room.”

“As a listener of bluegrass music, it feels groundbreaking to listen to the genre in Dolby Atmos,” adds Jesse Iaquinto of Fireside Collective, praising how the Bluegrass: Dolby Atmos playlist highlights bluegrass’s “depth” – with all its tone and timbre included.

In fact, artists like Jeremy Garrett of The Infamous Stringdusters say bluegrass is “prime candidate” for new tech like Dolby audio.

“Bluegrass music in particular is very dynamic and has great sonic separation built in by nature of the instruments usually involved,” he explains. “The extra space gives it the breathing room the music needs to really ‘pop’ for a recorded music listening experience.”

That was the idea for TIDAL’s Editor-in-Chief, Tony Gervino, too. He calls bluegrass “one the most dynamic and vital branches within today’s country music,” and notes that “as the Bluegrass sound itself expands, so do the listening possibilities for its fans.”

He and his team created the Bluegrass: Dolby Atmos playlist to celebrate that very expansion. They ended up with an expert-curated lineup which includes artists from across the bluegrass spectrum, from Lonesome River Band and Balsam Range, to Unspoken Tradition, Benson, The Grascals, The Cleverlys and more. Many of them are also part of Crossroads Music Group.

To them, the magic is in the way Atmos recording makes each listener feel surrounded – even through tiny computer speakers. You don’t just hear the notes, you hear the way each musician and their instrument play off one another, and how it all blends together. 

Before now, that has never really been captured in recorded music – not even bluegrass, with its intricately woven textures and overlapping parts. So for Iaquinto, this new playlist is especially gratifying.

“With no drums or percussion, bluegrass musicians are always playing subtle but intricate parts,” he explains. “These can go unheard on other forms of audio, but with spatial audio, they are brought to the forefront. 

“The vocals are brightened up and colored in a way that finally gives the recorded songs the respect and focus they deserve,” he goes on. “As someone who loves acoustic music, I am extremely happy with the level of quality provided by Dolby audio.”

For artists like Nicholson, the appreciation is perhaps more simple. Calling Dolby Atmos the “ultimate experience,” he praises the way fans can finally sense the attention to detail bluegrass musicians put into their work – a labor of love he likens to crafting “an amazing bouillabaisse.”

You might not know what’s in it, but you know it’s delicious.

“I’m proud of it. I’m proud for listeners to hear it,” Nicholson says, speaking of his music being recorded in Dolby Atmos, and placed on playlists like TIDAL’s Bluegrass: Dolby Atmos. “It is the way to enjoy the music with the utmost clarity. It’s a completely unique listening experience. Whether the average listener knows why, they do know that something is different. And in a good way.”


Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Crossroads Label Group.

BGS 5+5: Jon Stickley

Artist: Jon Stickley
Hometown: Durham, North Carolina
Latest album: Jon Stickley Trio, Meantime’s Up
Personal Nicknames: Stick, Sticky, Stickers, Sticky-Poo, J. P. Poo, Stickles, Stickles McGee, JP Stickles, Stickman

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

David Grisman, who at the time was already a monster Bill Monroe-style bluegrass mandolin player, took a huge step forward and created Dawg music, an amalgamation of many different styles with a reverence for the bluegrass music that was at the root of his sound. I take the same approach with the Trio. Every composition is an exploration of some new idea that we are experimenting with, but we do it all through the lens of, and according to the standards of, the traditional bluegrass music of Bill Monroe.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I guess I knew I was going to be a musician as long as I can remember! An early memory is being in children’s choir in church. I distinctly remember my friends not wanting to be there, and thinking it was odd because I was just having a blast following the notes along the page. Later in life, I was in an entomology class in college thinking about what to do with my upcoming summer. I had two opportunities: a summer missionary program, or joining the band Broke Mountain in Durango, Colorado. I joined the band, and now here I am!

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

I’ve always had to sit down and work on songs. They don’t often come to me out of thin air. Over the course of writing and recording our new album, my two sons were born, so time to sit and work on music suddenly became virtually nonexistent! We had a session around the corner and I needed one more tune. I decided to get my old Martin D-18 out and see if it brought me some inspiration. I started noodling around on a little metal lick just getting some frustration out when it started turning into something. I called the song “Triumph in Between” because I actually couldn’t believe I was able to put something together in time with so much LIFE going on.

What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?

I got a lot of good advice and just overall inspiration from working with Dave King, the drummer for The Bad Plus who produced a couple of albums for us. He said, “Be the most YOU that you can be. No one else can do that. It will make you stand out, and ultimately get the gig! It is a superpower.” Every time I remember to follow that advice, I stop stressing about comparing myself to others.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

Haha, the first thing that came to mind was cheeseburgers with Jerry Garcia. He was such a deep guitarist and I always love listening to interviews where he talks about his approach and practice routine and whatnot. He was just such a dedicated student of the guitar. Pretty sure we both share a fondness for cheeseburgers!


Photo Credit: Tom Farr

LISTEN: Balsam Range, “What the Years Do”

Artist: Balsam Range
Hometown: Haywood County, North Carolina
Song: “What the Years Do”
Release Date: March 24, 2023
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “I have been a fan of this Adam and Shannon Wright song for many years. I have been waiting for the right time to record and release it, and that time feels like now! It is exciting to be back in the studio recording and releasing new Balsam Range music. Starting our 16th year with such an extremely talented and incredible group of guys, I am so excited to continue growing our musical legacy and setting new goals for our musical journey. ‘What the Years Do’ is such a meaningful, lyrical song and it fits into where we are as a band, as friends and individuals. It reminds us that life has a way of changing our focus, our needs, our desires and with each year, we grow as individuals. We will all experience different chapters of life and each of those will mold us and shape us to become our best. It’s pretty amazing how the heart grows!” — Buddy Melton, Balsam Range

Crossroads Label Group · What The Years Do – Balsam Range

Photo credit: Courtesy of Balsam Range

LISTEN: Darren Nicholson, “Arkansas Without You”

Artist: Darren Nicholson
Hometown: Canton, North Carolina
Song: “Arkansas Without You”
Release Date: January 27, 2023
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “’Arkansas Without You’ is our bluegrass story of romance, deception and when emotions overtake you. It’s our modern-day bluegrass murder ballad. I watch a lot of forensic files and true crime, and there are many tales like this that show the darker side of the human condition. Colby Laney on guitar and Zach Smith on bass provide a rhythmic groove that was so easy for Wes Corbett (banjo) and Billy Contreras (fiddle) to float over. The vocal tells the story, but the instruments are the props on the stage which are helping set the mood. I’m very excited this recording will be available in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. It’s a unique listening experience for sure. The tones and the clarity are just at a different level. This is my first time using Ferdinand, my 1923 Loar, as well as my first time having a song in Dolby Atmos. The new frontier of mixing!” — Darren Nicholson

Crossroads Label Group · Darren Nicholson – Arkansas Without You

Photo Credit: Reed Jones

LISTEN: Chris Jones & The Night Drivers, “The Price of Falling”

Artist: Chris Jones & The Night Drivers
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “The Price of Falling”
Release Date: January 20, 2023
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “The addition of Grace van’t Hof and Marshall Wilborn to The Night Drivers started a new era of creativity for the band and for me personally, and our first album together showed the positive results of that. Still, most of it was recorded during the pandemic while we weren’t touring. This is our first single from our not-yet-released second album, which was our first opportunity to record as a band that has grown together, instrumentally and vocally. Everything felt more comfortable and intuitive. ‘The Price of Falling’ is an uptempo song I wrote about the up and down sides of falling in love. The arrangement is designed to highlight the instrumental give and take that feels very easy and natural to us now.” — Chris Jones

Crossroads Label Group · The Price Of Falling – Chris Jones & The Night Drivers

Photo Credit: Sandlin Gaither

Crossroads Label Group Sets a New Benchmark With Dolby Atmos

Like a lot of bluegrass musicians, Infamous Stringdusters fiddler Jeremy Garrett had never given much thought to “spatial audio.” He already had a good professional setup for home recording and playback in conventional stereo, and that seemed like more than enough. Getting into the next generation of three-dimensional sound, highly touted though it is, just didn’t seem important.

All that changed, however, as soon as Garrett actually heard his own music in Dolby Atmos, Dolby Laboratories’ surround-sound mixing process. It happened at the North Carolina headquarters of Crossroads Label Group, where Garrett records as a solo act. It just took one demonstration for him to come away a believer.

“It blew my mind,” he says. “Seriously. You can try to explain it ‘til the cows come home. But until you experience it, you won’t understand just how eye-opening it is. Stereo can give you a pseudo-in-the-room feel. But Dolby Atmos is like really being in the room, where you hear everything in depth and full spectrum from low to middle to high range. Even listening on a phone, you could tell the difference.”

This next iteration of surround sound is quickly becoming the sonic standard for the record industry’s high-rent district, with most major-label releases coming out in the format. But it’s also the new benchmark for Crossroads and its labels, Mountain Home and Organic, which is taking a far more proactive approach to high fidelity than most roots labels. Crossroads has been evangelizing about Dolby Atmos for the past year and making moves to put out all its new music in surround sound.

 

 

Of course, doing this takes major investments in terms of both hardware and time. Crossroads has gone so far as to build its own studio facility in California to do Dolby Atmos mixes and stay in control of the process. Company management is firmly convinced that this will be essential to survive, with Crossroads co-founder Mickey Gamble touting it as the future of the record industry – especially online, where the vast majority of business takes place now.

“Every single reproductive method before this, from wax cylinders to vinyl and up through the chain including compact discs, has had flaws,” says Gamble. “This doesn’t, which is why it’s important for us to be there. We still sell a little bit of physical product, but that’s mostly by artists at the table at their show. The business is drastically different now, and everything we do is aimed at increasing an artist’s streaming profile. This is just another piece of that. The time is not too far off where, if you want to have a streaming profile, it will have to be with Dolby Atmos because the technology is taking over the music business. If you can’t or won’t do it, you won’t be in the business.”

This kind of high-end immersive surround sound has long been the standard in movie theaters, but it’s only recently emerged for listening to music. Major streaming services including Apple, Amazon and TIDAL all use variations of three-dimensional surround sound — although Spotify and YouTube remain two notable stereo-only holdouts (and for that reason, Mountain Home continues to do conventional stereo mixes of its music alongside the Dolby Atmos versions).

Nevertheless, the overall trend is running toward universal adoption of three-dimensional surround sound for music, and major labels have been busily upgrading their catalogs. Among the albums that Gamble routinely plays for visitors to show off Dolby Atmos sound are Queen’s 1980 album The Game (“which I swear will take your head off,” he says) and the 1959 Miles Davis masterpiece Kind of Blue.

 

 

One metric to track surround sound’s rapid growth is the number of studios set up to mix in Dolby Atmos. There were just 30 Dolby Atmos-capable studios in the spring of 2020, but that figure has gone up to around 600 in 2022, according to Billboard. On the consumer’s end, there are also more and more playback devices for surround sound on the market, including car-stereo systems.

“The business aspect of it is huge and growing really fast, which is why we feel like we need to be in it,” says Gamble. “Personally, I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Dolby Atmos for the last year and a half – classical, jazz, rock, bluegrass, everything. And if I go back and try to listen to something in regular stereo now, it sounds dull and uninteresting. The difference is just that powerful. Without exception, every artist we’ve brought in to hear it has come out saying, ‘I want this for me.’”

To that end, Crossroads started by releasing immersive-audio mixes of its top songs of 2022, from artists such as Balsam Range, Tray Wellington, The Grascals, Lonesome River Band, Sister Sadie, and Sideline.

Surround sound is not the record industry’s first new technology to be touted as a major sonic revolution, going back to four-channel quadraphonic sound in the 1970s. But where quadraphonic failed to catch on because it required listeners to shell out for new hardware, Dolby Atmos doesn’t require an equipment upgrade to get improved fidelity (although the effect is more impressive on modern playback devices).

 

 

“The amount of immersion you get changes depending on the device,” says Crossroads Music chief engineer Scott Barnett. “But the immersive experience will scale to the system you’re listening on, automatically and in real time, whether it’s in your living room with 13 surround-sound speakers or on an iPhone through earbuds. The sound is object-based rather than channel-based – not just left or right but with a three-dimensional field. Dolby Atmos can present an enhanced experience without sacrificing any tone or dynamics.”

Another improvement that Gamble cites is that surround sound does away with the sonic compression of stereo sound, which limits the tones you can hear, and that improvement applies to any listening device. Indeed, Garrett has been demonstrating the dramatic differences of surround sound to friends using mobile phones – dialing up his song “River Wild” on Spotify stereo on one phone, and then in immersive audio on Apple Music on another. Even when heard on small phone speakers, there’s an audible difference.

“There’s a curve to go along with this, of course,” says Garrett. “It’s an extra process, and it takes quite a bit to get an entire record mixed for surround sound. But if it’s at all possible, I want every single song of mine to be in Dolby Atmos from now on because there’s no comparison. The experience is over the top, nothing else comes close.”

If Gamble has his way, that will be possible to do.

“I’ve always believed that presenting music with clarity will have an influence on listeners’ attachment,” Gamble says. “That’s true for the casual listener as well as the audiophile. What makes it dramatic are the placements in space, and the harmonics you can hear because there’s no compression. It helps music sound the same way it does if you’re standing right in front of the people playing it.”

LISTEN: Ashley Heath, “The Letter”

Artist: Ashley Heath
Hometown: Marshall, North Carolina
Song: “The Letter”
Album: Something to Believe
Release Date: October 21, 2022
Label: Organic Records

In Their Words: “I was listening to a lot of country and Americana songwriters when I wrote this song. This song was written about when you’ve exhausted every avenue of trying to fix a problem that even hand writing a letter and spelling it out wouldn’t change it. My favorite line is ‘If you had a heart to break, I wouldn’t know any better.’ I think that clearly sets the tone. The instrumentation has more of a Nashville country vibe to it with some big guitar swells and this one is probably also the most radio-ready song from the EP.” — Ashley Heath

Crossroads Label Group · 03 The Letter

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither

LISTEN: Aaron Burdett, “Denver Plane”

Artist: Aaron Burdett
Hometown: Saluda, North Carolina
Song: “Denver Plane”
Release Date: October 14, 2022
Label: Organic Records

In Their Words: “In August of 2019 my band was flying out to Colorado to play some shows. And we found ourselves traveling alongside the Steep Canyon Rangers, who were doing the same. We had a really tight connection at Charlotte, and I remember running between terminals for about 20 minutes alongside Graham Sharp, songwriter and banjo player for their band. Both of us were lugging heavy instruments and backpacks, and we were not optimistic we’d get to the gate in time. Fortunately we did get there just as the plane doors were closing, and I made a note during the flight with a song idea about ‘running with the Rangers.’ As often happens, it took me a year or two to flesh out the full song, and we finally recorded it in the spring of 2022. Here’s where the story gets interesting, though. In June of 2022, quite unexpectedly, the Rangers contacted me about the possibility of joining them, and now, as I write this in the fall of 2022, I’m actually a full member of the band, ‘running with the Rangers’ on a weekly basis. You can’t make this stuff up!” — Aaron Burdett

Crossroads Label Group · Denver Plane – Aaron Burdett

Photo Credit: Sandlin Gaither