Tag: Tornillo

The Lil Smokies’ Matthew “Rev” Reiger on Slowing Down for Their New Album, ‘Break Of The Tide’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

They may be called The Lil Smokies, but the bluegrass bangers birthed by the band originating from Big Sky country are anything but small.

Formed in the late 2000s when the group’s current sole remaining original member, Andy Dunnigan, began bringing his Dobro to picking parties during his college days in Missoula, Montana, the Smokies have gone on to become one of the West’s most captivating modern-day string bands, as they release their fourth studio album, Break Of The Tide.

Out April 4, the album is the Smokies’ first since 2021’s critically acclaimed Tornillo and features new band members, bassist Jean Luc Davis and banjoist Sam Armstrong-Zickefoose, for the first time. They’re joined by the core of Dunnigan, fiddler Jake Simpson, and guitarist “Rev” Matthew Reiger. According to Reiger, who joined the Smokies in 2015, his nickname stems from a life changing trip to California’s High Sierra Festival in 2007, where he earned the label for his love of the Stanley Brothers and gospel music. When he later joined the band, the name stuck, due to him sharing first names with their banjo player at the time, Matt Cornette.

“High Sierra changed the whole course of my life,” Reiger tells BGS. “It was at that festival that I made the decision to drop out of music school, grow out a band, get a band and most importantly, set out on a path to create a life where I really enjoyed the music I played instead of the academic pursuits. We made it back to the festival 10 years later to play it for the first time in 2017, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart.”

Ahead of the release of Break Of The Tide we caught up with Reiger to talk about the four-year process of bringing the album to life, recording in Texas, and the band’s separate lives while not together on the road.

What’s it been like for you, first joining an already well-established band and then welcoming two new members into the fold in recent years now with plenty of experience with the Smokies under your belt?

Matthew Reiger: It was a fast moving train when I jumped into the band. I had a decent place in Seattle at the time that I sublet to abandon everything I had and jump aboard. At the time we played and moved a lot faster. It was an incredible ride at the beginning and has been the whole way through, but what I love is the steady progression from runaway train to a rowboat on a gentle pond, which musically is more of where we’re at right now. This new record is as honest as anything we’ve ever recorded. Most of the songs were slowed down a bit, which is a good metaphor for how we are as people now.

Right now is about as introspective and pensive a time that I’ve ever experienced. A lot of people are making changes and finding a new path forward after COVID and the instability that ensued. For example, I recently started practicing with a metronome, not trying to play faster, but rather to see how slowly I could play a song. I want to see just how slow and deliberate I can play the song of my life. When you do that you find some challenging points where it’s not all bouncy, happy, and driving forward. The stillness is sometimes unnerving, but I’m happy we’re going through it on this record.

In that regard, [producer] Robert Ellis played a big role in slowing things down, especially on my songs. The way he heard the songs was perhaps even more honest than I heard them. It was quite a display of skill and artfulness on his behalf.

This was the second album in a row you’ve gone to Texas to record, following 2021’s Tornillo with Bill Reynolds at Sonic Ranch. What made y’all want to head back there to record with Robert at Niles City Sound this go around?

It was all for Robert. I’d fly anywhere in the world for the opportunity to work with him. He likes to produce the records he works on in Texas and I don’t blame him. We also recognized the impact of using a familiar place and equipment to a producer. On Break Of The Tide I probably played four guitars and there were a couple more involved beyond that. I think there’s a special alignment between instruments and the places where they live – they’re all there for a reason. It could be a big deal or seemingly innocuous, but there’s a reason they’re in that space and I think you can create some really cool things in those environments. That really came through on this record.

As we mentioned previously, Break Of The Tide is the Smokies’ first record since 2021. Was that four-year gap intentional and a byproduct of what you said earlier about slowing down, or is it due to something entirely different?

COVID, the resulting instabilities, and the band’s general desire to slow down were all factors, but if I had to pick a standout factor it’d be all the uncertainty within the touring music world. Just finding the time, money, and other resources necessary to continue doing that in the midst of a global shakeup was on our minds. It has taken every bit of determination and willpower I can muster – and I’m sure the rest of the guys would agree, too – to keep playing and stay together as a group. Adding an album to that was too much for us for several years and once you summon the courage to go do that you have the arduous process of working through the business side of things and everything that goes into making a record that’s non-musical.

You just touched on some of the struggles and the grind of being a touring musician, especially these last few years. Are those things y’all are singing about on songs like “Lately” and “Keep Me Down” from this new record?

You’re spot-on. I don’t think there’s any way to explain how challenging it is to juggle one’s personal life and touring. It is something I didn’t understand until I did it. The size and shape of the pieces you have to make the puzzle are always changing. It takes a radical toll on who you are at home, even when you’re not touring. You have this recovery period, you have this social adjustment, you have this relationship adjustment, and it’s sort of like you’re always jumping onto or off of a moving treadmill. Going on tour is like jumping on the moving treadmill since you often stumble because everything’s moving so fast, but then when you return home you have to slow down that uncomfortable pace and hop off the treadmill, which feels weird at first even though you’re hopping back onto stable ground since you’re so conditioned to running at full speed. Because of that there’s a lot of picking yourself up each time you go on tour and each time you come home, which is something both those songs touch on.

Similar to what we just talked about with “Lately” and “Keep Me Down,” it seems like “Break Of The Tide” and “Bad News Babe” are sister songs about being there for people you love while also knowing when to cut them off. Your thoughts?

I love the term “sister songs!” Like we talked earlier, touring takes a huge toll on personal relationships. I’ve said before that my first marriage isn’t to the Smokies or touring, but to music in general. It’s my first partner and has been for a long time. It takes a very special person to be in a relationship with someone who already has a partner, though it’s all very trendy in the coastal areas. [Laughs]

“Break Of The Tide” in particular is a song about feeling powerless, which is one of the biggest struggles we can face, and how it’s difficult to help those you love and even harder to walk away and recognize you can’t save them when those situations arise. Sometimes you just have to walk away to protect everyone involved, including yourself, which is oftentimes easier said than done.

We’ve been talking about the sacrifices of being a touring musician, but I’m also curious about your sacrifices within the band, particularly the miles between y’all being spread out in Seattle, Montana, Oklahoma, and Colorado. How has that affected how you operate together as a group?

It certainly makes it harder to get together and practice. [Laughs] I live just west of Seattle on Vashon Island, which is a 24-mile existence with a lot of retired folks. Everything’s a little slower than you expect and there’s a lot of hippie stuff going on – like I have a shower in my backyard. It’s super rural with a lot of farms, but it’s also just outside Seattle. Driving my car there is a little tricky, because I have to hop on a boat, but there’s ways to cross on a ferry and get to the city in 45 minutes to an hour. You have to put in some work to get there, which is what I love not only about this island, but the band as well.

It’s important for us all to feel like ourselves when we’re not on tour, because it’s a lot of costume-wearing when we are out on the road. Having that separation makes it easier to go back out on tour with more energy once it’s time to throw the costumes back on and jump in the van with a bunch of crazies for a while.

From the title of this record, Break Of The Tide, to songs like “Sycamore Dreams,” nature’s influence can be heard throughout the project. How would you say the outdoors informs The Smokies’ sound?

In some ways I think you could argue that nature is the only muse. There’s something so powerful about the ocean that I love. It’s the biggest thing in the world and connects nearly every point in it. In order to write in the way that I want to I have to be able to feel small and insignificant, and there’s nothing quite like an ocean to remind us just how small we all are and to be grateful for that. Because of that I’ve written very few songs that didn’t mention water.

What has music, specifically the process of bringing this new record to life, taught you about yourself?

I’ve spent most of my life trying to write music, but something that I’ve come to see – especially these past few years and what I hear on this record – is that the best art is not so much written, it is captured, and in order to do that you have to practice your listening. Writing and working on things is great, but in the end you have to turn off the metronome, stop thinking and just listen. That’s where you’ll find the beauty in every facet of life, not just in music.

Photo Credit: Glenn Ross

The Lil Smokies Tighten Their Bond with ‘Tornillo’

Posted on by Editor

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