The Lil Smokies Tighten Their Bond with ‘Tornillo’

The Lil Smokies’ long-awaited album Tornillo reflects the vast openness of the Texas desert town in which it was recorded, possessing all of the energy that comes with a renewed creative spirit. In a phone interview with lead singer Andy Dunnigan, BGS discussed rule-bending, burnout, and how recording at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas revitalized the Montana-based band.

BGS: It sounds like this album is really special to you. Can you tell me about the process of making it? What’s memorable about this one?

AD: Yeah, this is a special one. We were coming off of two or three solid years of extensive touring. We were pretty road-worn and dare I say a little burnt out. When we came into this session we needed to become a little more unified than we had been while on the road. We were looking for somewhere that we could go and get outside of the box creatively.

Texas was somewhere we had never spent a lot of time. We wanted to go down to the desert and we wanted to be able to live on the compound. These were all [realities] that Sonic Ranch in Tornillo was able to provide us, so when we got down there we didn’t really leave for ten days.

We lived a stone’s throw away from the studio. We’d wake up and eat huevos rancheros and then head over to the studio. We were kind of autonomous in the fact that we could make our own hours. It really brought us back to life. We were really unified in our work and the production of this album, and I think that’s really ostensible throughout the songs.

How much does a new album like this, where you have brand-new material and are fresh off the experience of recording, help motivate you to keep going out on the road?

I think it’s just that we toured the last album for a couple years and got a little tired of some of those songs. We were playing so much that we didn’t have all that much time for writing. I found myself trying to juggle between writing, being on the road, solitude, hobbies, and having a girlfriend. I was thinking, “Man, there’s just not a lot of time.”

So now that we were able to hammer out some new songs, getting back out on the road seems so much more enjoyable. I think when we’re having fun on stage there’s a direct correlation to the audience. They’re feeding off us and the pillars of reciprocity are strong.

This album definitely sounds like you’re having fun and doing things your way. You sort of bend the rules of bluegrass, but always in a way that adds something to the music. How do you keep an open mind about trying new things without being gratuitous about it?

We wanted to think outside the box for this record, but we didn’t want to do it in a contrived way where we say, “OK, this is going to be a weird album, so we’ll just make it intentionally weird.” We wanted to cater to the songs and adhere to what each song needs.

On the title track, “Tornillo,” we had originally worked up our traditional way of doing it with the bluegrass ensemble, but when we started playing it, it sounded like something that should be on the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. We were thinking, “This just isn’t going to work.”

Then Rev, our guitar player, worked up a piano arrangement and brought it to us towards the latter part of the session and we were like, “Oh man, this is so awesome. We have to use this.” We were just serving the song, and that was the ethos. Once we had the piano foundation, we started experimenting with drums and horns and some baritone guitar.

It was really fun for us. We intentionally gave ourselves a surplus amount of time in the studio so we could tinker around a little bit. We wanted to experiment sonically, and I think the results are really fun. It opened our minds to what you can accomplish in the studio if you have enough time and patience.

This album has a clear overall sound. Big, open, and full of space. Is that something you went into the studio wanting to accomplish, or did it develop more on the fly?

It’s a little bit of both. We wanted to create something big from the get-go, but we weren’t sure how we were going to do that. We knew we wanted to record live because that adds a little more energy, we had it in mind to drench a lot of it in reverb to create sort of a Fleet Foxes vibe or something a little more alt. That’s the kind of music that a lot of us have been listening to and getting inspired by for the last few years. We’re all listening to a lot of different music and we wanted to expand outside of the bluegrass domain in the production at least.

In your bio it’s mentioned that you “draw on the energy of a rock band and the Laurel Canyon songwriting of the 1970s.” How did bluegrass become the avenue that you express those influences?

Well, I think we all started out playing bluegrass. I came to it in my latter years of high school. I went down to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. I had gotten an electric guitar from my dad. He plays music for a living, so he gifted me a Strat, and then a lap steel. I listened to a lot of David Lindley and Ben Harper. Those were kind of the gateway into bluegrass music. Then when I went down to Telluride it blew my head open.

I think we all have our pioneer stories of how we got into the music. That’s how you meet the community of players. There’s this whole vocabulary attached to it but as you get older you expand your musical library. I think we listen to a lot of songwriters and a lot of rock. We still happen to play these bluegrass instruments, and we love bluegrass, but we’re just trying to express what we want to say while wielding bluegrass instruments.

Do you find that you’re an introduction to bluegrass music for a lot of your fans?

I do, and it’s one of my favorite remarks after shows. People say, “Man, I hate bluegrass, but I love you guys.” I hear that a lot and I think it’s funny and ironic, but it’s cool because I think there has to be somebody to pull you in and make you realize that you’ve been wrong about the stigma perhaps. I know I was that person at one time. I thought, “Man, bluegrass music? My dad plays the banjo. This is really lame.”

I think we’re seeing bluegrass kind of blossom into its adolescence and beyond, because for a while I think it was restricted by the staunch purists who were slapping everyone’s wrists for playing minor chords. Now we’re seeing Punch Brothers, Greensky Bluegrass, Infamous Stringdusters, and of course now Billy Strings, who all have obviously done their homework religiously and can pay homage to the traditional godfathers, but they’re also putting their spin on it. It’s really cool and it’s getting people excited. I think to be included in that group is really awesome and I think it’s an exciting time to be riding the wave.

How much do you rely on melody, texture, and other instrumental factors to further the meaning or story within a song?

A lot of it happens in the arranging as well, but a lot of times when I’m writing a song there will be a hook line, and that’s sort of from a rock standpoint. You have your verse-chorus and then there’s a riff or something. You know, this band was almost an instrumental band for a short period in the beginning. We were listening to a lot of David Grisman, Strength In Numbers, and a lot of that music.

We loved writing instrumental music, and then when I started singing and writing songs we kind of fused the two worlds together. Those little melody parts and arrangement parts are still so fun to incorporate in songs. In a tune like “Giant” on this album, we wanted something kind of spacy to create a dream-like state, so we tried to write something that sounded kind of spacey and sleepy.

Some of these songs are intentionally ambiguous in their origins. What is the intent behind that ambiguity?

I went to school at the University of Montana for creative writing and poetry and I love the way words sound together as much as I love melody. Sometimes the words and just the assonance, what they sound like, will dictate the melody and vice versa. Once I have a word in my head and I’m kind of ad-libbing on the guitar I try to steer away from some words and how they sound.

I like to write stories and have some ostensible narratives, but I also just love words and how they sound. “World’s On Fire” has a couple meanings in there but I also like to keep it intentionally ambiguous because I think it’s fun for people to create their own story.

You’ve said your time at Sonic Ranch “encapsulates all of the good things about being in a band and making music.” How did the band grow from the experience of making this album?

To circle back on what I said in the beginning, it’s a huge a sacrifice to be in a band. There’s the greatest ups and the greatest downs, kind of married to each other. Coming off of those past three years of touring we were all a little tired and burnt out, and maybe questioning if we were on the right path. During our studio session in Tornillo I think we were all realizing that this is why we do it.

When you make an album it’s like setting a bug in amber. It’s this fossilized preservation of your life at that point. The word tornillo literally means “to fasten” and refers to a screw. We named it after that place. The place really tightened us up together as friends and as a band. I remember leaving there and feeling really proud of what we had accomplished. I think it’s the most unified we’ve ever been as a band.


Photo credit: Bill Reynolds

LISTEN: Kitchen Dwellers, “Driftwood”

Artist: Kitchen Dwellers
Hometown: Bozeman, Montana
Song: “Driftwood”
Album: Muir Maid
Release Date: November 8, 2019

In Their Words: “I wrote ‘Driftwood’ after living out of a kayak in Alaska one summer. The trip changed my life in many ways, but one was just appreciating what you have at any given moment in time. Life isn’t perfect and comfortable and sometimes curveballs get thrown your way, but ultimately how you come out the other end is based on your perspective and resilience. We were so fortunate to have Jason Carter add a fiddle track and he did some amazing work. Once we heard it we knew it had to be the last song on the album.” — Max Davies, guitar/vocals


Photo credit: Silky Shots

Martha Scanlan Explores the Depths of ‘The River and the Light’

Growing up, Martha Scanlan says she equated music with “belonging and family and home.” The Montana-based folk singer-songwriter has woven those elements into her fourth album, The River and the Light, but, for Scanlan, home doesn’t exactly signify hearthfire. There’s a wilderness brooding about the album, as she moves throughout the landscapes that shaped her. She’s found her place in the natural world as much as those vistas have found their place in her.

Longtime friend and creative partner Jon Neufeld produced The River and the Light, continuing a collaboration that spans back to her 2011 album, Tongue River Stories. The two blended an array of brooding and beautiful timbres — with fiddle and accordion from Dirk Powell — that speak to those natural landscapes: The expansive skies and pressing quiet of Montana (“Only a River/True Eyed Angel”), the weathered mountainscapes and ancient tones of Appalachia (“West Virginia Rain”), and even, at times, the lush forestry and friendship she’s found in Oregon, where they recorded the LP.

Scanlan herself has described The River and the Light as a journey, which makes sense when you consider that journeys are as much about leaving as they are arriving home. She joined Neufeld on the phone during this interview with the Bluegrass Situation.

Looking back to Tongue River Stories, elements of place and belonging and journeys have always informed your songs. If you look at The River and the Light as a new chapter, what have you learned in that interim?

Martha: There’s this old cowboy saying that just jumped into my mind: “A horse will make a liar out of you.” As soon as you say a horse is one way, like, “This horse never bucks,” it’s going to buck you off. As soon as I say that a song is about something, it’ll end up being about something else. One thing that was interesting in terms of Tongue River Stories, which was such a collaboration with the landscape itself, is we were recording songs outside and the sound between the notes was the actual landscape. This record feels like its own landscape.

You both seem quite interested in atmosphere. I couldn’t get over the timbres on “Too Late.” How did you build those colors into that song?

Jon: Well, I know we got Dirk Powell’s fiddle part. He wasn’t able to make it to the studio, but he sent us a rough mix — he played some fiddle and accordion parts in that. I added some baritone guitar and acoustic guitar. There may have even been omnichord on that one. I ended up sneaking the omnichord on quite a few songs. And then near the end, I was thinking we needed something more, and Martha was back in Montana already, and she sent me… How did you even record that?

Martha: I had this really lame zoom video recorder that I got eight years ago or something, but it has a pretty good microphone. I recorded some brushes, like playing brushes on tambourine, and some harmony parts.

Jon: [Laughs] So she sent that. And I added that to it.

Martha: I think that song is probably the most layered one on the record. Or the most that had an afterwards. What was interesting to me about Jon’s production, I don’t know another musician that’s so in the moment and improvisational when we’re playing live or in the studio or anything. It’s fun because to watch him putting on different layers or overdubbing something because it’s that improvisational. It’s not contrived, it’s not overworked; it tends to feel really alive.

Dick Powell has said about you, “Martha feels the natural world…to such an extent that the stories transcend themselves.” How do you view your relationship with natural space?

Martha: I think there’s an openness, for me, about working and living so close to landscape that’s very much like music. I lived on this small ranch for seven or eight years in southeastern Montana. Doing Tongue River Stories, we recorded most of that outside and we could do that because it’s that quiet — there aren’t cars or planes overhead. To me, writing is more about listening than it is about planning or thinking. I’ve never been good about like, “I’m going to write a song about this.”

It unfolds on its own.

Martha: Yeah and seeing what shows up. As far as a theme in writing and in the music, I think that there was an element of this record that was an exploration of rivers, or different currents that run through and wind together. For both Jon and I, that’s something that occurred early on when we were passing ideas back and forth.

Are you thinking specifically about a certain river or more metaphorically about them?

Martha: Kind of both. I think I’ve always been fascinated with rivers and I’m around rivers a lot.

Jon: Yeah, I remember that back and forth. The theme of rivers was on the last track, “Revival.” I was like, I think it’d be really cool if you were going along a river and this thing pops up. All of a sudden, there’s an acoustic guitar solo for no reason; there’s no acoustic guitar until then. Just the way you go down a river and something appears and is gone. That was a very real theme, like visualizing the river and making a sonic imprint of that.

What keeps this partnership between the two of you so worthwhile in your minds?

Martha: It’s a hard question to answer because it feels really easy and congruent. What would you say, Jon?

Jon: I feel like in the first five seconds you can tell if you’re going to jive with somebody or not; I think it’s especially so with artists and musicians. When we first started playing together, it’s an obvious feeling. It’s obviously not wrong.

Right. You wouldn’t have worked together so many times if it weren’t working.

Martha: Something I really appreciate about working with Jon is there’s this constant sense of improvisation on stage and in the studio. Everything is very alive. We don’t practice a lot. [Laughs] We usually show up on tour and the first time we play together is, like, a radio show or at the sound check. But it keeps things very fresh and alive, I think.

Speaking of being in the moment, I read that “Brother Was Dying” was done in one take.

Jon: That’s probably the truth about most of the album.

Martha: That one, I had just finished putting the words together — I had written most of it, but it was still in this place where I wasn’t sure how it would all stitch together — and we went in and recorded it. I hadn’t sung it as a complete song; that was the first time we’d really played it.

What does your writing process look like nowadays?

Martha: For this record, I had started playing electric guitar; I was pretty psyched about that. It’s a really different animal: It’s a wash of sound, the physicality of it is really different, there’s a lot more fluidity in it. So I think messing around with that influenced some of the writing. It’s still to me such a process of discovery, writing songs. Some things just kind of show up, and then it becomes an inquiry, and sometimes that process continues for years after I write the songs. I feel like I go out and interact with whoever is listening to it and come back changed. I really enjoy that part of it. I think my last record, which Jon also produced, was so much about the current that moves through things, and this record felt even more whittled to the current that’s flowing through.


Photo credit: Yogesh Simpson

WATCH: Guthrie Brown, ‘Day to Day’

Artist: Guthrie Brown
Hometown: Montana
Song: “Day to Day”
Album: Natural
Release Date: November 18, 2016

In Their Words: “The process of making this music video is accurately summed up by lyrics of the song. It was such an ‘in the moment’ experience, and I feel like that spirit shines through in the video.

My band and I were on tour opening for Jonny Lang over the Summer. We had a few days off, so we went to my parents house on Flathead Lake in Montana. Our good friend Luke Enyeart joined us halfway through the tour and brought his camera. We didn’t have any real vision for the music video; we just thought it would be fun to get a ton of footage. Once we got to Montana, it was clear that we had to make a music video for ‘Day to Day.’ We took a boat ride to Wild Horse Island (which is located in the middle of Flathead Lake) and started filming. There were some big horn sheep hanging out in the valley of the island, and I immediately said, ‘We gotta go get shots of the sheep!’ We brought a mini portable speaker so that I could hear the recording of the song as I sang along to it. The big horn sheep must have dug hearing the music because they curiously started walking toward us as we were playing the song.” — Guthrie Brown


Photo credit: Andrea Behrends

LISTEN: Jack Klatt, ‘Anywhere I Go’

Artist: Jack Klatt
Hometown: Minneapolis, MN
Song: "Anywhere I Go"
Album: Shadows in the Sunset
Release Date: April 29
Label: Different Folk Records

In Their Words: "I wrote this song a while back for an old man I saw walking around the streets of Bozeman, Montana. I never met him. We only crossed paths for one moment, but he had a story in the way he walked that stuck with me. I got to wondering about that old man and how he carried his guitar case. He had the enlightened, wild look of a hobo king like Iowa Blackie or Utah Phillips. I wrote a song for him and, in return, he helped me realize that the only way a person can really get the best out of living is being alright with the dying part." — Jack Klatt


Photo credit: Joel Patterson

3×3: The Pines on Hamper McBee, Petey Greene, and a Blackfeet Indian Named Leroy

Artist: David Huckfelt (of the Pines)
Hometown: Moonrise, IA
Latest Project: Above the Prairie
Rejected Band Names: Los Piños

 

winona, mn

A photo posted by The PINES (@the_pines) on

What was the first record you ever bought with your own money?
"Mama Said Knock You Out" by LL Cool J

If money were no object, where would you live and what would you do?
In Hot Springs, Montana, population 551, a Blackfeet Indian named Leroy runs a hot spring with the third highest mineral content in the world. It's called Camas Big Medicine, and I heard he's getting pretty old, so I'd go out and let him retire.

If your life were a movie, which songs would be on the soundtrack?
"Life Gets Tee-Jus" – Carson Robinson
"Lord Help the Poor & Needy" – Jesse Mae Hemphill
"Peltier AIM Song" – John Trudell
"Shortenin' Bread" – Ora Dell Graham
"Big Iron" – Marty Robbins
"King Kunta" – Kendrick Lamar
"Ain't Got No/I Got Life" – Nina Simone
"The Roving Gambler" – Spider John Koerner
"The Roiling Sea" – Joseph Spence
"Mountain of Blues" – Joe Price
"Hog of the Forsaken" – Michael Hurley
"God's Chorus of Crickets" – Jim Wilson

 

duluth, mn

A photo posted by The PINES (@the_pines) on

What brand of jeans do you wear?
Camo

What's your go-to karaoke tune?
"Ghost Riders in the Sky"

What's your favorite season?
Early Autumn, and the first season of True Detective

 

bayport mn tonight

A photo posted by The PINES (@the_pines) on

Jason Isbell or Sturgill Simpson?
Hamper McBee

Fallon or Kimmel?
Petey Greene

Chocolate or vanilla?
Yes