Husband-and-wife indie-folk duo Drew & Ellie Holcomb have been making music together for 20 years. Ellie was a member of Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors when they first collaborated on a record in 2005 (now out of print). That was followed by 2007’s A Million Miles Away, which was then succeeded by something like their breakout, Passenger Seat, in 2008.
Over the years since, they’ve built up the Neighbors – and their cohort of friends, neighbors, fans, and listeners – into a more than tidy little paradise of a musical cul-de-sac, with more than a dozen releases (together and separately) and amassing more than a hundred million streams.
This year, the pair put out their first full-length duo album together, as equal fronting artists with the Neighbors behind them. Memory Bank, released on January 24, looks forward while looking back – a hallmark and through line of the duo, their group, and their creative output across their two-decade career. So many of the songs on Memory Bank seem to speak to the longevity they have – “Rain or Shine,” “Shut Up and Dance,” “Never Gonna Let You Go,” “Bones” – there’s a wisdom and perspective in this album that speaks to the distance they’ve traveled together. As well as denoting the upcoming miles they have yet to cover as partners, parents, and musical collaborators.
With the release of Memory Bank, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to stroll down memory lane with Drew & Ellie Holcomb, to contrast their latest project and the artists they have become now with their early projects and the artists they were then, in our most recent edition of First & Latest.
I wonder, as you put together this Memory Bank, what memories from 2008 and that first album came up for you? How did that nearly 20-year history of making music filter into this project and its songs?
Drew Holcomb: Honestly, Passenger Seat was not even the first project. There was a record in 2005 called Washed in Blue that Ellie sang on that has been scrubbed from the internet. We put on an album called A Million Miles Away in 2007, which had a bunch of songs like “I Like to Be with Me When I’m With You” and “Hung the Moon” and others. I think the younger version of us was much less confident, in a way. We were flying blind. We hadn’t made a lot of records yet and you don’t know what you’re doing in the studio. We didn’t know what we were doing as songwriters. Ellie was just a member of the band at the time.
Ellie Holcomb: I was a neighbor with benefits. The starkest difference for me between Passenger Seat in 2008 and Memory Bank in 2025 is an open-handedness and a freedom that comes with the death of ego and also with a general posture of curiosity and gratitude.
You are both prolific creators – together and separately – how have you balanced your individual musical identities with your collective work over that time period? Do you find it to be an easy balance or a tricky one?
EH: One of my favorite things about us doing music both together and separately is that there’s a massive amount of respect for each other. The reason it took us 20 years to write and record an album together is because we’ve always honored that artistic and creative space with each other. We write really differently, we create really differently. I think that mutual respect and space that we’ve given each other made space for us to make what we we’ve released into the world now – and I love it.
DH: My only addition is a short answer: No, it’s not an easy balance. It’s very tricky, but it’s worth it.
I think our relationship definitely manifests itself through the music. I think on the one hand, there’s like the aspiration – love songs are often about the love that you hope that you have. So, when you’re young and you’re speaking about when you get older, you’re making a promise to yourself and to each other about the kind of love you hope for. There’s also a bit of the truths of your own personalities make it into songs.
There’s clearly a mission and a message in your music, and I think that’s part of your staying power as artists and part of why over so many releases in so many iterations – as a couple, with the Neighbors, as solo artists, as collaborators on outside projects – your songs continue to resonate with audiences in such an authentic and down to earth way. I wonder how much of that encouragement folks get from your music that you get, yourselves? I can see that being a big part of how you’ve gotten this far and are still moving forward.
EH: I’d say we talk to our kids a lot about what a stage is for and we always tell them that a stage is to bring joy. It’s a shared space where our stories mingle together. Music is a bridge builder. Our mission, if you will, with music is that it would help people connect to their own story and that it would help people connect to everybody else and feel a little less alone. There’s this beautiful quote that says we decorate space with art and we use music to decorate time. We feel so deeply grateful that people have used our songs to decorate like the time and the seasons of their lives, sorrow, joy, road trips, family gatherings, etc.
What will you take with you in your “memory bank” as you move forward, as you stare down the next 17 years of making music together? What do you see as your touchstones – or, alternatively, what do you hope you’ll look back and recall if we were to have this conversation again in 20 more years?
DH: Our memory bank as we move forward in the next 17 years of making music together, we are always trying to keep growing. I didn’t know how to sing harmony until this record. I learned how to sing harmony, not with the intention of making a record, but because I wanted to learn. Ellie’s learning piano with similar intentions. There are always new songs to find.
When you were making and releasing Passenger Seat, where did you see yourself now, all these years later? Was this always the goal? Did it seem like a pipe dream that you’d still be doing this together? Or was it inevitable?
DH: Music was definitely not inevitable. When I started making music, Ellie was a school teacher with no intention of being a professional musician. So we have just taken it a year at a time.
The Isaacs need no introduction. In gospel, bluegrass, and country circles they are well known for their convicting, heartfelt songs in the sacred tradition, demonstrating ardent faith through familial harmonies and a stunning polished, tight-knit sound.
They’ve been performing and recording as a group for 50 years, with their first commercial albums released now more than 30 years ago. They are veterans of the Grand Ole Opry, churches and bluegrass festivals all across the country, Gaither Homecoming, RFD-TV, and so many more roots music and gospel institutions.
In October of last year, the family – whose band consists of Lily and her children Ben, Sonya, and Becky – released a brand new album, Praise & Worship: More Than A Hollow Hallelujah. And, whether heard by “secular” listeners or listeners of faith, the project is a pitch perfect continuation of the mission and message the Isaacs have brought with them across their entire 50 year career.
The collection, as always, is stirring, resonant, and warm. With crisp and clean stylings of modern worship music intermingled with country and string band touches. In an exclusive interview with BGS, we spoke to Sonya Isaacs via email about More Than A Hollow Hallelujah by comparing and contrasting their latest project with their first – A Labor Of Love, which was released in 1990 and Live in Atlanta, which arrived in 1992.
We spoke about the Isaacs’ longevity, their faith, what sacred music offers to all of us, and how it feels to look back on so many decades of making music together as a family and ministry. Gospel music and roots music have always gone hand-in-hand and the Isaacs demonstrate that connection, intuitively, in all that they do.
Your latest album, Praise & Worship: More Than A Hollow Hallelujah, begins with the track, “Gratitude,” which I feel is a perfect place to start. This project is more than 30 years – nearly 35! – since your first releases. Can you speak a little bit about your longevity and what it means to you, at this point, to look back at such a prolific and productive career? I imagine you must practice a lot of gratitude.
Sonya Isaacs: We have been so so blessed to be doing what we love to do for the majority of our lives now! We are incredibly grateful for the journey that has brought us where we are today. The highs were high and the lows were low, but God has been with us and allowed us to live our dreams. A lot has changed about our sound, style, and even personnel since those humble beginnings, but one thing has remained and that is Christ is the center of everything that we do!
Gospel music and sacred music go hand-in-hand with American roots musics of all types. You all are comfortable in so many genres and styles, from bluegrass and country to contemporary Christian. I wonder what it means to you that gospel is such a big part of so many roots genres and how you see your own music fitting into different formats and styles of music?
When we started out 50 years ago, we never intended or dreamed that our music would cross over into different genres and styles. God has opened doors in different markets for us to get to take His message into. We don’t change who we are, we don’t change why we are there, we just sing and the songs do the work! It’s wonderful that so many different styles encompass the gospel message and we are grateful that we get to stand on different stages all around the world and be who we are. God is always the most important listener at our concerts.
What do you remember about the making of those first albums, A Labor of Love released in 1990 and Live in Atlanta released in 1992? Did you ever think or dream or assume you’d still be putting out records well into the 2020s? Was that always the hope or the plan?
I don’t think any of us were thinking too much about the future when we first started out recording almost 50 years ago. We were so excited to be in the moment and to get to be singing and recording, especially when we got our first major record deal in the late ’80s. Back then we weren’t very experienced as musicians or singers, and in the studio everything felt like a dream! We remember feeling nervous, excited, and grateful during those early years.
When we recorded the Live in Atlanta album and video, some of us were the most nervous we have ever been on stage. But it felt like a game-changing album once we finished the concert. There was a sweet spirit in that room that only God’s presence can bring. The songs we recorded on Live in Atlanta became some of our first to reach the top of the charts.
Now, a song you selected to spotlight from Live in Atlanta is “From the Depths of My Heart.” How did that track come into your repertoire and how does it strike you now, decades later, when you listen back?
“From the Depths of My Heart” was a song Ben and I wrote in a car riding from home in Morrow, Ohio, to our new home in LaFollette, Tennessee in 1992. I had just graduated high school the day before and we were all leaving behind all we’d ever known. The sad goodbyes with friends and loved ones were the inspiration for the song. It was like a gift God gave us to not only help us, but millions of other people who have needed the words over the years. It became our first number one song in gospel music, and remained in the charts for nearly 4 months. Looking back, it’s really the song that catapulted our career. We still get requests for that song all the time!
Obviously, there are so many connections between your music then and your music now, but I wonder what through lines or consistencies you see in your own body of work? What’s changed? What’s stayed the same?
As styles and technology have evolved, so has our sound. When we first started out, there was definitely more of a bluegrass trueness that came from our dad Joe Isaacs’ musical heritage. As the kids got older and began to play instruments and write songs, the style became more contemporary in general, but still was heavily influenced by the traditional bluegrass sound. Over the years we have done different albums with different styles; some country, some Americana, mostly gospel, bluegrass, and others, but the harmonies the Isaacs are known for have remained a constant. The instrumentation of guitar, mandolin, and bass have also remained a staple in our sound. Also, we have always been faithful to stick with lyrics that didn’t compromise the gospel in anyway.
It certainly feels like, from the outside looking in, the conviction you feel and the passion you bring to your music remains steadfast. What keeps you “in it,” making gospel, sacred, and Christian roots music?
We have always looked at our music as a ministry. Sometimes we are singing to the choir and sometimes to those who won’t even step inside a church door. We know that any talent we have comes from God, the Creator, and we love the faith aspect of our music. It is truly why we do what we do and we couldn’t imagine our music without Him being the center of it! He is everything to us, and our mission is to carry His love to the world.
Can you talk about “(More Than A) Hollow Hallelujah,” the title track, and how the song and its message became the cornerstone of this latest album?
When we decided to do an album of praise and worship covers, there was a song that came to my mind that I had started writing years ago. I had the chorus mostly finished and called the other three to come finish it with me just a few days before the session. It seemed like an important song to have on the record because it summed up everything the record was intended to say. Without sincerity, it’s all in vain. Jesus is looking for true worshippers and followers. It’s easy to get caught up in life’s rat race and hurdles, but it’s more important now than ever to show God how much we love, appreciate, and need Him. He responds to praise and that is something we have learned down through the years. The mysteries of God and the miracles we read about are found out in the deep. We shouldn’t be content to splash around on the shore. This song calls us out to the deep.
Looking ahead to the next 35 years, the next 50 years, what do you hope will be the Isaacs’ legacy over the upcoming few decades?
As we are all getting older together, it’s interesting to think about where we will be in 10, 20, 30 (if we’re lucky) years from now. We run so hard on a day-to-day basis that somehow it doesn’t feel like we are as old as we are – with our youngest Becky turning 50 in August this year! What we pray our legacy will be, when it’s all said and done, is a family who loved to sing and pray together, who loved to share the good news of Christ in song, and a family who never stopped striving to be the best they could be at their trade. We hope the songs we have written and recorded will live on in time as those we enjoy today from others who have gone before.
Is there anything else you’re reflecting on or want to add as you consider your First & Latest and your long, full careers?
Looking back, it seems good that you can’t look forward. We have learned that the journey is just as important as the destination, and if we could see some of the twists and turns, some of the disappointments, we would no doubt have chosen different paths. We have been so blessed to have made it to where we are today with God’s grace, but we sure have overcome our share of dark days. Many songs and testimonies have been written out of those dark days that have helped others get through them. By experiencing life’s struggles, we are equipped with the knowledge and experience to help others get through them, too. Don’t begrudge the hard journey – it’s where our faith is built and our wisdom is learned.
In 1990, when banjo player Alison Brown released her debut album, Simple Pleasures, she had no idea where her career could or would lead. GRAMMY nominations, IBMA Awards, touring and performing with Alison Krauss, Michelle Shocked, the Indigo Girls, Steve Martin, and many more, founding a record label that would become a keystone in roots music – none of these impressive accomplishments were on her horizons, literal or hypothetical. Brown just wanted to play the banjo.
She had recently left her job in investment banking and wanted to give her musical career a legitimate go of it. Tasking herself with intentionally writing an album’s worth of original tunes, over the years from 1988 to the project’s release on Vanguard Records in ‘90, Brown pushed herself sonically, aesthetically, and compositionally. The result was demonstrably spectacular and effortlessly cutting-edge.
Simple Pleasures, which was produced by David “Dawg” Grisman and included Alison Krauss, Mike Marshall, Joe Craven, and more among its cast of collaborators, would help launch Brown’s now decades-long career as a bluegrass and roots music multi-hyphenate and business leader. Simple Pleasures broke the ground, fertilized it deeply, and helped cultivate one of the most innovative and forward-looking careers ever accomplished by a five-string picker.
Now, some 34 years after its original release, that debut album has been reissued – on vinyl and digital, with a handful of digital-exclusive bonus tracks recovered from a cassette tape of demos. The project is a delightful time capsule and a perfect representation of the vast and varied musical ground Brown has covered over the intervening years. She may not have known it then – she readily admits, as a picker in her twenties, she was just taking this “banjo thing” day by day – but Simple Pleasures would lay the groundwork for all of her many successes in the music industry and in bluegrass.
For a special edition of First & Latest, we spoke to Alison Brown by phone about her first release and her latest – which just so happen to be the same album, the original and the new reissue. It’s essential listening for bluegrass, banjo, and roots music fans.
Simple Pleasures was originally released in 1990, 34 years ago. I wanted to start by asking you about your frame of mind now versus then, about what’s changed in the interim. What’s changed regarding how you view yourself as a creator and as a banjo player? Looking back, in retrospect, do you recognize the person you were then? What do you remember about your frame of mind when you first put the album out?
Alison Brown: It was this time in my life during which I was writing this music and then trying to get a record deal; I had just left my investment banking job and had taken this bizarre leap of faith, which I didn’t necessarily get a lot of support for. My parents weren’t saying, “Hey, I think you should quit your investment banking job to play banjo.” [Laughs] It really was a leap of faith.
I just couldn’t stop thinking about the banjo. So, I gave myself the challenge of seeing if I could write an album’s worth of music that would hold up and just try to make a record. And then, in the course of working on that, I wrote these tunes and joined Alison Krauss & Union Station. By the time we recorded the tunes, I’d been in her band for a year. I was really at the beginning of what has become my career path since then, but when I was doing it, I didn’t really know how it would be received or if it would get any props or even if it would be any good. All the validation that came on the heels of releasing this, and then everything since then, has made me a much more confident musician than I was when I wrote the music and recorded the record.
Before this album, were you already writing tunes? Was that something that you always did? Or was this an intentional practice shift for you? Was making an album of your own tunes something you had always been working towards or was it part of that purposeful transition from investment banking to banjo?
That is a really good question. I had never written much music up until that point, but I’d always wanted to. Stuart Duncan and I did a record called Pre-sequel. That was like a teen record, but we had a couple original tunes, stuff like “Possum Gravy on Grandma’s Beard” and “The Great Lasagna Rebellion.” It was like teen stuff.
Anyways, I really had wanted to challenge myself to see if I could write some “real music” – that isn’t really quite the right word, but some more substantial tunes and some tunes that really took the instrument maybe to a new place, which took my voice to a new place. That was a lot of this exercise and those 12 tunes. I didn’t know if I could write them or even if they would be any good, but that was like the beginning of this kind of process of self discovery.
When you look at the credits list – Mike Marshall and David Grisman and Alison Krauss and more – you can see some of the fingerprints of you and your community, but it was a kind of a longer process of you writing and getting to the point of recording, right?
I’m trying to remember… yeah, probably from the time I started writing the tunes was maybe middle of 1988 and then we recorded them beginning in 1990. So yeah, there was definitely some time in there–
Was there some extrapolating in your head of, “What are these songs going to sound like? Who is going to play them?” What do you remember about deciding on how you were going to make the tunes and who was going to make them with you? Because I have a feeling that was just as important a part of the process as having the material to record.
Once the door opened for me to work with David Grisman, to produce the record and play on it, then I was pretty much like, “What do you think, David?” But I knew I wanted to have Alison on the record and I knew I wanted to have Mike, ‘cause I love his music no matter what he’s playing. I’m the head of the “Mike Marshall Plays Guitar Fan Club.” [Laughs] I love his guitar playing. And Mike was in the Bay Area, so that made perfect sense.
But then, in terms of bringing in the flute or percussion, I hadn’t really thought about those things. When I listen to this record now, it’s surprising really how much of a footprint the record created for what we’re doing now. ‘Cause we’ve got a rhythm section and flute in the band. In some ways, it feels like after all this time we’ve come full circle, at least back to the seed that record planted, sonically, for the music.
That’s so interesting, to be able to look back and trace that throughline, when at that point it may have felt like a one-off to have those instruments and those styles represented in the music. And now it’s present through lots of your work.
Yeah, it is really interesting. There’s obviously things that weren’t included [on Simple Pleasures]. We’ve had piano in the band pretty much since the beginning and we didn’t have piano on that record, obviously. But I don’t know, somehow that doesn’t seem as much of a template thing, the idea of percussion elements and certainly the flute. David really brought that – and the idea of incorporating cello. I’m not sure I was really thinking about those things. My thinking was probably more in the bluegrass-rooted box.
One of the things that’s definitely changed from the original Simple Pleasures to the reissue over those 30-some years is these bonus tracks that you’ve added – such a time capsule. I wanted to ask you about their… I want to say provenance, but I don’t mean to be that formal. Like, how did you hold onto the demos over time, did you always have them in your back pocket?
You know, as we were working on re-master I kept thinking I knew I had a cassette of the demos. I just dug around and I found it! That’s where the actual takes came from, but that between-take talking, to me, is my favorite part of the whole thing. Just hearing Mike and David and Richard Greene, who produced those demos, talking to each other – I just think that’s the coolest thing. That came off the 2-inch tapes that we had. But the 2-inch tapes, we didn’t have the final mixes of the demos. So, it just worked out that we dumped the cassette tapes into this computer and tried to sweeten it a little bit and that’s what we used.
Looking back, this was a big transition point for you with a GRAMMY nomination, winning IBMA Banjo Player of the Year as the first woman to win an instrumental award. Of course this would end up a seminal album and was a really important kickstart for your incredible career. But at that point, back in 1990, were you worried about it? What was your frame of mind as far as expectations for what this album could do and where it could go?
I’m sure that I had no expectations. [Laughs] It was just something that I really wanted to do myself. I wanted to see, could I write a bunch of music and would it stick together? And, can I get some great people to play on it? I was just happy that all those things came together and I got it on a label.
It was just so cool to be on Vanguard Records. The Welk Music Group had bought that catalog and they had just started signing artists. I was one of the first artists they signed to the Vanguard imprint. All that was enough, but then to get a GRAMMY nomination was completely a surprise. I didn’t expect that at all, or the IBMA recognition. That validation was huge, obviously, and it would be for anybody, but for me it was just so huge. I actually took my parents with me to Radio City Music hall for the GRAMMYs and that went a long way toward them accepting my career 180. [Laughs]
It seems like this was definitely proof of concept for, “I can do this banjo thing. I can make banjo records. I can do this as a career.”
And in retrospect, I completely agree. In the moment, none of those things [were certain]. That’s what they say, “Hindsight’s 20/20.” And that’s so true; when you’re in the moment, you just don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Then it turned out great! I feel so lucky every day that I get to play music or create music or help somebody else create music, all that is just such a gift. Because it was not a foregone conclusion, I could easily have gone back to investment banking or something else with my tail between my legs. I’m just so grateful that isn’t the case.
At this point in your career, people think of you as a multi-hyphenate, as somebody who runs a label, is so active in the industry, and picks a really mean banjo. But this project predated Compass Records by several years. Were you already planning that sort of multi-prong, multi-hyphenate approach then? Or do you think it would be a surprise to 1990 Simple Pleasures Alison that you are the multi-hyphenate you are now?
Yeah no, I did not know it was [in my future], I think I was really just taking it a step at a time. At that particular point in time, my goal was just to write tunes and play in Alison [Krauss’] band. Then, when I left her band, I was really at this juncture again. My parents kept saying, “We really think you’d enjoy going to law school!” I was on the edge of applying to Vanderbilt Law School when I got a call from Michelle Shocked looking for a band leader for her world tour in 1992.
So no, I definitely didn’t have the multi-hyphenate, as you put it, plot hatched at all yet. That’s really something that came during that time that I spent with Michelle and then Garry West, who was playing bass in the band [with her as well]. We connected on a personal level, on a business level, and we started talking about “the good life.” Like, how do you make a life out of music? That’s when we started envisioning the different spokes of the wheel, and one of them was a record label and one of them was playing banjo and touring. That 1990s Alison was really just taking in a day at a time.
There’s this quality that musicians talk about a lot, almost to trope-ish levels, of not liking listening to themselves, not liking going back and hearing their own musical ideas or their own creativity from the past. It can be cringey! When you hear your young adult voice on the banjo now, what’s your reaction? Do you bristle at it? Do you feel inspired by it or do you have a moment where you’re like, “I can’t believe that I played that or I did that”? You’ve been inhabiting these tunes to remix and re-master them, not just rubber stamping a reissue. What does that feel like, to be going back and forth between who you are now and who you were then?
I really thought it was going to be like a lot of cringey stuff, like listening to those tracks and thinking, “Oh god, why did I play that?” Instead, I had a completely different feeling, because I felt like I could hear and really remember both the joy of figuring out that I could do this thing and the uncertainty of, “I don’t know if it’s any good or if it’s going to connect with anybody at all.” I can hear both of those things, but at the end of the day, what I felt most was just wishing I could reach back in time and give myself a pat on the back [and say,] “It’s going to work out okay and you’re on the right path.”
Because I think that’s the thing, we’re all looking for our true path. Sometimes it’s really hard to see, and for me, it was definitely hard to see. I really thought that I would be like a respectable business person and instead – well, I hope I’m a respectable business person, but it’s certainly not what I expected to be! [Laughs] I really thought, banker, lawyer, doctor, that kind of thing.
Your portfolio as a banjo player, label head, and producer is so diverse. And I wondered if you feel that’s directly correlated to being a woman who plays the banjo, or if you think there’s something else that’s driven that or informed that? Because I firmly believe marginalized folks in roots music – really anyone who’s not a straight white man – we often have to have very diverse career paths just to make a living, to make ends meet.
One thing I do notice is that big opportunities that opened up for me early on, they were all created for me by other women. That’s really not lost on me – whether it was Alison Krauss or Michelle Shocked. It wasn’t a male band leaders inviting me in. I think that’s really significant and that’s one of the things that I think is interesting about the times we’re in now, the fact that there’s much more diversity – even though it’s not as much as we would like to see. But there are women peppered throughout the ecosystem of the bluegrass community. We’re really in a position to empower and bring up the next generation, where we weren’t so much before. That makes it a really exciting time. I know that’s something that I love to look for opportunities to do.
If I’m producing a record, I want to bring those other voices into the room and let’s raise the next generation. ‘Cause when you come out of investment banking, you can see how adept the guys are at bringing on the next generation of guys, but women in corporate situations just historically haven’t [had the same access]. There are many reasons, it’s not their shortcoming. I think it’s just the circumstances, but now it doesn’t have to be that way. I find that particularly exciting.
34 years later, these folks who played on Simple Pleasures are still part of your community and are collaborators of yours. Back then, were you thinking, “All right, these are my ride or dies! We’re going to go the distance together.” Or was it like, “I can’t believe I get to be in a room with these folks and I hope we can do it again”? How does it feel now to look back and have decades-long relationships with these folks that you made the album with and to have that community be such a present part of the music that you continue to make and the records that you put out?
It’s amazing to look back and to think about the fact that I’ve known Mike Marshall since, gosh, I think I was a teenager the first time I met Mike? To have 50-year-long relationships with some of these people, it’s an amazing thing and it’s such a gift. I think one of the best things about our community is that people can have careers that extend over decades and you can have friendships with people that extend over half a century or more. I’ve known Stuart Duncan since he was 10, so I’ve known him for half a century. It’s crazy and wonderful too. And it’s such an amazing aspect of our community.
I don’t know if it’s the same in other kinds of music, but I think the intergenerational aspect of bluegrass music and roots music just creates for some amazing lifelong friendships. I think it’s not uncommon for people to start when they’re 10 years old – or, Stuart started playing this music when he was six or seven. When I met him when he was 10, he was already a hotshot fiddle player. The fact that you can get into this music as such a youngster, keep playing it, and there’s room for you even when every hair on your head is gray, it’s just a great thing. I think in popular music the window is more narrow.
But in this music, people want to see you play your music whether you’re six or whatever age. How old was Bobby Osborne? He was 92! The record that I did with Bobby, Original, we was 86/87-years-old when we recorded that record. You wouldn’t see an 87-year-old pop artist probably making a record.
For a musician that could easily play every instrument in a standard bluegrass lineup – plus dozens more – it’s remarkable that Darrell Scott put out a post-pandemic record, Old Cane Back Rocker, that decidedly features a band. A picker’s picker and a songwriter’s songwriter, Scott has in the past recorded and released albums that feature other players only sparsely, fleshed out nearly entirely by his own playing. But this time, he wanted to feature his string band.
This wasn’t a post-pandemic realization either or a discovery brought on by the existential crises of the early pandemic, when communal music seemed like a far distant memory. No, Old Cane Back Rocker was actually tracked in 2019. COVID-19 was not the impetus for this collectively-created record, but rather the pickers themselves: Bryn Davies on bass, Matt Flinner on mandolin and banjo, and Shad Cobb on fiddle each inspired this new release, its track list, and its “out of many, one” approach.
For avid fans of this hit songwriter and country music renaissance man, Old Cane Back Rocker will feel like a return of sorts, a homecoming that reminds of many shows at the Station Inn and performances at bluegrass camps and festivals around the country. But, the album is even more fascinating and engaging when contrasted with Scott’s entire catalog, which showcases a diverse and circuitous lineup of production styles, genres and musical aesthetics.
For a new edition of First & Latest, we put Scott’s latest, Old Cane Back Rocker, up against his first release, Aloha From Nashville. As it happens, there’s a recording of Scott’s Travis Tritt-recorded hit, “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” on each album, making for the perfect starting point for our phone conversation.
When you first recorded “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” in the ‘90s, did you expect it would have this longevity? Did you have a feeling you’d still be recording it and performing it or did you think it would be the hit that it’s been?
Darrell Scott: No, hits are hard to distinguish, when you just hear the song – at least for me.
I think a hit has a lot more to do with the business, to make a hit, and it’s not the songwriter. It’s everything that follows after the songwriter. It’s the label. It’s the management. It’s the business connectivity, the promotion, the radio – all that has nothing to do with the songwriter. Zero. I remember saying one time, “A hit is that thing you hear a thousand times.” Repetition has a lot to do with a hit. It’s almost obvious.
Here’s one of the ironies. That song had been recorded three other times on major labels, but was never released before Travis Tritt got it. So tell me this, since it was a hit, why would three acts lose their deal [and not make it to release] with a hit? You see what I’m talking about? What made it a hit was the business machine that makes hits. A song is written by a songwriter. But a hit is made by the powers that be, after the fact.
In my case with that song, I had hurt my back, so I had to be on my back for a week. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t go to sessions. I had to cancel my entire week so that I could lie on the floor, because I couldn’t do nothing else. Honestly, I couldn’t even sit up. After 6 or 7 days when I could [finally] sit up, I was literally just heating rice in a microwave – and considering making soup. Just sitting at the table, which I hadn’t done all week. It was the most blessed thing to do such simple things. And that’s where the song came from.
I wonder what made you want to do another version of that song this time around, with a string band? Because this is a song you’ve recorded and put out in quite a few manifestations.
DS: There’s one really simple answer for that. We recorded this album in August of 2019. In September of 2019, I’d heard two or three months in advance that a cornfield, a corn maze – like those pumpkin farms and apple pickings and that style of thing. There’s one north of Nashville that I heard was going to put my image in their corn maze. They cut my image and then the words, “It’s a great day to be alive” in their corn maze.
I thought, you know what? That, I can’t pass that one up. We’re going to have to make a video of that, and of us doing that song, rather than just lip-syncing to the one from ‘95 – which is actually when I recorded it. Wait, maybe even ‘94, but somewhere way back there. Instead of using that track, it was like, “Hey, I’m recording a string band album. I’m just going to put this in the string band’s hands and we’ll throw it down.”
I think we premiered that video back in the day! Well, the song certainly does beg the question: Does “a great day to be alive” look the same to you now as it did back then? Or, what does “a great day to be alive” look like to you now?
DS: Man, anything that makes you grateful, is a great day to be alive.
If you look at that song, there’s two things I notice in that song. First of all, the things that this person is grateful for are simple things like rice in a microwave, making some soup. They’re pondering, “Hey, I know it’s hard out there in the world, but today’s a good day, and tomorrow may not be.”
It’s just taking that moment, when you realize, “Hey, it is a great day to be alive. I am glad to be alive.” There’s no shame in saying such a thing. And that’s still the case. You know, that wasn’t just in 1994 or ‘95 or ‘97. Any day that you can feel that way is a great day.
You have this uncanny ability to take your listeners into a small, tiny moment like that, a split second moment of gratitude or of grief or of just big feelings and turn it into this whole big song. And what I’m thinking of now is “Inauguration Day” / “The World Is Too Much With Me.” And I’m so glad that ended up on the new record, because I went back to that Facebook video of that song, dozens of times after I first saw it.
DS: I’ve alluded to it so far in our talk, but songs have a life of their own, and they have a timing of their own, and they don’t have a shelf life or preservatives. You know, almost anything’ll start showing mold in about three to four days here in Tennessee. And songs don’t have that kind of shortness.
I try to gravitate towards songs. On a good day or night, to have a song that’s timeless is the goal for me. One that doesn’t just burn out in the second listening or in three months or something like that. That’s what I try to go for. I’m trying to see a bigger picture than, “So-and-so will like this song” while I’m writing it. “Oh, my publisher will like this” or, “I’m going to pitch this to so-and-so.” If you’re thinking that while writing a song, you just sold the song down the river. You don’t have that song any longer, you have a commodity.
I’m not a commodities writer, I’m a songwriter. From an experiential point of view. So, “Inauguration Day” is simply how I felt on inauguration day.
Well, and I felt myself returning to that song over and over. Even though it’s a very specific and very topical song, the repeated line, “The world is too much with me, too much today,” it just feels like such a mantra.
DS: Right? Because some could feel the same way about– uh-oh, I’m blanking on the current president… Biden! But see, some people could feel that about any inauguration day, the day that Biden got in or the day any other president got in and that’s fine. But I absolutely wrote it on Trump’s inauguration day. I couldn’t do anything else, to tell you the truth. The world was too much with me that day. All I could do was I escaped over to my dad’s cabin. I have my dad’s Kentucky cabin here on my Tennessee property, and that’s where I went. I just crawled into a hole, pretty much, but inside the cabin was a five-string guitar that’s supposed to have six. I just played it with a bar, like a Dobro thing.
I came back to the house where there was a signal [to record the video] and there was wind in the microphone and all sorts of unprofessional things. But I then recorded that song within five minutes of being back at the house, having just written the song. That’s what I do. I follow my inclination. There again, I’m not writing a hit. I’m writing from a reaction in that case, just like “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” was a reaction to seven days of lying on a concrete floor.
It’s not my only skillset, but it shows up [in songs] like that. I’m just writing out of a need to write. I need to write. On inauguration day, I had to. I couldn’t do anything else, so I did that and that’s how it felt. It felt like the world was too much with me.
So the other two First & Latest tracks we’re here to talk about are “Title of the Song” from Aloha From Nashville and “Fried Taters” from Old Cane Back Rocker. I feel like the through line here is pretty obvious, the sense of humor that you have in your songwriting and in your music making.
DS: Right, because that’s another part [of my writing,] I do have a humorous side. I have a sarcastic side. I have a pointed, jabby way of observation, because – here’s what’s at the top of the page, above “songwriter” or “musician” and “singer” is observer. I’m first and foremost an observer. Part of that observation is being comedic or pathetic.
That whole first album of mine, Aloha From Nashville, “aloha” means hello and it means goodbye. I wasn’t sure which it was going to be, it being my first record I put out in Nashville. I took a lot of pot-shots at Nashville and the music industry within that album, and that’s why I called it Aloha From Nashville.
“Title of the Song,” it’s just a comedic song that’s so true that it’s almost doesn’t need to be said, except I went ahead and said it, you know? Writing a song about writing a title for a song, we all know the formula. It’s poking fun at that situation. The comedy is there, in both the writing and the production.
The reason I put comedy on this last record with “Fried Taters,” is it’s the same humor, it’s the same comedy. This one’s an instrumental, but I have a voiceover thing going on that’s making the snide commentary, that is kinda the same commentary as 1994 or ‘95, with “Title of the Song.” On “Fried Taters” it’s literally the words of a famous musician in jazz who really put down country music, audibly and frequently. Those are literal quotes from that person. I littered them throughout our little instrumental, to have that attitude.
Was that a tune by you? Did the melody come from you? Was that a band tune?
DS: I had the progression, that I wrote. Matt Flinner is such a great composer, who plays the mandolin and banjo in this group, he has so many records and compositions. He’s an educator, he teaches. He’s just a marvel as a composer. I knew that I could just flip [the chord progression] over to Matt. It had an A section and a B section, but that was about it. So he’s the one who put the melody to it. It’s a co write, but we never sat together with it. I did the chords and sent it off to him and he sent me back the melody and we were ready to record it.
I definitely appreciate you, more than almost anybody else, getting Matt Flinner to play banjo. He is so good on banjo.
DS: Yeah, he’s such a great banjo player and I’m so pleased that he plays it for me. I think probably, the only other time that he played banjo was in Leftover Salmon. Matt Flinner is such a great banjo player and many of us know this about him. I’m so lucky I get him to play banjo on every single gig, I mean, he may be on banjo more than he is on mandolin on our gigs. He’s a fabulous banjo player. I play banjo, too, but I know what a really great banjo player is. Matt’s got the composer ability. He’s got the band leader ability. He’s got the sideman ability, obviously the mandolin and the educator ability, but then he gets in there and and plays banjo that well.
What a lot of people think of first when they think of you is like, a one man band or that you’re a multi-instrumentalist or utility player, but clearly it was so important for you to have a band with you on this album. Why did you intentionally want to make this a collective work, rather than just hiring a band to back you up or playing it all yourself?
DS: Yeah, well, because I wanted this to be a band. I’ve played with these guys now for eight or 10 years. I don’t even know. Anytime a festival wanted me to have, in essence, a bluegrass band or bluegrass instrumentation, these are the very people I’d take. Every single one of them. We did a Live at Station Inn album and it’s the same people. If RockyGrass hired me, or Grand Targhee, or MerleFest, or something like that, this is who I would bring. But we’d never made a studio album. So I knew I had to do that.
Then the other part of it, I wanted it to be a band, but not just in the instrumentation. I want Matt to bring in a tune. I want Shad [Cobb] to bring in a tune. I want participation. I want everybody to sing harmonies, every chance we get. I very mindfully made this a band record – sound, input of songs, and stuff – because I know how to put together a solo album and all that. I’ve done it. I wanted this to be this band, because I know their abilities beyond just being sidemen.
I think bluegrass fans know that you’re a picker’s picker. But sometimes your albums, they’re so song-centered that that fact can fall to the wayside, despite the fact that you’re always improvising and using that vocabulary. So with this album and having the band right in the title, it felt like a return in some ways.
DS: Well, that’s what I wanted and why I wanted to do it with these people, it has everything to do with these exact people.
Here’s one of those ironies of our town or this music. So you what’s supposedly called a “sideman” like Shad Cobb, but Shad can lead his own band. He’s got boxes and boxes of songs and tunes. Matt Flinner has cases of songs and tunes. He used to tour with his trio and they would write a song per day, each of them. And that night they’d perform it!
This is what I’m talking about. These people, they do stuff like that. Where’s the hit making in that, you see what I mean? Just going back to that silly idea that the hit is everything. No, driving 300 miles and having a new tune that night times three people in the band, that’s news to me! Not what’s number one this week.
At 77 years-old, singer and song interpreter extraordinaire Bettye LaVette just keeps going. Her new album, LaVette!, features a set of songs so perfectly suited to the recording artist’s voice and perspective many listeners assume she wrote the material herself. But this collection was all penned by Randall Bramblett, whose songs were first selected by LaVette’s husband of 20 years, Kevin Kiley.
“[Kevin] has actually sought out these tunes for me, about 100 tunes,” LaVette explains via phone. “He narrows it down to about 50 that he knows I’ll like and then I narrow it down to the 10 I’m going to record… But if I could write, these songs are exactly what I would have written.”
Whether she’s covering Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Van Morrison, or Bramblett, LaVette has a striking ability to make a song her own – a hallmark of her style since her earliest days as a recording artist, tracking singles like “He Made a Woman Out of Me” and “Nearer to You” as a teen, now more than 60 years ago. For this installment of First & Latest, we compare and contrast these two early singles from the late ’60s with LaVette’s latest album, which has a special vinyl edition dropping today, Friday, August 18, with a vinyl-exclusive track, “What You Don’t Say” featuring Reverend Charles Hodges of Hi Rhythm on organ. Hear a BGS-exclusive preview of “What You Don’t Say” above.
We reached LaVette via phone to chat about her First & Latest recordings and about what’s changed within her creative process and her perspective over the last 60+ years.
BGS: What goes through your mind when you listen back to those first recordings of yourself from the earliest days of your career? What comes back to you? What do you remember about those times and recording those tracks?
BL: I don’t think I look at it quite so sentimentally. They’re just fleeting. There’s no one big thing. From your questions, I immediately knew that you were probably very young. [Laughs] Because old people don’t think like that. That’s what you might think about, but do you know how many singles I had before I even had an album? The fact that I wasn’t having an album out was not a pleasing situation. Those singles made me think of various things, but it wasn’t on a trajectory, the way you may think about it.
I do know that since this journey of mine started when I was 16 years old, I was thinking something different during that period. You know you age in periods of about five years at a time, so from 16 to about 20 or 21 I saw one thing – and I kind of felt that way about everything! Not just a particular song or anything, that was just my mindset for about five or six years.
[“He Made a Woman Out of Me” and “Nearer to You,”] those songs were back to back and were meant to be an A side and B side. They were the first time I recorded in Nashville, with the people that became the Memphis Horns, with Wayne Jackson as leader. I was in love with him. And that’s what I remember most. [Laughs]
At that juncture, when you were recording those tracks, did you think you would still be singing this many years later? Did you hope you would be? What was your frame of mind?
No. I thought I was going to be a star right after that came out and that would be it. I didn’t think in long range at that point. I’m thinking in long range now. Like, “Am I gonna get through this next tour?” That’s long range now. I saw somebody with a t-shirt the other day that said, “Do not fuck with old people. Life terms in jail do not bother them.” I will kill you!! [Laughs] No…
If somebody had even come up to me and said, “At 77 you will have a new album out.” I would have been like, “Okay… and it’s been large talking to you.” [Laughs] You know, I don’t know that anybody – if they exist they are certainly more brilliant than I – who were thinking at 20 about what they were going to be doing at 77. We’ve got to force ourselves to think that way, we plan better.
Listening to your music made me think about how it has morphed and changed over the years, but also how it has stayed the same. I think there’s so much enjoyment and so much love in what you do, musically. Is that what’s kept you going and kept you in it?
Do you seriously believe, even if this was my husband we were talking about and I married him when I was 16 years old, do you seriously think I’d still be getting giddy every time I saw him? [Laughs]
I don’t know how to do anything else this proficiently! [Laughs] And I would look foolish trying to do something new. I do this well, it would be stupid for me not to do it. And since they didn’t let me get rich, I can’t not do it. But have you listened to the new recording? Have you listened to the lyrics?
Yes! I love it.
[Sings:] “I keep right on rolling, but the thrill is gone…” and I don’t say anything I don’t mean, at this point. [Laughs] No, honey! I’m somebody’s grandmother! If you think I want to put on real tight clothes, a lot of makeup, and go holler and scoot across the stage, you’re wrong. [Laughs]
But I would like at this point, I would like to have what I keep calling a “Ray Charles career,” where they pay a lot of money for the tickets. Everybody’s sitting down. It’s a beautiful venue. And I just sit there and talk to them and sing for an hour to two hours and a half. But, no! [The music business] isn’t even what I think about when I’m not doing it.
[Laughs]
Now, don’t laugh at old people… [Laughs]
The tracks that we chose from the latest album are “Lazy (And I Know It)” and “In the Meantime,” and I wanted to start talking about how you’re known kind of famously as being this song interpreter, somebody who takes songs and makes them your own. How do you find songs? What’s your process for collecting and putting together a collection of songs?
It took me 50 years and kissing a lot of frogs to find a husband. And he loves music. He has everything that everyone has ever recorded in the history of the world. [Laughs] I’m exaggerating, but he is a record historian and a record collector. This still thrills him, even if it doesn’t thrill me. We just celebrated our 20th anniversary and in the 20 years we’ve been together this career, this “fifth career,” I call it, has been going on that whole time. He has actually sought out these tunes for me, about 100 tunes. Then he narrows it down to about 50 that he knows I’ll like and then I narrow it down to the 10 I’m going to record. I could not sit at this point and listen to that much music for any reason in the world.
[Kevin] pretty much knows what I like. When I’m looking for a song, the lyrics have got to be solid. Absolutely solid. I’m too old to look in your face and say bullshit. As I said, I mean the lyrics that I sing. This young man, [Randall Bramblett,] he wrote all the tunes on this album, he said, “Do all the tunes have to be about you?” I said, “Yes.” [Laughs] He said, “Okay…”
But listen, I’ve lived 77 years now. There isn’t a genre of song you could write that wouldn’t pertain to me at this point. And that is why there are so many different genres of songs on the album. I picked the ones out of them that that pertain to me.
Everybody keeps saying in interviews, “Did you write the songs? Did you write them for you? Did you write them together?” None of those things are true! [Bramblett] and I are about two years apart in age. He’s the only person I know who’s had more flop records than I have. [Laughs] He’s done the same thing, devoted his whole life to it for 50 or 60 years, and he pretty much feels the way I feel about this. There were adjustments I had to make in the tunes, but if I could write, these songs are exactly what I would have written.
I’m very pleased with them. When you talk about the tunes, like when you when you were talking about “He Made a Woman Out of Me,” since I was 20, I have just become such a different singer now. The basics of me have always been there, but I’ve broadened so and become such a different thing, a different woman. “He Made a Woman Out of Me,” by now it’s almost a throwaway, a novelty [song] on stage. I sing it when I’m somewhere where people are familiar with it, but it’s no longer a part of my show. It’s now just a part of my life. And my recordings’ lineage.
I wanted to ask you about “Lazy (And I Know It),” because I make this joke constantly lately that laziness is a radical act–
You know what, I’m writing this down – and I’m slapping you! [Laughs] A radical act! [Turns to her husband,] He said “Laziness is a radical act!”
You know what? White people associate laziness with Black people so much, I took the tune out of the list 50 times. [Laughs] I’d take it off, then I’d put it back. I put it back [ultimately] because I was thinking about – girlfriend in Blazing Saddles… She’s laying in the bed. She’s like, “I’m just tired.” Wasn’t she named Lili Von… something? But I thought about it and I think that’s the attitude that I wanna have about it. Oh yes, Lili Von Shtupp!
Yes!!
I entertained myself with it. When I could make it entertaining to me and I got away from that initial feeling, then it was just fun. And it’s just fun to do on stage. I love it.
What do you do when you need to be lazy when you need to take a vacation? What’s your what’s your favorite way to relax?
Oh no, I just come home. I like to be at home. I’ve got 50 plants in the house and with summer, I’ve got 1,084! Me and the deer have been having a constant battle over whose hostas they are, mine or theirs. I love my home. If my mother had lived to know that I would love being at home, she could have lived to be 200 years old, because she could have just been so satisfied.
I don’t want to go out to dinner. I entertain at parties, at a place where people are having a good time. And I drink and I eat and I don’t want to do that when I come home. I want to taste my food that I cook and you know, but I’m not that anxious to look decent and go out and have dinner.
(Editor’s Note: BGS is excited to debut a brand new column and feature series, First & Latest, which examines the discographies of artists, musicians, and bands by comparing and contrasting their first album against their latest album.)
Chicago-based, long-running bluegrass outfit Special Consensus have been making records since 1979, when they released their debut, self-titled album. Since then, they’ve put out about 20 records – and they’ve criss-crossed the country and the globe spreading their modern-yet-traditional, hard-driving sound. Banjo player Greg Cahill, who is also a bluegrass industry leader and community builder, is the band’s sole remaining original member and, across those decades, has been the linchpin, the keystone of what has become a true legacy act.
To mark the occasion of their latest release, Great Blue North (released May 12 on Compass Records), we compare and contrast the band’s debut record with this new project with Cahill – it’s First & Latest, from BGS.
What goes through your mind when you hear a song from that first record, like “Like a Train?”
Greg Cahill: I cannot believe it was so long ago! This was our first time in a recording studio and we knew nothing about the process of making a record. It was truly a complete learning experience and we had a wonderful engineer who was a master at finding the exact place to punch in, and he even manually lined up and spliced the ¾” tape on one of the songs so we could use the first part of the one pass and the second part of a later pass. The album is pretty basic and far from top notch, but we did our best and actually sold a good number of that vinyl record.
At that point, did you ever think this band would have such longevity?
We had no idea about where our journey would take us. Special C actually formed sometime in 1973 – two of us were grad students and two had full time jobs. By 1975, I had finished my masters degree and was playing in local pubs and venues while working a full time job in social work, and all I wanted to do was play the banjo. It was 1975 when bass player Marc Edelstein and I decided we wanted to try playing full time – to play and tour as much as possible to get this bluegrass bug out of our system and go back to “real” jobs/life in a couple years. The other two members decided not to join us for this ride, so we found a guitar player and a mandolin player and quit our day jobs to devote full time to playing music. Marc left the band a few years later but the plan didn’t work for me – the bluegrass “addiction” only became stronger. I just “kept on keepin’ on” with no set time limit on my musical journey and now here I am today, never dreaming I would still be going strong with no set end time.
What do you think has been the key to your spanning the decades in bluegrass – besides yourself, that is!
I have been most fortunate to have had some great musicians/people in the band over the years – and still do have wonderful bandmates. Of course I have experienced the ups and downs of playing full time – it was always worrisome when a band member left or when there were slow times but we always found side jobs and teaching opportunities to keep us moving forward. I guess I am just too stubborn to even think about not playing because I love making music so much.
There’s an energy, a drive, even in this earliest recording that you’ve continued to carry with you. Where do you think that comes from? It reminds me of classic Seldom Scene and Johnson Mountain Boys, like you’re always leaning a bit forward into the groove.
I found bluegrass music through folk music (Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Limelighters, etc.) and eventually Pete Seeger – whose music prompted me to buy a long-neck 5-string banjo and then a 6-string guitar and then a 12-string guitar. I played in a folk trio with friends in college, and one day I heard “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” and immediately knew I had to learn how to play the bluegrass banjo. I found the Earl Scruggs book and was obsessed with playing the banjo every free moment of my life and it was his drive and perfect tone and timing that overwhelmed me. Then I heard J.D. Crowe and he became my model and eventually my mentor of sorts, even before I ever met him. This was in the early 1970s. New Grass Revival also grabbed my ear, and I spent hours trying to learn J.D. solos but also Courtney Johnson licks, determined to not lose the drive when playing non-Scruggs/Crowe licks because at that time many folks felt that Scruggs style playing was the only “right” way to play the 5-string. It has always been about the drive for me – and I learned that from J.D. as well – he always had drive, even on slow songs that he played with superb finesse.
“The Singer” feels like that classic move of a bluegrass band playing a country song, can you talk a bit about what you remember about choosing that track and recording it?
We were city boys playing in big city pubs and venues where the general public had no idea what bluegrass music was. Although we always loved the traditional bluegrass songs and tunes, we felt we had to play some material that the general public might recognize and eventually really like our brand of bluegrass music. So we included old rock songs, country songs, and jazzy swing songs in the repertoire along with the traditional songs. I would say we actually became more traditional over the years, because we were building a local and then national and then international audience while maintaining a varied repertoire.
When I heard “The Singer” I immediately wanted to include that song in our repertoire – the song is so well written, the words are so poignant, especially knowing that Neal Allen wrote the song about his father Red Allen and also that Neal died of pneumonia while on the road. As Bill Monroe would say, “It’s a powerful number.”
Now, about the latest album, Great Blue North, what inspired you to cross the Great Lakes for this album and do Canadian bluegrass?
We are so fortunate to be on the Compass Records label and especially to have Alison Brown as our producer. When we begin preparations to record, the four of us and Alison begin our search for new material. We are basically on a bi-annual release schedule with the label and one of the songs Alison thought would be a good song for us to include on our 2020 release was “Blackbird,” written by the great Canadian songwriter/singer/guitar player J.P. Cormier. We loved the song but as we gathered material for that release the theme shifted to featuring a nod to Chicago, where the band has been based since beginning in 1975, because 2020 was the 45th band anniversary. Hence the 2020 “Chicago Barn Dance” release. We knew we would record “Blackbird” at some point, and after the pandemic shut-down we wanted to let folks know we were still alive and well and anxious to get back on the road, so we recorded “Blackbird” and Compass released it as a single. As we began the search for material for a new recording, Alison mentioned that it might be a good time to give a nod to our Canadian friends — since we have played there so much over the past three decades — and we all agreed. We then decided to include only songs written by Canadian writers and also to ask many of our Canadian musician friends to perform with us on some of the tracks.
Do you think being such a long-running Midwestern-based group informed the new album for you? And your connections to this material?
I think we may have had more opportunities to tour in Canada because of our Midwestern base. We did not play the big festivals when we first began touring there – we played shows for bluegrass associations and community centers in Toronto, Ontario (only an 8+ hour drive from Chicago), Winnipeg, Manitoba (13+ hour drive) and Calgary, Alberta (25-hour drive). We would head directly to Toronto or work our way through Minnesota to the Canadian gigs, which helped us get invited to the festivals. We also learned about the Canadian songwriters through so many of the great Canadian musicians whom we met and became friends with through this networking.
To me, a throughline between your first and latest albums is the arrangements, the way your band is always playing as a tight-knit ensemble, not just a handful of instruments sounding simultaneously. Where do you get the inspiration for the way your individual parts play off of and dialogue with each other?
I think we have always been focused on the power of tight and interesting arrangements. This again goes back to the fact that because we are from Chicago – not a bluegrass hub in the eyes of the general public – we had to make sure to keep the attention of the audience and not have songs begin to all sound alike. The arrangements give the band the opportunity to be more creative and to showcase the tight vocal and instrumental harmonies. I have always wanted an outside/non-band member producer to give us an objective opinion about the sound, the material and the performance. We have always had very good producers and I must say that Alison Brown is a phenomenal producer who has brought the band to another level. From our perspective, she basically considers each song on our recording to be unique and “special” – there are no “filler” tracks, and we spend however much time necessary to make each track stand out.
“Snowbird” will go down as one of Special C’s tastiest cover songs, do you have favorite covers from across the years? It’s kind of a hallmark of your band!
Although we try not to be seen as a cover band, we have chosen to cover some songs from artists that we feel we can make sound like a bluegrass song, and especially sound like a Special C song. We have been most fortunate to have been given some great songs by many great songwriters over the years and we have also chosen some songs from other genres that we thought we could have fun recording and that our fans would enjoy hearing. “Snowbird” was one of the first songs on our list once we decided on the Canadian theme after recording “Blackbird” – my wife had suggested that song many times and now it seemed like the perfect song to feature Greg Blake’s fabulous voice. Some of the covers we have done on past recordings include “Viva Las Vegas,” “Ramblin’ Fever,” “Dream of Me,” “I Cried Myself Awake,” “Big River,” “Sea of Heartbreak,” “Looking Out My Back Door,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “City of New Orleans,” our entire Country Boy: A Tribute to John Denver recording, “Alberta Bound” and several other songs on the Great Blue North release.
I must say, that as the years pass so quickly and the time between the first record and the current recording becomes so long I realize how fortunate and blessed I have been to be able to keep making music with so many wonderful musicians/people/friends. At times I have felt that the first recording was below the professional level but because of this interview and going back to listen to it, I now truly understand that we can only do our best throughout this journey, be thankful that we are able to keep growing and learning and appreciate our accomplishments no matter how insignificant they may seem at any given time.
Photo Credit: Jamey Guy
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