Punch Brothers’ Paul Kowert: Musically Driven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Photo: Courtesy of Red Light Management

A Long, Musical Friendship: A Conversation With Hawktail

Chalk it up to changes in the music business—goodness knows there are some reasons to do so—but whatever the cause, it’s clear that, at least in the roots music world, more musicians than ever are choosing to devote themselves to more than one project at a time. Case in point: Hawktail, the trio known as Haas Kowert Tice before they expanded to a quartet in conjunction with the making of their latest release, Unless. Each member has built a career out of participation in multiple, and often musically different configurations—not only in the past, but right now and for the foreseeable future—even as they’ve persisted in exploring a sound that is uniquely Hawktail’s.

That’s obviously been a challenge when those other ventures include acts as prominent as Punch Brothers (Kowert’s their bassist) and the David Rawlings Machine (fiddle by Brittany Haas), or as personal as guitarist Jordan Tice’s Horse County album of 2016. But the addition of mandolinist Dominick Leslie (Deadly Gentlemen, Missy Raines & The New Hip) is, if anything, a token of how committed the group is to that distinctive sound, and to finding a long-term, yet non-exclusive way to keep making it. And the value of that pursuit can be measured by the music on Unless, which slides effortlessly and naturally from spicy takes on traditional American fiddling to more wide-ranging tangles of sophisticated chords and melodies that are nevertheless equally memorable.

A conversation with any of Hawktail’s members would have been enjoyable, but I was especially glad to get to talk to Haas, whose powerful bow arm and fierce energy first knocked me out when I joined the Tony Trischka bluegrass band for a couple of tours around the recording and release of his Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular album. Getting to hear her night after night was a real treat, and I’ve been a fan ever since—and now the Americana Music Association’s on board, too, giving her an Instrumentalist Of The Year nomination just a few days ago. With all that she and her bandmates have going on, catching a Hawktail show requires some vigilance, but it’s well worth the effort.

Did you really have all of Unless cut, and then decide to chuck it when you brought Dom in?

We actually did it twice, and chucked all of that, basically; there was one song that made the cut from an earlier recording—a tune called “Britt Guit,” that’s the one on there that’s only the trio. But yeah, it was a long process, because we cared about it a lot, we wanted it to be just right. So we did it several times.

Part of it was that we were missing an element, which turned out to be Dom, and part of it was that we hadn’t gotten the tones in quite the way that we liked them. And then, just as Dom was joining the band, and we’d done some sessions with him, we did this West Coast tour in November of last year. Those were the first live shows we played as a quartet, and Paul had just gotten this recorder right before the tour, and he recorded them all. We were doing that to sort of figure things out, because the arrangements were still developing as we started playing them, but it went so well, and then we decided that some of the live versions were better than anything we got in the studio. So it was a constantly evolving process—but we’re happy with the state that it’s in now.

It’s interesting that you mention your concern about the tones, because they’re really consistent between the live and studio cuts.

Yeah, that was amazing. We’re kind of baffled by it.

You mentioned being really committed to this project, even though y’all are involved in other stuff. What is that makes Hawktail bubble up to or near the top of your priority list? Because I’m sure there are more things that you could do than things that you actually do.

Well, for me, it kind of came about because of our long musical friendship. At the time that we started being a trio officially, we’d been friends for maybe six years or so, who just played for fun when we had time. But then I was getting a little bit more free because Crooked Still was slowing down, so I thought, I need something new to fill the time. And I’d always loved making music with these guys. So that was the impetus of it for me. But the longer that it goes on, and the deeper we get into it, the more it’s just a really cool creative outlet, and one that I learn a lot from, because it pushes me in different ways than the other projects.

The songs on Unless are credited to Hawktail, not individual members. It seems to me that’s something that’s getting more traction in our corner of the world, crediting everyone in the band for a tune. More and more folks are choosing to take collective credit in a way that underlines the seamlessness between writing and arranging. Is that the way you guys work? Does someone bring in an idea and then you work it up, or are people bringing in whole pieces and then you all are going from there? Is it one continuous thing or are there clear lines of separation?

I think it’s more continuous, and that’s the way we like it to be. It evolved over time. Of all the material that we have, some of it has been more where somebody has a distinct idea and brings it to the band, and then we arrange it together. But ultimately, the arrangements do a lot, because that’s how we figure out how to be ourselves on the piece. So yeah, it’s really collaborative, and now having Dom in it, and using the stuff we’ve written already but incorporating him into it is very much a process that we’re all figuring out together. It’s pretty cool—it’s very collaborative, very democratic.

It sounds like you guys are having fun. I wonder how you would describe for our readers…when I listen to the record, and when I listen to the other record, for that matter, there are passages where I think, that’s a fiddle tune there—it sounds like a fiddle tune, it has rhythms like a fiddle tune, it might have more parts than a usual fiddle tune, but that’s still kind of where it comes from. However, other stuff is much more moody and lyrical. Where does that come from?

Good question! I often don’t even know—like I’m definitely more responsible for the fiddle-tuney things. Jordan and Paul, their musical relationship goes back 10 years—as it does for all of us, really, even including Dom, just through the music scene—but they were writing music together through all that, where they realized that they were into a lot of the same music, like Edgar Meyer, Béla Fleck, Väsen, and classical music as well. They’ve got this way of writing together, from being inspired by all these same things, and talking about them, and incorporating them with the cool harmonic ideas that they both have.

The title track, “Unless,” is really inspired by Väsen and that Swedish music and its harmonies, and the amazing stuff that their guitar player does, the lines that just cascade through it, leading you to all these new places and the chords. And then the tune “Randy,” that was a guitar tune primarily, that was kind of Jordan’s guitar playing and harmonic conceptions. And then there’s things that blend that, or at least try to, that have little bits of a fiddle tune here and there, but then get a little more expansive around it.

It seems like it’s a way of writing within a single tune, similar to what a lot of the jam bands do in a set, which is to go from this texture to that, and kind of fiddle around back and forth, and have these really significant changes in musical feel, going from one song to another. And you guys are sort of doing that within a single tune sometimes. I remember flying home from Joe Val one time with Critter, and he played me roughs of what became “Blind Leaving the Blind.” Some of it was super-composed, and then they had much more improvisational sections, too. Is that what you guys are doing—you have some parts in tunes where you really know what the other folks are doing every time you play the piece?

Yeah, totally. We do have a bunch of that. And that was also kind of new to me, to be that specific about things. But it’s cool what that opens up, in terms of musical gestures that can really get you somewhere. And just knowing what everyone else is going to be doing—that actually opens things up. I think in my mind I used to think that was confining, like you have to play a scale at this time. But then to feel the effect that it has, the power you can get from that, is great.

Is it a big challenge for you guys to work out the Hawktail stuff with everything else that you’ve got going on?

It has been, but I feel that, as we’re all growing up and kind of figuring out what our lives are, and how we want to balance things, it gets a little bit easier. Like, OK, we now know—we’ve learned the timeline of how far ahead we have to think, and how careful we have to be about saving time for this band that we all love so much. We don’t want to let ourselves get too busy with other things. We’re getting there—we learn every day, you know! Being out on the road, and just doing it and figuring out each step of working with a booking agent, or of not having a manager, and what that means you have to do. It’s been a learning curve, and we’re grateful to everybody who’s helped us along the way. And the fact that we’re such close friends, I think, helps, because we can be like, you dropped the ball on that! We’re all coming into our roles more and more as we go.

It seems more difficult in the short run, but maybe more sustainable in the long run—it leads to a more enjoyable life and career as a musician, to be able to do different things, scratch different musical itches, and spend time with different people.

Yeah, I think we’re realizing that, too. We’ve known each other for such a long time already that this musical bond that we have, and our similar paths through life and our careers means that this is not going to go anywhere; we’re gonna always be friends and we’re always going to want to keep collaborating. So we don’t have to hit it so hard at this exact second—we have to just remember that it’s this beautiful thing that can sustain and exist for the rest of our lives, if we’re good to each other and keep being excited about creating together.

So there’s more Hawktail to come?

Definitely!

 


Photo credit: Tilt at Windmills Photography

Hawktail, ‘El Camino Pt. 2’

Not long ago, the bluegrass-meets-old-time-plus-chamber-music supertrio that consisted of fiddler Brittany Haas, bassist Paul Kowert, and guitarist Jordan Tice stopped simply billing themselves by their last names, added mandolinist Dominick Leslie to the fold, and renamed their outfit Hawktail. Their debut album, Unless, solidifies their status as a concrete ensemble — a grown, autonomous entity, more than just a collection of friends and string band experts who happen to enjoy playing tunes together here and there, when tour schedules allowed and stars aligned. Fortunately, that solidification was not predicated upon the elimination of the spontaneity, whimsy, and kineticism that shone through their picking as they grew from a pick-up band to an established trio to this, their current, matured form.

On “El Camino Pt. 2,” you can hear the live audience responding to this kineticism, watching in palpable awe while these four young paragons of acoustic music dialogue with each other. As they ebb and flow, rise and fall, they demonstrate to every listener that that feeling among the crowd, the exciting premonition that everything could, at any point, careen off the rails, is purposeful and under precise control. After all, this is one reason why old-time and bluegrass are so appealing: When you are in the presence of true virtuosos, players whose musicality transcend their instruments, quite literally anything can happen. The fact that Hawktail never forsake their exquisite taste, their sometimes quirky, funky, or nerdy personalities, their supremely traditional influences, or their penchant for everybody-hold-onto-your-hats fun while maintaining their deliberate, cohesive voice as an ensemble makes it even more adventuresome to follow wherever they may lead.

WATCH: Hawktail, ‘Abbzug’

Artist: Hawktail (formerly known as Haas Kowert Tice)
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Song: “Abbzug”
Album: TBD
Release Date: April 2018

In Their Words: “Fiddle tune with a walking bass line. Britt wrote the melody. Her title is a tribute to Edward Abbey. This video is from the recording session of our forthcoming record at Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville.” — Paul Kowert


Photo credit: Jody March