Tag: Michigan

Billy Strings Could Play Whatever He Wants – And Still Chooses Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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.

(Editor’s Note: Continue exploring our Billy Strings Artist of the Month content here.)

Photo Credit: Dana Trippe

Artist of the Month: Billy Strings

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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.

All month long, we’ll once again be celebrating Billy Strings as our Artist of the Month. Enjoy our revamped Essential Billy Strings Playlist below, check out our exclusive interview with Billy here, explore our list of favorite songs and recordings – by other artists – featuring Billy here, and stay tuned on BGS and on social media as we dip back into the archives for all things Billy Strings.

Photo Credit: Dana Trippe

BGS 5+5: Frontier Ruckus

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Frontier Ruckus
Hometown: Detroit, Michigan
Latest Album: On the Northline (out February 16)

(Editor’s Note: All answers provided by Matthew Milia.)

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

“Celebrate the minutiae.” It’s no secret that that’s what my lyrics are all about. Specificity, specificity, specificity. I truly believe that the universal resides in the particular. And, that by singing about things in extreme detail, enormous truths are unlocked. Hence my apparent mission to name every landmark of my local universe/my personal mythology: The mall where my mom worked when I was a kid, my Catholic grade school, the soccer field where I first experienced the holy human emotion of humiliation.

On the Northline is a continuation of that ongoing catalog of catharsis. Me constantly digging deeper in the junk drawer of memory. You’d think that approach would be an almost unlistenably niche experience for the audience – but I’ve found it to be the opposite. I was so stunned the first time we played in London and kids in the front row were singing lyrics back to me about obscure Michigan towns and situations. They told me after the show that I might as well have been singing about their own towns, that the truths were universal. That was one of the best feelings ever.

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

We once opened for blues harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite in Houston and his parting words for us were: “Remember, the only chords you need are I, IV, and V.” Anyone who’s listened to Frontier Ruckus knows I definitely did not heed that advice, as I’m constantly trying to insert labyrinthine chord progressions and every melodic trick I’ve absorbed from 38 years of listening to pop radio.

Advice that we’ve found more apt came from our first manager, Dolphus Ramseur – an old-school North Carolinian known for discovering the Avett Brothers. He would always say, “Matthew, a career’s not a rocket ship, it’s a balloon ride.” And though we’d often laugh at the down-home, fortune cookie flavor of that mantra, it proved truthful time and again. The little career peaks came and went – playing Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, whatever. But the thing that really allowed us to build anything of lasting value was the very gradual “one fan at a time” approach. Back-alley performances of the song someone wanted to hear, who drove from another state, sending out lyrics that someone wants tattooed in your handwriting, favoring intimate living room shows over bar gigs. I’m sure my bandmates Davey and Zach would agree, those are the things that have made Frontier Ruckus a glorious balloon ride.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me?”

Constantly. People think the majority of my songs addressed to a “you” are to a love interest or even an enemy, depending on the song. It’s almost always me speaking to me. Sometimes encouraging myself; sometimes beating myself up. Internal monologues, at least mine, are mercurial and neurotic. Putting them into song really helps me work through some stuff, psychologically. That bit of distance allows me healthy perspective. A chance to pep myself up to fight another day. To quote myself singing to myself: “If only you knew what you are.”

Which artist has influenced you the most – and how?

It’s no doubt cliched, but it has to be Dylan. My dad raised me on him and it’s what activated my love for language. The potential playfulness of words. Their athleticism and malleability. The infinitude of connotation. The element of surprise packed into unexpected metaphor. How a line can be drop-dead-serious and winking at the same time. I also think Dylan is an underrated melodist and chordal architect. Look at all the non-12-bar-blues songs on Blonde on Blonde. The energy is propellent, continually cascading in an amphetamine avalanche. And it’s not just the words, it’s the chords providing the lyrics a perfect vehicle to ride in. The erosion of really intentional chord progressions in modern music is something that worries me quite a bit.

What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?

I studied poetry in college under an incredible poet named Diane Wakoski who came out of the New York beat scene. She really informed my fondness for striking images, unexpected metaphor, and surprise revelations. Other than my bandmate David Jones, she was one of the earliest champions of my writing who helped me hone my voice and style.

Sometimes I wanna write songs that feel like a David Lynch film: A shiny Americana veneer on the surface, a severed ear of fractured emotion buried in the grass. I love quaint things with a shady underbelly. I’m obsessed with ’90s sitcoms set in New York, but with obvious LA studio back-lot sunlight. Any art form where sharply antithetical images are juxtaposed in magnetic conflict inspires me. On the Northline hopefully portrays a similar landscape: An insular world where the darkness and light necessitate one another.

Photo Credit: John Mark Hanson

LISTEN: Frontier Ruckus, “Clarkston Pasture”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Frontier Ruckus
Hometown: Detroit, Michigan
Song: “Clarkston Pasture”
Album: On the Northline
Release Date: February 16, 2024
Label: Loose Music

In Their Words: “There’s a wonderful tension running through the songs on this album that marks a monumental faultline in my life. I wrote half the songs before I met and fell in love with my now-wife Lauren, and the rest in direct response to that life event – trying to make sense of how I got so lucky (see: “Mercury Sable” and “First Song for Lauren”).

“‘Clarkston Pasture’ was definitely in the former batch. It’s a dead-of-winter, lonesome-as-hell sort of song, where bachelorhood had lost its luster and I was fantasizing about a brighter future full of love and purpose. That’s why the verses are set in these dismally frigid, Michigan-winter landscapes: Cheering on a bar fight, turning off the furnace so as not to waste the warmth on just myself. Then the choruses flash to the glory of a Michigan summer – cruising through the towns on the northern edge of metro Detroit where the subdivisions start to dwindle and the fields start to open up. There aren’t many diametric opposites as stark as a Michigan winter and a Michigan summer, and that polarity turned out to be the perfect metaphor for how love changed my world.” – Matthew Milia

Photo Credit: John Mark Hanson

Lindsay Lou Conquers Personal Challenges on New Album, ‘Queen of Time’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

With the September release of her album Queen of Time, Nashville artist Lindsay Lou takes listeners beyond a creative journey – it’s more like a long, strange, and satisfying trip, where her “radical truth” conquers all.

A former bluegrass songsmith with roots in groups like her former backing band, the Flatbellys, and Sweet Water Warblers, Lou’s Queen of Time marks the start of another new solo chapter and follows a rough time in her life filled with earthquakes of change. She both lost a grandmother who was pivotal to her development and experienced the end of a marriage – all while her career picked up steam. But, through those endings came a new beginning. One where she better understood her place in the universe, both spiritually and musically.

On Queen of Time, Lou welcomes herself to that new identity (and all who care to follow), doing so with a fresh sound and some old friends. Featuring Billy Strings and Jerry Douglas, 11 thought-provoking tracks infuse her bluegrass roots with atmospheric folk, back-porch psychedelia, and more, as lyrics and voice weave together into something like a sonic dreamcatcher – snatching ethereal truths from the cosmos and translating them in ways the mind can just begin to process.

Recently, Lou spoke with BGS about this heady transformation, working with her friends, and how her “teacher-turned-Rainbow-Gathering-healer” of a grandma helped shape her radical spirituality.

BGS: Tell me how you’re feeling about music making these days? I know this album comes after a lot of change in your life, personally and professionally. Has the way you feel about making music changed, too?

Lindsay Lou: It felt like the most freeing recording endeavor that I have ever set out on. Working with [producer] Dave O’Donnell was really great. He held a ton of space for me creatively and emotionally and just in all the ways. So it was really nice. I brought in all of my friends, and what drew me to music to begin with was jams that my family would have, so feeling among my chosen family, being able to bring in the people who I’ve been jamming with in living rooms and on stages for the last several years, was really, really sweet.

Honestly, I’m feeling really inspired and just really happy about music. All of the tours have felt like they were in really good flow, and spiritually, it just feels very open and satisfying. I sort of blew up my life a few years ago, and the last three years or so I’ve been gestating and rebuilding my path. It was rebuilding on the foundation I had laid down with the Flatbellys and the Warblers, so it wasn’t out of nowhere, but it felt like there was a lot of unknown – and there were times where I felt there’s just some fear that goes into it. But now I’m on the cusp of watching all of this be born and come to life, and it feels so good. It’s like everything that I could have hoped for. 

Seeing the record in the hands of people and hearing all the stories they send me about how it’s touched their lives has been very, very fulfilling. And I’m watching the album chart and watching different things on the horizon, different gigs and stuff – it’s just really inspiring, and I feel really excited to follow this new path that I’ve laid out for myself. 

You don’t always get that payoff when your life blows up, so congrats! Tell me a little bit about the imagery behind the Queen of Time theme. You’re asking the listener if they know who they really are – did that come from an epiphany you had?

It definitely came from an epiphany and the ongoing question and journey of self-discovery, because it’s something you never achieve. It’s just a journey you’re always on. The imagery [for the song “Queen of Time”] was definitely from Absolem, the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. He challenges Alice, “Who are you?” And it was less about who she was and more about who she identified as, because we contain multitudes. So this is a broad and complex question, and as I’ve been playing it, the song has sort of come to life and revealed itself to me in new and unexpected ways. I always love that with songs.

You start the album off with this refrain saying, “I don’t need the world to hear me / I’m singing and nothing else matters.” What’s the significance of that to you?

I guess it’s just acknowledging the personal relationship. I always say that the voice is a window to the soul, but a lot of people have this horrible trauma that they carry with them – that they’re not a good singer and that they don’t have a good voice, and so they don’t ever sing. I feel so much grief thinking about people not even singing to themselves. In my darkest hour, the most soothing thing that I have found to do is to sing to myself. And it’s not because I think that I have the greatest voice, it’s because singing actually releases endorphins in your mind. It’s like a physiological truth that the experience of singing is medicinal and it’s a form of meditation. 

The obvious interpretation of that is that as career musicians, you’re always wanting more people to hear you and wanting your fan base to expand. But at the end of the day, the reason that I sing and I think the reason anyone sings, is because it is a magical and medicinal way of expressing your soul, your spirit, your inner truth. So just remembering that value that I don’t need to be anywhere to let my voice ring and to connect with my own soul in that way, that’s really the most powerful thing.

I know your grandmother had a big part in influencing the record. But on top of everything else she was to you, did she also help you get into music?

I guess in a roundabout way, she did. Her greatest influence on me was spiritually. She was a preacher woman, and she lived her life the best that she could in the literal footstep of Jesus. So she took everyone in and she welcomed everyone. She was always preaching that [unless] you have not sinned, don’t cast the first stone and really strongly believed that no one will be left behind. Like if God said the greatest commandment was to love God and to love your brother, then she spent her whole life practicing that. Now, I call myself a praying atheist. I don’t necessarily connect with any institution of religion, but I do connect with the practice of spirituality and of love. Even Christianity says that God is love. So in my mind it’s like, “Well, then let’s just get right to the heart of the matter and call it love!” If we’re living in love and if we’re thinking critically and we’re following our radical truth, then we’re doing it right. 

Was music a part of your childhood?

[My grandmother] had 12 children and she surrounded herself with hippies and counterculture. And her husband – the father of her 12 children – was a musician. He played the trumpet and he sang, so they always sang to their children, and the songs that she sang to them, they sang to their children. So I heard all the gospel songs that she sang to my mom, because my mom sang them to me, and there’s been various forms of family bands throughout the generations of all of her children. The older kids had a rock band, and they would get together and sing gospel songs in harmony and Beatles songs and folk songs, and the younger kids formed bands with the older cousins. There was just always music around, so I think she just held space for music.

She sounds like an amazing person. Is that her voice in the phone conversations you put on “Love Calls”?

Yeah. I played that song for a couple of my friends before she was in it. There was this long expansive jam and my girlfriends listening to it were like, “We want more Lou here.” I thought, “Well, what version of Lou makes sense to go there?” And it dawned on me that it was the version of Lou that interviewed grandma. I interviewed my grandma on the one hand to sort of preserve her radical life story for posterity. And on the other hand, as a way of knowing myself. I’ve collected about 27 hours of her telling me her life story and how she came to believe what she believes. It’s a little bit foggy now, but I had an idea of what story I wanted to put there, and once that conversation was in there, the song had the context that it was calling for.

What was the context?

The song is about someone being a guide of love for someone else. And the conversation is her telling me the story of meeting someone at a rainbow gathering who she had a conversation with, and later found out that that conversation talked them out of suicide. Many parts of this record came together in the context of me witnessing suicides in my music community, and addiction and mental health struggles. And pretty much all of my music goes back to that in some way, because of where I came from and the world that I see around me.

Other songs have that through line to it too, right? Like “Nothing’s Working”? I know you worked with Billy Strings on that one, how did it come together? 

He and I get together every once in a while to write and we had gotten together and started that song. He had just been hanging out with Bryan Sutton and had this open B shape thing in his head that he started to play along with, and he was talking to me about Ionia – the town that he grew up in. He had just seen so many people get a job and try to make all the right decisions and try to always do the right thing, and just end up with nothing to show for it, because they’re stuck in a system that doesn’t support them and wasn’t built for them, or a scene that really wasn’t good for them. 

We wrote the first verse, and kind of left it at that, and it sat in my voice memos for a couple years. Then I was on a plane on my way to the Jeff Austin tribute concert benefit [late member of Yonder Mountain String Band, who died in 2019], and I was just thinking about things. I think I finished it on my way home, but during that same week, I attended my cousin Emily’s funeral. She died in her 20s and was struggling with opiate addiction. I don’t mention either of them in the song necessarily, but it really got me into the headspace of thinking about people I know who are still alive, who are struggling with similar challenges. The song is about telling their story, and telling their story with compassion and honesty.

I noticed a lot of hard bluegrass influence on tracks like “Rules,” and along with Billy you have a collab with Jerry Douglas. Do you still feel like you can be creative in the bluegrass form these days? Or is it harder to do that as you grow as an artist?

Bluegrass gave me a lot of tools and a home. It gave me a place to belong and an opportunity to hone my craft, just in terms of tightening up rhythm and getting better at playing the guitar – and having an entire world of people I can get together with anytime, anywhere, and play any one of the many songs in the bluegrass canon and sing three-part harmony, like we’ve been a band our whole lives. It gave me so much, but I didn’t grow up in a family or a community that played bluegrass music. It was something I found in my early 20s. I’ve never been like people like Billy and Molly [Tuttle] – [bluegrass] is not just a part of their history, it’s like their earliest memories.

I grew up doing acoustic music, so there’s always going to be some element of that in my music. And I’m so grateful to have bluegrass now as a tool of expressing myself. But I don’t think I find it harder as I get older. I just find it easier to connect more authentically with my own voice, and bluegrass is a tool of doing that – but it’s not the only tool. 

Photo Credit: Dana Kalachnik

WATCH: Full Cord, “Reelin’ In The Years”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Full Cord
Hometown: Grand Haven, Michigan
Song: “Reelin’ In The Years”
Album: Cambium
Release Date: November 10, 2023
Label: Dark Shadow Recording

In Their Words: “‘Reelin’ In The Years’ is a song that grabbed our attention from the first note. We really connected with the way the song flows and moves. Our arrangement has some cool rhythmic and chordal variations that we feel really show off the band’s musicianship. Our hope is that the fans will connect with our version of this classic Steely Dan song.” – Full Cord

Track Credits: Written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker

Produced, recorded, and mixed by Stephen Mougin at Dark Shadow Recording, Goodlettsville, Tennessee.
Mastered by David Glasser, AirShow Mastering, Boulder, Colorado.

Photo Credit: Scott Simontacchi
Video Credit: Stephen Mougin

WATCH: Cruz Contreras, “Let Somebody Love You”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Cruz Contreras
Hometown: Bridgman, Michigan
Song: “Let Somebody Love You”
Album: Cosmico
Release Date: September 15, 2023
Label: Cosmico Records

In Their Words: “‘Let Somebody Love You’ is a hypnotic groove jam with a simple message. It’s time to let somebody love you. Speaking to Western themes and adventure, broken dreams, moonshine-inspired journeys, and psychedelic realizations, ‘Let Somebody Love You’ delivers a driving verse and grand chorus that encourages the listener to overcome their fears, whatever they may be. The syncopated guitar riff creates the transcendental meditation that takes the listener to another plane where rock ‘n’ roll and grooves make all things right.” – Cruz Contreras

Photo Credit: David McClister

LISTEN: The Bootstrap Boys, “Even Though”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Bootstrap Boys
Hometown: Grand Rapids, Michigan
Song: “Even Though”
Album: Hungry & Sober
Release Date: April 28, 2023

In Their Words: “‘Even Though’ is me grieving the death of my father and thinking back positively on his memory at the same time. It was an emotional roller coaster to write. I have all these happy memories of playing and singing with my dad, and they’re sitting across the table from sad realizations about how that can’t happen again. He would be proud that I’m doing what I want with my life, venturing off the beaten path.

“It was a harsh realization for me to accept that line ‘even though he had to die for me to be the man that I’ve become.’ Without that painful experience of losing my father at the young age of 30, I wouldn’t have undergone the personal growth I was forced into. Without that sadness and loss, this song wouldn’t exist. I might just still be half-assing poetry over acoustic guitar at a coffee shop for a handful of hipsters. Sometimes it feels like I owe a debt to death for spurring me on.

“My dad played Johnny Cash’s ‘Don’t Take Your Guns to Town’ every time he picked up the guitar practically. The gospel and bluegrass songs he listened to and played (around/with me) when I was growing up carved and shaped me like water does rock. I reference a song from Tom T. Hall [‘Homecoming’] in the second verse. I wondered if being distant from your family and feeling alone and exhausted in this world is just a part of being a country music singer. I identified with that sentiment heavily, decades later. The names and faces have changed but the story stays the same.” — Jake Stilson, The Bootstrap Boys

The Bootstrap Boys · Even Though

Photo Credit: Sara Stryker Photography

WATCH: The Accidentals, “Eastern Standard Time”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Accidentals
Hometown: Nashville-by-way-of Michigan
Song: “Eastern Standard Time”
Album: Time Out Session #2
Release Date: March 4, 2022

In Their Words: “This song was written over Zoom with Peter Mulvey, one of my favorite songwriters. A Wisconsinite, Peter is known for riding his bike across the country with his guitar on his back, sharing stories and provocative wisdom in song form. We were introduced to Peter at a show in Michigan and after watching his set we knew someday we would write a song with him. We were really excited when an email came in, asking if we’d be interested in writing a song. We’ve learned in co-writing, the key is to find the things you have in common. We found about five minutes in, that we were both avid nature lovers, and we spent a while talking about everything from trees to birds to fungi. Eventually, we started talking about the UP [Upper Peninsula] — it’s where our home state connects to Peter’s home state.

“The UP is one of the most beautiful places on Earth and we plan a tour there every year when the leaves are changing. We decided to write a song about that. Peter landed the hook, ‘Eastern Standard Time.’ The line ‘Three fires burn from the old bloodlines’ pays homage to the Three Fires Council — the three Native American tribes that comprise much of the Midwest. The descriptions of northern beauty are underscored by thin cracks in the visage: the dangerous oil pipeline threatening our remaining freshwater resources and the long-lasting effects of colonization on Indigenous people. Every beautiful thing comes with baggage. You can’t talk about one without talking about the other. The video was a gift from our friend Elijah Allen. That is him holding/operating the drone while skating across the frozen lake. He’s an avid outdoorsman and really wants people to experience the beauty of where we live in Michigan.” — Sav Buist, The Accidentals

Photo Courtesy of Sideways Media

BGS 5+5: Laurel Premo

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Laurel Premo
Hometown: Traverse City, Michigan
Latest Album: Golden Loam

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

For me dance is such a huge influence. I’ve spent quite a few years as a dance musician for square dances, being a traditional fiddler. That role of being more the motor for the good time, as opposed to being the focal point, has always resonated deeply with me. But beyond that, I know that just my experience as a participant in social dance in both American old-time and Nordic traditions has given my body a vocabulary that comes out in my music. I’ve found a through line in my voice that, no matter the tempo of the music, I always am wanting to make these larger slower pulses, make longer groups of beats, tap my foot at a slower frequency. I’m certain that that longer embodiment of phrases, and the pull, and balance, from dance have played into my nature there.

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

I have a really early memory, I’m not sure what age, but before I was big enough to hold any instruments. I was in my bedroom, standing next to the door, and I could hear my folks playing music on the other side of the wall in the living room, my mom really tearing it up on some fiddle tune. In that moment, alone, I remember that I started air-fiddling and kind of marching around or dancing in the little corner. I just wanted to be part of whatever was going on there.

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

I took a while composing this lap steel track, “Father Made of River Mud,” from the new record. For a bit, it was separate pieces, in different tunings, that I didn’t know if I’d be able to fold together as one. It’s a really beautiful moment for the maker of a piece, when some kind of grace math helps everything line up in your head, and then you get to hear the thing for the first time in its full form. That tune is like a circle, it doesn’t really have to end at any one point.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

I try and spend some time ruminating with memory that reflects back at me the elements of my personal experience that I want to embed in the performance, to make more vibrant what I’m laying down there for listeners. It’s almost a way of remembering myself to myself, because there are a lot of possible distractions when you’re recording or performing. Every little step of the setup could be something that takes you away from your body and the meaning you’re trying to imbue in the work. So, I just real quickly try to go into the wilds to try and counteract all of the civilization that I’m traversing through.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

In the last two to three years, my wild haunts have been woods, dunes, and rivers. I grew up in the woods, so shadows and green, what reverb the places with a great amount of life growing have, and the scents of being real close to the ground — those are all deep in me, and as an adult I go back to similar places to find quiet, and to kind of listen beyond that quiet. Walking rivers for the past few years, learning fly fishing, has brought about a whole other set of turns, including just a beautiful sideways weight from the gravity of the river flowing against you. I definitely take gestural impulses from my time spent in the wild, and work to keep all my senses open to what rhythms lay in front of me.

Photo credit: Harpe Star