Tag: grateful dead
Mixtape: Randy Miles’ Songs for Time Travel
In every season of life we have songs we come back to over and over. Songs that keep some fire going deep down for one reason or another. A lyric, a melody, a groove, a voice, or just a feeling or memory tied to the song. Like the way the smell of hot dogs on the grill transport me to summer, or the smell of old mothballs remind me of playing in my grandparents RV parked in the back lot, or the smell of fresh chocolate chip cookies takes me somewhere I don’t quite remember, but it takes me. Songs are tied to memory, feelings, and sensations in the same way. They allow us to travel in time.
When I started writing songs for Chaos & Commotion, I was in a moment of life where I was processing a lot of old baggage from childhood and trying to find the words for it all. I guess I’m still in that place. The title track of the album specifically walks through my childhood home and explores the landscape and characters within it, as well as the feeling of freedom and lack of structure I had growing up. Which at the time, felt like the coolest thing ever. Many of the songs in this album are also me trying to make sense of the world feeling like it’s on fire. Has the human race always felt like the world was on fire and doomed for implosion throughout history? Or is this moment specifically pretty fucked? Aside from contemplations around childhood, the album explores toxic masculinity, the arbitrariness of the lines and biases we draw, finding inspiration and momentum in the mundane, and the realities of blue-collar life in rural New England.
Bringing it back to this idea that music can transport us to different moments in life, often the songwriter is doing their own version of time travel as they dive into some past lived experience and start the archaeological dig on the details. A lot of my writing comes from a place of this sensory memory. This playlist could probably map out good chunks of my life. Many of these have come to me in the last year or two and I will continue to carry them with me to revisit this moment of great creative expansion I’m currently in. Many of these songs are not even necessarily my favorite songs from these artists to date, but they are just what I needed to hear in that moment and serve as little bookmarks for the different chapters in life. Here is what, where, or when these songs transport me to. — Randy Miles
“Chaos & Commotion” – Randy Miles
My childhood home in Woodbury, Connecticut. It describes the space and characters in the home I grew up in.
“Little Peace” – Lou Hazel
This song moves me deeply and reminds me a lot of the rural New England I grew up in. In general, Lou has this ability to portray rural American life in a way I didn’t know I was searching for. Riot of the Red was a go-to album for me while looking for inspiration for the album.
“Angeles” – Elliott Smith
I’m not sure how I came across the album Either/Or (maybe the library), but I have distinct memories of sitting at my mom’s chunky old ’90s computer that had a CD-ROM drive and shitty speakers while finding my love for lo-fi alt pop sadcore music at age 13. This was probably a gateway drug into my emo years.
“The Stable Song” – Gregory Alan Isakov
This song brings me back to my first year studying human ecology at the College of the Atlantic in Maine. Gregory was in constant rotation for me and I played this song often at college open mics. I really fell in love with modern folk music through his music and playing his songs helped me find my own voice as a solo performer.
“All My Days” – Alexi Murdoch
My friend, Mark Cranford, was the drummer for a hardcore band we played in back in the day called Trees to Towers. He handed me the album Time Without Consequence one day after a rehearsal and I’m not sure if I ever returned it, I was so in love with it. This song broke the trance and hyperfocus I had on the hardcore/screamo music scene at the time and brings me back to my early 20s.
“Is This Love” – Bob Marley & The Wailers
My beautiful wife Natalia and I’s wedding song. This song transports me to our wedding reception party where I think we both probably drank too much tequila and then headed out on a three-month honeymoon cross-country road trip the next morning.
“La trama y el desenlace” – Jorge Drexler
Jorge Drexler is a poet above all. He was a doctor in Uruguay for some years and then decided to move to Spain and pursue his music full time. I was introduced to his music when I first met my wife, living with her and our best friend from Bolivia, Klever, in a house on Mount Desert Island, Maine. That is the year I learned Spanish, and fell in love with Latin music.
“Sailor” – Randy Miles
This was one of the first songs I wrote for the album in 2024 and it was a real catalyst for me in my writing. It was also the first song we recorded when we got in the studio and I think it really set the tone and creative momentum for the rest of our time in the studio.
“Act Appalled” – Circa Survive
The peak of autumn in New England. Driving through Litchfield, Connecticut, area smoking Camels (gross) with the windows down and the chilly autumn air in my face. For some reason, Circa Survive generally brings me back to Autumn, my favorite season.
“Old Pine (Every Kingdom)” – Ben Howard
Summer love on an island in Maine. I learned to play this song to impress a girl. Then, Ben Howard ended up impressing me, and he is now one of my favorite artists to this day.
“Feeling” – Billie Marten
This song is beautiful and has been on repeat for me over the last year. I think often when I’m really hooked on a song, it’s usually because there’s some essence there that I wish I could capture in my own songs. It’s also right on theme here. She speaks about old memories tied to specific sensory experiences.
“Brokedown Palace” – Grateful Dead
My childhood best friend’s funeral at 26 years old. Mikey was my ride or die. He left us too soon, but that’s how it goes for special souls.
“The Wolves” – Watchouse
Watchouse was a gateway drug for me from folk into more traditional folk and bluegrass music. If you’ve never watched them live, you need to. It is a transcendent experience. Watchouse got me through a lot of my college years and inspired me to pick up a mandolin and start my first folk/trad band.
“Deep in Love” – Bonny Light Horseman
This song brings me back to right before the pandemic traveling to Northfield, Minnesota, to work on a friend’s album. JT Bates happened to be drumming on the album and I was pretty stoked at the synchronicity there. Fast forward 5 years and JT ended up playing drums on half of Chaos & Commotion.
Photo Credit: @jonieonfilm
Billy Strings – Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass
Billy Strings sits down with Tom Power for a special live episode of Toy Heart recorded at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the fall of 2025.
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Billy traces his journey from growing up playing bluegrass with his father to becoming one of the most influential musicians in the genre today. He talks about the moment he rediscovered bluegrass as a teenager, the artists who shaped his playing, including Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, Larry Sparks, and Jimmy Martin, and how moving to Traverse City, Michigan, opened his eyes to the possibility of making a living as a musician.
He also reflects on discovering the improvisational side of bluegrass through bands like Greensky Bluegrass and String Cheese Incident, learning to appreciate the Grateful Dead and other forms of improvisational music, and why he believes a great song doesn’t need to be changed to connect with a massive audience.
Billy talks openly about poverty, addiction in his family, and the role music played as a coping mechanism and survival tactic. He explains why he isn’t chasing fame or Grammys as much as he is running away from the life he once knew, and why being an ambassador for bluegrass has become one of his life’s greatest purposes.
Photo Credit: Dana Trippe
The Stanley Brothers Clinch Country’s Top Honor
They started playing music as farm-bred young boys growing up amid the Appalachian mountains of Southwestern Virginia, sometimes using sticks of firewood to mime picking banjo and guitar.
A few years later, Ralph and Carter Stanley embarked on a 20-year professional journey as the Stanley Brothers. The music they created starting in 1946 lives on, bringing them widespread fame. It survives in their hundreds of live and studio recordings, and as a deep influence heard in cover performances by artists from Bob Dylan to Billy Strings, Vince Gill to Patty Loveless, Emmylou Harris to Ricky Skaggs, Elvis Costello to Dierks Bentley.
Carter, the older brother, lead singer, and guitarist, was born in 1925 and died tragically young in 1966, ending the brothers’ career as a duo. Banjoist and tenor singer Ralph, born in 1927, lived until 2016, building a legendary career of his own.
In March 2026, the Stanley Brothers achieved the highest honor available in this field, membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Their formal induction in October recognizes not only their distinctive body of creative, deep-roots music, but also the strong impact they have had on performers within and outside of bluegrass.
For years, Carter Stanley’s daughter Jeanie had led legions of family and fans to press acceptance of the brothers by the Country Music Association voter pool that picks new Hall of Fame inductees. In regular social media posts, Jeanie described previous bypasses of the act as ridiculous and called upon followers to write and implore CMA insiders to honor her father and uncle.
From a bluegrass point of view, it didn’t make sense to overlook an act recognized as one of a few foundational artists of the style, along with Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs, who were inducted in 1970 and 1985, respectively. But voters in the Veterans category of membership choose among acts eligible 45 years after each emerged in country music. This formula meant that the Stanley Brothers had been eligible since 1991, but also allowed more recent “veteran” stars such as Tanya Tucker to be honored in increasing numbers, with each year that passed.
For all the Stanley Brothers’ authenticity and artistic merit, they only enjoyed one Billboard chart hit, a jokey number called “How Far to Little Rock.” It says something that the Music-City-based CMA honored the brothers even though they never moved to Nashville and never joined the Grand Ole Opry during their years together. (Ralph became a member of the historic show in 2000.)
All of that aside, the Stanley Brothers’ Hall of Fame induction illustrates their increasing recognition as a cornerstone act, each year growing new legions of followers, both in America and far beyond. String-band-music phenomenon Billy Strings, who regularly performs for houses of more than 10,000 fans, features songs at each show that were first composed or brought to wide attention by Ralph and Carter Stanley. There’s no way to measure how much that exposure means.
Overall, the richness of the Stanleys’ sound and legacy means it pops up over and over again, not just in bluegrass or country settings, but also among pop acts. A story circulates that the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards once mouthed “Stanley Brothers!” to a bandmate to illustrate the mournful backup sound he wanted for a performance.
In more formal recognition, the Library of Congress added the brothers’ rendition of the Albert Brumley composition “Rank Stranger” in 2008 to the prestigious National Recording Registry, an annual listing that “highlights the richness of the nation’s audio legacy.”
Elsewhere, “The brothers rose to fame performing traditional religious songs in an Appalachian bluegrass style marked by tight, high-pitched harmonies and strongly influenced by Bill Monroe,” their Encyclopedia Britannica entry reads in part.
Why include this Britannica language, even though it overemphasizes their gospel orientation? The Stanley Brothers’ acknowledgement in a top-rank information source shows the distance the brothers covered during their million-mile journey from a tough childhood, through countless challenges, to creative triumphs that have kept creating new fans in recent years.
Down Home
Born in rural Dickenson County, Virginia, the boys were raised by banjo-picking mother Lucy and ballad-singing father Lee Stanley among mountainside farms and busy lumber camps, living in an atmosphere of homegrown food, spring-drawn water, and lamplit rooms through their early years. Church music, sung unaccompanied in the traditional style, became a mainstay of the brothers’ own music, along with Celtic-derived story songs, neighbors’ country-string music, and eventually the commercial country music heard on a battery-powered radio. The music they learned emerged as what’s now called “pre-bluegrass” until Ralph and Carter first heard the riveting sounds of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs on WSM’s Grand Ole Opry.
Starting out on country radio stations such as Bristol’s legendary WCYB, the Stanley Brothers recorded their early sounds for the busy regional label Rich-R-Tone, then graduated to major labels Columbia and Mercury before winding up on Starday and King, as well as a handful of smaller outlets.
Many standards of bluegrass and country music, such as “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow,” “The White Dove,” “Rank Stranger,” “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” “Pretty Polly,” “Harbor of Love,” “Angel Band,” and “Could You Love Me One More Time,” were written or adapted by Carter and Ralph Stanley.
Both brothers wrote songs, but it is Carter who has been recognized as perhaps the most gifted songwriter in the style. It wasn’t until the folk revival and the later country traditionalist movement that Stanley Brothers songs commonly reappeared in versions by other artists.
Covers by the Hundreds
Carter Stanley had co-written songs with bluegrass founder Monroe, and pitched his song “Going to the Races” in 1957 to the recently formed Washington, D.C.-based act the Country Gentlemen. The Gents’ recording of this song, released by the Stanleys in 1958 as “Gonna Paint the Town,” represented an early example of what would become hundreds of the brothers’ songs reflected in other artists’ recordings.
Bob Dylan’s 1962 release of “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow” hasn’t been definitively linked to the Stanley Brothers, but decades of the folk legend’s work have reflected their influence. He’s performed a batch of Stanley-connected tunes – including “Hallelujah I’m Ready” and “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave” during his endless touring years. Dylan recorded “Rank Strangers” and “Driftin’ Too Far From the Shore” as solos, and “The Lonesome River” in a 1998 duet with Ralph.
Brotherly innovation, including the skyscraping “high-baritone” harmony, influenced members of the West Coast bluegrass scene going back to the 1960s, Byrds founding member Chris Hillman once said in an interview. The striking harmonies produced by Carter and Ralph likely played a role in the two-part sound the Byrds came up with when recording their first hit, Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he said.
The influential Johnson Mountain Boys from the Washington, D.C., area helped move bluegrass back to its roots from a newgrassy direction in the early 1980s, serving up such Stanleys classics as “I Don’t Want Your Rambling Letters,” “Harbor of Love,” and “Our Last Goodbye.”
Elvis Costello, an artist who shook pop music in the 1970s, has been best known for hard-hitting, sometimes abrasive New Wave pop and rock. In a 2015 interview with New York Times writer A.O. Scott, Costello remembered early days embracing all sorts of country music: “From the ’70s through the mid-’80s, I absorbed all the American music, not just country music like Nashville country music or Bakersfield country music, but older, more traditional styles, even the Stanley Brothers and that stuff.”
Jammin’ Stanley-style
Before Billy Strings arose, a swath of bluegrass artists brought awareness of the Stanley Brothers to new generations of fans through cover renditions. The Grateful Dead, especially co-founder Jerry Garcia, cited the Stanleys as an inspirational source, adding fuel to the jam-band movement that in recent years has brought giant crowds to bluegrass.
Del McCoury, also a Stanleys believer, draws mighty crowds to his festival, DelFest, where mashups of straight bluegrass and Dead-driven improvisational bands are common. Bluesy Larry Sparks, a onetime member of the Stanleys’ Clinch Mountain Boys band, cooks up his own mix of gospel, country and ‘grass, also citing the brothers’ influence on any music he produces.
Fellow Country Music Hall of Fame members Emmylou Harris, Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley also served as key testifiers to the greatness of Ralph and Carter Stanley.
Disciples since their youth, Skaggs and Whitley were overheard by Ralph Stanley in 1970 singing note-for-note recreations of the duets of Ralph and Carter. Ralph was an hour late to his own gig, due to a flat tire; when he arrived, he initially thought the venue was playing a Stanley Brothers recording. Still in their teens, they would go on to tour, record and release music with Ralph Stanley as members of the Clinch Mountain Boys.
After a starry career as a bluegrass sideman, Skaggs had early hits as a solo country artist that included versions of the brothers’ “I’ll Take the Blame” and “Could You Love Me One More Time.” His 1997 roots-return CD, Bluegrass Rules, a Grammy winner, included a large helping of Stanleys numbers, including “Think of What You’ve Done” and “Midnight Train.” In concert appearances years before the Stanley Brothers’ Hall of Fame induction, Skaggs paid tribute to the act and talked about how richly they deserved the honor.
Emmylou Harris, Skaggs’s onetime employer in her Hot Band, also helped advance the Stanleys’ legend through her recording of their songs. Her dedication to country and bluegrass produced cuts of “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn” and “Who Will Sing for Me.” Harris even took part in a gospel album and act called “Angel Band” along with Vince Gill, Emory Gordy Jr., and Carl Jackson. And Harris and Skaggs joined voices on the Stanleys’ “Could You Love Me (One More Time),” on Skaggs’s first solo album in 1979.
Why the Stanleys?
There’s more to the long reach of the Stanley Brothers even than the captivating sounds of the brothers’ voices, the hard-hitting stories of their songs, and the driving rhythm of their instrumentals. Fans sum it up as authenticity.
When country music veered into steel-driven honky-tonk and later the smoothness of the Nashville sound, the Stanley Brothers stuck mostly to the music they’d come up with in their early days. Oh, there was the steel guitar of “If That’s the Way You Feel,” the Elvis-esque sounds of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and the R&B side-trip of “Finger Poppin’ Time,” but Ralph and Carter stayed almost entirely acoustic, always leaning on their hardcore mountain sound, true to their rural roots.
This quality of authenticity touched countless musicians and fans on first hearing. Patty Loveless shared an IBMA Award with Ralph Stanley for their recording of “Pretty Polly” on the all-star Clinch Mountain Country album and even helped inducted him into the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium in January 2000. Released later that year, the inclusion of “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” (newly recorded by the Foggy Bottom Boys) and the a cappella rendition of “O Death” by Ralph Stanley were highlights on the multi-million-selling soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, bringing new attention to their style of roots music.
For a California punk musician named Gillian Welch, one Stanley Brothers cassette was all it took for her to find “her music.” In 2018, Americana star Welch and partner David Rawlings were among the performers at an evening tribute to Ralph and the Stanley Brothers at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, with country star Dierks Bentley as host. The event was a celebration of a Ralph Stanley exhibition opening at the museum.
That night, Bentley brought on the Traveling McCourys, the act starring Del’s boys and other musicians, as well as the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. Others on the show included Ralph Stanley’s son, known as Ralph II, bluegrass duo the Gibson Brothers, and the hot-picking Justin Moses and Sierra Hull.
The evening of music from a diverse group of performers shone with songs such as “I’ll Just Go Away,” “Could You Love Me One More Time,” “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” and the first Stanleys hit, “Little Glass of Wine.” It reflected a theme universal to myriads of musicians and fans, that the Stanley Brothers’ music hits so hard and so deep that it has served as a foundation for followers going back generations.
“Some of the first songs I ever saw played on a guitar were Stanley Brothers songs,” Auerbach said, according to Rolling Stone.
Closer to the present and into the future, Compass Records this year announced an all-star tribute album marking the 80th anniversary of the Stanley Brothers’ debut as a performing act in 1946. Last year, the label gave a hint of the disc’s content with a single release of “Ralph’s Banjo Special” featuring Kristin Scott Benson, Gena Britt, and Alison Brown.
Through the years, fans have treasured the forthright values of the Stanley Brothers and admired the ways they combined the traditional music they loved with creative new ways of addressing those sounds. Sad to say, the Stanley Brothers endured some hard times just to play the music they had fashioned, instead of changing their sound to follow the whims of music-business fashion. Carter once addressed their steadfast point of view with a note in a publication written to be mailed to their fans.
“For the past few years, we have tried to bring to you country people the kind of entertainment you enjoy,” Carter wrote. “In doing this we have been criticized by some for not being more modern. Since we were raised with this old-time music as part of our background, we have never had and still do not feel any desire to change our way of playing.”
Sticking to their guns remained the Stanley Brothers’ trademark through their two decades of touring, performing, and recording together. Some 60 years after Carter’s death ended those years, the Stanley Brothers’ legacy has paid off for them with membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame among country music’s most highly esteemed acts.
Photo courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame ® and Museum.
Jamgrass in July
In bluegrass and string band music in 2026, one thing is clear: jamgrass is the center of gravity.
Once a decade or so, give or take – this is bluegrass, not arithmetic – our cozy little niche genre and its neighbors enjoy a renaissance. Many experienced the O Brother, Where Art Thou? bump that bluegrass enjoyed after the hit film (and its beloved soundtrack) was released in 2000. Before that, the best-selling bluegrass album of all time was Old & In the Way, a self-titled debut album released in 1975 by Peter Rowan, Jerry Garcia, Vassar Clements, David Grisman, and John Kahn. That was another prominent spike on the bluegrass-popularity-line-graph.
Alison Krauss & Union Station brought hundreds of thousands of new listeners into these genres in the ’90s and ’00s – as they continue to do, to this day. Many count AKUS as another such inflection point for bluegrass. As well as the (capital F, capital R) Folk Revival, Flatt & Scruggs appearing on The Beverly Hillbillies, and even the earliest days of the genre when Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys were superstars, electrifying audiences on the Grand Ole Opry, over the airwaves, and across the country. Since the genre’s earliest days, bluegrass enjoys these periodic notoriety tidal waves in mainstream, popular culture driven by its charm, virtuosity, and “wholesome” perception.
In the 2010s and 2020s, the most striking inflection point for bluegrass is certainly jamgrass. While the genre’s popularity in the new millennium has been demonstrably multivalent – in the social media age, the music’s fanbase has grown by leaps and bounds no matter the genre or subgenre – jamgrass still stands out as the primary popularity driver in the space. And even more so as an economic driver. As vertical video advances across the internet as the most commonly ingested content format, jamgrass is proliferating right along with it, young folks and acolytes connecting, combusting, and fueling the jamgrass charge.
Billy Strings is surely the zenith of the form at this point in time, as we all know, but – as he himself readily will admit – he stands on mighty shoulders, the roots of jamgrass reaching far, far back. By some measures, its seeds were planted in the Big Mon’s time, too, but it really only began to coalesce as a slang term, subgenre, and an informal set of style points and signifiers from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s. In the early days of bluegrass, decades prior, many acts we see as legends and forebears – and many inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame – were just as likely to call their music “country” or “hillbilly” or other terms as they were to use “bluegrass.” Similarly, in jamgrass, the earliest acts to pioneer these sounds often didn’t use the term at all, or still to this day aren’t routinely categorized as jamgrass. But wherever bluegrass jams were brewing – especially at bluegrass and music festivals, where lineups were often eclectic and creative cross pollination was common – jamgrass was being grown.
Who was the first jamgrass band? Was it the Earl Scruggs Revue, when Earl and his sons grew out their hair, played anti-war songs, and toured colleges? Was it the Country Gentlemen or the Seldom Scene? Was it New Grass Revival – a choice candidate, yes, but their music could indicate they are a generation (or two or three) further evolved than jamgrass’s missing link would be. We have many fine specimens in this historical record, but who is the common ancestor of the form? John Hartford? Mmm… not quite. Or perhaps it wasn’t the Revue, but Flatt & Scruggs themselves, when their material began to shift towards the end, and Lester started eyeing the door…? Or was it the Grateful Dead? Well, it certainly wouldn’t exist as a genre or subgenre without them, but were they the first to do the thing? No.
David Grisman, Tony Rice, Clarence White, Peter Rowan, Vassar Clements, Tony Trischka, and so many other pickers who learned at the feet of the first generation – literally and figuratively; or on stage beside them – would go on to become gems in the crown of jamgrass and foundational figures. But none perfectly fit underneath the moniker’s umbrella. (That’s certainly a beauty of the format, it almost always requires one foot in bluegrass, old-time, and string band and the other foot as far afield as hips will allow.) Very few of these examples would use the term, ever, across their careers.
As the generations further unrolled, into the future, Tim O’Brien, Leftover Salmon, the String Cheese Incident, Railroad Earth, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Sam Bush Band, and more gave rise to Greensky Bluegrass, Yonder Mountain String Band, the Infamous Stringdusters, Trampled by Turtles, Hot Buttered Rum, Fruition – and suddenly there wasn’t just a critical mass of acts making Bonnaroo-ready bluegrass, it was becoming a tradition unto itself. As these things happen, jamgrass has snowballed, its exponential growth bringing us to 2026 and a veritable golden age of the form. But it’s still just getting started.
Billy Strings may be the one filling arenas, but wherever you take a sample of bluegrass across the States, around the world, at festivals or venues, or on TikTok or reels, jamgrass is going to be there. Mountain Grass Unit are quickly on the rise, and Bronwyn’s live shows are excellent, charming, infinitely ingestible jamgrass. Molly Tuttle brings psychedelia and the Grateful Dead with her into her new pop-inflected era, Sierra Hull jams out with Cory Wong on tour, and Tatiana Hargreaves guests with the Dave Matthews Band – who, it turns out, were themselves a jamgrass band the entire time. AJ Lee & Blue Summit aren’t quite a jamgrass band, except they totally are – especially in the way they infuse California and the Bay Area into everything they do, drawing a direct line from Garcia, Grisman, Rowan, et. al. to their own songs and sounds today. Like Sam Grisman Project, too, who interconnect jamgrass generations and all the many circles of its Venn diagram.
Magoo, Clay Street Unit, Fireside Collective, Kitchen Dwellers, Shadowgrass, and countless others have never known pre-jamgrass identities as bands. They’ve always been jamgrass bands. It’s fascinating. We may forget this fact in the face of its obviousness, but we’re watching the conception of a new genre of music happen in real time.
It’s truly a golden age of jamgrass and there’s oh-so-much-more to explore. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface.
All month long, we’re celebrating Jamgrass in July on BGS! Check out our Essential Jamgrass Playlist below – and please let us know who we forgot and what songs we missed! – dive into our collection of 30 Jamgrass Sitch Sessions, read about the origins and evolution of jamgrass, check out our chronology of jamgrass, and stay tuned for everything else jamgrass all month long, right here on BGS and across social media.
Photo Credit: Sam Bush by Shelly Swanger Photography; Bronwyn by Alexa Stone; Billy Strings by Dana Trippe.
Dreamy Folk Artist Satya Looks Back and Moves Forward
The release of a debut album is a momentous accomplishment for an artist. For singer-songwriter Satya, the June 5 arrival of her first full-length, Yellow House, also represents the culmination of a long and emotional journey.
A Bay Area native who recently moved to Los Angeles, Satya initially started writing the songs for this album in early 2020, with the soon-arriving pandemic serving to provide her time to work on her music along with delving into her own journals, where she explored her feelings involving growing up in a household that was both abusive and loving.
The songs on Yellow House certainly reflect this duality of emotions. Her lyrics touch upon moments of madness, darkness, and desertion, while also offering up the possibility of escape and survival. Her singing holds an alluring calmness even as she’s addressing some highly charged topics. The album’s laid-back music, which combines elements of neo-soul, dreamy folk, hushed blues, and smokey jazz, serves to support her subdued vocals, creating an inviting, enveloping sound. The blending of musical styles suits someone who has played in Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, sung (and lived) in New Orleans, and performed at San Francisco JazzFest and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass back on her Bay Area home turf.
Satya, following some work with another producer, recorded Yellow House back around 2023 with noted blues guitarist/producer Colin Linden (Keb’ Mo’, T Bone Burnett, Bruce Cockburn) at his home studio in Nashville. When she spoke with BGS, she talked about Linden’s important contributions to the record – as well as the significance of covering Lucinda Williams’ “Fruits of My Labor” and the Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain,” the influence of Mazzy Star, and how the release of Yellow House is both a proud moment and a bittersweet one.
How did this album, Yellow House, come together?
Satya: I started writing this project in 2020. The first song I started with was “Circles.” Then the pandemic hit. I was going through a lot at the time with family stuff. I really started writing a lot of the songs for myself.
It was something that I was working on. Then the years would go by and I would kind of put it down and work on a side project. This one always just felt so personal that I wanted it to feel right, and I wanted it to really capture sonically what I wanted.
Do you feel that your sound evolved from your prior EPs (2022’s Deep Blue and 2020’s Flourish Against Fracture) or is more like a continuation of your earlier work?
This album feels like a continuation of [my] first EP I released, in a way, sonically. … I have other stuff out that definitely feels more like soul- and R&B-forward. This one, I feel like, went back into the folky, more Americana style. I don’t even think it was kind of subconscious. It was just the songs that were happening sounded that way. And I think it definitely captures a sound that I just naturally gravitate towards.
One thing that I really loved about the album was the way your singing and the instrumentation floated harmoniously with each other – and I was wondering how you achieved this airy, lived-in feeling?
That’s a good question. I know what sounds I’m drawn to. I reference Mazzy Star a lot for this project. I’ve always kind of felt listening to her, [Mazzy Star lead singer Hope Sandoval] and listening to that band, there’s a whole world that you get sucked into sonically.
This album really is based off of my past and [is] kind of a world. So, I felt like I wanted to create that same spatial sonic feeling. I think, for me, what draws me into those spaces, I think I’ve just taken notes of other artists that I love. And I love slide guitar a lot. I love the organ. I love the Rhodes. I love things that feel like reverb or taking up space.
I grew up singing in choirs and church. So, being in a wide room and hearing sounds bounce off the wall, I really wanted to make sure that the tracks felt not too airbrushed. I wanted everything to feel very raw and, you know, some things are one take.
Colin also definitely had to remind me, too – because I like to contradict myself – as much as I love everything sounding raw, I’m a]perfectionist. So, if we’re going to do it in one take, I need to do a hundred takes. But he was very good, I think, at kind of sifting through and just like allowing things to be.
How did you get together with Colin Linden as your producer?
I met him like two years before we actually recorded the album. I connected with him through my manager, Phil Green, who used to work with an artist named Fantastic Negrito. And I believe Fantastic Negrito had been working with Colin Linden. So, he was recommended to me. At the time I was living in New Orleans, too. So, I was like, “Okay, Nashville is close.” And I made my way out there.
Actually, one of the songs on the project, “Heaven’s Cry,” we just wrote that day – the first time I met him. Then, a few years later, we brought the album to him.
How big of a contribution did he make on the album?
He is a huge part of how the sound came out, and just like how the album came out. First of all, his studio is like my dream studio. He has a home studio in the back of his house. It’s like separate, through his backyard. It’s beautiful. And he just collects so many vintage, old guitars, mics and equipment.
I really just loved his approach, too, because a lot of these songs I came with were fully written. A lot of [what he did] was just kind of restructuring [the songs] or him taking the lead with rearranging.
We spent a week. I flew out to Nashville. We recorded every day, and it just felt really organic. I think that’s also why I really gravitated towards working with him. I just really loved his approach to music and also just his passion for it.
I don’t like using a lot of auto-tune or things on my voice. I really love performing live and I also love performing with a band – just having the live instrumentation… Colin loves live tracking and bringing in instrumentalists and all of that. So, yeah, I just gravitated towards working with him and it just felt really comfortable.
There was a lot of live tracking during the week you were at his studio?
Yeah, definitely. I brought the vocal stems to him. I had kind of recorded all these songs with a different producer, and then we put it down. So, I brought all the stems with me. Some stuff I already had tracked, but some of the stuff we fully reopened. He’s all over it playing slide guitar. His wife actually was playing organ on a lot of the tracks. We brought in an amazing bassist who is playing upright on some of it and a live drummer. So, we definitely had a lot of live tracking.
How significant was it to have done some work with Colin before getting into the studio with him?
I think I was very used to – especially because of the pandemic – being in my own studio and being kind of isolated with writing, which I think there’s a lot of beauty in, too. But that was the first time in a long time where it was just a full week dedicated to just “the art.” And I think that was really special.
The song “Circles” was the first one that you recorded, and did that song show you a way into the album and led to the songs connecting with each other?
Yeah, definitely. I wrote “Circles” and it just kind of sparked all the other songs – and just the concept, too, I think. “Circles” just opened up the idea; it felt like that song was needed to be next to others. “Circles” definitely felt like, sonically, “Oh, okay, this sound feels really nice.” And I think it kind of creates the world for all the other songs to live in.
The album contains two covers – Lucinda Williams’ “Fruits of My Labor” and the Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain.” How did they become part of this album?
When I perform covers, I try my best to embody the song or embody the lyrics and tie them to my own feelings.
Well, “Fruits of My Labor” – I loved that song forever and ever. I didn’t plan to have that on the album. It was the first day that I came to Colin’s house. I had been covering that song [since] when I was doing small tours with my band. We were doing an arrangement of it, I played it for Colin, and he was like, “Okay, so we’re tracking that right now!” I was listening to that song so much after the pandemic and her lyrics just really stuck with me.
And then “Box of Rain”… that was another song that I had covered. My grandfather, he loves that song a lot. I grew up listening to it and I just love the lyrics. I wanted to add it on the album too, just because the whole album is around my family. “Box of Rain” really reflects to me just so much beauty, as well, in my family. When I hear that song, it just reminds me of a lot of the joy and a lot of the sweetness. So, I wanted to add that too.
When did this week of recording take place?
I think it was 2023.
So, it has taken some time to get it all done?
Yeah, I took a while for sure. You know, if I lived in Nashville, after that week, I could have gone back and listened to everything. But a lot of it was kind of one and done, so it was a lot of him sending me tons of different forms of the mixes and me writing feedback and going back and forth – getting the project mixed and mastered, and then everything else around it. But, yeah, it was a long time coming.
It must be really an emotional experience to have these songs finally coming out?
Yeah, it definitely is. It feels like a mixture of emotions for sure, because I’ve sat on these songs for so long. I think it’s just like – with a lot of musicians, I’ve heard and I’ve always felt this way – by the time a song is ready to release, I’ve already heard it a thousand times and I wrote it years ago. A lot of these songs were heavier, so they were a way for me to process everything I was feeling. It definitely feels like a release to be able to just finally let it all go and give it away.
I feel like I had to really take a step back when this project was done and just look at my own personal life over the last six years – and how much I think I’ve grown and overcome and a lot of things I feel have healed. It feels like, I think, a lot of things at once. I think I feel very proud and also very bittersweet from that time.
I think that also just writing this project kind of showed me the power in music and art, and how much it can bring, and cultivate so much healing, and connection with other people even. Like the conversations just kind of sparked by sharing these stories have been really special. But at the same time, I’m going to be unwrapping a lot of this stuff forever and I think it will always spiral outward, you know.
Photo Credit: Lola Lankford
Yonder Mountain Never Meant to Change the Bluegrass Landscape, But They Did
Following instructions for listeners to Get Yourself Outside in 2022 and declaring they’re heading Nowhere Next in in 2024, jamgrass torchbearers Yonder Mountain String Band have reached their zenith on Good As True.
Released March 27, the collection finds the band embracing the skill sets of its newest members Nick Piccininni (mandolin, vocals) and Coleman Smith (fiddle) more than ever, as they dissect the human condition through nine tracks highlighting everything from falling in and out of love (“Brand New Heartache”), to confronting regret (“Blind”), and frustrations with today’s political climate (“The Lie”).
During a recent phone call, bassist Ben Kaufmann spoke with BGS about working Piccininni into the writer’s room, lessons learned from touring, how former band member Jeff Austin’s spirit sticks with him, and more.
This is your third album having Nick in the writer’s room with you, Adam [Aijala], and Dave [Johnston]. What has that evolution of bringing him into the fold there been like?
Ben Kaufmann: Yonder has always had its own special sound. There’s a very specific energy and communal taste with the music that we’ve been tapping into collectively for so long. Nick had already been writing for a while before coming aboard [for 2022’s Get Yourself Outside], so once we got him up to speed with our style we realized how intuitive he is. He has his own understanding of what a Yonder Mountain song is, which has made it fun when it comes to overhearing him workshopping songs or when we swap ideas backstage and on the bus.
We also knew, with recording time on the calendar, that we’d need more material. For most of Yonder’s lifespan we’ve had four writers – going all the way back to the days with Jeff, so it only made sense to give Nick the same opportunity when we saw what he could do. After putting songs from all of us “through committee,” a bunch of his wound up being cut [recorded] these last handful of years.
It’s especially important because Nick is such a wonderful singer. He’s great at everything he does, which is really inspiring to be around. He’s really stepped into his own as a featured vocalist and as a mandolin player. It’s been fun encouraging him to cultivate his own voice while also hearing him take the reins on some of Yonder’s oldest, most beloved songs.
What’s most satisfying for me with this band is writing my own songs, playing them with the band, and having people who are ostensibly there to hear the music enjoying it. There’s no better feeling than that and we wanted Nick to feel it too, since he’s currently in what seems to be a really prolific time of his life for songwriting. He’s the perfect fit for what we do. I’m so grateful he came into our lives and continues to enjoy making music with us. Being in a touring band isn’t for everyone, but everything with Nick has felt very natural from the start.
You just mentioned touring life, which I know the band touches upon with the song “Long Ride.” Do you have any good tips or wisdom you’ve picked up from your 28 years on the road with this band?
It’s like two hours of the greatest time of your life, every day, followed by 22 hours sitting in an airplane. [Laughs] In all seriousness, it’s been very different depending on the time in my life we’re talking about. I’ve handled it really well, but I’ve also handled it terribly. I’ve made mistakes and overcome them, but I’m sure I’ll make even more. When I was young I felt invincible. I’d drink too much and do all the drugs – not to the point of turning disastrous, but I lived that life. Doing that ages you so much faster than otherwise, and touring in general is already not easy.
Because of that I’ve spent so much time, energy, and money working on my personal growth through therapy and reading about ways I am deficient and could improve, to realize my full potential. A massively important part of my life is having a deep curiosity for how to be a better person, which is something I’d like to think I’d still be doing even if I worked in an office or at a place like FedEx. I don’t even know what else I’m qualified to do at this point except survive on the road.
What’s helped me through it all is paying attention to the people around me, investing in myself, and embracing the group dynamic so we can create the highest possible energy state and vibe. Essentially, don’t be a dick! [Laughs]
Lyrically, this record deals a lot with relationships, communication, and the fallout that can occur when those two things break down. With songs like “The Lie” and “One To One Another” this seems to deal partly with politics, but were there any other factors that motivated this direction on the record?
Not in the sense that we spoke about it ahead of time. We didn’t say, “Hey, we’re going to do a record so let’s write about A, B, and C.” A lot of our songwriting is done individually, but there still are some collaborative opportunities for us to get together, as well. As we got closer and closer to our recording dates and the song started being developed, [that] was when we first noticed those common themes. At the same time, I’m not surprised when common themes like this do emerge due to being on the road together and living the same life a lot of the time. When you’re seeing, doing, and talking about the same things regularly it’s easy to have a lot of synchronicity between what we’re writing about and creating.
Ultimately, we’re at our best when we’re writing about our own experiences and what we know. With “The Lie,” I like to think about Jesus, [and] all the bad actors in our world, many of which wield immense power. It makes me feel helpless at times as a bass player and musician – like, what am I supposed to do? It’s an overwhelming predicament, and that song for me speaks to that feeling of, “How did we get here?” It’s also very empowering to sing a song that speaks truth to something like that.
“The Lie” was also one of the songs that got my explicit vote when it came to making the cut for the record. When it came to sequencing, I also wanted that to be one of the first songs you hear when you put the needle down on your vinyl or press play.
“Blind” seems to be a song about regret, mental health, and realizing too late how much someone truly mattered. Have you ever thought about how that tune and what it’s describing relates to your fallout over a decade ago with the late Jeff Austin?
To this point I hadn’t connected that song with how I engage with Jeff’s spirit, but maybe I will now. His spirit and my thinking about him happens at every show. As time has passed, I’ve found that the thoughts I have about him that stick out are all the good times we had together, which wasn’t always the case for us. It was a deeply challenging and complicated relationship we had together and it wasn’t wonderful at the end, which is ultimately why we stopped playing together.
But as time passed, and with his passing – which remains one of the most tragic things I’ve experienced in my life – I became more and more crushed that he didn’t get the help that he needed. I don’t think he knew how important he was to so many people. I think more and more fondly of his spirit, energy, and memory with each passing day.
That original version of the band really changed bluegrass music by building a bridge between it and the jam world. What it did was really powerful, so it’s very interesting trying to think back and conceptualize what it was that we accomplished because we didn’t mean to do anything – we were just trying to play music the best we could.
As I look at it – especially as far down the road as we are now – I see the scene that’s developed from it and all the people doing amazing things with the music as a result. It’s all very humbling, and Jeff was a huge part of that. There’s never going to be anybody else like him, good and bad. We had a pretty complicated relationship – we were the best of friends for a while until we weren’t – but I always have and will love him.
One of my favorite moments on the record is the 17-minute jam on “Barroom Feather.” How did it come about?
One of the things that’s always interested us once we were able to start accessing the data is what our most-streamed song is, for better or worse. [Laughs] What we found is our most-streamed song is a cover of “Dancing In The Moonlight,” which is a good song, but not an original like I wish it was. Then our second most-streamed song is a tune called “Midwest Gospel Radio” that’s an instrumental from our self-titled record. On the album, when we first released it, the song was only two and a half or three minutes long, but along the way someone else released a nine-minute version that’s gotten millions of streams and is now second on our list of top songs.
It got me reflecting on our version and how comfortable we all were in the studio recording it, so when Dave brought us this song we pivoted from doing a shorter, “radio edit” version [that you also hear on Good As True] to something much longer. We recorded a couple takes that way, allowing ourselves to exist in that space and jam a bit, and I couldn’t be happier with the spaces and textures we came up with. It has this time-travel, hypnotic space-time warp thing about it that we were really psyched about. It works really well as both a more streamlined song and as a long jam like what we end the album on, so I’m excited to see how people listen to and engage with it.
You’ve been touring with Yonder for 28 years now. What continues to motivate you nearly three decades in?
First and foremost, I love music. That will never change. I also have a 14-year-old son that I love more than anything in the world. Music is part of the fabric of my flesh, blood, and spirit – I simply don’t know what else I’d be doing if not for it. I’m so blessed that this weird little music project called Yonder Mountain String Band happened, because looking back it doesn’t make much sense. Going from that to seeing what bluegrass music has become, having schools and colleges now devoted to bluegrass music, to [the] elevation of the music’s degree of technicality and musicianship, has been mind-blowing. None of that was the case when we were starting out in the ‘90s. We loved bluegrass music but were a lot more beholden to the spirit of the Grateful Dead than we were Bill Monroe, but we still wanted to play it.
I look at it in the sense of me being good at what I do, but by no means am I the best bass player around. None of us were the best at what we did and when you put it all together it goes against all the laws of physics, mathematics, and common sense. But two plus two equaled five for that one moment in time. I can’t tell you why, but it did and here we are now.
As a result, I get to live this extraordinary musical life that’s navigated some big ebbs and flows. That, along with all the fans who’ve embraced our music through the years and found us in different ways, is what keeps us going.
Photo Credit: Lead image by Robin Vega; alternate images by Mountain Trout Photography, Trent Grogan
Our Jamgrass column is brought to you in partnership with Preston Thompson Guitars.
An Oral History of the Infamous Stringdusters
BGS was founded 14 years ago and from the very beginning, we’ve been covering, collaborating with, and cheering on the Infamous Stringdusters. Our first posts about the group published to our site in 2013 – not even a year after our launch – spotlighting banjoist Chris Pandolfi’s Bluegrass Manifesto, the band’s only-four-years-old marquee event The Festy Experience, and their most recent album at that time, Silver Sky. Now, in 2026, they’re not only our Artist of the Month for the second time, they’ll be headlining our stage at Bourbon & Beyond this September, too. But, our love for the band – and the many partnerships we’ve built together – began, like most, back in 2007 with their now iconic debut album Fork in the Road and a banner year for the group at IBMA’s World of Bluegrass and the IBMA Awards.
Back then, when the Stringdusters took home trophies for Song of the Year (“Fork in the Road”), New Artist of the Year, and Album of the Year, perhaps no one – not even the band themselves – would have predicted the seismic, existential impact they would end up having on bluegrass and the as-yet-unnamed subgenre thereof: jamgrass. Twenty years on, the Stringdusters celebrate their duo of decades with 20/20, an album of 20 songs celebrating 20 years of defining and redefining bluegrass and jamgrass.
For our Artist of the Month coverage, BGS and Good Country co-founder Amy Reitnouer Jacobs sat down with all five members the Infamous Stringdusters for a wide-ranging conversation of a band that epitomizes bluegrass, jamgrass, and psychedelic string band music in the 2000s.
First of all, again, I wanna just thank you for doing this. We are so thrilled to have you guys as our Artist of the Month and congratulations on 20 years of the ‘Dusters.
I wanna start this with Panda actually, and this is not gonna be just an oral history interview, but I think, looking back on 20 years, it feels appropriate to start from the beginning. So let’s talk about origins and start back at Berklee [College of Music], if that’s cool. Tell us a little bit about the beginning of the band.
Chris Pandolfi: I arrived at Berklee in 2001, which was the year that Andy [Hall] had just left Boston for Nashville. I first met Critter [Chris Eldridge] through Zach Hickman, who was playing in Josh Ritter’s band. He went to Oberlin [University] with Critter. We got together and we were playing, and Zach had some free studio time at a spot in New Hampshire and we were gonna go record some music, just for fun. Our careers were not underway in any way, shape, or form. We didn’t have any grand designs here. We were just gonna go record some music and have some fun.
Then, on the precipice of this recording, we went down to the Cantab Lounge to meet this guy named Andy Hall. We went there and–
Andy Hall: [It was] The Plough and Stars.
CP: The Plough and Stars! Andy was playing–
AH: I don’t remember exactly if I was playing or if you were playing.
CP: And the next day we were in New Hampshire at this recording studio and we made this EP called Stable Horse. Essentially, Andy was already living in Nashville, so around that same time, he had met Jeremy [Garrett] and they were playing together. It was that recording session that got the wheels turning for me. Like, “Oh, we could do this thing with other people our age,” and not fall into the very sort of common thing in bluegrass where you get hired by someone else and you’re essentially a sideman.
We were recording and teeing things up, and we all had other gigs at that time. It was me, Andy, Jesse [Cobb], Critter, and Alan Bartram from the Del McCoury Band. But that was my earliest memory of “We could start a band with our contemporaries.” And Zach Hickman, I give him credit, he facilitated that.
I don’t even think we had the name “Stringdusters” yet. Alan got the offer to go play with Del McCoury and we had met Travis [Book] at IBMA, so we called him up and he came and lived in my driveway for a few months. True story.
Travis Book: You can really get away with a lot if you park your car in someone’s driveway and then try to stay outta the way.
So Andy and Jeremy, what are the origins of you guys starting to play together?
AH: Was it Ronnie Bowman? Was that the first time? I was in Ronnie Bowman’s band and the fiddle player and Ronnie had a bit of a falling out while we were on the road and–
CP: We were all at a festival, so we scooped up Jeremy and he got on the bus with Ronnie Bowman!
Jeremy Garrett: Yeah, I definitely knew about you two beforehand. And, of course, in bluegrass everyone’s a fan of Ronnie Bowman. He’s such a crooner and such a cool cat. I definitely had plenty of experience before, but this was like one of my first major Nashville gigs. And it was eye-opening very quickly that, as a sideman, it’s pretty limiting.
The conversations I remember started happening pretty fast in the back rooms: “Hey, let’s maybe consider doing something of our own. Long-term, how can we make this happen?” But it was just like whispers. I remember going to IBMA – that’s where I met Chris Pandolfi and he blew me away with his melodic banjo playing style and this futuristic sound that he had. I’d really never played with that before, because I came from a very traditional side of bluegrass.
CP: Didn’t I give you a copy of my record? I remember you telling me that.
JG: Yeah. And I listened to that record all the way home from IBMA – I’ll never forget – and my dad was riding with me. I was just like, “This guy’s awesome.” Overall, it felt like all of us coming together through our connection in Nashville and these music parties that used to happen on the reg. I don’t know if they still do. We would have huge jam sessions, especially at Panda’s Pad. There’d be 20-30 people all gathered up in somebody’s backyard, picking. And it was almost every night. So you can’t help but get tight and start seeing the writing on the wall, the possibilities, through those kind of connections.
CP: These days in Nashville are so different. It’s so much “cooler” now. There’s so many young people playing bluegrass and when you hear about a lot of the socializing in Nashville, it’s a lot of young musicians. When we were having these parties, it was a real diverse mix of ages. You had Sam Bush there, you had Scott Vestal, you had Ronnie Bowman, and the McCourys. We were the young cats around and there wasn’t a very vibrant young scene. We were intermingling with a lot of the elder statesmen of bluegrass.
That’s a really special time in Nashville. I can remember that’s when I started hanging out in town and there was like a magic in the air. That intergenerational mix doesn’t organically seem to be happening as much, but maybe it is and I’m just not invited to parties anymore.
So Travis, were you coming to Nashville from Colorado? Where were you before then?
TB: Yeah, I was living in Durango and Anders Beck from Greensky [Bluegrass] and I started playing music together in maybe 2002. There were gigs and we were learning this music and then Andy Thorn and some other friends – that’s Leftover Salmon – they just showed up in a music store one day. Andy was probably 19 on college break and we hung out with him for three days straight. When he went back to North Carolina, we called him up. We’re like, “Dude, you gotta come back! We gotta make a band! We’ll play RockyGrass, you’ll win the banjo contest, we’ll win the band contest.” Anders and I were like, “We can see the future, but we need Andy Thorn,” because he was such a compelling musician and just such a natural. Still is.
We started this band called the Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band with Jon Stickley, who’s also a visionary in our music. We were all picking and almost entering that same path as Leftover Salmon or Yonder [Mountain String Band]. We were already doing this like hippie bro band, just loving playing music and camping and playing festivals and going to hot springs and just fucking around. It was brilliant.
But then we went to IBMA, which at the time was the best way to show off your band and position yourself in the context of the larger [bluegrass] world. Try to get some gigs and go party your absolute brains out for a week. We were pretty rough around the edges, but one night I stepped off an elevator and Chris Eldridge came around the corner. [He] was like, “We need a bass player for this jam. Will you come jam with us?” I went into this little alcove and it was essentially the Stringdusters. It was Critter and Pandolfi and Andy Hall and Jeremy and Jesse Brock. I was just hanging out, holding on for dear life. I’m partying, I have a backpack full of beer, I have no shoes on, and I looked around and all my band mates were just there sitting along the hallway floor listening to the jam.
Andy’s partner at the time, Janice, said, ” Do you ever think about moving to Nashville?” I just laughed. Absolutely not. But I had fixed myself in their mind and once they exhausted all the possibilities of people who could play bass in Nashville – at least this is my understanding – they dug into their collective consciousness and called me up to audition. They’re like, “We think you’re the guy. When can you move to Nashville?” So I went out there to work on Fork in the Road that summer. What was this, 2004? Am I right, guys?
AH: I think that would’ve been 2005.
TB: Yeah, you’re right. 2005. [I] moved out there in September and lived in this guy’s driveway. It was kinda wild.
Falco, I promise we’re getting to you. We’re almost there!
In pretty quick succession though, you’ve got the core crew with Critter and Jesse [Cobb] at that time, you record the album, and get signed to Sugar Hill. And then things just start happening! Can you walk me through the time between recording and the IBMA Awards in ’07?
CP: There’s a lot of extremely disorganized touring. We’re driving around in two cars. I still have the notebook from the gigs – we were getting paid a few hundred bucks a night, maybe a thousand on a good night. Doing everything that we could.
We didn’t have grand designs on anything. The IBMA Awards was a really big moment for our band. Thinking back, it was a moment of legitimacy, of just getting [to] one of the hardest things as a band, which is the collective feeling that this thing is gonna stick together. That’s the peril of starting a band with players who you think are really good: at any time anyone could get hired away for something. But we were playing gigs, we were loving life, we were working on our music, and we were poor as could possibly be. I just remember the IBMA Awards as a big moment of solidity, of that feeling like we could really do this, we could really be in this for a long time.
TB: There was that first summer we had a couple of big anchor gigs, but a lot of it was really just driving around and killing time in between these anchors and hoping that we could reach the right audiences. I think that the big bluegrass scene was ripe for some young pickers who were taking it seriously and committed to each other.
JG: Yeah, getting gas in the tank right off the bat was huge for us, that’s for sure. And we spent a lot of time in between those gigs just going to be in the wilderness and spending time together. I don’t know, for lack of a better way of explaining it, [we were] bonding like a band.
But man, when you’re a real band and you’re not just like a frontman or whatever, you’ve got a real synergy with other guys in a group. It’s special. And I feel like a lot of what brought us together and [what] makes us as tight as we are now was those off times where we were discovering our lives and just doing cool stuff like that. Creating this thing together.
I do need to know who came up with the name. Where did the name come from?
CP: Ben Eldridge.
AH: Yeah!
CP: We were working with a list of pretty mediocre names and Ben came up with “Stringdusters.” After 20 years, I can say there’s a lot of bad band names out there, but the Stringdusters – I think it’s a cool band name and it suits us.
All right. Now we bring Falco into the mix. So how did you get mixed up in all this? Tell us your origin story.
Andy Falco: So, Critter fell off the back of a truck and I got picked up – no! What happened was, I’d known Pandolfi and Andy Hall from the Northeast bluegrass scene. I was playing with this guy, Buddy Miriam, who’s on Long Island, and who actually was friends with Bill Monroe because he got struck by lightning at the Berkshire Mountain Bluegrass Festival, which of course was Grey Fox. And Monroe found out about it and reached out and they became friends. So he learned a lot of mandolin directly from Monroe.
My brother was getting into bluegrass and was like, “You should come to this bluegrass festival.” I went up there and saw Doc Watson and really got into playing bluegrass. I moved to Nashville maybe a year after Panda and Critter did. Andy Hall was already playing in Dolly Parton’s band. And I had met Jeremy, actually by accident, at SPBGMA. My first time in Nashville, some guy came up to me and said, “Hey man, how are you doing? How’s everything been?” I was like, “Great. This is my first time in Nashville. Everything’s been great.” Then he stopped and said, “Man, I thought you were someone else.” And he says, “Come meet my son.” That was Jeremy’s dad, and that’s the first time I met Jeremy.
When I moved to Nashville, these guys were starting the band. I was watching them doing their sets at IBMA. It was killer. Then when Critter left, they asked if I’d be in. I wasn’t gonna start until September and one month later was the IBMA Awards. So I just joined the band and here they are, winning all these awards.
JG: I would like to say, I’ll never forget your first gig. You killed it harder than literally anybody I’ve ever worked with to this day. Absolutely stepped into the role and blew it away. And it was very obvious at that moment that he was the right man for the job, for the Stringdusters.
AF: I had big shoes to fill with Critter – and Critter and I were friends. In fact, I knew Critter before I met anybody in the Stringdusters. We met at seven o’clock in the morning on the last day of IBMA, when we’d pick all night and our door was open. And here comes Critter with his guitar.
CP: Critter introduced us.
AF: Yeah.
CP: He said to me, “Do you want to go hear the fastest guitar player alive?” And I said yes.
AF: I worked with Critter, too. Critter was very supportive of coming over when I was preparing to join the band, showing me the parts that he played on the record. So I had a really good foundation, thanks to Critter, of what he had done. Then I was able to put my stamp on it.
So what is that pivot then? You all mentioned the kind of shift that occurred, moving you away from traditional bluegrass and more towards jamgrass. How did you find your own sound? What was the decision to pivot?
AH: I remember a specific show where we decided we were gonna try and extend some [of the] set. I think it was the Animus Theater in Durango and it was a Colorado bluegrass crowd, which was more of a dancing crowd. They were used to more diverse sounds. I don’t remember, we were just like, “Let’s try and put a jam in this one song,” or whatever. So we’re playing, we’re jamming, and we’re extending whatever song it was. The whole crowd was just dancing. The energy was feeding back and forth and it was like, “Whoa! This is so much more exciting,” in contrast to everyone sitting silently and clapping in between songs. We made a choice one night and we saw the crowd just light up and dance and lose themselves in the music, and that fed our energy.
CP: Also, we were into that stuff.
AH: Yeah.
CP: But we hadn’t really made that connection yet. The real moment that I remember is we opened three shows for Railroad Earth. We played the 9:30 Club. We played Theater of the Living Arts and, I think, and we played Burg Williamsburg, when our van broke down and we showed up last minute. Those are the gigs that I referenced in the Bluegrass Manifesto. When I did the IBMA keynote that grew out of that, it really referenced those. I remember a few shows, too, where we would come off stage and we’re like, “Oh my god, that jam. Let’s do that again.”
We played these shows with Railroad Earth and it connected some dots that didn’t connect automatically, even though we had Grateful Dead, Phish, playing all the time. We were really coming from that IBMA buzz and awards. And, like anything, it took some time to discover, [it took] some experience. That was when some real change started happening around our business. Then the music really followed that trend.
JG: I’ll say, you guys, don’t forget about the Zeltfestivals. They were beyond anything that I personally had ever experienced. We went out and these people were going absolutely bonkers for our music – they had barricades out there and stuff. I’d never seen any of that at a bluegrass show. To me, that was fire in the tank.
AF: I think that also a big part of that is just, I know for myself, not growing up playing bluegrass music and then getting turned onto it by Garcia and Grisman and people like that. But I think it was just like when I started learning bluegrass. There’s a way that you have to do it and then, finally, you get to a certain point where all these dots are being connected, where you start to let these other influences come out, because you start to get more comfortable as a band. You start to allow that like, “Yeah, why can’t we do it? Why can’t we mix these things?” Even just as individual players. Why can’t you play this style? Blending these kind of jammy elements and these rock elements and then seeing how it worked.
You all have such varied individual projects and influences. Do you still think that you’re shifting your sound? What are you listening to and is that influencing what you’re doing?
AH: It’s definitely influencing what we’re doing. I think, to Falco’s point, I feel like I’m allowing [in] more and more of my original influences that I grew up with. I was a metal dude in high school. I think the older I get, the more I enjoy letting in who I am.
AF: Getting away from the “that ain’t a part of nothing” bullshit, right? Like, what? Who’s to say, right?
JG: Yeah, at the end of the day it’s art and you gotta let that lead itself, if you’re a true artist. Otherwise, you’re doing a preservation society kind of thing in the bluegrass world. For the longest time, I felt we were all paying homage to this awesome music, but we’re not letting it breathe like it should sometimes. It’s very fun to be an artist and be able to have the permission to just kinda let it flow, which is what we let ourselves do. We let the art dictate what we did, and we were true to ourselves in that way. That was something that served us very well. Still does.
You all live in different places now. I know the band is not as centered in Nashville as it used to be, but you did talk about the off-times and how that bonded the group early on. How do you stay bonded as a band now? How have things shifted? Being a decentralized band, how has the writing recording process changed for y’all over the last 20 years?
JG: I think that’s an important point. Yes, we’ve changed a lot over the years, but we’ve been able to stay tight because of those early formative years when we were all just broke traveling around in a band. I didn’t have any brothers growing up, but these guys are definitely my brothers and they know more about me than anybody else in this world. To allow each one of us to have the freedom to live where we wanna live and come together the way that we want to come together, I think that has been really one of the main things that have kept us together.
Over the years we’ve all developed little side things outside of the band. I think that’s been healthy. For me, I like to do my own solo music, music that I write and I like to perform – and stuff that wouldn’t necessarily fit within the confines of the Stringdusters. But I still want to get that art out there. We continue to challenge each other. Music can be competitive in a not-healthy way. But I feel like we do it in a healthy way, in the sense that we drive each other to just be the best that we can be at what we do.
CP: I got married last fall and in the run up to my wedding, one of my aunts asked me, “Are all your bandmates gonna be there?” In my mind I had this moment where I was like, “Are my band mates gonna be there?” You might as well ask me if my family is gonna be there! It’s just life at this point. After 20 years, it’s cool to observe the level to which you become each other’s family.
That’s the definition of community and you don’t think about these things when you’re going into this life, but there are some incredible unintended consequences. That informs the music and that informs all the life experiences too.
And here we are, 20 years later. That’s pretty cool.
Explore more of our Artist of the Month coverage of the Infamous Stringdusters here.
Photo Credit: Daniel Milchev
Steve Poltz Loves a Tangent
Steve Poltz has built a career by following each song wherever it wants to go. Sometimes that means a meticulously fingerpicked melody. Sometimes it means a story that veers off into comedy, confession, or absurdity before circling back to the heart of the matter. That tangential nature – equal parts songwriter, raconteur, and road-tested troubadour – has become his signature, especially onstage, where no two of his shows are ever the same.
Poltz’s new album, JoyRide (released January 30, 2026), reflects that same restless curiosity. Trim, deliberate, and capped at 10 songs, it distills decades of touring, collaboration, and lived experience into a tightly sequenced record designed to be heard in one sitting. From satirical observations about modern life to deeply personal reflections shaped by years on the road, JoyRide captures Poltz at a moment of clarity – still chasing the perfect song, still trusting instinct over plan, and still finding meaning in the long way around.
Long before JoyRide, Poltz earned his reputation the slow way – by logging miles, swapping verses with fellow songwriters, and learning how a room breathes. Founder of the San Diego-based rock band the Rugburns and co-writer of Jewel’s breakthrough “You Were Meant for Me,” he has never been defined by that early success, instead carving out a singular path marked by humor, humility, and an almost reckless openness.
In a conversation with BGS, we spoke with Poltz about the making of JoyRide, the longtime relationships that have sustained him, and the zany, unpredictable ride that has been his career. Whether sharing a bill with old friends or holding a crowd rapt with nothing more than a guitar and an improvised aside, Poltz approaches music less as a performance than as a conversation – one where the destination matters less than the unexpected connections made along the way.
Let’s start with early memories. Was there a moment when music really clicked for you?
Steve Poltz: I remember when I was in second or third grade, I stuttered, had asthma, eczema, and I didn’t hang out with many people. I started playing guitar when I was six. So I brought the guitar to school for show and tell. And I sang the song “Sloop John B” in class. And other kids brought snakes, brought their moms who were nurses or doctors or firemen, and their dads and stuff. I sang a song on guitar. I went out and sat alone. I remember I opened my lunch and I looked up and there were six girls around me. I thought, “This is all I have to do!” That was it. That was the plan.
I had a friend who was a DJ at San Diego State University [radio station] KCR, and she moved in with these roommates. They had brought this record by that had just come out by this woman named Rickie Lee Jones. It was her eponymous debut LP. And, oh my God, I listened to that record nonstop. There was a song called “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963,” which is still one of my favorite songs. It was in the movie Stripes with Bill Murray.
Man, two years ago I played Byron Bay Bluesfest in Australia and Rickie Lee Jones was on after me. Just the way the world works and the universe works, I knew her percussionist who plays the vibes, Mike Dillon. He sees me, and he’s sitting with Rickie Lee Jones, who’s like my hero. She’s one of my favorite lyricists ever. I’m a Dylanologist, and still, Rickie Lee Jones – those first two records especially – her poetry, the way she puts the songs together, I put it at the top of my whole pyramid.
[At Bluesfest] I told her I’d do a cover of “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” and I segue into it from John Hartford’s “Presbyterian Guitar.” She loved John Hartford, too. She comes out during the song in front of 5,000 people, sings the second verse, and I just started crying. It was one of those full circle moments. These are the people that are my heroes.
You’ve become very deliberate about keeping your albums, like JoyRide, short and sweet. Why?
We’re just in such a quick world, where people don’t have the attention span. I’ve come to this conclusion that 10 songs is the perfect amount of songs to have on a record. Leave all these other ones on the cutting room floor. Put them out later on B-side compilations or something. Keep it under 33 minutes. It fits on vinyl perfectly. It doesn’t lose any of the resolution. If people are into you, it’s not too hard to give 32 minutes of your time. My hope is they go, “Let’s hear it again.” That’s my fantasy. One day I’ll get it right.
You’re known as a road warrior. What still thrills you about touring?
I feel like I’m kind of like the Grateful Dead in that I’m better experienced live than on record. Live, there’s magic. I’m still looking to make the perfect record. Maybe when I’m 80. I can’t believe Bob Weir just died, I mean he’s so young, 78. I’m like, “God, that’s like 12 years older than I am, I better get my shit together.”
I love it when things don’t work on the road. When something goes wrong, when animals attack. It took me a lot of years to get there, but sometimes things are really good when they don’t work. It messes with the audience. It’s like mental jiu jitsu.
Perhaps not surprisingly, you often reference comedy as an influence. How important is humor to your music?
I loved Andy Kaufman. I loved Richard Pryor. The early Steve Martin albums, Cheech and Chong – I memorized all that stuff. When I heard Allan Sherman sing “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah!” I remember thinking, “Why can’t every song be like this?” Same thing with listening to the Dr. Demento [radio] show. Dr. Demento was huge. He played the Rugburns [on his show]. “Weird Al” Yankovic used to come to our shows and loved [our 1995 record] Dick’s Automotive. Because of that song, he wrote “Albuquerque.”
What are some of your earliest musical memories? You mentioned Rickie Lee Jones earlier. What are some other early prominent memories of being moved or touched by a song? Where were your first performances?
My uncle took me to see Julian Bream at the Hollywood Bowl. Classical guitar. That was it. I wanted to learn classical guitar. You know, with my left foot up on a stool, with a nylon string guitar, the way you hold it all in the proper classical way. I learned to read music. Fernando Sor’s etudes. My first gigs were in Mexican restaurants in San Diego. Four hours of classical guitar. Free meals. One night I got the courage to sing “Time in a Bottle.” The waitress said, “I didn’t know you could sing.” That night ended with me running out a window and leaving my left shoe behind. I never went back to that restaurant.
And then there was another one in El Cajon and it was called El Amigo. The El Amigo Ballroom. Then I got a job at Round Table Pizza in La Mesa. I got fired because I sang on the mic and I sang “The Rodeo Song.” One night, I got really drunk with the manager and I didn’t know the owner was in the audience. That was where I kind of learned mic control, because the manager was like, “Man, you’ve got a good voice for speaking. I want you to be the guy who says, ‘McDonald, party of four, you’ve got a large pepperoni pizza.’”
One night the manager got me really drunk. He was a younger guy. I started singing “The Rodeo Song,” which was this Canadian song that went, “Well, it’s 40 below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck and I’m off to the rodeo.” And the chorus goes, “You piss me off, you fucking jerk, you get on my nerves.” It’s like a really juvenile song that was played on the radio in the late ‘70s. They would have all these bleeps where the cuss words were. And I sang it on the mic. Then the next morning I got a call from the manager. He’s like, “You need to come in and pick up your check.” I said, “We’re getting paid early.” And he goes, “No, you’re fired. We need pizza makers, not entertainers.”
Let’s talk about JoyRide. Tell us about the opening song, “If It Bleeds, It Leads.”
It started with a guitar riff. A major seventh chord. Then the melody. Then the words came. And the next morning when I woke up, I was kind of laughing. I always saved ideas, it’s like a junkyard of melodies, words, everything in my iPhone on my notes page, and then also in my voice memos. And I went, “Oh, this fits.” [Quotes:]
I can never watch the news with you because you yell back
You scream like they can hear you in the television set
What am I to do when all you’re doing is yelling at the top of your lungs?
You’re even scaring all the pets.
You’re scaring all, you’re scaring all, you’re scaring all the pets.
And it just worked out perfectly. You just kind of shave off syllables and fit it into this sort of Sudoku puzzle or something.
And next thing you know, it’s like you’re fishing and you have this song on the line. Like, where do I want it to go next? You can say, “I remember one time when you went and grabbed your pistol.” And so that harkens back to Elvis Presley, who I was lucky enough to meet when I was nine years old. He put me on his shoulders. I’m like, “I gotta name check Elvis in this.”
The songs comprising JoyRide seem especially quirky, even by your standards. Can you tell us about some of the ones that you have the most affection for?
“Petrichor,” which is track two, I really love because it’s really fast fingerpicking. I wrote that with Gary Nicholson, who wrote a bunch with John Prine and toured with Guy Clark. He’s just a wonderful songwriter. I went over to his house and I was like, “I have this idea for this song called ‘Petrichor.” I showed him the guitar riff, we wrote that song, and it’s a banger. I love playing that live. There’s one called “At It Again” that I wrote with Jim Lauderdale that I love playing live, and I love playing “Love a Little Bigger.”
There’s a song called “Hair Lift,” where I learned a tuning from Richard Thompson. It’s just my E string goes down to C and my A string goes down to G, and everything else is the same. He uses that tuning in “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” but he capos it up. So I took that tuning and wrote this song called “Hair Lift.” I love singing that song because it’s got lines in it that are just so goofy, they still make me laugh. Stuff that I find funny, not everybody else does, which makes me laugh even harder.
My favorite one to do live is called “The Son of God,” and that’s because I get to play myself and Jesus. I’m having a conversation with Jesus, and that whole song came about because when I was a kid – it’s one of my fondest memories – [there] was this door-to-door salesman [that] came to our house. He was selling Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias. Dude, it was like a new iPhone. All the answers to everything were in this set of encyclopedias, and I begged my parents to get them. I begged them and they got the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias for me.
My mom said, “You gotta read every one of them cover to cover.” And I did. Every day I would just read the encyclopedia, because I found all this knowledge so fascinating about everything. Words I’d never heard of and countries I’d never heard of. Niger! I mean, come on. And I’d want to read everything about it. So I was thinking when I made up this song, “The Son of God,” like, “Hey, whatever happened to all those Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias?” I had this fantasy that Jesus called me up and he was trying to get rid of them, because you have to have a storage unit in heaven.
What came together perfectly on this record?
It’s hard to get me into the studio, so just that it happened is like a dream. I’m always on the road. But I recorded at this guy’s house in Nashville. The vibe was good. That’s everything to me. I wrote songs with Jim Lauderdale. One with Vince Herman. It all came together naturally.
You spent ten years in Nashville before returning to San Diego. What did that city give you?
From the moment I got there, it was where I was meant to be. Everywhere you go, you’re making contacts. Coffeehouses are where everything happens. People are polite. You don’t know who anyone is. Your Uber driver might get you a record deal. I remember I was at this coffeehouse and I looked over and there was Lisa Loeb, who I hadn’t seen in years because I toured and opened for her back in the ‘90s. I hadn’t seen her since that tour and she just happened to be in town and I was in this coffeehouse and she was like, “Steve?” “Lisa?” And she said, “You know, I always come here to write and hang out.” Then, the same coffeehouse, there is another amazing person just a week later. And then at a different coffeehouse, Jim Lauderdale. Then me and Jim became really close – and must have like 30 songs [written together] – and it just went on and on and on. Like wherever I went, I was just making contacts.
Circling back to where we started our conversation, some people don’t want humor or irony or banter in their music, staples and bedrocks of JoyRide and perhaps your entire career. How do you continue to approach and navigate those variables?
Luckily, there are hundreds and thousands of artists for everything. Some people want to slam dance or listen to really serious bluegrass. Some want to cry. My audience wants stories. They want to laugh and to cry. They want to hear some guitar playing. In today’s world, part of the whole thing is you got to be consistent, you’ve got to get out there, and you got to keep doing it, because nobody’s going to just tap you on the shoulder and say, “Hey, kid, I’m going to make you a star.” It just really doesn’t happen.
I like small rooms. Low ceilings. Shoulder to shoulder. Quiet listening rooms. Tangents. That’s the ultimate job.
Photo Credit: Jay Blakesburg
Somethin’ About Train Songz
What first began as a locomotive and string music meme page has transformed into one of the most quirky and beloved sources of independent journalism in roots music, one zine at a time.
Founded by Anthony “The Conductor” Perasso and James “Promontory Paul” Lucey in July 2023, Train Songz has since grown its community to over 28,000 Instagram followers and more than 1,200 paid subscribers. Readers collectively contribute anywhere from $33-$99 per year (or $11 per copy), with three to four issues published per year. The latest, eighth edition features a 44-page interview with Billy Strings’ bassist Royal Masat.
The interview for Masat is a full circle moment for Train Songz, which began with a Billy-centric focus before expanding to feature other bluegrass acts like Mountain Grass Unit, East Nash Grass, and Valley Flower. In fact, it was a Billy Strings show in Bridgeport, Connecticut, attended by Train Songz co-founders (that they rode the train to themselves, no less) where the concept for the then-meme page first came together.
“At the show Billy was wearing a hickory-striped railroad hat that someone (who we’ve since connected with on Instagram) threw up on stage a few shows prior, as trains were passing by the stage,” recalls Perasso.
“I tweeted from my personal account a photo of Billy with the hat on and the caption ‘Train Songz,’ which was a Trey Songz pun – like if Trey Songz is Trey Songz, then Billy Strings is Train Songz,” Perasso laughs. “Four days later, I locked down the @train_songz username and posted our first meme.”
After publishing some popular Billy and Grateful Dead inspired memes, Train Songz began transitioning to a zine in December 2023, while Perasso was home for the holidays and more sedentary than usual after recovering from multiple surgeries. No stranger to producing print media, having previously worked on a satirical newspaper while in college, he says the zine quickly filled a void left empty since graduating in 2017. Now two years in with eight installments of the printed zine, Train Songz has grown into a thriving community bigger and wilder than Perasso, Lucey, and the rest of the core team – including Liza Chaplin (art/design) and Mitchell “Brakeman” Harbin (writer/editor) – could have ever imagined.
“Beyond my personal penchant for print, Train Songz was gathering a community of wooden-instrument-music enjoyers, so print felt like a natural extension of that vibration,” Perasso continues. “And from a more boring media strategy point of view, print (and email!) offers you a direct relationship with your audience that algorithms can’t get in the way of and platforms can’t take away. So for both those reasons, a Train Songz zine felt like a perfect move.”
After wrapping up production on the eighth installment of the zine, the Train Songz crew spoke with BGS via Zoom about the zine’s origins, how they first discovered Billy Strings, the publication’s next steps for growth, and more.
Y’all use pen names in the zine (except for Liza). How did each of you come up with your alter egos?
James Lucey: Before I get to that, I’ll just add that leading up to this interview we all debated if we should do this as ourselves or go by our pen names. It’s been an interesting dynamic, [navigating] who are we in relationship to the zine [and] what the zine is in relationship to us and our audience. We made the zine to try and participate in some way in the broader conversation about modern-day bluegrass music; we’re not the face of the zine, we’re just the people that are powering it.
But regarding my pen name, “Promontory Paul,” he’s the voice of the Old Tune Review, which is one of the core pieces of the zine. In it we pick a handful of old songs [and] dive deep into [their] history through independent research. It’s born out of the idea that these old songs are still being played today and still resonate in some way. In some ways it’s like a time machine, because you’re feeling the same emotions that someone felt hundreds of years ago when they wrote these things. So it’s cool to dive in and see what the actual genesis of those songs are.
[Paul’s] the guy who runs that, but we also feature him in a little recurring cartoon series that sees him playing banjo and getting into all kinds of crazy adventures. “Promontory” is a reference to the Promontory Summit, which was the final completion [point] of the first transcontinental railroad in Utah, when the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroads (which had been building from Nebraska and Sacramento, respectively) finally met.
This effectively connected the old world with the new one, sort of like what we do with the zine.
Mitchell Harbin: My name actually came out of the fact that a brakeman is a role on an actual train – he’s the guy that pulls the brakes. It was actually during the production of the zine’s third issue that I had come aboard to help with proofreading and copy editing. There were a couple of times in that process where James and Anthony were like, “Alright, we’re good to go, ready to launch” and I would pump the brakes and say, “Whoa, hold up.” Which is what eventually spawned the name idea.
Liza Chaplin: I’m still working on mine. [Laughs] It’s an ongoing thing that I’ve been thinking about, but so far I haven’t gotten anywhere with it. At first I decided to put my own name on it to use as a portfolio-building mechanism, but now with how the zine has grown it feels very silly to still have my actual name on it.
Anthony Perasso: “The Conductor” came to be when James and I were talking about taking the meme page offline [and moving] into print form with our first issue. We made a decision that Train Songz was the name of the publication and brand and community – or whatever vibration of people who value the same kind of music as we do, cultivating this eponymous meme page.
As the person who had started the meme page, I didn’t want Train Songz to be seen as an individual, as in, “That’s Anthony, he’s Train Songz.” Our desired outcome would be: “That’s Anthony, he’s The Conductor for Train Songz.” That allowed Train Songz [to be] less a single being and more of a vehicle for those involved. Pun intended. (A mentor even recommended to me that the title of The Conductor be something that can be passed on from individual to individual, like the Pope or the President. Time will tell if we get to that point!)
What was Promontory Paul’s role in this latest issue of Train Songz given its focus on the Royal interview?
AP: Paul’s column still exists in the newest zine, but he went about it in a really cool way. The idea began with our third edition, when we gave Promontory Paul an entire section to write about old bluegrass songs regularly covered by the likes of Billy, the Sam Grisman Project, and whatever other bands we listened to or saw live that quarter. So we’d cite where we heard it played before diving into a history lesson and where it came from.
Then, for this issue with Royal, we took that Old Tune Review and instead of songs we heard out in the wild made it all about songs that he mentioned during the interview. Throughout the interview there are little interjections from Promontory Paul – almost like Clippy, the office assistant on Microsoft Word. It’s been fun to take these gimmicks that worked for us a year ago and apply them to the restrictions presented by this long-form interview. Royal gave us so much that we wanted to give him the entire issue, but we’re still going to sprinkle in the ethos of what our readers are familiar with and what we like to do, which is to connect something that’s happening in the present day – like the recent Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton tour with Royal – to the past. It’s been really fun connecting with folks like that through the zine. It’s almost like Paul’s on a time-traveling train or something. [Laughs]
We send surveys out to our subscribers after publishing each issue and Promontory Paul’s history lessons are always towards the top when it comes to [readers’] favorite parts of the zine. It’s also been a cool way to make note of the fact that it’s not just us behind the scenes who are enjoying this. It really speaks to how much we respect the audience that we have and how that drives us to create the best issue possible every quarter.
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I saw recently that Royal left a copy of Train Songz #7 at the NPR Tiny Desk following the session he recorded there with Billy. What did seeing that mean to y’all?
AP: He’s been a follower of ours for a long time and brought that copy of the zine to NPR on his own after reaching out to us to subscribe about a year ago. We knew he’d been reading along for a while, so once this tour came up with him, Bryan, and Billy, it just seemed like the perfect thing for the zine to cover. It was important for us to capture the combination of old and new in those shows dedicated to Doc and Merle Watson and T. Michael Coleman and featured the King of arena-grass playing these smaller rooms of 400 to [2,200] people with one of the most preeminent guitarists alive in Bryan Sutton.
It took us a second to come around to the idea, because we’ve been very cautious about not becoming a Billy Strings-exclusive fan zine. We want to serve the broader ecosystem, but that tour was something we couldn’t pass up, especially with Royal being a reader. Once we did reach out, he blew us out of the water with the time he put into it. His interview with Mitchell ended up being over 4,000 words that he sent us by email after wrapping up a tour in Europe. Once that wrapped I remember him sending us a literal tome – he took it very seriously and his responses were so thoughtful.
The final result almost looks like a children’s book with the way Liza designed it. None of that would be possible without our paying supporters, who make it possible for us to work with the 17 artists we partnered with on this issue to bring it even more to life with quirky illustrations that tie back to things Royal said, like throwing in an illustration of a medieval horse with a knight in shining armor where Royal refers to his bass as his trusty steed. I like to refer to what she does as “Andy Warhol-ing.” [Laughs]
I know you just mentioned not wanting to become exclusively a Billy Strings fan zine. However, I’m curious to hear when and how y’all first encountered his music?
LC: The first time I saw Billy was at RiverRock, a free festival on Brown’s Island in Richmond in 2019 before he blew up. I had heard of him prior to that, but after seeing him live I became absolutely mesmerized. I didn’t like bluegrass for the longest time, but something clicked with me when I saw Billy and was like, “Oh, this is what I want to keep following and chasing.”
MH: In college, I was a huge Deadhead and Phish fan and was consumed by the jam world. Then I heard about Billy on some Facebook groups and message boards, talking about how he covers The Dead really well.
I moved to Boston shortly thereafter and the first month I was living there Billy played at the Wang Theater. I wound up buying a ticket and went without having listened to his music at all beforehand and was absolutely blown away. To me, it was like a psychedelic Dead or Phish show combined with bluegrass, which in hindsight probably hit on the homesickness I was feeling at the time, because I had been around bluegrass before, but wasn’t really interested in it when I was living in the South. From there, I jumped down the rabbit hole into more old-time bluegrass, which is when I started playing the music myself. So I attribute my musical pursuits now to that moment and think that is probably true of other people, too.
JL: I remember [going down] a YouTube [rabbit] hole in 2020 and coming across a set of Billy playing Doc Watson tunes. It may have been Royal’s first gig with him. I just so happened to be in a bit of a bluegrass moment at the time I found that video of Billy and was instantly hooked, resulting in me digging even deeper. I was already a Deadhead as well, so I loved his covers of those songs too. Then I worked my way to his original stuff – which is also sick – and I have YouTube to thank for it!
AP: I remember James, “Promontory Paul,” showing me Billy for the first time. Like most of the bands I like, I channel my music taste through him. When we first got into him there was still a lot of remote work going on, so we’d listen to Billy while doing that or even while we were playing games like Fortnite. I started listening to a lot of The Dead in order to try to get to the point where I could listen and name the year the show came from. But over time Billy started taking more and more of the market share of my listening time away from the “What year is this Grateful Dead show from?” project.
What are your next steps for continuing to grow Train Songz?
AP: We occasionally host concerts (the next one is February 12, 2026 with The Asheville Mountain Boys), and have captured audio recordings – which we call Tiny Train Sessions – in the past, but we look at them more as a marketing tactic than a growth mechanism.
My day job is a social media manager and doing that I’ve noticed that the best way to get a lot of views on Instagram is to post reels, because they [are served] to non-followers and new followers first. We could post a bunch of concert clips and other things to build our audience, but we intentionally opted to not do that because we’re firm believers that things that grow slow last a long time. We don’t want to gatekeep or make it hard to find us, but rather [hope folks will] find us organically through a friend sharing one of our memes or sending you a copy of the zine itself. I want the first point of contact to be someone who’s already within our ecosystem that really digs it and turns you onto it, one person at a time.
All visuals, artwork, and zine scans courtesy of Train Songz. Learn more about artists Morganne Allen and Sara Dennis.