Tag: string band

Punch Brothers’ Noam Pikelny: Getting Inside the Story

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Noam Pikelny has a dry delivery only when he’s joking around. But as banjo player in Punch Brothers, his playing is crisp, inventive, and in step with his colleagues. This is especially true on All Ashore, a new release that explores the personal challenges of relationships as well as the growing political divide in America. This year he’s nominated for IBMA Banjo Player of the Year, while his two previous solo albums earned Grammy nominations. His Twitter bio sums it up: “Widely considered the world’s premier color blind banjoist. Punch Brother.”

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

When I was at your show at the Ryman, you were usually turned toward the band but I could never tell if you were singing. Do you sing with the guys on the songs?

I sing on a few things, but not much on this record. I actually don’t think I sing any harmony on this record.

Is that by choice or have they tried to convince you otherwise? Why is that?

Usually, like when I’m singing at all, it’s because we have like five part harmony going on. And I think it has to do with my range. I have the most limited vocal range of anybody in the band. But that was how I was born. I was born that way, it’s not my fault! … And then on the one song I sang on, on the last record, they invited everybody else in the universe to sing on it. On the song “Little Lights” that was on The Phosphorescent Blues. And so I think it essentially the policy that if Noam is allowed to sing, then everybody is allowed to sing. It’s only fair to have a one-hundred person overdub. I can’t hear myself because of all these people.

A couple of you have mentioned what’s going on in the country right now as inspiration. I think it’s on everyone’s mind, but why does it seem like a good inspiration for a song? Like “Jumbo,” for example. Why do you think it lent itself to writing a song?

Well, I think on a more macro level, I think it’s really important to be sticking to your guns. I think a lot of people are demoralized and questioning whether what they’re creating or what they’re doing for a living is valid in times when it seems like a lot of them are under assault. I know for me personally that having an opportunity to make music with musical co-patriots was very crucial. I feel like there’s such division right now in this country. I think people are thriving on families being alienated from each other. You think of the Thanksgiving dinner that becomes so troublesome. Friends are becoming alienated through all kinds of political differences and I feel like our sense of community and our sense of comradery as a whole is kind of under assault.

I think parsing through what’s going on in our lives right now, a solo project can be quite lonely. I think we find strength in working with each other and we have the ability to hone our thoughts with each other around, as far as what’s important to us and what we want to say. For “Jumbo” in particular, why does this make for good music? Or why is this musical inspiration? I ultimately thought that these people are like the protagonists that are Jumbo and his cohorts, they spend most of their time celebrating themselves. And we just wanted to get in on the action and celebrate them as well. So it’s really a celebration, more than anything.

It’s a fun melody if you just listen at the surface level. How’s it going over live? It seems like one that people would be responding to?

I think people are responding to a lot of it. [Playing live] is a huge component of the musical journey of this music. Making a record is obviously the most concrete and typical manifestations of the music. But the journey really is just beginning once that’s finished and we start playing it live, getting audience feedback, and shaping the song for the live experience. We’re flattered that people are enjoying it and starting to know the words.

Gabe that told me that you have a good story from being on Letterman. Do you have a minute to tell that story?

Oh, I’m not sure exactly what he’s referring to. I mean we got to go on Letterman about eight to nine years ago and play with Steve Martin. He announced that he was doing this yearly banjo award – it seems like a long time ago, it was nine years ago now. So, it was one of the more surreal experiences of a lifetime, getting to be up there with Steve Martin and Dave Letterman.

You were the first one to get that award. I remember when that started. Since then, a lot of your peers have been recognized. This sounds like a weird question, but is there like a banjo community or like an instant friendship when you meet another banjo player?

Um, there’s a secret banjo cult that meets in a cave in Horse Mouth, Kentucky, on the third Saturday of every month. And everyone’s totally cloaked and in these robes that are covered in banjo tablature… No, there’s no secret society – or if there is, I haven’t been invited yet which probably makes sense. But I think there’s an instant kinship with anybody else who’s pursuing music as their life’s work. And I think any instrumentalist, you always want to pow-wow and talk about their techniques and who they studied with, so I think there’s an extension in that way.

I wanted to ask you about songwriting collaboration. The way I understand is that everybody wrote the music together and then crafted the stories on top of the music. Is that pretty accurate? What was the process like?

We write the music instrumentally first, as a band, and that’s often with the five of us in the room. Oftentimes, Thile will be kind of singing, just gibberish, or a few words he has stuck in his head that associates with that music. Sometimes, those couple words will become the kernel of the song, and we’ll shape it around that. He often goes off and starts writing lyrics and brings it back for collective input, and we’ll help edit and shape the lyrics.

Sometimes we’ll have late-night discussions over cocktails or a drink, talking about what’s going on in our lives, whether it’s our familial environment or what’s going on in the world right now, and he’ll go off and try to capture that collective thought into a lyric. So it’s always different, but interestingly in Punch Brothers, the lyrics almost always come last. We write placeholder lyrics first, then that’s the final but obviously very crucial element.

Are you a good lyricist? Do you enjoy contributing in that way?

I don’t consider myself a true lyricist. I really do enjoy the process of working with the lyricist. And I feel it’s an effective kind of partnership to them to have Thile leading the charge in that way, but then having this kind of counsel for feedback that can be brutally honest.

You just got married this year right?

Correct. A few months ago.

So this album has a song like “All Ashore,” which is about a relationship falling apart, but then you’re a newlywed. In order to get into a character, do you have to set your personal life out of mind when you perform a song like that? How do you separate the two?

Well, no, I think “All Ashore” isn’t about the collapse. It’s more about the challenges. It’s the struggle and the ups and downs, the ebb and flow, to quote the song itself. But you know, when we get up and play a song like “Molly and Tenbrooks,” which is a racehorse song, I don’t feel like I have to identify personally with the jockeys or the horses … but I think it’s really important to get inside the story of the song and as you perform it, you can really deliver the intent of it.

And so there might be a difference of whoever is the lead singer. You’d have to ask Chris how it’s different, whether it’s sung from the first person, or a narrator, or an actor. All of those roles probably come into play on different material and especially on covers that we do. … I think you can emphasis the story even if you don’t see yourself in that story. That’s the case in music and in real life. I think being an instrumentalist, I’m trying to support the singer by helping him deliver the intent of the song. I make the story more vivid through the way that I play it.

Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Punch Brothers’ Chris Eldridge: Influences and Integrity

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Chris Eldridge, the good-natured guitarist for Punch Brothers, comes by his bluegrass pedigree honestly. As a young man, he attended innumerable shows by Seldom Scene, a pioneering ensemble whose lineup included his father, banjo player Ben Eldridge. After studying at Oberlin Conservatory, he co-founded the Infamous Stringdusters, which won three IBMA Awards following their 2007 debut project, Fork in the Road. Indeed that album title proved auspicious, as Eldridge took a different path with the formation of Punch Brothers – a rewarding partnership that a decade later has yielded their newest project, All Ashore.

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

When I saw you guys at the Ryman, I noticed you were wearing a Hawaiian lei, so I take that as a sign that things are going well on the tour. What’s the vibe so far?

The vibe has been really fun and it’s great because the band’s back together, as they say. We’ve been connected, all of us in various ways, even in this time off from the band. I see Thile a bunch because I’m usually playing guitar on Live From Here. Paul lives really close to me, so I see him like every other day in Nashville. And Noam is close, and I see Gabe, but to have all of us in the same place out on the road for me is a really fun thing because one of the real privileges of my life is getting to play music in Punch Brothers, getting to be the guitar player in a band with those guys.

One of my favorite songs on this record is “The Gardener.” I feel like it sets a nice tone and tells a hopeful story. Tell me what the band was hoping to capture with that song.

Well, the music was started on that years and years ago, probably in 2012. We were in London doing a thing with T Bone Burnett for a movie and this simple melody kinda just sprung up. We were trying to brainstorm some stuff for this movie and it almost sounded like a Christmas carol. And so it was this thing that we always really liked, and we didn’t give it to that project that we were there working on. We wanted to hold it close to our chest and keep it ourselves. It was something that we had sitting around, even for The Phosphorescent Blues, but we just didn’t develop it into anything.

And then Thile had come up with that kind of weird, modulating, tonally ambiguous guitar that starts the song. He showed that to me and it was really cool. The way it works for us is, we always work on music before there’s any content, in terms of story. That’s pretty much how it tends to progress for the band. We’re definitely a music-first band. So it was a matter of making both of those ideas interesting. And the original idea from 2012, the Christmas carol idea, was really neat and we really liked it but it had a limited amount of development. A lot of Punch Brothers music, the song will have to have a certain amount of development. It’ll tend to go places. Usually we won’t just repeat a thing over and over.

And as we were trying to develop that, someone had the idea, “What happens if we do that crazy, weird, finger-picked guitar thing — the ambiguous tonal thing – and pop it together?” We had to change the key around a little bit but we found a key relationship that worked and it solved this problem.

So then it’s a matter of figuring out what the song is going to be about. Thile had this idea about a gardener, some guy kinda tending. You know, because the music is not lonely exactly but there’s like a forlorn imagination, like optimistic vibes, that are encoded into the sound of that melody. So it was trying to find a story to go along with it. And it dovetailed with a lot of the things that we’ve been thinking about and talking about as a band, in terms of society today. People who have things and people who don’t have things. People who feel protective of themselves and their tribe. It’s a meditation on a lot of those kinds of thoughts. I’m barely touching on them, but that’s kind of where it came from.

You guys would make a pretty cool Christmas record. Has that ever come up?

We’ve talked about it before. I don’t know if we’ll ever do it, but I think that would actually be really fun. There are so many cool, beautiful songs. Really timeless, gorgeous melodies. There is some solid music there in that canon of holiday music. It’s so hard to get everybody’s schedules to align now. People have three children in the band at this point, and three wives, and essentially all of us are in completely and deeply committed relationships … and we’re all older. The band can’t sit totally in first place anymore, which is necessitated by having families and that’s now the most important thing. So we really have to be deliberate about our time and it means that we don’t do as much stuff together – but when we do, we try to really make it count. That being said, I would love to make a Christmas record.

I thought with your connection to Seldom Scene, I’d ask if you knew John Duffey well.

I didn’t know him that well, but I certainly grew up around him. John didn’t really know how to relate to little kids. I have a lot of memories of being around John, just being around the band, but I didn’t really interact with him much until towards the very end of his life. We’re talking probably the last less-than-six months he was alive really. He started to acknowledge me because I was probably 13 or 14 years old. I was just getting to the age where he related to me as more than just a small child. I was starting to feel a little more like someone he could relate to.

I remember the last time I saw him alive. I was sitting backstage at the Birchmere. They have these big chairs and I was sitting in one of them. He came up behind me and just scruffed me by the hair and said, “Hey there, guy.” That’s kind of where the story ends but I was just so blown away, like, “Whoa! John Duffey just talked to me!” That was an amazing thing!

I have very clear memories of the sound of his voice. I probably went to hundreds of Seldom Scene shows and I heard those guys play hundreds of times when I was a kid and the sound of Duffey’s tenor, the sound of his mandolin playing, the sound of Mike Auldridge’s Dobro bouncing off the walls. That stuff is burned so deeply within me. I’m so thankful and grateful for that. It’s this crazy privilege that I was just born to have those experiences. As I get older, I appreciate more and more how cool it was. But I don’t think I ever really took it for granted. I loved the music, I loved the sound of that band from the time I was a boy.

I know that Tony Rice is one of your heroes too. How has his music shaped the music that you’re making now?

Oh man, profoundly. He provided such a great example of musical integrity. In terms of rhythm, not just rhythm guitar playing, but actual timing, his sense of time and elegance and grace and power and intelligence – all these things that I really try to emulate. The goal was never to be a clone of Tony. I mean, it’s easy to learn the note that he plays. It’s not that hard but I feel like once you do that, then the real learning begins. What’s he doing with those notes? Why is it so good when he plays them? What’s going on there? That to me is when the rubber hits the road and that has everything to do with his musicianship and his sensibility. And so those are the lessons that I studied so hard and it affected my outlook and approach to how I want to present music on acoustic guitar. And just music in general.

But I would argue that Tony had strong ideas about that and his enormous integrity to those kind of musical values was really influential to everybody in the acoustic music community. His high level of musicianship – and how he retains some of the essence of bluegrass, the rhythmic essence – sets the stage for a lot of the modern music that we like. And certainly Punch Brothers. Certainly all of us were deeply influenced by that example of musicianship.

Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Punch Brothers’ Paul Kowert: Musically Driven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Photo: Courtesy of Red Light Management

Punch Brothers’ Gabe Witcher: Finding Narratives

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Gabe Witcher, the fiddle player – and some might say secret weapon – in Punch Brothers, has been a performer for nearly his whole life. As a kid, he toured the Southwest playing bluegrass with his family’s band; that’s how he met Chris Thile, forming a musical friendship that has spanned more than three decades. Though his stage presence is low-key, his musicianship is undeniable, playing as joyously or mournfully as a song requires. This is also true on Punch Brothers’ newest album, All Ashore.

In this interview, Witcher kicks off a five-part series as the Bluegrass Situation salutes the Artist of the Month: Punch Brothers.

I love the fiddle part you play on “Three Dots and a Dash.” I was wondering, how much of your music is arranged when you go in to record, or how much of it unfolds by feel when you’re in the studio?

Yeah, this record is a lot different than our previous records. We really had the bare minimum amount of time to get it done. Historically, there is a good deal of improvising on all, throughout our music, and so that’s always spontaneous every time we play – in the studio, out of the studio, whatever. But there is a good deal of highly-arranged stuff as well and historically that stuff would have been written and rehearsed for months leading up to getting into the studio … and we just didn’t have that luxury this time. So, while there’s a good deal of arranged things on the record, it all kind of came together in the studio anyway.

“Three Dots” is a good example where we had the form, we had the melodies, we knew “this is how the arrangement is going to unfold, this is who plays when, this is what the song’s going to do” when we got into the studio and played it a few times – and didn’t like it. So, we put the brakes on recording and went and huddled up in one of the corners of the studio for three or four hours and completely reworked the entire middle section of the song. From post-middle-solo until when the melody returns at the end.

It’s just one of those things: “This isn’t good enough yet, so let’s make it good enough.” When we did, when we finally got something we liked and went back in and recorded it, a lot of that section, I’d say it’s about 50/50 arranged and improvised. Solos are improvised, but we got something that we absolutely loved and that all happened in the moment in the studio. That is a new thing. That has never happened to us before because we had always historically gone in super prepared with, “This is the music, this is what it’s going to be.”

One of the things I love about this record is that what you’re hearing on the record is the first time any of these songs were performed to our satisfaction. You’re getting the excitement of us discovering this music and playing it for the first time. That’s always an exciting thing to hear.

Yeah. So you said bare minimum. What was the timeframe for this?

Oh, let’s see. I think we wrote the record in about four weeks. Not all together. We had three days in October, we had eight days in December and then two weeks in February to get it all situated. Then we recorded it over the course of three weeks in March. And then mixed in April.

The Phosphorescent Blues took almost three years to write. We had the luxury of writing it over the course of three years not work every day, of course. We might have worked twelve weeks total on it, but we had the chance to sit with things and revise, and change, and live with it. This one was more of a “Let’s just get it out.” And I think it worked to our benefit because everything feels super fresh on the record.

I read that you played on the score for Brokeback Mountain and Babel – and they both won the Oscar for best original score. Do you think there’s a cinematic component to Punch Brothers’ arrangements as well?

Yeah, absolutely there is. That’s a comment we get quite frequently. It’s not intentional, but I think everyone is in love with trying to find narratives that can happen instrumentally along with a lyrical narrative. We’re always trying to find textures and new ways to approach presenting musical ideas and finding interesting ways of getting you from point A to point B. I think there’s a definite classical music influence in that regard. Not only is the music supporting the lyrics in a vocal as it would in folk-based or pop music, but the music itself is also helping to create the narratives.

You in particular have a bluegrass background, from playing in your family’s band. How did that prepare you for this experience of touring with Punch Brothers?

Surprisingly enough, doing that is how Chris and I met. We met at a festival called Follows Camp Bluegrass Festival that happened in Southern California. My family would always go up and camp and play and my dad would emcee a lot of the time at that festival. There was a contest and our family band got booked to play it. I think it was the second year or the second time it happened. A 5-year-old Chris Thile just happened to be there that time. As he tells it, he saw me playing onstage with my dad and was like, “Oh my God, that’s so cool. Another kid plays!”

After we got done, we were introduced and immediately became friends. I think we played baseball in the road that ran along the campground, then spent the rest of the time playing tunes with each other. Doing that led directly, a couple decades later, to this band becoming a thing. Of course, you can’t discount the years and years and years spent learning the craft of playing, and playing in an ensemble, and performing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s a unique way to grow up.

The good news is, I got all the … well, not all, but a good portion of the dues-paying out of the way before I even knew I was paying any dues, so by the time I was out of high school I had a level of proficiency as a professional that most people don’t have the luxury of gaining until they are well into their 20s. I was able to hit the ground running. I went to college as well, for music, but I’ve got to say: music was there all along. The only thing that changed was that I finished school. So that went away but the music continued.

You were able to play with Bill Monroe as a kid, too, right?

Yeah, when I was 6, we were at the Strawberry Music Festival. This is the thing that launched the family band. My folks decided that we were going to go up to the Strawberry Music Festival, which at that time happened in Yosemite, California. I had been playing for almost a year at that point. We just went to camp and hang out and check it out. One of the days my dad and I were jamming at the campground, and people wandered around the campground, so people were coming in to listen. Then they’d wander off.

Monroe was playing that night at the festival. He was headlining the show that night and they had gotten him to do a workshop during the day, a mandolin workshop. My dad took me over to that. I didn’t know who that guy was. He was just some old guy up there playing. There were a couple hundred people at this workshop listening to Monroe, and right towards the end, and my dad would probably remember better than I do, but somehow, someone pointed me out and said, “Have you heard this guy play? You should pick a tune with him, Monroe.” And so Monroe got me onstage and he and I played a tune called “Gold Rush.” It’s actually one Byron Berline wrote when he was in Monroe’s band.

So Monroe and I played that tune and I got a pretty cool picture with Monroe afterwards. Then, later that day, probably because of that, the Strawberry folks asked if my dad and I would do what they call a ‘tweener set, where you go up and play two or three songs in between the main stage bands. So, Hot Rize was playing and then New Grass Revival was going to play after that. I think this was the day after Monroe played. So my dad was like, “Yeah, sure! Yeah, we’ll work up three songs.” So he grabbed a bass player and a guitar player and also asked Byron if he would sit in on the solo. And so we got up and played three songs, and Byron came out, and we played “Gold Rush” together. And it was so much fun, my dad said, “Hey, do you want to do this more?” And I said, “Sure!”

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Photo: Courtesy of Red Light Management

A Radical Woman: A Conversation With Lindsay Lou

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Lindsay Lou had some reservations about the cover of her new album, Southland, her first not to bear the name of her backing band the Flatbellys. That much is understandable, as the photo depicts the singer/songwriter/guitarist perched on a rock in the woods, nude except for a hat and her long hair.

“We woke up at 3 a.m. and snuck into Cummins Falls State Park, just outside of Nashville,” she explains. “There’s this beautiful waterfall that draws people from all over the area, people from different political backgrounds and religious backgrounds, all sharing in this common, unifying experience of submerging into nature, cooling down in the river. Everybody takes their clothes off to swim—not to the degree that I did, but what’s the difference?”

The photo stuck with her—partly because she liked how it conveyed both strength and vulnerability, or perhaps strength through vulnerability. “The thing I love about that image is the light of the sunrise coming over the waterfall and lighting up the mist. I like seeing myself as part of that beauty, as part of something much larger than myself.” But there is still a stigma attached to the nude female body, despite it being 2018 and all. So she called up her grandmother and asked her advice. “She said, if you’re not being radical, it’s a wasted life. Don’t shy away from it, because that’s what the world needs. Love is radical.”

Nancy Timbrook ought to know. Lindsay Lou says, “In 1969, after dropping out of high school to get married, she decided she wanted to be a teacher. She got her GED and went to college, all while raising eight children.” Taking a job at a school in Detroit, she heard her students routinely dropping the f-bomb, but rather than scold them, she turned it into a lesson, even writing FUCK in big letters on the chalkboard. She spent the night in jail; later, she was the subject of a Time magazine article called “Obscenity: The English Lesson.” Grandma Timbrook remains one of Lindsay Lou’s greatest influences, musical or otherwise.

“She’s a radical woman.”

That’s what Lindsay Lou aspires to on Southland: radical in every sense of the term. The album chronicles a period of great change in her life, not just the move from Michigan to Nashville and all the mixed emotions of leaving home, but an even more remarkable change in her music. Building off the bluegrass-stained acoustic pop of 2015’s Ionia, Southland is her boldest album, her most daring, with clever interpolations of pensive folk, spry rock, twangy country, high-flying jazz, old-school R&B, swampy southern soul, even a little bit of punk. Her confident synthesis of so many different styles and sounds may be the most radical aspect of Southland.

Lindsay Lou spoke with the Bluegrass Situation from her front porch in Nashville, where she occasionally jams with her neighbors (which is all the more fun when Billy Strings live across the street). “It’s elevating to be surrounded by so many people you admire and just to be part of what’s happening in the scene. Moving here felt like coming home even though we had never lived her before.”

You’re home again after a long tour of Europe and Australia.

We did a month in the UK, and then we did our first tour of Australia for another month. That was nice. I got to spend my birthday on the northern beaches in Sydney. What I found was that they’re really happy you’re there and really eager to hear you play, and I think the kind of music we play demands a certain degree of listening. We played this outdoor festival in Dorset, in southern England, and we played to this huge crowd of mostly young people. I was really floored by how everyone was engaged and listening to us, even though they were all drinking and partying. Once we started playing, they were all really engaged. And that is encouraging.

Was that the first time you’ve played some of these songs, or did you have a chance to work these songs out before recording the new album?

Even though we just released it, this album will be two years old in November. We made it and then we thought, “Let’s hang on to this and see if we can put together a proper team to release it.” I don’t know if I’ll ever do that again. The way the music industry works now, I think it’s best to release things right after you make them, when they’re fresh and they’re still real to you. So we played these songs for a year onstage before we ever released the record. But now I’ve already got a new batch of songs.

You could pull a Kanye and create the album cover on the way to the release party.

That’s basically how we did Ionia. We recorded it in October 2014 and we had it in hand for a Germany tour by November. It was a crazy feat, but it pays homage to that moment and to the realness of the music you’ve created. That’s the way to do it. But talk to me when we start the next one and maybe I’ll have a different opinion.

Southland seems to map out a period of great change. Does that protracted release schedule change your perspective on these songs?

Totally. My relationship with my songs is always changing. I find myself singing songs that I wrote years ago and feeling like, Man, this was such a truth to me at the time and now it means something completely different. But a record is a record of time. I love that when you listen to a song that you’ve been listening to since you were 10 years old, and all of a sudden you hear the lyrics for the first time. Whatever is happening in your life, your experiences—everything gives those lyrics a new context and a new meaning. I think of a song as a baby. When I write a song, it’s like, Oh, I have a new baby. And then I get to see that baby grow up and take in influence from all of the people who were part of its upbringing. It’s exciting to see a song take for from other people who aren’t me.

The title track on the new album, “Southland,” for example. We made the record in eight days in Maine with Sam Kassirer, but we felt like it needed one more track. I sent a handful of new songs to Sam, and we whittled it down to that one, “Southland.” I went back to Maine by myself and I recorded that song. I played electric bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and sang lead and all of the harmonies. That track is just a bunch of me on top of myself, like those early Joni Mitchell recordings where she’s singing all her own harmonies. But I can’t do it live. The band breathed their own life into the song, so it takes a new form.

And the band continues to change, which means the songs continue to evolve.

The band has been evolving since the beginning. What happened was, the Flatbellys was this cool, traditional bluegrass band of young college kids that I met and ended up marrying one of them. Josh [Rilko], who I married, is the only original Flatbelly left in the band. When we made that first record, it made sense to tour as Lindsay Lou and the Flatbellys, since we thought people already knew who they were. So when we were getting ready to put Southland out, we didn’t feel like that name was reflecting us anymore. We were going through another lineup shift and going out into some new territory. We couldn’t think of a better name, so we just dropped Flatbellys.

It’s not a complete change, and I’m not sure it was the right time to make that change. It might have ended up causing confusion for people, because people were coming up to me asking if I’d hired a new band. Josh got a haircut and PJ doesn’t have his beard anymore, so I guess it looked like I was with a whole new group of people. And we’ve added a drummer to our live performances, which is a huge change. But the music is what it is no matter what you call it.

But the music on Southland sounds very different from anything else you’ve done. Especially with music that might be described as traditional or acoustic, is there a risk in branching out that way? Is there a chance you might alienate a portion of your audience?

I think there definitely is. But as an artist you have to do what feels like your own truth. If it doesn’t feel like honesty, if it doesn’t feel like the art that you want to create for yourself, then it’s not going to have the elements of truth that art has to have. If you’re making it only to keep certain people in your audience, then it’s going to have a certain sense of falsity to it. But I’ve been on the other side that. I listened to a lot of punk rock when I was a kid, and I always hated when a band would start to sound more polished. It’s like they’re selling out because I love what they were and I don’t love what they’re becoming. But I’ve discovered as an artist, I have to put that aside. I have to do what feels right to me.

I was just talking to Andy Falco from the Infamous Stringdusters, and he was going on about how all of us are just trying to create art that we’re proud of. That’s what we’re all working toward. I find myself listening to a lot of my peers, like the Wood Brothers and Greensky Bluegrass and Billy Strings and the Stray Birds. When I listen to their music, I feel like I’m listening to right now. I’m listening to the world through their eyes. And that’s what I’m trying to do—create something that sounds like the world I’m living in.

I don’t think you could find a more compelling or complex subject than that, especially at this particular moment in history.

I don’t want to shy away from the ugliness. It’s a part of the truth, we’re all experiencing it, so there’s desperation and there is sadness and loss and it’s all in there right alongside the beauty and the positivity. I think on this record more than any other record I’ve embraced that sadness and instead of running away from it. In my youth I wanted to sugarcoat everything. I wanted to put a positive spin on everything. It felt like that was how you make it through a tough time: You just have to be super positive about it. But as I’ve come into myself as an adult, I’ve found that you can’t run away from it.

That reminds me of the line in “Go There Alone,” the one that goes, “All we are is blind, but if we can hear the music, we’ll be alright.”

That was a cool songwriting experience writing that song. It carries a lot of weight for me as an artist. I wrote half of it, and when I got together with the guys for a musical retreat—which we do periodically—I played them as much of that song as I had. I told them that when I stop, just say the first things that come to your mind. They did that, giving me some good words and phrases to play with. When everybody else went to bed, I stayed up all night putting it all together. That was where that line came from. And I believe that’s true. Music is a way of moving forward, but also a ways of creating beauty in the face of all the roadblocks we run into. It illuminates our blind spots. Creating beauty is a radical exercise.

Don’t miss Lindsay Lou on the Bluegrass Situation Stage at Bourbon & Beyond, held Sept. 22-23 in Louisville, Kentucky.

Photo credit: Scott Simontacchi

Kittel & Co., ‘Chrysalis’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s hard to say if humankind will ever know exactly how a caterpillar goes about shedding its skin, digesting itself, turning into a primordial soup, and then transforming its own goo into a resplendent butterfly or moth, but the entirety of this process happens in one of two places: inside a cocoon or a chrysalis.

Whorls, an eleven-tune elemental soup of its own, invites listeners to envelop themselves in the cozy, metamorphic trappings that Kittel & Co. explored as they fashioned a new identity from their harlequin musical backgrounds and experiences. Led by fiddler, composer, and virtuoso Jeremy Kittel, the outfit has accomplished a feat of new acoustic, string band-rooted chamber music that isn’t simply as mind-boggling and intangible as the inner workings of a butterfly’s transfiguration; it’s as whimsical, alluring, and magnificent, too. “Chrysalis” begins with Simon Chrisman’s bounding hammered dulcimer, contemplative and exciting, while the ensemble chimes in one by one, in dialogue, building and deconstructing the silky hook together, ever dipping back into the melodic soup to transform the song into newer, grander, wilder, softer, shimmering versions of itself.

It becomes abundantly clear, as “Chrysalis” ebbs and flows, wriggling to life, that from top to bottom, Whorls is as if innumerable chrysalises were arranged like nesting dolls, with each subsequent transformation revealing a more surprising, captivating conversion building up to and succeeding each magical metamorphosis it contains.

Closer to Self-Acceptance: A Conversation with River Whyless

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Bands grow. Styles evolve. Lineups shift. Genre identifiers morph to accept those changes while the music industry holds certain expectations for reinventions and reimaginations. It’s refreshing, then, when you happen across a band that isn’t bogged down by those precedents, choosing to just follow their songs and their true selves wherever they may lead.

The folk-pop outfit River Whyless finds themselves on this trajectory with their third album, Kindness, A Rebel. The product is not gratuitous, heavy-handed, or obvious, and it never stumbles or attempts to assert that “the old River Whyless is dead,” because true reinvention is never about demolition and rebuilding. It’s about finding the skeletal structure that was already there and allowing it to shine on its own, set apart. Drummer Alex Walters jumped on the phone to unpack the integral aspects of self-acceptance and self-celebration that blossomed on this beautiful testament to allowing oneself to just be.

This record seems to be as much about personal growth for each of you individually as it is about changes for the band as a whole. Why do you think those two things coincided here?

Alex McWalters: I think those things are always connected in some way. Whenever you make a piece of art, your life is always factored into that, there’s always growth. [It’s partly] because we’re now in our early 30s and feeling really lucky that we’re still able to make music and be a band. With that, there are a lot of adjustments you have to make as you head into the next phase of life. Ryan [O’Keefe] just got married, my girlfriend and I just bought some property and we’re working on building a house, and Halli [Anderson] moved to Oregon with her sweetheart. A lot of big life things are happening.

I guess this is a record about grappling with how to be a band in a different phase of your life. It’s honestly a little more challenging when you have more responsibilities outside of a band. Whereas, when we were in our 20s, it was like we were homeless. We lived on the road. Our whole lives were the band. It’s a much different way of operating professionally and creatively than it was 10 years ago. It’s exciting, but also challenging to continue doing it in this way.

How do you all feel that growth comes through the music, overtly? I hear it in “The Feeling of Freedom” and I hear it in “Another Shitty Party” — which I feel echoes my own personal growth through young adulthood — but how do you feel that perspective comes through?

I think “Another Shitty Party” is a great example. I hold this new record up against the one we did before, two years ago, in terms of the way it feels — I sort of have an inside view as to how it was made, so it’s a little hard to convey to someone who wasn’t there. It feels like we sort of embraced whatever came out of us this time and didn’t try quite so hard to be a certain way or accomplish a certain thing with the music. There were a lot more growing pains in the last record, as far as figuring out how to make three or four songwriters coherent.

This time we just went with it. We just let the songs be the songs. With that, the idea of “Another Shitty Party” is sort of connected to a bigger idea of coming a little bit closer to self-acceptance and trying to be honest with who you are in the world. The idea of going to a party and walking away from that feeling like, “There’s no reason I had to be there!” is a metaphor for the larger feeling of being in a band and trying to be cool. Let’s just stop trying to be cool and just be us.

Something that we aren’t necessarily taught as kids or teenagers is that sort of self-acceptance, that acknowledgement, is such an integral part of what we refer to as “maturity.” It’s getting to a point of being able to accept yourself as whomever you are, having been morphed by all of the factors of our lives. What brought that to the surface for you?

I’m not sure if it was conscious. Maybe it was also having reached some level of, I guess, gratification in terms like, “Oh, the last tour we did went really well.” I think part of maturity is you have to learn what works and what doesn’t. Some people aren’t as lucky to reach that point of self-acceptance to where you can say, “No, I don’t want to partake in this.” Or, “I don’t agree with that and I’m not going to do it.” It can sometimes require a lot of work to get to the point where you’re able to be mature. Some of that was just us being a little more confident than we were before.

Also, it’s just hard to avoid the elephant in the room as far as the current political situation and feeling like we didn’t say or do enough. Not that we could have done anything [specific], or that we even knew what to do, or maybe we shouldn’t have done anything, but we had that sense of, “Oh man, what just happened and how do we go forward?”

Taking responsibility of that and taking it onto ourselves is also a very mature idea.

Precisely.

And kindness really is a rebellious act right now. I think that was one of my biggest takeaways from the album. Like, “Oh shit, yeah, being just a kind human being at this point in this weird political, divisive period, is rebellious.”

Absolutely. You hit that right on the head.

I hear you reckoning with that on “Born in the Right Country.” This is something that I think about a lot right now, about how we can address these sort of personal perspectives we have while we also acknowledge our own privilege and our own complicity, too. How did you reconcile that conflict with yourselves and through that song?

The song was written by Ryan and I think it’s interesting, because, like I said, we all had a very intense reaction to the election. There’s a lot to have to work through once you realize that Donald Trump is your president. We are four white people in a band and our life has been pretty peachy and, for the most part, is continuing to be pretty peachy, so anything we say about Donald Trump or the people who voted for Donald Trump has to be self-aware. You have to go through a process of recognizing where you’re coming from when you speak and how you sound and what your actions actually say without you realizing you’re saying it.

There was a point at which that song was introduced to the band and we all wondered if we even wanted to go there. What does this mean? How will it be interpreted? What good does it really do? What is this song really going to accomplish besides sounding like four white people complaining about Donald Trump? And maybe it still does, but I think an important part of it was trying to get into that three-minute song a part about us having a certain responsibility that we have to figure out how to own, as far as being who we are and what we could or could not have done more of.

Personally, I thought 100 percent that he was going to lose, so I was very complacent and complicit in terms of the whole thing. That alone says to me that I was kind of blind. There was a whole lot I wasn’t seeing or that I was refusing to see. And what does that say about my situation and how removed I am from the pain that people are feeling?

Talking about growth and maturity as a band, there’s an expected trajectory in these roots genres for bands to go from string band into more pop-influenced sounds. You guys seem to be on that track. But your music seems to be on this trajectory because it feels like this music is song-driven first. Why do you think that is?

I don’t know if I have a very concrete answer, but I think some of it has to do with the organic evolution. On our first record, we had a different bass player, so we introduced a new player to the band and that inevitably has an effect on how it sounds. With that, there’s also a shift in the power dynamic of the band, for lack of a better way of putting it, where one lead songwriter’s vision isn’t steering the ship anymore — at least not totally. That has a lot to do with how the evolution has happened.

Again, also just letting go. Just letting what comes out come out and not trying to steer it any direction, genre-wise or sound-wise. We obviously have influences and things we’re into and that’s what influences the sound of the moment we’re in, but outside of that I think we just kind of let go of what we want to be and just let it be what it is. It’s so much easier said than done.

Another outgrowth of self-acceptance.

I would say so. I never really thought of it like that, but now that you say it…

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

STREAM: Oliver the Crow’s Self-Titled Album

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Oliver the Crow
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Album: Oliver the Crow
Release date: June 22, 2018

In Their Words: “This first album feels like a meeting of the future and the past for us. It is informed by the styles of music that make up both our personal pasts — a rogue classical cellist and a fiddle-jazz gun for hire — as well as the styles of music we have always so adored. Although it feels nostalgic, it also feels new. It has a modern sound of its own and we find it hard to describe its genre. Whatever it ends up being defined as, we are certainly proud of it. Oliver the Crow grew out of a love of us playing together and an urge to get outside of our comfort zone — this record is the first real product of that. When we listen to it, we smile. We hope others do, too.” -Kaitlyn Raitz

Photo credit: Taylor Noel Photography

STREAM: The Slocan Ramblers, ‘Queen City Jubilee’

Posted on by Editor
Artist: The Slocan Ramblers
Hometown: Toronto, Ontario
Album: Queen City Jubilee
Release Date: June 15, 2018

In their words: “My favourite music comes from watching ‘working bands,’ bands that play all the time—they get tight musically and stay loose in spirit and approach. The music presented is a deliberate statement but there’s a real spontaneity in the details. Therein lies the aesthetic for Queen City Jubilee, the culmination of three years on the road since Coffee Creek came out. We had a ball putting this record together, writing a lot of new songs, unearthing old obscure gems, and generally trying to stay out of the way of the music. And check out the artwork! Done by our very own Frank Evans, it offers a rare glimpse into the dark mind of the contemporary bluegrass banjo player.” — Adrian Gross


Photo credit: Jen Squires

David Benedict, ‘The Golden Angle’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

How does that old adage go? The one about “the company we keep” and all that? Based on the roster for his tune, “The Golden Angle,” it would seem mandolinist David Benedict had grown up with this principle as his cardinal rule. The title track of his upcoming album features bassist Missy Raines, the winningest bass player in the history of the International Bluegrass Music Association; Stuart Duncan, perhaps the most prolific fiddler and session player in Nashville and every bluegrass musician’s favorite musician; Wes Corbett, a former Berklee banjo instructor and one of the contemporary five-string’s most clever pickers; and Ross Martin, a flatpicker who impeccably combines the workhorse qualities of bluegrass with a more deft, subtle, jazz-flavored approach.

At the helm in the producer’s chair was another mandolin seer, Matt Flinner, whose fingerprints are found aplenty on the whimsical, Fibonacci-inspired tune. Like Flinner’s compositions, Benedict’s “Angle” is centered on a strong, cyclical melodic idea while it plays out linearly, each of the players listening intently to and building on what’s come before. It simultaneously registers as a danceable breakdown or a new acoustic chamber piece; it’s not better taken as one or the other, rather, its pliancy offers more varied perspectives on the song and its interpreters. Benedict’s voice as a composer and musician is remarkably mature and individualistic, without flirting with becoming too gratuitous — something that cannot be said for many pickers his age. It might be a safe bet to guess that these qualities are also thanks in part to the wildly phenomenal company he keeps, but either way, he should keep doing what he’s doing.