Lead singer and songwriter of the bluegrass adjacent Trampled by Turtles, Dave Simonett is a talented musician and a great outdoorsman. From the small town of Mankato, Minnesota, to the vibrant music scenes of Duluth and Minneapolis, Dave shares his upbringing in a musically inclined, nature-loving family shaped by the sounds of church hymns and classic rock. He opens up about his dual passions for music and the great outdoors, recounting his experiences with pheasant hunting and conservation efforts in Minnesota. He also reflects on the parallels between the camaraderie found in hunting and playing music, emphasizing the importance of trying new things and embracing the unknown. Follow as we delve into the evolution of Trampled by Turtles’ unique sound, described as a “butterfly’s heartbeat,” and trace the band’s journey from traditional bluegrass to their own distinct style.
In our Basic Folk conversation, Dave also talks about the challenges and rewards of maintaining artistic integrity in the music industry while balancing creative growth with commercial pressures. He shares insights on his band’s latest project Always Here, Always Now, a dual EP featuring recordings by both Trampled by Turtles (Always Here) and his solo project, Dead Man Winter (Always Now). He wrote five songs and instead of picking a band to record the tracks, he handed them over to both bands to do what they will to the music. The results are very cool to listen to side by side. The episode wraps up with a fun lightning round, where Dave reveals his dream supergroup and favorite hunter orange accessory (gotta be safe out there!).
(Editor’s Note: This December, we continue our annual series – see also: Dolly in December, Dawg in December, Dylan in December, and Del in December – by celebrating the iconic, trailblazing jam band, the Grateful Dead, all month long! We’ll be featuring the Grateful Dead as our Artist of the Month, celebrating their enormous impact on bluegrass and roots music over the next few weeks.
To kick off our coverage, BGS contributor Garret Woodward pens a heartfelt and personal AOTM reveal. Plus, don’t miss our exhaustive Essential Grateful Dead Playlist below.)
The single most profound moment within my 39 years of existence (thus far) is the first time I heard the Grateful Dead. Not far behind that life-altering experience were my initial encounter with LSD (in high school) and finally cracking open Jack Kerouac’s seminal 1957 novel, On the Road (in college).
Summer 1994. I was nine years old and living a simple, yet happily mischievous childhood in the small North Country community of Rouses Point, New York. One mile from the Canadian Border. One mile from the state line of Vermont. Solitude. Desolation. Rural America. Mornings spent building tree forts and wandering vast cornfields surrounding my childhood home. Afternoons jumping off the dock into nearby Lake Champlain.
Even at that time, I was a bona fide music freak. Whether it was Top 40 radio (Gin Blossoms, Melissa Etheridge, Collective Soul, Sheryl Crow) blasting out of the small boom box in my bedroom or whatever my parents shoved into the cassette deck in the family minivan (Willie Nelson, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Nat King Cole, George Jones), I was in search of “the sound.”
But, everything in my existence changed one evening that summer at a family cookout at our camp on the lake. Sitting at the picnic table — chowing down on some burgers, beans and potato salad — I noticed a hat my aunt’s boyfriend was wearing. The logo on the front was of a dancing bear, with the back featuring a skull with a lightning bolt. I inquired.
“It’s the Grateful Dead,” he replied with a Cheshire Cat grin emerging from a bushy beard. “Have you ever listened to the Dead, man?” No, I replied. After dinner, he walked me over to his early 1990s Volkswagen Jetta. He hopped in, rolled the windows down and turned on the stereo. Again, with a grin, as if he knew what was going to happen once he pressed play and cranked the volume.
It was the Skeletons from the Closet album. The opening tune, “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” hit me like an undulating series of waves in some endless ocean of melodic tones and lyrical truths. It was just like when Dorothy Gale entered the world of color in The Wizard of Oz.
Nothing really was ever the same after that moment. It was not only the first music I’d discovered on my own – without the radio or my parents’ influence – the Dead, for some unexplained reason at the time, immediately became “my band.” Something clicked deeply inside of me. I awoke. And I had arrived.
Soon, a seismic shift occurred in my adolescent life. I wore Dead shirts to my Catholic elementary school to the dismay of the nuns. Tacked up Jerry Garcia posters on my bedroom wall. The swirling sensation of “Sugar Magnolia” or “St. Stephen” echoing from the boom-box. Incense burning on the windowsill overlooking the cornfields and unknown horizon of my intent. I even had a small shrine to Jerry on my bookshelf for several years after he died. I was all-in.
Musically, the Dead were a bunch of incredibly talented bluegrass, folk, and jazz freaks, who were inspired by the onslaught of the Beatles to plug in and go electric. The band itself was this massive sponge, one which soaked in any and all influences it crossed paths with — either onstage or merely wandering down the road of life. That authentic sense of curiosity and discovery is key to the Dead’s magic throughout its decades of improvisational splendor.
At its core, the Dead’s message resonated within my often-bullied and ignored self as a kid. If you like the Dead, you’ll always find a friend out there in the universe to connect with. The band’s symbols are beacons of love, compassion, and acceptance once you walk out the front door. In essence, I’d found my tribe, this wild-‘n’-wondrous ensemble of loving oddballs, eccentric weirdos, and all-around jovial folk. My kind of people, who remain so to this day.
The Dead is about personal freedom. To not only be yourself, but to also seek out the intrinsic beauty of people, places and things in this big ol’ world of ours. Have adventures. Pursue wisdom. Radiate love. Be kind. Damnit, be kind. All of these things offered from the music and its followers were placed in my emotional and spiritual toolbox as I began to wander the planet on my own following high school, college and impending adulthood.
And here I stand. Age 39. That nine-year-old discovering the Dead is still inside of me somewhere, still burning incense and blasting “St. Stephen.” That youngster’s excitement for all things music (especially live), endless curiosity for what lies just around the corner, and running with a reckless abandon towards the unknowns of tomorrow are as strong and vibrant as ever — especially through this ongoing catalyst that is my career in the written word.
Case in point, I recently headed to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky, for another celebratory weekend for its current exhibit: “Jerry Garcia: A Bluegrass Journey,” on assignment and on the ground covering the festivities. An incredibly curated collection of rare Garcia artifacts and wisdom, the showcase will run onsite until next spring.
Before the inception of the Grateful Dead, Garcia was completely immersed in the bluegrass and folk scenes in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was part of numerous acoustic acts and ensembles throughout the bountiful period — the culmination of that vast knowledge and in-depth experience being poured into the Dead’s formation in 1965.
To note, there’s a lot to be said about Garcia’s talents on the banjo being applied to what would become his signature tone on the electric guitar. And to that notion, add in the sheer lyrical aptitude of Robert Hunter, who not only penned many of the Dead’s iconic melodies, but was also on a parallel journey to Garcia’s early on and throughout the band’s 30-year trajectory.
And there I was in Owensboro, some 400 miles from my current home in Western North Carolina. Traveling for hours just to arrive on the mighty Ohio River – the state line of Kentucky and Indiana, this crossroads of the Southeast and Midwest. And for what? To push further and farther down the cosmic rabbit hole that is Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and those who follow.
The next 48 hours were a whirlwind of sound and scope. Seemingly endless tribute sets to Garcia and the Dead at the Woodward Theater inside the museum from the Kitchen Dwellers, Lindsay Lou, Fireside Collective, and members of the Infamous Stringdusters to late-night jam sessions in hotel rooms next door.
The Grateful Dead are arguably the only musical entity to exist that – regardless of who or what genre is being represented – once one of their tunes is placed into a performance, folks either show up in droves or are already present with ears perked up to what’s radiating out from the stage. It’s a fact that no matter what style of music you play, if it involves the Dead in some form or fashion, Deadheads are game to check it out. You could be a polka group and we’ll be right there, standing front row, the second you roll into “Althea” or “Shakedown Street.” The music provides, always and forever.
Before I left Owensboro and the Garcia celebration at the museum, I found myself on a bourbon distillery tour on Saturday afternoon. I walked into the enormous facility and checked in with the host. All by myself and waiting for the tour to start, the host tapped me on the shoulder.
“You like the Dead?” his face lit up, pointing to the Dead stealie tattoo on the back of my right leg. “Sure do, my brother,” I shot back with a smile of solidarity. We talked about our favorite live Dead recordings and where we’ve caught Dead & Company in concert recently, kindred spirits now eternally connected by this band of roving musical pirates. It’s a genuine interaction that happens often to Deadheads and something I don’t ever take for granted.
Even as we stand in this uncertain time in American history – where nothing is the same, everything is the same – the Grateful Dead remain this portal to escape, to purposely choose compassion, camaraderie, and community. It’s about cultivation of one’s self and of the sheer magnitude and gratitude of daily life, so long as you stroll this earth with the pure and honest intent to connect, to listen, and to understand.
Love Your Mind, the new album from Boston/Toronto-based band Twisted Pine, is a delicious exploration of joy, growth, and self-love, packaged into tight grooves and soulful vocals. The quartet – which features Dan Bui, Kathleen Parks, Anh Phung, and Chris Sartori – is beloved for its genre-bending approach to acoustic music; they continue to defy expectations with their mandolin, fiddle, flute, and bass instrumentation.
What I noticed most about this new record, besides its refreshing positivity (in this economy?!), was the seamlessly collaborative sound. In discussing this in a BGS interview with the entire band, they explained that they’ve taken these past years to hone their collective voice as a group. With this new album, they felt that they had found that voice.
Together, we all agreed that the name “Twisted Mind(s)” might be more appropriate for the band at this point. Below is our conversation, where we cover Love Your Mind and the joy within it, the inspirations found in jamming, how flute fits in at bluegrass festivals, and so much more.
I love the amount of joy and uplift that comes through this album; it’s rare among Americana albums in this day and age. Is that feeling something that the band gravitates to organically? Or was it a choice you made specifically about this project?
Kathleen Parks: I think that happened pretty organically. Some of the songs started coming out of the post-COVID era. “After Midnight,” for example, was written after the first Ossipee [Valley Music] Festival in person after the pandemic and I tried to capture the joyful feeling of being around each other again. … Some of the album started in that appreciative state.
Dan Bui: I would add that throughout the album some subjects are a little bit more somber – there’s a theme of personal growth and learning through hardship and dealing with things like anxiety, making mistakes, and learning from them – but it’s always viewed through a positive lens, and musically, certainly, it is more of an upbeat fun vibe. That’s what we try to put out into the world and bring to our shows in general.
I love that song, “After Midnight (Nothing Good Happens).” Can you tell me more about that one?
KP: I was deciding not to party one night and [was] walking to my tent … listening to the roar of fiddle tunes and good times being had. I was like, “Oh my god that sounds so fun, but I also have two sets to play tomorrow.” My dad used to say that title phrase to me as a kid. He was also a musician who toured a lot so I always thought, “Cool people stay up super late.” My dad was like, “No, nothing good happens after midnight.”
Your fans have been starving for a new Twisted Pine record. What have you all been working on in the four years since your last release?
DB: Releasing our last record [Right Now] in 2020 was a huge challenge. We had to pivot and we weren’t able to do what we wanted to do, performance-wise, for a couple of years. So by the time we were able to get out there, we kind of went “all in” on touring and working on our live show. Before the pandemic, we had only really been playing with Anh for a short time, about six months. Since she lives in Canada, it was impossible to get together in person for a very long time.
Chris Sartori: Even getting into the studio with Anh for Right Now, it felt like we were just starting to figure out how that might work. These past couple of years have been really about ironing out the sound we had envisioned as a quartet and getting it to a place where we could write for that sound.
Anh Phung: It felt like with the 2020 record I was injected into a band that already existed, but Love Your Mind came from a place of more foundational collaboration. I was truly a part of the band before we got in there and recorded.
KP: I also feel like on this new album we had more time to discuss, “How do we want this song to sound?” We brought in players like Ethan Robbins, Ali McGuirk – just because we could. We had time and space and we weren’t being rushed into anything.
I also wanted to ask you about the “A Beautiful Phase (90’s Song).” Is it a ’90s song to you? Or is it just referencing nostalgia for the ’90s as “a beautiful phase”?
KP: For some reason, it ended up in the voice memos with that title. For me sonically, it very much has a “Bitter Sweet Symphony” vibe and I always see chrome when I sing it – that really, really specific blue chrome color, which I remember as a child.
Yes! I had that nail polish!
KP: Yep. It’s kind of looking back on a younger self, talking to a younger self. … For me, it’s about the missed opportunities with being a musician. You miss a lot of time with your family or family events [and] the song is almost apologizing for that.
DB: That song was one of the more collaborative ones. We had these early writing sessions at Kathleen’s where we got together and just jammed to see what came out. … There was this one section that turned into the chorus of that song. At one point, Chris and I were sitting around and decided, “Let’s just build this around this moody section.” We worked with that and kind of introduced a verse and this idea of having it modulate to a bunch of different keys. We roughed out a structure and that was what the lyrics were written over. When we went into the studio it was fresh – a lot of choices were happening in real time. It was cool to have it just come together like that.
Do you write a lot from jamming?
KP: It is a mix of jamming and melodic ideas. The final product is usually the outcome of playing the song down with a lot of different grooves and ideas, seeing what fits, and what we can pull off.
DB: One example is “Green Flash.” Kathleen was playing this 12-string electric guitar and this melodic idea kind of popped out and we decided to make something out of that sound.
That song also features Jerry Douglas. How did that happen?
KP: We had seen him at Earl Scruggs Music Festival and he said, “If there’s any way I can help, just let me know…” So, when that song started coming together, we were like, “We should ask Jerry to be on this!” In the studio we made this video asking if he would play on this song and sent it to him – and he said sure!
AP: Jerry has the exact style for it. I feel like the tune has the vibe of Strength In Numbers, so he fits perfectly.
OK, this question is specifically for Anh: What has your experience been like being the “flutist at the bluegrass festival?”
AP: Honestly, by the time I was playing with Twisted Pine, it was a pretty soft landing, because a lot of the work building my credibility in the scene came before that. Even going to IBMA, I was expecting a lot of pushback, but it has been pretty shocking how welcoming people have been. I think the initial expectation was pretty low. People were skeptical of how I, playing a flute, would work within this band, so when they hear it and it’s going well, it has even more of an effect!
Can you tell me about the actual recording of the album?
DB: I think a big part of the sound of the record should be credited to our co-producer, Dan Cardinal. We have worked with Dan on every record that we’ve done and he’s just someone who understands what we’re going for. He does a great job at capturing the organic sound of our instruments, but is also very creative and able to augment the sounds of our band … subtly and sometimes not so subtly. His choices make the recording sound a little bit bigger, wider and deeper. He was really valuable in that way. A lot of the songs were new, still being worked out, and he had some great third party observations.
KP: He’s good at placing sounds so that you feel them, but you’re not suddenly met with this random out-of-place soundscape in an otherwise acoustic recording.
That’s something I loved about the record. Even though you’re genre-bending, the sound is still so acoustic, where I imagine it would have been easy to add drums and synths, etc. Were there specific records you were referencing for production?
CS: I think each track has its own inspiration. Like “Start/Stop” is very Motown, “Chanel Perfume” is going more for an Aretha “Rock Steady” thing; each track we approached as kind of its own world.
Okay, last question, what does the title, Love Your Mind, mean to you?
CS: That sort of reared its head after we were finished recording and [after] looking back at what themes had emerged. We kind of identified that as a common thread that ties the record together, even though sonically it goes in all of these directions.
KP: For me, it means that whatever state you’re in – dark or frantic – you have to just try to look at yourself from someone else’s point of view and love yourself completely through all the stages.
AP: This is kind of riffing on a different idea, but I also think of Love Your Mind as – it’s common knowledge that our band has been hard to identify genre-wise, and I think that even though this album has a mixture of genres the sound that came out of this album is kind of unified in the way that the four of us play together. Twisted Pine is the four of our minds together, so the magical chemistry is loving our minds.
(Editor’s Note: Want more Twisted Pine? Check out our Basic Folk episode on the group featuring an exclusive interview with fiddler Kathleen Parks. Listen and subscribe here.)
In our last Bluegrass Memoir, “Beginnings,” I described David Hoffman’s documentary, Earl Scruggs with his Family and Friends. By the time NET aired it, the Revue was already off and rolling with Earl’s new music.
In 1970, bluegrass festivals – the first was in 1965 – were becoming quite popular. The music’s supporters had discovered that such events could present their favorite music to broader, younger, urban audiences. These larger crowds brought their tastes and preferences with them. At these booming festivals, new acts like the Earl Scruggs Revue spoke to musical perspectives shaped by contemporary popular music.
The Revue played to large numbers at Monroe’s Bean Blossom Festival that spring and to Carlton Haney’s Camp Springs Festival on Labor Day weekend. Earl’s solo album, Nashville’s Rock, and Randy and Gary’s solo album, All the Way Home, were released that year.
The Earl Scruggs Revue at Bill Monroe’s annual Bean Blossom festival, Bean Blossom, Indiana, June 1970. (L-R) Unidentified bassist, Jody Maphis, Randy Scruggs, Earl Scruggs, Gary Scruggs, and Leah Jane Berinati. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.
In 1971, Columbia released Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends (C 30584), a soundtrack album that included much of the content of Hoffman’s documentary along with two additional fine vocals by Doc Watson. In its liner notes, Don DeVito characterized the show’s topic:
Earl Scruggs is a man who has paid his dues. You can forget the generation gap … Earl has always been an innovator and an adventurer…
Also in 1971, newgrass music emerged. Its key figure at that time was singer-songwriter and banjoist John Hartford, whose “Gentle on My Mind” had been a 1967 Glen Campbell hit. John had flourished in the LA television business as a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and a performer on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.
Hartford and Scruggs – they’d met in 1953 – had developed what Bob Carlin, in My Memories of John Hartford (University Press of Mississippi) calls “a deep friendship.” When Hartford returned to Nashville in 1971, he recorded what is now considered the first newgrass album, Aereo-Plain. The Revue’s Randy Scruggs played bass on this ground-breaking disc alongside Tut Taylor, Vassar Clements, and Norman Blake.
The Revue and Hartford were at the center of Nashville’s jam-based music, which embraced musicians from new scenes blending rock and older genres – folk, bluegrass, and country. Both bands appeared at a number of bluegrass festivals in 1971 and the Revue was busy recording in Nashville.
I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends(1972)
Earl was working on his next album, I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends: Earl Scruggs with Special Guest Stars. The back liners of the album (Columbia KC31354) described it as “Earl Scruggs and The Earl Scruggs Revue in performances with Linda Ronstadt/The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band/Stacey Belson and Arloff Boguslavaki.”
Stacey Belson was a pseudonym for blues singer Tracy Nelson, then with the band Mother Earth. Arloff Boguslavaki was Bob Dylan’s pseudonym.
Bill Williams’ liner notes describe the fabulous jam sessions that were happening at the Scruggs family house – hence the album’s concept:
Picture, if you will, the group sitting around together at the Scruggs home (although the actual locale was shifted to Columbia Studios) …
For this album, the studio became the living room and the producer was Don Law, the Nashville vet who’d worked in the ’30s with blues legend Robert Johnson and western swing pioneer Bob Wills and in the ’50s with Flatt & Scruggs.
At this Scruggs family jam session were Earl and sons along with their Madison High School contemporary, drummer Jody Maphis. Also in the room were fiddler Vassar Clements, in the process of moving from Hartford’s band to join the Revue, and several others who’d later join the Revue, including pianist Bob Wilson, a Detroit R&B musician who’d moved to Nashville and subsequently recorded with Bob Dylan.
Each of the featured star guests are heard in solo, sometimes singing in harmony with each other. Earl plays on every cut. Great to hear his backup work with all its nuances! Randy’s lead guitar and Vassar’s fiddling appear throughout.
It was as if these people had showed up at the Scruggs home one evening to play for and with each other – an old-fashioned domestic music session, with the host going around the room inviting each to perform and providing musical backups for all. The evening’s repertoire was the kind of stuff you might expect at such an event: mostly recent country, folk, blues and rock – things you might have heard on the radio lately in 1971.
The sound was that of contemporary popular music, suggesting that this was what you’d hear if the Earl Scruggs Revue came to your living room, festival, or auditorium.
The album’s first side opens with an LA country soul rock tune, Bonnie and Delaney’s “Lonesome and a Long Way From Home.” Gary is singing lead and playing bass; Nelson adds harmony. This is rocking R&B – Wilson’s piano opens the break and, with fiddle and drums, keeps it rocking to the end. Earl’s banjo is out front throughout.
Next comes Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings,” sung by Linda Ronstadt with harmony by Nelson. The backup piano and Dobro are joined by a fiddle break. Straight-ahead Nashville country.
Track three features “Boguslavaki” (Dylan) singing Charles E. Baer’s 1896 hit, “It’s a Picture From Life’s Other Side,” a song that had gone into the folk tradition and been frequently recorded by hillbilly and gospel singers in the ’20s and ’30s. The laid-back fiddle, bass, and drums, along with Nelson’s harmony on the chorus, mark this as a parlor folksong.
It’s followed by Nelson’s performance of “Motherless Child Blues,” where accompanying musicians Earl, Norman Blake, Randy, and Vassar stretch out with some nice blues breaks.
This side closes with Mike Nesmith’s “Some of Shelley’s Blues,” performed with members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, with Gary Scruggs and Jeff Hanna doing the singing and Earl and Randy both taking instrumental breaks.
The second side of the album opens with a vocal by Gary on another Bonnie and Delaney cover, “Never Ending Song of Love.” Ronstadt sings a county cover, Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”
Dylan brings out another pre-war country folk oldie, a great “Banks of the Ohio.” While Nelson is featured singing folksinger Bruce “Utah” Phillips’ “Rock Salt and Nails,” a song first recorded by Flatt & Scruggs in 1965, with Ronstadt adding harmony on the chorus.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band contributes another Nesmith song, “Propinquity.” The side closes with the album’s title track, a sing-along for everyone, “I Saw the Light.” The album was released in 1972.
Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972)
Around the same time as I Saw The Light was made, banjoist John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band asked Earl to be on their new three-LP concept album, Will The Circle Be Unbroken. Scruggs was playing in Denver with the Revue when he and McEuen met. The Dirt Band’s sound, with McEuen’s skilled Scruggs-style banjo, appealed to him, as did their project to honor and make music with the earlier generation’s pioneers. That had been his own goal in bringing Maybelle Carter into the studio to record with Flatt & Scruggs back in 1961.
Earl, well-connected in Nashville as an Opry star with record, television, and movie hits, helped bring a number of his country music friends into the project. Both Gary and Randy were also involved, as were several of Hartford’s Aereo-Plain band members, notably fiddler Vassar Clements and Dobro player Norman Blake.
Unlike Earl’s Nashville’s Rock album, which covered recent rock and pop hits on the banjo with Nashville studio backing including electric instruments and, on several cuts, a soulful female vocal trio and a string section, this album had completely acoustic backup by the Dirt Band as they covered legacy hits by country, bluegrass and folk pioneers like Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, and Jimmy Martin.
Earl played a pivotal role in the making of these recordings, playing guitar or banjo on sixteen tracks. The whole Scruggs family can be heard: Randy contributed guitar, autoharp, or voice on eleven tracks, Gary sang on eight, and Louise and Steve sang on one track.
Of the many interesting performances on this award-winning album, Randy Scruggs’ acoustic guitar version of “Both Sides Now” was perhaps the most remarkable; the final selection in the set, it followed a group sing-along of the title track, similar to the closing on the Earl’s I Saw The Light, in which all of the Scruggses sang. These recordings, released in 1972, were made in August 1971.
The Scruggs Brothers (1972)
Also recorded in 1971 was Gary and Randy’s second Vanguard album, The Scruggs Brothers (Vanguard VSD 6579). Some of the same musicians who played on I Saw The Light performed here, like Tracy Nelson, the Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna and John McEuen, pianist Bob Wilson, and drummer Karl Himmel; but the album had more of a country rock sound. It opened with “Little Maggie,” a song Flatt & Scruggs had recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1962. With Gary’s bass and Jody Maphis’ drums leading the way, it sounded something like the Nashville studio A-listers Area Code 615’s 1969 version.
Throughout the album, Randy played a majority of the solo breaks, some on acoustic guitar but most on electric, in a heavy metal style similar to what I heard him playing in Maine in 1975. Four tracks were their own compositions, two by Gary and two collaborations.
On one, the instrumental “Trousdale Ferry Rag,” Earl played banjo. This up-tempo, bluegrass-style piece has an unusual ending, shifting to a slow blues beat. Most notable is Gary’s “Lowlands,” a great ballad set to the tune of Earl’s “Sally Ann,” which both brothers had been hearing at home all of their lives (Flatt & Scruggs recorded it in 1960). Gary plays guitar, Randy picks banjo.
Covers of older (dare we say traditional?) material includes a rocking version of Jimmie Rodgers’ “T for Texas,” and the other cut on which Earl played banjo, “Hobo’s Lullaby,” which features a sing-along chorus similar to that on the closing of the I Saw The Light and Will The Circle Be Unbroken albums. Another older piece was “The Johnson Boys” (Flatt & Scruggs did it 1962) on which John McEuen’s frailed banjo created the album’s most old-timey sound.
The Earl Scruggs Revue at Bill Monroe’s annual Bean Blossom festival, Bean Blossom, Indiana, June 1970. Randy Scruggs, Earl Scruggs, and Gary Scruggs. Photo by Carl Fleischhauer.
The boys’ continuing involvement with country rock is reflected in two songs that originated in 1967 with the LA band Hearts and Flowers. “Rock and Roll Gypsies,” which closes the first side of the album, seems to have been an attempt to garner radio play – it’s the only track on the record to include string section backup. The other Hearts and Flowers-connected track, “Bugler,” a sad song about the death of a dog, had recently been covered by Clarence White with the Byrds.
Live at Kansas State (1972)
During this year of extensive studio recording, the Revue was also out playing on the road. Although Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends included a few examples of the group in action outside the studio, Live at Kansas State (Columbia KC 31758) was their first full show album.
Many of the songs the Revue did at this 1972 concert remained in the band’s regular repertoire and showed up, for example, at the 1975 Maine concert, including “T for Texas,” “Paul and Silas” (they titled it “Bound in Jail All Night Long”), “Sally Goodin[g],” “Carolina Boogie,” “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven,” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”
Several were on their recent albums, like “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Both Sides Now.” Bluegrass classics included “Good Woman’s Love” and “Bugle Call Rag.”
In 1998, a reviewer for No Depression wrote that Live at Kansas State was “probably their album most deserving of a full reissue … a surprisingly cohesive ‘bluegrass-rock’ blend, the likes of which has seldom been heard since.”
In 1972, the band included fiddler Vassar Clements and Dobroist Josh Graves, a bluegrass icon who’d just left Lester Flatt’s band. The album package has several photos of the band; these are notable in that they include everyone but pianist Bob Wilson, who is very much present in the album’s audio.
Wilson had moved to Nashville from Detroit’s R&B scene. His first years in Nashville were slow going, but that changed when Bob Dylan came to town to record Nashville Skyline and wanted “a funkier piano sound than the usual Nashville cat could produce.” The success of his work on Dylan’s album gave him plenty of studio work and he also found time to go on the road with Scruggs.
“When I was with the Earl Scruggs Revue,” he recalled, “Earl always introduced the band, and when he came to me, he always told the crowd, ‘And this is the man who played piano on Nashville Skyline, Bob Wilson.’ I must admit the applause felt really good.”
In his memoir, Bluegrass Bluesman, Graves spoke of the challenges he enjoyed while rocking with the Revue: “Earl and that bunch forced you to work up new licks. You had to come in there on the stuff they were playing. It was so loud I couldn’t hardly stand it, but I really enjoyed it. It opened a lot of doors for me. They were into a lot of things. …”
“Earl was doing the same old tunes with a little modern touch. Earl got bored with bluegrass – I’ll tell you that. He just didn’t want to play it anymore. They had that big beat, that sound behind it, and that’s what he liked.”
“He’d play ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ with that band and people would go wild.”
The Revue carried on into the early ‘80s, with albums that drew from contemporary pop music and brought younger country, folk, and rock stars in as guest artists. We’ll touch on a few of these next time.
The first time I heard Billy Strings’ name was in 2014, from a guitar picking pilot friend of mine from northern Kentucky who was working up in Michigan. I first met him at the Frankfort Bluegrass Festival in Illinois two or three years later, by which time I’d played a song or two from the Fiddle Tune X album on the satellite radio show I was hosting with Del McCoury. Billy had either recently gotten or was about to get his first IBMA Award for Momentum Instrumentalist of the Year (his then-roommate, Molly Tuttle, got one at the same time).
After that, I’d see him from time to time – I was already writing songs with fellow Michigander and Billy’s across-the-street neighbor Lindsay Lou – but it wasn’t until June 18, 2018, that we got together to write our first song, “Love Like Me.” We wrote a few more after that, he went into the studio, and put most of them on 2019’s Home. Since then, working as a team with another Michigander, Aaron Allen, we’ve written many more, for Renewal and now for Highway Prayers, too. To be honest, it’s been a little life-changing – a taste, at least, of what it must have been like for Music Row songwriters back in the day.
One striking feature of Billy’s trajectory has been his ability to keep the enthusiasm of the normative bluegrass industry and community that the IBMA generally represents; my social media feeds regularly remind me that most of the stalwart traditionalists among my friends – people who grew up immersed in scenes that trace back to the music’s earliest days – aren’t dissing Billy Strings. They’re cheering him on. That hasn’t always been the case with bluegrass artists bringing the sound and the songs to larger-than-usual audiences, but it’s indisputable here, as three successive IBMA Entertainer of the Year awards (finally supplanted this year by Del, another traditionalist admirer) demonstrate.
The reason, I think, is that, as BGS Editor Justin Hiltner puts it in his Artist of the Month reveal essay, “the most innovative and revolutionary aspects of Billy Strings and his version of bluegrass are not what he’s changed, but what has stayed the same.” When the BGS team invited me to have a chat with Billy for Artist of the Month, I figured it was, among other things, an opportunity to dig deeper into that idea – and so I did.
Together, we talked about recording Highway Prayers, about working in a band, about writing songs and making set lists. We talked about a number of things, but somehow always wound back up, again and again, at the endlessly rewarding music of Mac Wiseman and Larry Sparks, “Riding That Midnight Train” and “Cumberland Gap,” “Uncle Pen” and more.
Does it get any more bluegrass than that?
You didn’t record Highway Prayers all at once, did you? Wasn’t it recorded over a while?
Billy Strings: Right. We started in January out in LA at EastWest Studios, with Jon Brion the producer and Greg Koller at the helm as engineer. We recorded a few tunes out there. I really love what we got sonically, but I just don’t know if being in LA while trying to make a record was right for us – we were right downtown in freaking LA, man. I felt like, “What the hell am I doing out here in this big city where all these movie stars are, trying make a record?” I was working with Jon [Brion], who is a genius, that’s where he likes to work and the sounds we were getting were awesome and everything was cool, but I think it was also at a time where I was wanting to get the guys together without a producer and just throw stuff at the wall.
So we threw a makeshift little studio together and brought in Brandon Bell, and that’s where we recorded a good bulk of it – just threw up a couple of mics with a little lunch box of pre-amps and went for it. We would sit there and work a song out and then go upstairs and cut it. The great thing about being at my house was, it’s like there’s no authority figure there and it doesn’t feel like a studio – it just feels like we’re at band practice. And if you wanted, while somebody’s trying to do a overdub or something, you could go for a bike ride. Just that in itself was mentally freeing.
I will say that the tones we were getting out there with Jon were unquestionably better to me. But I’m kind of in the spot where I’m just, like, “Does it really matter?” Well, even if most people listen to music on their damn phone, it does matter. That’s how you make a sound that can evoke emotion. But also, as a bluegrass musician, any time we get with somebody or something, it’s like, “We should record you guys on these old ribbon mics and straight to tape with no edits,” and it’s just like, “Well, dude, it’s 2024.”
I feel like in some ways when people do that, they’re kind of privileging the process over the result, when the result is what people are gonna hear and what they’re gonna relate to.
Yeah, I’m just chasing something and I’m not trying to think about it too much. I read something in a book the other day, it’s called Blues and Trouble, by Tom Piazza. He says that sometimes you can push an idea up a hill, and you gotta push and push to get it to the top of the hill, but sometimes an idea gets going and you have to run to keep up. That’s where I like to be – you know what I’m talking about as a songwriter – when it just kind of falls out. Those are the best ones, you know, and quite a few of these songs just rolled off the page. Like “Be Your Man,” for instance, I wrote it in 20 minutes; it just came out. Of course there are other ones you have to work hard on, but, man, those – I just love when they show up like that, it almost feels like you just siphoned it out of the ether. Who wrote the song, you know?
That’s something that I’ve heard a lot over the years from a lot of great songwriters: it’s just like pulling it out of the air, and it kind of falls right in there. When you’re in that zone, you can’t hardly beat that.
No, you gotta keep going with it, you know. It’s hard to get in that zone, and like I said, it’s rare for me, it might only happen a couple of times a year that I write a song like that. That’s how “Dust In a Baggie” was. I wrote it in 30 minutes at work – I didn’t even have a guitar, I just had the melody in my head and a little notepad. I was cleaning rooms at the hotel and I sat there and wrote that. That’s still how the song is today, you know, it was just… it was done. Finished.
Let me ask you a little bit more about your process more generally. What’s the role of the guys in the band? You know, in the bluegrass world, at one extreme you’ve got the Jimmy Martin style of bandleader, which is, you know, “This is my sound, and this is how you’re gonna do it, and I will tell you what you need to do and show you what you need to do.” Then, on the other end, you’ve got somebody like Bill Monroe or J.D. Crowe, who says, “I brought you in to do your thing and let’s see how it fits together with everything else going on there.”
I very much lean towards the latter. I’ve got such amazing musicians that I’d be stupid not to listen to what they’ve got to say, you know? They’re so amazing and each one of them has their own strengths. So it’s a good mixture of like, I’m the band leader, kinda what I say goes, but I also take into consideration everything that the guys say. Sometimes I really need their advice and ask for it– like, for instance, most of the time I write the set list, but sometimes … I’ll go to the front lounge and say, “Hey, what do you guys wanna play tonight?” And then some ideas will come at me.
They’re there when I need them and they also don’t take anything personally when I say, “Hey, no.” It just depends, because sometimes it’s touchy when you write a song and somebody else wants to try to change it. But sometimes, if you hear them out, the idea that they come up with is way better. It just takes you a second to see what they’re talking about.
What you said about Crowe, bringing people in to do their thing, that’s really what I want. I don’t wanna be the dictator. I wanna be somebody who’s in a band. My whole life, my friends have been my family, especially when I was a teenager and started playing in bands. The word “band” means a lot to me. It means my brotherhood, you know, my closest friends and family.
That leads me to something that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody else talk to you about this. You’re constantly bringing new material into the band – not originals, but older songs, old bluegrass songs. You’re always refreshing the repertoire. Are you just listening to old stuff all the time and hear something and say, “Man, that’s cool, let’s start doing that”? How does it work?
There’s a lot of songs in my head just from growing up playing bluegrass and we still haven’t scratched the surface of it. You know what I mean? Like, one night I’ll just be thinking of my dad in the old days, how we used to pick down around Barkus Park, and I get feeling sentimental or something and all of a sudden we’re gonna play “Letter Edged in Black” or whatever.
There’s just a whole well of tunes to pull from the bluegrass songbook and I like to mix it up. Like, if we did “Cumberland Gap” last time, then let’s do “Ground Speed” this time and if we did “Ground Speed” this time, next time let’s do “Clinch Mountain Backstep.” And then sometimes you play a tune and it feels good, so then it will stick around – like we’ve been playing “Baltimore Johnny.”
I guess having the guys in the band that you do helps, because a lot of them already know those tunes – or at least have some idea how they go, so you can work something up pretty quick.
Yeah, and they’re quick learners. Most of the time I wake up at the hotel and I’m stressing until I can write a set list, until it’s finished. Otherwise I can’t take a nap, because it’s a puzzle every day. There’s so many people that come to every single show of ours and we see the same people in the front row every night. I just don’t wanna feed them the same thing for dinner. I wanna mix it up.
Sometimes it takes two or three hours to make a set list. I’m doing it all on my iPad, so I’m not actually crumpling up paper and throwing it in the waste basket, but that’s what I’m doing. I’ll make a set list and I’ll go, “Oh, fuck that, that’s garbage.” And then eventually I’ll land on something that I feel is suitable or whatever. But it’s a puzzle every day. And then usually there will be a song or two on there– back in ’23, or maybe ’22, we played a new song every single show of the entire year. Every set that we played, we debuted a new cover. That was a task; once we got halfway through the year, it was like, “We gotta keep it going.”
So these days, it might not be every single show that we’re having to learn a new song, but we’re definitely having to refresh on things and arrangements and stuff. Every day before a gig, if we go out on stage at 8:00, then 6:45 or so we’re getting our instruments and sitting down and we’re starting to talk through some shit. Sometimes we’re learning these songs. And then sometimes we go out there and wing it. I like to be in that space, too. A lot of times, if we over rehearse things and think about it too much, somebody will fuck it up. But if we just get the basic idea down and go out there and somehow believe in ourselves, then we get through these songs.
Leaving the covers aside, I was reading a review of Highway Prayers and the guy who wrote it seemed almost baffled by the fact that it’s really a bluegrass album. And it is, from “Richard Petty” to the opening song that you wrote with Thomm [Jutz], to “Happy Hollow” and even “Leadfoot.” These are songs that, to me, are almost super-traditional in the forms that they use and the melodies.
Do you feel like your ear is kind of trained enough to feel comfortable with reusing folk materials, for lack of a better term? Like “Leadfoot” has this “Lonesome Reuben” kind of sound to it – but it’s not “Lonesome Reuben,” either. That’s gotta enter into your process a lot, I would think.
Not consciously. I grew up playing bluegrass and sometimes when I’m trying to write a song, that’s just how I think about it. When I first started writing, back when I was 16 years old, I would just rewrite “Riding That Midnight Train” or something. Not trying to, I would just write a song and then I would be like, “Oh, fuck, this is just ‘Riding That Midnight Train,’ it’s just the same melody. I can’t even call this my own song. But now, with a song, I show it to the band guys and they’ll say, “I don’t know, I think it’s your tune.”
I’m just trying to chase the idea, and not get in its way, and not let anything – especially from the outside world – into my brain to influence my direction. When I’m writing something good, it’s like I’m trying to write in my diary or something – or like I’m trying to write a bluegrass song that is [reflective] of my childhood and my love for the music. It’s that sentimental feeling that I get when I hear bluegrass music, that I love it so much, that it reminds me of my childhood. That before I knew anything dirty about the world, there was this love for bluegrass music and that’s the kind of music I wanna make.
I’m a bluegrass man. You know, we do all this other stuff, and I write other songs too, but at the core of it all is a bluegrass musician who was fed Doc Watson and Bill Monroe and Larry Sparks. So that’s the stuff that I like. I’m still listening to the Stanley Brothers all the time. I’ve listened to this shit my whole life and I still haven’t heard it all, you know?
You could do pretty much whatever you wanted, and yet you are still, at the core, playing bluegrass music.
What’s authentic? You know? I’m trying to not lose myself to this fucking big monster, you know what I mean? Because, yeah, I could get a drummer and pick up my electric guitar. I could put on a cowboy hat and join that whole bandwagon, too. But that’s not me and it’s not true. I don’t care about that shit. The more that I’m in this industry, the more that I’m just trying to stay true to myself and my music, because I see past all the bullshit and see past the glam of it. And I’m so grateful – so, so grateful – to have a fan base that will allow me to just wear a pair of blue jeans on stage and play three chords and the truth at them.
I feel like if I went and changed it up too much, then I might lose a bunch of those folks. And that’s hard, too, because sometimes I feel like we need a drummer. We’re in these giant arenas, it’s like, “Man, if I had a drummer and I could pick up the Les Paul, we could just fucking chop heads.” And I do enjoy that, too, because that is part of who I am. When I got out of playing bluegrass so much, when I was a kid, I played some electric and some Black Sabbath and shit – so there’s some of that in there.
But what I play is what’s in my heart, man. And that’s why I’m still playing Mac Wiseman songs, and there’s something – it’s almost like a freaking kink or something. I just love it so much. I love playing “It Rains Just the Same in Missouri” to a big crowd of people, or “I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home, or “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” or any of these old [songs].
You get out on the big arena stage like that and you play “Uncle Pen,” it’s like, “Fuck, yeah!” It’s kind of like just force-feeding these people bluegrass, and I love it, you know.
We’ve been covering our friend, GRAMMY Award winner and physics-defying flatpicker Billy Strings for now almost ten years. In that relatively short period of time, he and his band have revolutionized the bluegrass, jamgrass, and acoustic guitar scenes. Way back in 2014 and 2015, when the local Michigan guitarist with generational talent first started appearing on our site and in our Sitch Sessions, and making his mark on the national bluegrass scene, almost no one would have predicted he would be selling out arenas less than a decade later. And yet– there were always signs.
Indeed, BGS’ first viral content was a Sitch Session performance by Strings and former duo partner Don Julin, performing what would eventually become a “hit” for Billy, “Meet Me at the Creek.” The video spread like wildfire on BGS, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and beyond – rapidly garnering more than a million views. It was just one of the many early inflection points that would occur over Strings’ stratospheric rise.
Strings’ jaw-dropping picking, gritty and heartfelt vocals, mystifying jams, and virtuosic, tradition-steeped aggression are all at once charming and hypnotizing. Given a platform, of any size or reach in his early career, his performances, songs, and live shows were an unstoppable force. Audience members and fans could hardly look away.
His personal narrative, of hardship and bootstraps and holding onto a childhood dream of playing bluegrass for a living, of road-dogging and paying dues and “god-given” talent, bolstered his trad bona fides when his metal and rock background, long hair, and drug-infused stories might have undercut his appeal to bluegrass and old-time audiences. Strings was – and is – obviously, a real human being; despite what supernatural touches are evident in his music, here is a guitar hero embodied. And, for hundreds of thousands of roots music fans, diehard and uninitiated, that brand has been limitlessly resonant and relatable. Plus… there’s that picking!
It’s no wonder, merely four solo studio albums into his career, Strings has gone from touring 250+ days a year at every mom-and-pop bluegrass festival, rock club, coffee shop, and barbeque restaurant in the U.S. and Canada to selling out enormous arenas, auditoriums, and amphitheaters for multi-night runs all around the world. Billy Strings, as an artist, a brand, and an individual, was always made to go the distance.
His newest album, Highway Prayers, which released September 27 on Reprise Records, finds Billy and band putting even more miles under their well-worn, veteran tires. A long form, 20-track album, the project includes breakneck instrumentals, many a live show and fan favorite, and plenty of that Billy Strings magic that only he and his cohort could bring to such a record. But, despite the fact that Billy has guested on dozens of projects as a track feature in the past few years – from Post Malone to Zach Top to Sierra Ferrell to Willie Nelson to Luke Combs to Ringo Starr – Highway Prayers has not a single credited celebrity feature.
Which brings us to a point that, forest for the trees style, seems to go missing from considerations of Billy Strings, his music, and his impact. Yes, Strings is defining and redefining bluegrass in the modern era and in the 2000s. Yes, Strings is perhaps the most important bluegrass artist of his generation, if not of all time. Yes, Strings has illustrated there truly is no ceiling for bluegrass music, commercially and otherwise. And yes, he and his band are revolutionizing the very landscape on which this music is built, offered, and examined.
Still, as Highway Prayers – as well as his live shows and his entire discography – demonstrates, the most innovative and revolutionary aspects of Billy Strings and his version of bluegrass are not what he’s changed, but what has stayed the same.
Even Alison Krauss & Union Station at their very peak were only performing true bluegrass for a portion of their live shows. The Chicks, for all of their international touring and arena sell-out shows, would often only have four or five string band songs set aside in a special mini-set during their performances. Billy Strings and his band are not only raising the bar for bluegrass and its marketability and sale-ability in an era where nearly all music businesses are floundering and struggling, they’re doing it all as a simple, five-piece bluegrass band across the front of the stage.
Sure, there are pedal boards and LED screens and smoke machines and delay, and WAH, and distortion – plenty of “no part of nothin'” moments, of course. But at the beginning and end of the day, whether touring in a Ford Econoline or with dozens of road crew and buses and tractor trailers, Billy Strings is a bluegrass musician, playing bluegrass songs, birthing thousands of new bluegrass fans, and doing all of it at the largest scale we’ve ever seen as a community and as an industry.
There’s much (well-deserved) noise to be made about all of the strange and unique ways Strings and his team have accomplished this, but even more noise ought to be generated. For the most remarkable impact of Billy Strings is that he’s shown everyone, all across the globe, that bluegrass doesn’t need to fundamentally change to be something everybody can love.
For many of us, we’re already well aware of how difficult it is to pinpoint the sonic tones and textures of Fruition. From Americana to blues, gospel to folk, the ensemble has this “kitchen sink” type of subconscious approach — one where anything goes musically, so long as it inspires and stokes the creative flame within.
On their latest album, How to Make Mistakes, the Portland, Oregon-based quintet retains that same intent, which has made the group a prized touring act in acoustic realms coast-to-coast since it first came onto the scene in 2008.
At the helm of the band is founding member Mimi Naja, a multi-instrumentalist whose swirling, carefree vocals of joy, purpose, and curiosity reside at the heart of the chemistry that gives Fruition this ebb and flow relationship with the muse itself. Always soaking in whatever you cross paths with; always radiating a deep sense of self from inhabiting of your own respective path in this universe.
Beyond the new record, Fruition also recently crossed over the 15-year mark together, after a cosmic happenstance where guitarist Jay Cobb Anderson just so happened to see Naja at a Portland open mic night those many years ago — the result being this continued journey of not only artistic discovery, but also genuine friendship.
Listening to the new album, what I like about it is in such a chaotic world we live in on a day-to-day basis, it’s relaxing. It made me, purposely or subconsciously, slow down a little bit.
Mimi Naja: Yes. That’s amazing. I love “relaxing” as an adjective. I really feel like we matured a little bit by this stage. But really, I think we just kind of relaxed. There’s a lot of half-time tempo. Just settle in and do the song. Not a lot of pumped, flashy, show-off energy, just very chill.
It didn’t seem like y’all were in a hurry. It seemed like the band was enjoying the process, being together and creating.
That’s exactly it. You’re nailing it. I’m glad that it’s coming across that way. The title, How to Make Mistakes, is pulled from a song lyric in one of the tracks. But, it’s really appropriate to the fact that it’s all [recorded] live with no overdubs. All in the same room and just in the moment. Making a record like records used to be — an actual record of people sitting in a room playing music.
What does it feel like to be with folks that you’ve played together for 15 years and to still enjoy that space?
It’s the best. And the fact that it has been so many years is why it’s easy to get there. I dabble in other side projects and I love the thrill of having to stay on your toes, when you’re getting to know someone musically and otherwise. But, it’s a real blessing to just settle in [with Fruition] — it feels like home.
Maybe even on an existential level, what does that album title mean to you?
We just believe in the beauty of flaws. And knowing when something is raw, it’s real. In a world of how we look on social media and filters and everything being polished and clean and quantized, we love the realness and the rawness. Sometimes that’s cracks in your voice or you’re slightly out of tune or whatever it is — we love that. There’s a thirst for that realness in this polished age. So, we hope it makes the ears happy in this world.
Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, your band is very elusive sonically. Is that by design or just how things evolved?
I think it’s a point of pride in the early days of, “We are here to deliver a good song in its finest form, no matter what it sounds [like].” In some ways, it’s been to our detriment, as far as a growth trajectory. From a longevity career standpoint, being elusive is charming, but it’s also hard to sell. So, in a way it was by design. But then, as the years went on, I think we hate boxes. People need boxes and we don’t have one for them. So, that’s why we’re kind of trying to cling to this Americana blanket because it works for us.
There’s such a rich tapestry of sound. I hear Delta blues, gospel, country, indie rock, and folk. I hear everything in there. But, that’s also a testament to the band’s curiosity. Y’all seem like you’re sponges just constantly soaking in influences.
For sure. And it’s what we love about ourselves individually and as a band. It’s what fuels such a richness. But, it’s a double-edged sword. That can be confusing to new fans that are just pushing play. It’s such a crap shoot on whatever two or three songs they choose to push play on throughout our pretty large discography. They could get a very different outcome. But, you know, that’s the chance we take, we love it all. That’s what makes this unique, but also confusing.
Multiple harmonies are a big part of your sound. Why is that such an important component to the band?
We just love singing, first and foremost. As a band, that’s the roots of where we began. We were a sidewalk busking band before we ever really organized. That’s just what we were doing for fun and for chump change. Back in the good old days, just busking to pay our bills. And that’s when we realized how powerful this three-part harmony was together. And that comes back to [the new album], how it feels sitting in a room together when those three-part harmonies kick in. That’s what really feels like home. It’s always to serve the song – that’s our deep love right there.
What did busking teach you about who you are as artists?
You learn to use the kind of the raucous, fast, high, long note vocals. But faster, a little more like party songs. We knew when we needed to turn it up, to turn some heads and get a couple bucks dropped. But, I learned once you’ve drawn them in, that’s when you can do what you really want, which is sing the slower, sadder, prettier things. We love it all. We love raucous rock, but we’re really quite tender artists at heart. I learned how to get attention and I learned that we do have something special. Once we’ve gotten the attention, we have it, and so then we have freedom to relax. Today’s climate makes it pretty challenging, but we believe in it and we’re just hoping for more ears, so that we can continue doing what we love.
Fruition recently crossed over the 15-year mark. What’s been the biggest takeaway for you on this journey thus far?
I can tell you that the passing of time is blowing my mind. Fifteen years sounds wild. My body doesn’t feel youthful, but my spirit still feels youthful. The road and the performing, the giving your heart up onstage and getting that back from the crowd? That keeps us young. The flying and sitting in vans doesn’t. There’s a youthful spirit that stays alive through all of this somehow. A true band is as deep as a marriage or a sibling-hood. It’s beautiful. And it’s a real testament to the music, too, because it’s cool when you see people just grow and continue to offer new shades of their music or new chapters. And, with no shade to any sort of artist or bands with hired guns, it’s very apparent that this is so different from that. It’s so much deeper. It’s a family, you know?
Though Randall Deaton’s excellence as a producer and engineer has been well known for many years in the bluegrass world, he had taken a hiatus from music for nearly nine years before returning in 2024. His latest venture is both a conceptual and musical triumph. The new release, Silver Bullet Bluegrass (Lonesome Day Records), pays tribute to the great rocker Bob Seger with an all-star corps of bluegrass vocalists and instrumentalists performing his tunes reworked, bluegrass style. The lineup of performers includes Gary Nichols, Tim Shelton, Shonna Tucker, Bo Bice, Tim Stafford, Bill Taylor, Larry Cordle, and more.
The project’s origin dates back even further, as Deaton detailed during a recent extensive interview with BGS conducted via email.
“(I got the idea) probably sometime around 2009,” Deaton said. “We released records by the band Blue Moon Rising and Ralph Stanley II in 2008 and each of those records contained songs that were pulled from non-traditional bluegrass sources. Blue Moon Rising did a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Youngstown’ and Fred Eaglesmith’s ‘Freight Train,’ while Ralph II did Elton John’s ‘Georgia’ and Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Loretta.’ I brought all those songs to the artists and I was really pleased with the way they turned out. They ended up being very legitimate takes on the songs without having any of the ‘pickin’ on’ vibe. I think the first thoughts of a Seger bluegrass record came from the idea of wondering how ‘Hollywood Nights’ would sound in a bluegrass style.”
However, the project took longer to happen than anticipated. “The overall recording process took over 12 years, but that was because I took about an eight year break from music in the middle to pursue other things,” Deaton continued. “The original challenge was to track the songs without the final lead vocalist. Seger is such a great vocalist and can comfortably sing in keys that most other male singers can’t, so I had to consider which keys to track some of the songs in. Some songs I left in the original keys and just knew that those songs needed to stay right there. Other songs we dropped down a step or so in order to have more options when it came to finding the right singer. The actual studio work was pretty easy once we knew who was doing what.”
“A great deal of the tracking band was the same group of musicians that we used on a record by Jeff Parker entitled Go Parker!” Deaton continued. “Mike Bub, Stephen Mougin, Ned Luberecki, and Shawn Brock all had plenty of experience playing and recording traditional bluegrass, but they also had experience outside of that – including Mike playing with Steve Earle on The Mountain record and Stephen touring with Sam Bush. Ned is a very progressive banjo player and Shawn is simply one of the best musicians I know. Other musicians were added based on what I thought the track needed. We used several fiddle players on this record and each of them brought something special and unique.”
When asked about personal favorites from the session Deaton responded: “The first singer to agree to perform on the record was Josh Shilling of the band Mountain Heart. He did “Main Street.” He did such an awesome job on that song that he set a bar for the rest of the record. That song is definitely one of my favorites. I am also partial to that track, because Megan Lynch [Chowning] played my grandfather’s fiddle on that track. It was just an old catalog fiddle from the 1930s, but I was told that he used to sit on the front porch and play it.”
“He passed away before I was born, but somehow I ended up with the fiddle. I think it is really neat that the same fiddle is doing that signature melody on ‘Main Street.’ The last two vocals that we recorded for the record were the Carson Peters and Bill Taylor tracks. Producing those vocals and in Carson’s case the fiddle was the first time I had been in a studio in many years and I wasn’t sure how effective I would be after so much time away. I am very proud of how those tracks turned out because they made me feel like I could do this again in the future if the right situation came up.”
An interesting thing about Deaton is bluegrass wasn’t his initial musical love growing up. “When I was a kid, we listened to country music around the house,” he recalled in his bio. “I knew more about Exile than I did about The Police. I knew a little bit about bluegrass, but I didn’t really get into bluegrass until I started learning how to play guitar. All the people that I could play with around home were mostly playing bluegrass music. That’s how I really got introduced to it.”
From that early start as a guitarist, Deaton converted a church left him by his grandmother in 1999 to a studio and started focusing on engineering. That led to the creation of the Lonesome Day label, which took its name off a Springsteen tune. Their first project was by Eastern Kentucky bluegrass artist Sam Wilson. The label soon became celebrated in bluegrass circles for turning out both hits and classic albums by a host of greats. The list includes Jeff Parker, Lou Reid, Blue Moon Rising, Larry Cordle, Steve Gulley, Ralph Stanley II, Ernie Thacker, Darrell Webb, Richard Bennett, Shotgun Holler, Wildfire, Fred Eaglesmith, and more.
Deaton’s accomplishments aren’t limited solely to the music world. He’s overcome retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that affects nerve cells in the retina that causes functional failure and an inability to transmit information from the eye to the brain. But that hasn’t prevented Deaton from continuing his brilliance in the studio, nor from expanding into other musical areas as a label owner and producer. In 2011, Lonesome Day would release Sweet Nothings by Girls Guns & Glory – now known as Ward Hayden & the Outliers – which was produced by Paul Kolderie and recorded in Boston.
Kolderie would later produce Tim Shelton’s album, Jackson Browne Revisited. In 2014, A second Girls Guns & Glory project titled Good Luck was produced by Eric “Roscoe” Ambel. Prior to taking his break from music, Deaton’s label would also issue three albums by bluegrass guitar master Richard Bennett. But, by 2015, Deaton was both a bit disillusioned by some things happening in the music business and ready to do something else.
“Something else” included converting his music studio into an AirBnb, investing in short-term rentals in Eastern Kentucky, and later buying resorts in two different areas in Michigan, as well as a restaurant. Deaton also did a bit of concert promotion in the meantime. Eventually, he’d return to making music, with the latest result being Silver Bullet Bluegrass.
When asked about his favorite projects over his career, Deaton offers these selections:
“I really like the work I did with the band Blue Moon Rising. Their first record, On The Rise, was very well received and made me feel like I could make records that would find their place in the bluegrass genre. The second record I did with them entitled, One Lonely Shadow, is the record that contained ‘Youngstown’ and to me that is still probably the single best record I have been a part of. The song selection, the performances, and the engineering work of Mike Latterell are all outstanding. I am also very proud of the Ralph Stanley II record entitled, This One Is II. Again, the performances and song selections were outstanding and Mike also tracked and mixed this record.”
“We did both of these records in the same timeframe so they are kind of linked for me,” he continued. “These are consistently the two records that people still bring up to me saying that one of them is their favorite. One of my very first things that I still think guided me was my work on the record entitled Time by Lou Reid & Carolina. This was a band record and most everything on the record was done by Lou’s current band. Lou brought the song ‘Time’ that ended up being the title track to the record and it was clear to me that the song needed more than just what the band could bring.”
“We ended up using some great outside musicians,” he continued, “Such as Ron Stewart, Randy Kohrs, and Harold Nixon to get a track that was more solid. We also ended up getting Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs to sing on the track. The final track turned out great and it ended up being a #1 song on the Bluegrass Unlimited chart in 2005. The song was also a challenge, because I felt like I was pushing for greatness and the artist was taking into account other things besides the record – such as the feelings of the band (which also included his then wife) and how those considerations would always be there moving forward. I always thought that if you were going to make a record you should do everything that is possible to make it as good as it can be within the means that you have.”
Deaton hesitates to pick personal favorites in terms of artists he’s worked with, but acknowledges a few names. “That is a tough one, because I have worked with so many talented people. Since I am such a proponent for great records, I would have to say that the audio engineers that I have worked with are always very special to me. In the very beginning I worked a lot with a guy named Harold Nixon and Harold introduced me to Ron Stewart.”
“Harold and Ron were very big parts of a lot of the Lonesome Day work from the beginning through when I got out in 2015. I also did a lot of work with Mike Latterell starting in 2005. Mike is one of the best audio engineers that I know and we still keep in touch to this day. I also had the chance to work with Brandon Bell on a couple records. He is also an incredible engineer and just a great guy in the studio. Gary Nichols introduced me to Jimmy Nutt back around 2013 or so, and he has been awesome to work with on this Silver Bullet Bluegrass record. When I got back in the studio in 2023 with Carson Peters, Jimmy made me feel like it was just yesterday that we were in the studio together, not eight years ago. Jimmy and his wife Angie have also become great friends to me and my wife, Shelagh, so if there is music in my future Jimmy will definitely be involved.”
“One musician that I have known for years, but never have worked with is Shawn Camp,” is Deaton’s first response when asked about possible future collaborations. “I think he is so talented and such a nice guy that I would love to work with him sometime in the future. A lot of the singers on Silver Bullet Bluegrass I had worked with in the past. Carson Peters and Bill Taylor were great in the studio and I think they have immense talent and I would like to work with those guys sometime in the future.”
As for possibly adapting other musicians’ tunes to the bluegrass idiom, Deaton immediately cites one name. “I think it would be great to do a Bruce Springsteen record. I am a big Springsteen fan and even named my label after one of his songs. I’ve lost count of the number of [his] concerts I have been to, but it is well over 100 from 1999 to 2024.”
His first response to the final question, regarding what’s next for his label, is “I don’t know.”
“I have been really focused on finally getting Silver Bullet Bluegrass finished and released that I haven’t thought about anything else. The landscape of the music business has changed so much since I started that I am in the middle of a learning curve again. I know that I like making records and I know that I don’t need to make records in order to make money. Whatever I end up doing, if anything, I want it to be fun and I want to at least think that it may matter somehow.”
Are you enjoying brat summer? We sure are, too, but as Teddy and the Rough Riders declare with their new video dropping today in You Gotta Hear This, “Catfish Summer” is what it’s really all about!
That’s not all our premiere round-up holds this week, either. We’ve got new videos from folks like guitarist-songwriter Joy Clark and Texan-Los Angeleno Silas Nello, and a new track has been unveiled by Americana duo Ocie Elliott, too.
Don’t miss bluegrass offerings from up-and-comers and legends, both. Jaelee Roberts brings a new single, “Between The Two Of Us,” East Nashville mainstays Greenwood Rye premiere “Down to the River,” and the Queen of Bluegrass herself, Rhonda Vincent, pays tribute to her homeland of Missouri with a song co-written by Opry star Jeannie Seely and Music Row stalwart writer Erin Enderlin. Vincent’s new album, Destinations And Fun Places, hits store shelves and digital platforms today.
To round out this edition of our weekly collection of premieres, don’t miss Moira Smiley’s rendition of the classic Jean Ritchie song, “Now Is The Cool Of The Day,” which debuted on the site earlier this week in honor of Farmworker Appreciation Day. It’s all right here on BGS and You Gotta Hear This!
Joy Clark, “Lesson”
Artist: Joy Clark Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana Song: “Lesson” Album:Tell it to the Wind Release Date: October 4, 2024 Label: Righteous Babe Records
In Their Words: “My grandma is and was my root and when she passed, I thought about the gems she imparted to me in her 86 years of life. She’d say to me ‘Get your lesson!’ I’d sit at her table and talk to her. I came out to her at that very table. She accepted me. After she died, I sat down with my producer Margaret Becker to write, and the lyrics just rolled out; capturing the way my grandma lived her life. She taught me to treat everyone with kindness and to strive for peace while never backing down from a good fight. It’s a timely ‘Lesson’ for this country as we fight to take our rightful place in the struggle for freedom.” – Joy Clark
Video Credits: Directed and shot by Jared LaReau, Something Human. AJ Haynes – Creative Assistant
Ocie Elliott, “Adelina”
Artist:Ocie Elliott Hometown: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Song: Adelina Release Date: August 9, 2024 Label: Nettwerk Music Group
In Their Words: “‘Adelina’ is about a fictional heroine inspired by a combination of legendary musicians and personal idols –people who hone that extra something inside of them to carve their way through the barriers of the tangible world, prying doors open for others in their wake. In comparison to some of our previous recordings, the final result of ‘Adelina’ reflects the way in which it was put together – with a lot of play, compromise, reinventing, and scrubbing at the built-up grime and loose ideas to make a smooth surface for finer grit to be poured back in. To us, it feels louder, more immediate, and present. It’s a song you play when leaving somewhere – a ‘windows down, future open and ready’ kind of song.” – Sierra Lundy and Jon Middleton, Ocie Elliott
Greenwood Rye, “Down to the River”
Artist:Greenwood Rye Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Down to the River” Album:Hideaway Release Date: August 9, 2024 (single); August 23, 2024 (album)
In Their Words: “‘Down to the River’ was one of the first songs I wrote when I moved to Nashville in 2020 and the first original song we started playing live as we started Greenwood Rye during the pandemic as the house band for Jane’s Hideaway in Nashville. I wanted to write the quintessential song for what we were trying to do as a band. It is a fun, funky groove with a singable chorus, has a jamgrass style instrumental bridge, and plays around lyrically with some bluegrass themes. I was thinking a lot of ‘Old Home Place’ and how the narrator is blaming others for his problems. So, I came up with the idea to have a character who takes responsibility for his actions. He ‘runs off to the vineyards’ rather than the ‘taverns took all his pay.’ But there is also a level of hubris in the narrator, as he feels like he can just go ‘down to the river’ every time he does someone wrong ‘again.’
“The track features Sasha Ostrovsky (Darius Rucker, Bering Strait) on dobro.” – Shawn Spencer, guitar, vocals, songwriter
Track Credits: Written by Shawn Spencer. Shawn Spencer – Guitar, vocals Cat McDonald – Fiddle, vocals David Freeman – Mandolin, vocals Taylor Shuck – Banjo Sasha Ostrovsky – Dobro Larry Cook – Bass
Produced & mixed by Billy Hume. Mastered by Pete Lyman. Matt Coles – Additional engineering Recorded at Compass Records.
Silas Nello, “Holy Ghost Blues”
Artist:Silas Nello Hometown: Los Angeles, California via Dallas, Texas Song: “Holy Ghost Blues” Album:From West Hollywood Release Date: August 9, 2024 (single); September 13, 2024 (EP) Label: Blackbird Record Label
In Their Words: “It came to me in a dream – a sort of fantasized crossroads moment of how mankind trades this for that and we don’t realize until the deal is already done. I wrote this song at the wet bar of my then 1980s home just north of Dallas sometime in 2016.” – Silas Nello
“The video was meant as a portrait of Silas Nello. We went around Los Feliz, West Hollywood, and Wild Horizon Sound, documenting his travels like a ‘day in the life.’ We broke the fourth wall with Silas acknowledging the camera and the audience throughout the piece. What this created was an intimate moment where we’re spending time with him but he was also spending time with us.” – Taylor Hungerford, filmmaker, Silverspark Printworks
Track Credits: Written by Silas Nello. Silas Nello – Lead vocal, background vocal, acoustic guitar, harmonica, tambourine Produced by Claire Morison & Silas Nello. Recorded at Wild Horizon Sound. Recording engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer – Claire Morison
Video Credit: Taylor Hungerford, Silverspark Printworks
Jaelee Roberts, “Between The Two Of Us”
Artist:Jaelee Roberts Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Between The Two Of Us” Release Date: August 8, 2024 Label: Mountain Home Music Company
In Their Words: “‘Between The Two Of Us’ was written with my friends Donna Ulisse and Kristen Bearfield. When we got together, we agreed that we’d like to write something up-tempo and happy, and ‘Between The Two Of Us’ is the result of that session. It truly is a happy song about love lasting between two people and what you have to do to achieve that. Getting to hear this song come together in the studio was really amazing, and I am so thrilled with the end result. The musical arrangement provided by Ron Block, Andy Leftwich, Cody Kilby, Byron House, Justin Moses, Stuart Duncan, and John Gardner absolutely made this song even more special than I could have imagined! To top it off, Stephen Mougin and Kelsi Harrigill joined me on harmonies and their voices were the perfect touch to convey the message of the song. I hope y’all enjoy this love song that is filled with words of hope, joy, and encouragement.” – Jaelee Roberts
Teddy and the Rough Riders, “Catfish Summer”
Artist:Teddy and the Rough Riders Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Catfish Summer” Album:Down Home Release Date: October 11, 2024 (album) Label: Appalachia Record Co.
In Their Words: “This one is about visiting my mom’s side of the family who live in Rockmart, Georgia. I was 12 or so and didn’t really wanna visit my grandma Lou-Lou that summer. But instead, my mom dropped me and my cousin off at my uncle Bubba’s house for a few weeks, and he lived in an amazing hillbilly shack on the side of a catfish pond with about ten dogs, deep in the woods. Greatest summer ever! From childhood bummer to high time.” – Ryan Jennings, Teddy and the Rough Riders
Rhonda Vincent, “I Miss Missouri”
Artist:Rhonda Vincent Hometown: Greentop, Missouri Song: “I Miss Missouri” Album:Destinations And Fun Places Release Date: August 9, 2024
In Their Words: “My Grand Ole Opry sister Jeannie Seely started writing ‘I Miss Missouri’ for me several years ago. She lost everything, including the lyrics she had written, in the Nashville flood of 2010. Fast forward to February 29, 2020, the night she made my greatest dream come true and invited me to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry. We have since become close friends, and after the Opry invitation she said the lyrics started coming back to her.
“She invited Erin Enderlin and I to join her in writing the song. ‘I Miss Missouri’ was the inspiration for creating a ‘destinations’ project, with all the songs representing a destination.” – Rhonda Vincent
Track Credits: Written by Jeannie Seely, Erin Enderlin, and Rhonda Vincent. Adam Haynes – Fiddle Rhonda Vincent – Lead vocal, mandolin Mickey Harris – Bass Zack Arnold – Guitar, harmony vocal Aaron McDaris – Banjo Jacob Metz – Resophonic guitar
Moira Smiley, “Now Is The Cool Of The Day”
Artist:Moira Smiley Hometown: New Haven, Vermont Song: “Now Is The Cool Of The Day” Album:The Rhizome Project Release Date: September 6, 2024
In Their Words: “August 6th is Farmworker Appreciation Day, and I didn’t know that until this year. I am writing this as I sit on a hill above the rolling Vermont farmland where I grew up being a young farmworker and musician. In honor of this day, I’m releasing one of my favorite songs of all time – and the best one I know for reminding us to slow down and remember our roles as carers and tenders of this beautiful planet and the people around us. This week, I’m showering appreciation on the people that grow and tend food in my area; buying from small farmers, donating to the Open Door clinic that serves the medical needs of immigrant agricultural laborers. This gentle video hopes to slow your pace, and bring you along with me in acknowledging that farmworkers make our nourishment possible. Let us thank them.” – Moira Smiley
It’s another full week of new releases and exciting premieres! Leading off our round up this time is young fiddlin’ phenom Carson Peters singing a Bob Seger classic, “Long Twin Silver Line.” Plus, don’t miss bluegrass tracks from our friends Unspoken Tradition and Meadow Mountain – the latter of whom debuted the first installment of their SkyTheory Sessions on BGS yesterday.
There’s also plenty of Good Country to find herein! Kyle McKearney is joined by bluegrass flatpicker Trey Hensley on “Lonesome,” Jessie Wilson brings us a new one, “Outlaw,” and Will Stewart & the Gold Band share a tune from their Live in Norway project. Plus, Jordie Lane brings us a new single, too.
Yesterday, Donovan Woods exclusively premiered a new Lori McKenna and Matt Nathanson co-write on BGS,. as well so don’t miss that! It’s all below and really, You Gotta Hear This!
Carson Peters, “Long Twin Silver Line”
Artist:Carson Peters Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Long Twin Silver Line” (Bob Seger cover) Album:Silver Bullet Bluegrass Release Date: July 12, 2024 Label: Lonesome Day Records
In Their Words: “Randall Deaton approached me with this tribute project a while back, and I loved the idea and jumped at the chance to be included with the great artists that were already on board. I grew up listening to classic rock and roll music riding in my parents’ car. It definitely helped me appreciate all styles of music and I always enjoyed hearing Seger songs. Randall had most of the track ready for me when I came in to put vocals and fiddle on it, and his ideas and choices made this song even better than I imagined. We played around with arrangements for a fiddle break in the middle, but he was the brain behind the arrangement for sure. I think (and hope) that the youthfulness in my voice and aggressive style of fiddle playing suits this song well, and gives it a nice spin. I am working up a live version with my band so we can put into our shows.” – Carson Peters
Track Credits: Written and published by Bob Seger, Gear Publishing Company Producer – Randall Deaton Engineers – Randall Deaton, Jimmy Nutt Tracked at Lonesome Day Recording Studio, Booneville, KY / The NuttHouse Recording Studio, Muscle Shoals, AL. Mixed at The NuttHouse Recording Studio, Muscle Shoals, AL.
Guitar – Stephen Mougin, Gary Nichols Mandolin – Darrell Webb Banjo – Ned Luberecki Bass – Mike Bub Dobro – Jake Joines Fiddle – Carson Peters Harmony vocals – Sarah Borges
Artist:Kyle McKearney Hometown: Calgary, Alberta, Canada Song: “Lonesome” (featuring Trey Hensley) Release Date: April 26, 2024 Label: Kyle McKearney Music
In Their Words: “I’ve been following Trey Hensley for years and have always been a huge fan of his playing, singing, and Southern charm. I got to meet Trey at a gig in Colorado and I was blown away to learn that had been a fan of mine as well. My keyboard player James and I wrote ‘Lonesome’ with Trey in mind, hoping that he’d jump on for a shred on his flattop. I love how this song turned out and am grateful to Trey and team for their contributions. I can’t wait for folks to hear this burning two stepper!” — Kyle McKearney
“I became a huge fan of Kyle McKearney the moment I heard his music several years ago. I became an even bigger fan when I got to meet him and hear him live out in Colorado last year. I knew then that I would love a chance to work on some music with him in the future. I was thrilled when the opportunity arose for me to go up to Alberta and record with Kyle for his new song ‘Lonesome.’ As soon as I heard the song, I immediately knew this was going to be a blast… and sure enough, it was an absolutely incredible experience. Kyle is such a phenomenally talented artist, and I’m beyond honored to be included on ‘Lonesome.’ I can’t wait for y’all to hear it!” — Trey Hensley
Jessie Wilson, “Outlaw”
Artist:Jessie Wilson Hometown: Phenix City, Alabama Song: “Outlaw” Release Date: May 3, 2024 (single)
In Their Words: “‘Outlaw’ depicts a universal feeling – no matter what field you are in or where you’re at in life, almost everyone has felt like they weren’t good enough and wanted to fit into a certain group at some point or another. I wrote this song about Nashville; I’ve often wondered what I need to do to be wanted in this town and the music industry. Is it about dating the right person, or changing my morals – what’s the answer? This song was written from that state of mind. It took a lot of vulnerability for me to admit that there was a time when I would do anything to fit in and gain the love of others, because deep down I was so lonely and lost. It’s typical to want to compare yourself, but you have to steer your mind away from that idea. I’ve since learned that I don’t have to change who I am and that the right people and opportunities will come to me and love me for the person I am.” – Jessie Wilson
Track Credits:
Producer – David Dorn Acoustic & electric guitar – Tim Galloway Bass – Tim Denbo Drums – Matt King B3/Synthesizer – David Dorn BGVs – Kristen Rogers and Caleb Lee Hutchinson Recorded at Farmland Studios. Mixing – Mark Lonsway Mastering – Mayfield Mastering
Will Stewart & The Gold Band, “Real Drag” (Live)
Artist:Will Stewart & The Gold Band Hometown: Birmingham, Alabama Song: “Real Drag” (Live) Album:Will Stewart & The Gold Band Live in Norway Release Date: June 7, 2024 Label: Cornelius Chapel Records
In Their Words: “Ross Parker, my longtime friend and bassist, sent me a rough demo of ‘Real Drag’ last year. I slightly tweaked the arrangement and melody and added a verse and it immediately became a staple in our live set. I get to throw in some jangle on this one, and Janet’s guitar playing compliments that in a nice way. The lyrics sort of speak for themselves, but it’s about a series of unfortunate events after a long night of being out, which seems to be a common theme in a lot of my songs, now that I’m thinking about it. It’s a combination of people and places that we’ve encountered over the years.” – Will Stewart
Track Credits:
Will Stewart – Guitar, vocals Janet Simpson – Guitar, vocals Tyler McGuire – Drums Ross Parker – Bass Recording Engineer – Harvard Soknes Mixed by Brad Timko. Mastered by Alex McCollough.
Jordie Lane, “The Changing Weather”
Artist:Jordie Lane Hometown: Melbourne, Australia (Based in Nashville, Tennessee) Song: “The Changing Weather” Album:Tropical Depression Release Date: May 2, 2024 (single); August 23, 2024 (album) Label: Blood Thinner Records, under exclusive licence to ABC Music/The Orchard
In Their Words: “I had just got back to America after the terrible 2019-20 Australian bushfires when this massive EF-3 Tornado devastated our East Nashville neighborhood. Everything in my mind and body was kind of in shock about this severe weather, being so close to being hit. It scared the sh*t outta me. The song came after thinking about how people often complain about the very things that could and should be seen as a gift. Like the simple act of getting caught in the rain.
“Humans are remarkably good at denying the truth sometimes and covering it up with a bunch of other crap that we pretend is more important. We tend to just wanna get on with our lives, and not think about the scary things inside us, or with this planet we live on. This song is my take of an easy-breezy ’60s song to keep cruising along to, until the moment it’s all too late.” – Jordie Lane
Track Credits: Written by Jordie Lane. Produced by Jordie Lane & Jon Estes.
Video Credits: Director, director of photography, editor – Korby Lenker Aerial photography – Travis Nicholson Producers, production designers – Jordie Lane & Clare Reynolds
Unspoken Tradition, “Georgia In Her Eyes”
Artist:Unspoken Tradition Hometown: Cherryville, North Carolina Song: “Georgia In Her Eyes” Release Date: May 3, 2024 Label: Mountain Home Music Company
In Their Words: “‘Georgia In Her Eyes’ is a deeply personal song that I wrote in a fit of inspiration not long after meeting the woman who is now my wife. Looking through the perspective gained from 12 years together, the lyrics are even more meaningful. I’m excited that the guys in the band chose to help bring this song to life.” – Sav Sankaran, bass and songwriter
Track Credits:
Audie McGinnis – Acoustic, vocals Sav Sankaran – Vocals, bass Tim Gardner – Fiddle, vocals Zane McGinnis – Banjo Ty Gilpin – Mandolin
Donovan Woods, “Back For the Funeral”
Artist:Donovan Woods Hometown: Sarnia, Ontario, Canada Song: “Back For The Funeral” Album:Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now Release Date: July 12, 2024 Label: End Times Music
In Their Words: “‘Back For The Funeral’ is a story that a lot of us end up experiencing. Big life events – deaths, births, divorces – seem to pull us out of the flow of time somehow. The days around these events can feel like a dream wherein the regular rules of our lives don’t apply. People fall back onto old habits or maybe construct a new temporary-self to shield them from grief or shock. What I like best about this song is that it reflects that dream-like feeling without sacrificing clarity. It feels the way those life-dividing days feel. I wrote it with Lori McKenna and Matt Nathanson. I’m about as proud of it as anything I’ve written. I hope it’s useful to people.” – Donovan Woods
In Their Words: “It sometimes feels like my life is split up into eras – periods of a year or two that, upon looking back, have a distinct, overarching feeling. As I get older I’ve started to recognize when I’m on the edge of one era, moving into the next one, and I begin to get a sense of the overall color of my recent life. I had that feeling as spring moved into summer last year and wanted to document it in a song. It recounts moments in the Colorado wilderness, misadventures in love, and my abiding wish to be Sam Bush in the 1980’s.” – Jack Dunlevie, mandolin and songwriter
Photo Credit: Carson Peters by Cora Wagoner; Jessie Wilson by Sam Aldrich.
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