Tag: union station

Tim Stafford Shares Memories of Steve Gulley, Alison Krauss, and Tony Rice

Posted on by Editor

Tim Stafford could be renowned for any one of his many contributions to bluegrass music over his prolific career, his talents as a musician and writer having been showcased in so many of its important creations. He is perhaps most well-known as a founding member of Blue Highway, one of the most influential and decorated bands in bluegrass. Prior to that, he formed Dusty Miller in the late 1980s, and Alison Krauss hired him in 1990 as part of her band, Union Station, with whom he recorded the Grammy-winning album, Every Time You Say Goodbye.

Stafford is also an accomplished author. In 2010 with Caroline Wright, Stafford issued Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story, the authorized biography of the flatpicking icon and Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame member. As a songwriter, Tim has placed more than 250 cuts and was named IBMA’s Songwriter of the Year in 2014 and 2017. He notably co-wrote IBMA’s 2008 Song of the Year, Blue Highway’s “Through the Window of a Train,” with Steve Gulley. Tim and Steve were frequent collaborators and released a duo album in 2010 called Dogwood. Ten years later, they created another album of co-written material, but Gulley passed away suddenly from cancer soon after it was completed, making the title, Still Here, all the more meaningful.

BGS: How does it feel to release this record? With Steve’s unexpected passing I imagine it must be a more heavy feeling than a typical record release.

TS: Yeah, I’m really glad it’s finally out. Steve was really looking forward to this record coming out. We were both excited about the songs and it ended up being his last recording, which was hard on all of us. And now it’s part of his legacy. After Steve passed, I talked to the label about maybe coming up with a different title besides Still Here, but we decided it was a very appropriate title because his music is still here. He would have been proud of it. I know that for sure.

How long had you known Steve?

I didn’t know him when I was younger, although he was around and playing. He was mainly playing up at Renfro Valley in Kentucky and he didn’t travel much until he joined Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver which would have been in the late ‘90s or around 2000. I was playing a festival somewhere with Blue Highway and he came up to the record table and we started talking like we’d known each other forever because we knew a lot of the same people. We just hit it off. He was the one that first suggested we write and it was either the first or second time we got together we wrote four songs in one day. And all four of them got cut. I felt like at that point we had something special. We seemed to have a wavelength that we could touch off of each other. That’s really rare. You don’t get that with a lot of people.

The subject matter in the songs on this record seems very personal, and often about people you know. I would imagine that it’s sort of therapeutic, maybe in the same way that journaling might be, to write about personal things like that. Is that how you feel about it?

That’s a good way to put it and I did used to journal. Some of them, like “Back When It Was Easy,” are just about general topics that we know about. Whereas “Long Way Around the Mountain” and “She Threw Herself Away” are about things that actually happened that we chronicled about friends. And sometimes they are big stories that you just can’t stay away from. “She Comes Back to Me When We Sing” is a story we’d both seen on Facebook about this guy’s mother who was in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and didn’t know anybody until she sang with her son. And when that happened, she remembered all the words and she could remember everything. We thought that was a really inspirational story and deserved to be a song.

You’ve been writing for so long that it seems like you’ve been able to build the skill of telling a story through song, rather than narrating a timeline to music.

Yes, that’s where it’s at. That’s where the craft comes in that you only develop by doing it. I really didn’t know how to write a song when I started. But you learn little things along the way through trial and error. It’s like anything but it’s really difficult to learn how to do something like write a song out of a book — although I have a whole collection of them here. I have lots of books about songwriting like Jimmy Webb’s Tunesmith and Sheila Davis’ The Craft of Lyric Writing which is really good. You can learn tips, but you’re not going to learn how to write from a book. So it’s a matter of doing it.

I don’t remember exactly where I heard it, but I think I remember Jimmy Webb talking about writing “Wichita Lineman” and him saying that it was fully fictitious. But that he felt like, as a songwriter, he should be able to write about people he didn’t know. That he should be able to understand people well enough to write a story that was convincing without it having to be true. I could be misremembering that, though.

You may not be. I think that there’s actually a book out about that song, “Wichita Lineman,” that I finished here last year and I believe you’re right and he’s right. I think that being able to tell a story about somebody you don’t know is important. There’s a song that I wrote really early on called “Midwestern Town” that Ronnie Bowman recorded. That song is totally fictional. I didn’t know anybody like the character in that song. But I’ve had a lot of people come up and say that they did know someone like that or that it could have been them and that song made a big difference to them. It was a comforting song. You’ve got to be able to get inside people’s heads and think the way that they would. You have to know what your character might do in any given scenario. I can’t remember all the times I’ve been co-writing and said, “What would this guy do?”

Have you written songs as long as you’ve been playing guitar? When did you started writing songs?

I guess I wrote all the way back when I first started playing guitar, but I wasn’t really serious about it. I had written some songs before I played with Alison in the early ‘90s and we actually recorded one of them, but it never came out which was my fault. She wanted to put an instrumental I’d written called “Canadian Bacon” on Every Time You Say Goodbye, but I talked her out of it. I told her we needed to record “Cluck Old Hen” because we were so psyched about Ron [Block] being in the band and his playing on that. And I don’t regret that though it probably would have meant more money.

You were in Union Station from 1990 to ‘92, right? That was a very cool lineup of that band. How did you feel about it at the time?

I was blown away by it. I loved it and it was really cool that it worked out because the first time she talked to me about playing with her, it was back when I was in a group called The Boys in the Band. We played at SPBGMA and her band was there but her guitar player, Dave Denman, was leaving. She called me a few weeks after that and asked if I’d be interested. At that point, she had only recorded Too Late to Cry and I was really impressed with the songs, with John Pennell’s writing, and her singing. I had already committed to playing with a different group though so I had to decline.

About two or three years later I had started a group called Dusty Miller that she was a fan of. That band had Barry Bales and Adam Steffey in it. The three of us kind of grew up together playing music. We’re all from Kingsport, Tennessee. I actually gave Adam his first mandolin lesson, which is such a joke. [Laughs] Adam didn’t know anything about the instrument at all at the time. I tried to show him some stuff and I just kept thinking, “That guy’s never gonna get it.” And I barely knew how to play myself but I tried to show him “Bluegrass Breakdown” and he just couldn’t get it. He got with a different teacher after that and got real serious about it. The next time I saw him play, I was like, “What happened here?” [Laughs] It was like the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I take absolutely no credit for that whatsoever.

Barry Bales was a student of James Alan Shelton. And James and I both taught at the Guitar Shop in Kingsport. That’s where I met Adam and gave him that lesson, and I met Barry down there, too. We all three ended up playing in The Boys in the Band. And then we started Dusty Miller. Alison liked that rhythm section so she offered the job to all three of us at the same time, and we took it. This was early 1990 and we played our first show in May — I think it was at the Station Inn. It was just incredible. We played some amazing places, but it was during the period of the band when we were all traveling in a van and staying in one hotel room.

I was playing with Alison when I met Tony Rice. We ended up playing a lot of shows together because he and Alison had the same agent and were on the same label. I never will forget the first time I really ever talked to Tony much. We were playing right before him at Winterhawk (which is now Grey Fox) and I broke a string on the last song we played. We got a standing ovation so I was backstage digging around, trying to find a string so we could do an encore. And Tony walks over with “the antique” and says, “Hey, man, here, play this.” I had a smile from ear-to-ear and Alison was smiling too.

What was it like getting to put that biography of Tony together? What led to that?

Well, a few years after that, after I left Union Station and started Blue Highway, I was still playing shows with Tony because Blue Highway had signed with Rounder, too. We were at a show with Tony and I said, “Man, have you ever thought about a biography?” And he said, “Well, actually, yeah, I have thought of that. But I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I think you’d be the ideal person to write it.” I said OK and started on it. That was about 2000 and it took 10 years to finish.

Three years into it, Caroline Wright came on board through Pam [Rice, Tony’s wife]. Caroline is a journalist and her mom was a member of the bluegrass community from New York state. Caroline lived in Hawaii at that time and had written a really well-done article about Tony in Listener magazine. I had started Tony’s book, but I was bogged down with it and wasn’t making a lot of progress and Pam suggested that Caroline come on board. We did four or five major, huge interviews with Tony that could have each been a book by themselves. And when we started transcribing them, we realized that Tony was so eloquent that we had to put it in Tony’s words. We couldn’t make it a narrative biography. That’s why it’s laid out the way it is. It’s chronological but in Tony’s words.

I’m really glad that we got to do it. Somebody would have done a book on him eventually, but I’m really glad that it came out before he left us. He’s one of those generational talents. I just don’t know that there’s going to be many people ever come along again who have an impact like that. He’s in the same league as Earl Scruggs, a top talent who created a language on the instrument.

So, it’s been a weird year, obviously. What have you been doing during this time?

I’ve been doing a lot of co-writing over Zoom. The other day I wrote my one-hundred-and-fourteenth song since the pandemic started.

Whoa!

Thomm Jutz and I’ve written 40 or so, just the two of us and, you know, you just get into the habit of doing it every week. I feel like Zoom is going to stick around and be the standard after the pandemic. I think it’s changed the way a lot of people think about co-writing. It makes you more disciplined and more productive. The technology just makes it easy. There’s no reason now for me to make a trip to Nashville, which is like four and a half hours, and get a hotel and all that when I can do all of it from home on my computer.

When you’re writing or doing work, are you the sort of person that has to change into regular people’s clothes to feel productive, or can you stay in your pajamas and be productive?

I think I’ve written at least a hundred of those 114 songs in my pajamas. [Laughs] I’m not going to dress up, I just want to be comfortable.

Photo credit: Ben Bateson

These Artists Take Irish Banjo Beyond Four Strings

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Editor’s note: Tunesday Tuesday is changing slightly in 2021. What began in 2017 as a bi-weekly tune feature and short review will now be expanded into a monthly roundup of interesting, engaging, and groundbreaking instrumental music and the themes we trace within it. 

One of the most thoughtful and virtuosic clawhammer banjoists around, Allison de Groot (Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, The Goodbye Girls) has released a brand new video with fellow Canadian, guitarist Quinn Bachand. The two old-time musicians found themselves with free time hunkering down on British Columbia’s coast last fall and joined together on a gorgeous rendering of a couple of tunes — not rousing old-time or bluegrass fiddle melodies, though. Instead they chose a pair of Irish jigs: “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone.” 

“I love working up fiddle tunes outside of the American old-time repertoire,” de Groot relays via email. She arranges old-time and bluegrass with a striking, clean precision and unmatched rhythmic pocket for a frailing banjo player — facets of her playing style which might not seem to lend themselves to the often staccato or triplet-heavy or frenetic flurries of licks and trills in Irish music. 

“When I’m playing in a new style,” she goes on, “I try to capture aspects of what makes the music special to my ear while still embracing the unique qualities of clawhammer banjo.” And on “Tom Billy” and “Trip to Athlone,” she does just that, impeccably so. De Groot is a player that at times can perfectly disappear into her source material, but her obvious embrace of clawhammer’s idiosyncrasies is what makes these Irish forays so entrancing.

 “Adapting jigs to the five-string banjo is not a historically new endeavour, but there is lots of room to explore clawhammer banjo in this setting. I find a lot of freedom in that space!” That freedom is perhaps the most charming aspect of this set of tunes — second only to the joy always apparent in de Groot’s picking. 

Though perceptibly rare, other banjo players have indeed been enticed by that very same freedom (de Groot is right that it’s not a new endeavor). The five-string banjo, especially post-Earl Scruggs, is an instrument with intrinsic qualities of innovation, acrobatics, and thinking outside the box. The physical instrument itself and the lore driving the mystique behind it lend it perfectly to Irish and Celtic folk music. 

Ron Block, longtime member of Alison Krauss’s band, Union Station, and an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, has long been an acolyte of five-string Irish banjo. On a 2018 duo release with Irish songwriter and picker Damien O’Kane entitled Banjophony, the pair explore not just the mind-bending beauty created by a five-string banjo’s interpretations of traditional Irish musical vocabularies, but also the ways in which the five-string and four-string instruments bump into each other — often delightfully — in these contexts. The linear-laid-out four-string banjo and the more bouncy, melodic five-string each naturally settle into their roles in this dialogue, like old-time and bluegrass’s primordial band structure of fiddle and banjo, but with more aggression and dissonance — and a heavy dose of the stark sort of beauty that grows from the spine-tingling friction between such gregarious and bold instruments.

Irish music fully embraced the banjo — the four-string iteration of the instrument, most often tuned in fourths (C, G, D, A) — by the mid-twentieth century, closing a transatlantic feedback loop that began in Africa, landed the banjo’s precursors in the Americas brought by enslaved Africans, and then transported the instrument in its modern form back across the Atlantic to Ireland. This conclusion occurred after the four-string banjo (and any/all banjos with varying counts of strings) skyrocketed to the height of fame in America’s popular music of choice throughout the nineteenth century: minstrelsy.

Its punchy volume, its bubbly, single-string triplets, the low buzzing of the wound strings were each folded into the greater sound of Irish folk so naturally, from the purest traditional instances to the most daring punk affectations. The banjo’s subversive, trailblazing tendencies are ripe for exciting forays and experiments. One such experiment is banjo player, builder, and inventor Tom Saffell’s behemoth Infinity 8-String Banjo.

In this 2007 video with acoustic Irish-bluegrass band Plaidgrass, Saffell demonstrates how the Infinity 8-String Banjo combines Irish banjo approaches on both four-string and five-string instruments. The two lower, wound strings, while droning or being picked, round out the natural high-end of five-string banjos, bringing in some of the punch and gravel we know and love in Irish banjo. Meanwhile, the higher strings — with one additional above the typical D first string — equip Saffell to efficiently execute Irish turns of phrase with a simple bluegrass roll of the right hand. 

Whatever it is about Irish banjo playing that just works, these pickers demonstrate there’s an entire world to be discovered not just in other genres that may be seen as outside of the norm for our instruments, but even more so in the space created between those genres. That’s as close to a definition of American roots music as we might get, the “melting pot” quality we all know and love, evident and flamboyant in each of these examples of Irish banjo on more than four strings. 

Photo credit: Patrick M’Gonigle  

Alison Krauss Marks Silver Anniversary of This Classic Album

Posted on by Editor

Twenty-five years ago this month, Alison Krauss glided into the mainstream with Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection. Did you wear out your copy, too?

Envisioned as a way to highlight the songwriters who were important to Krauss, according to a Billboard article published a few weeks before release, the project included what many would consider her signature song: “When You Say Nothing at All.” Originally recorded for a Keith Whitley tribute album, Krauss’ version positioned her as one of the finest ballad singers of her generation, a skill that wasn’t quite on full display on her bluegrass albums with Union Station.

She told Billboard that, as a producer, Now That I’ve Found You gave her “the chance to record material we do that doesn’t necessarily fit within the structure of our [other] records.” Along with “When You Say Nothing at All,” the double-platinum project offered “Oh, Atlanta,” “Broadway,” and “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” as well as exquisite selections from her prior Rounder albums.

In the article, Krauss explained that she turned down a chance to open for Garth Brooks because the arenas “were just too loud for me,” although she thought it was “pretty neat” that he would ask a bluegrass band to open his shows. She also reiterated that the album “is not a representation. It’s missing the other half of what I do with Union Station.”

Taking the music business perspective into account, the article addressed the anticipation for “When You Say Nothing at All” at country radio and CMT, as well as the label rollout and the expected sales of the album. In some ways, it’s still the same conversation surrounding any critically-acclaimed artist poised for crossover appeal: How do you retain the core audience without being “too commercial”? Or in this case, how do you market an artist that Billboard describes as having “soft, lush ballads on one side and her bluegrass band work on the other”?

At the end, Krauss offered her own opinion among all the industry input: “We just try to do whatever fits the song,” she said. “I don’t think selling out either way is good.”

The Songs of ‘So Long, So Wrong’ Ranked

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

So Long, So Wrong is an iconic album. It signaled Alison Krauss & Union Station’s shift from a bluegrass-centered aesthetic to the signature post-grass, adult contemporary, mainstream sound that solidified their astronomical success. Ostensibly a bluegrass album, it rose through the ranks to land at number 4 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart in 1997, the year it was released. But the objective markers of its success really don’t matter here. What does matter is that this album brought up a generation of bluegrass pickers, and mashers, and emotive songwriters who are rabidly, unapologetically, all-encompassingly in love with this album. This author falls into more than one of the categories listed prior.

So it’s a given, then, that we’re going to rank the songs of So Long, So Wrong from worst to best, right?

Right.

Keep in mind that even the lowest ranked of this set of fourteen songs are still superlative and are beacons of bluegrass artistry for all who adore the form. Yes, even you, “Looking In the Eyes of Love.”

14. “Looking In The Eyes Of Love”

Yes, you read that right. It’s cheesy, it’s overplayed, and it’s time bluegrass had a better go-to wedding song. Oh, and it’s in Ab. Whyyyyy?

13. “There Is A Reason”

The cinematic intro and reprise that bookend this song are absolutely delectable. It’s a faith-oriented song with a compelling message and it would rank higher if it didn’t, by its nature, exclude folks of differing beliefs from enjoying its whole delectability.

12. “I’ll Remember You, Love, In My Prayers”

Besides giving us a rare glimpse at a world in which the grammar of bluegrass song titles is formatted correctly (except for the capitalized preposition), this track has only given us scores upon scores upon scores of mash jams pounding the everlovin’ shit out of what once was a nuanced folk song, sung in a timeless Appalachian style.

Damn, but it’s good.

11. “I Can Let Go Now”

It’s a gorgeous, deft, brooding testament to the beauty of reverb. And we know not to ever turn down an opportunity for Ron Block to pick up his guitar. Still, this is Alison Krauss we’re talking about, and we’ve been taught to demand a higher level of quality from our brooding, reverb-soaked, AK songs. Sorry if this offends you, but someday, you’ll no longer care. You can let go now.

10. “Pain Of A Troubled Life”

It’s actually quite nice to hear each of the boys sing lead on this album (except Barry?), but this poor song is up against some steep competition. And that strange internal rhyme (double/troubled) is just… strange.

9. “Happiness”

You can’t always trust happiness. This one, you can trust — with those ethereal fiddle pads and the impeccable harmonies and swooping and swirling “ah’s” and “oo’s.” It’s immaculate. “Happiness” only happens to fall this low in the lineup because of the strength of its competition. Splitting hairs and all that.

8. “Blue Trail of Sorrow”

The mark of a truly adept bluegrass band is being able to play a song at this exact tempo. They didn’t just find the pocket, they pulled up a chair and sat down in it.

7. “Little Liza Jane”

Moral of the story? DON’T SLEEP ON ALISON’S FIDDLE PLAYING SHE IS A BEAST. And that chop though. (Honorable mention goes to Steffey’s picking being so clean you can make your brain tune into his pick noise alone just by thinking about it.)

6. “Deeper Than Crying”

What is this intro?? How does it conjure a DVD home menu soundtrack loop while still sounding like pure delight?? What is this voodoo? Well, no, the true voodoo in this song is the harmonies. These are not your mama’s harmony contours, but we are here for them.

5. “No Place to Hide”

This, my friends, is what mash can be. The Spotify embed for this song ought to be next to the entry for “mash” in the dictionary. And they may have captured the very best banjo intro ever played. Just give me more of that mando chop, that molasses voice (Steffey, Steffey, Steffey!!), that head-bobbin’ groove, and that catchy af hook.

4. “Find My Way Back To My Heart”

“I used to laugh at all those songs/ ‘bout the rambling life, the nights so long and lonely/
But I ain’t laughin’ now./”
And in 17 seconds, you’re already crying. And there’s no one but me gonna take my part!

3. “The Road Is A Lover”

The combination of somewhat random subject matter with the asymmetry of the lyrical structures and the odd chord progression makes this an absolutely classic AKUS song. What’s with that overdubbed fiddle bowing during the banjo solo? WHO CARES, IT BOPS. If you haven’t screamed a third part to this song along with Dan and Alison at some point, you haven’t yet lived.

2. “It Doesn’t Matter”
The angst. The minor-key nihilism. The sheer melodramatic depression of it all. The breathy, gasping, echo-y background vocals with the arco bass. It’s everything — at least it was to a certain 16-year-old who used to die for the reharmonization beneath the vocal tag. It doesn’t matter if I pleeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaad!!

1. “So Long, So Wrong”

That vibey fade in. That hook on the flattop. That unflinching right hand on Ron Block. That signature wonky chord progression. That bridge. Those twisting and winding background vocals. That reverb. Those bends on the banjo solo. This stunner is pulling much more weight than a typical title track. Wow, put it on repeat. A well-deserved number one.

The Language of Music: Kaki King in Conversation with Dan Tyminski

Posted on by Editor

“One of the worst ice storms in my life was in Nashville,” says Dan Tyminski. “Go figure. I grew up in Vermont, and I had to go to Tennessee to get the ice.”

Kaki King remembers that ice storm, because she was stuck in the Volunteer State, as well. She had two nights booked at OZ Arts, a venue just outside of Nashville. “The night before, everything was fine. We set up everything, all of our gear, then went back to the hotel. We ended up getting trapped there for two days. We could make it to the highway, but we couldn’t get our stuff!”

These two instrumentalists may come from very different musical worlds, but their experiences during ice storms — and not during ice storms — are actually very similar. Tyminski is a bluegrass veteran, playing countless festivals as a kid and serving as a lynchpin with Alison Krauss + Union Station for a quarter-century. King, on the other hand, spent her teenage years playing in pick-up punk bands before developing a very complex playing style that treats her acoustic guitar like a drum set.

And yet, both of them kick and push against the strictures of their chosen genres, constantly ripping it up and starting again. Tyminski is most famous to younger generations of listeners for his collaboration with Swedish DJ Avicii, and on his new solo record, Southern Gothic, he mixes country and bluegrass with EDM production techniques and looped beats. And King recorded her latest album, Live at Berklee, live at Berklee, with a small orchestra of student musicians filling out new arrangements of old compositions. Both releases are outliers in catalogs full of outliers.

First of all, do you know each other? Are you familiar with each other’s work?

Dan Tyminski: Just a little bit.

Kaki King: I know a little bit about you, Dan, and the things that you’ve done.

DT: I just did a little bit of recon before the call. I heard some wonderful guitar playing, and then the phone rang.

You’re both known for your guitar playing, but you’ve both released albums where that instrument takes a back seat to these larger arrangements.

DT: It’s funny. On my album … I actually opted out. This is the first album I’ve done where I really opted out of the playing. I had Jesse Frasure produce this record. We were going down a different avenue of sound and, when he was putting together the band to track all of this stuff, I really felt like I would have a better chance of getting in the way from having him have the freedom that he needed to explore. So, I really stayed out of the playing on most of my record. I’m on new ground, where I let someone else come in and do it all.

KK: That’s cool.

DT: The bad part is, now I have to learn how to play all this stuff. And, it turns out, that some of it is hard.

KK: The idea for Live at Berklee was to put together an ensemble and reimagine a bunch of older tunes with strings, and brass, and woodwinds — and then do it live. This wasn’t the kind of thing we wanted to go a studio and make perfect. The liveness of it is what’s exciting. For me, it was doubly hard because, on one hand, I had to write a few arrangements, which is out of my wheelhouse. But I enjoyed it. And then … I had to go to college. I was working in a classroom with a conductor and 13 really good players. I never went to music school, and I haven’t been conducted since I was in high school band. I really had to buckle down. It challenged my guitar playing to be able to keep up with these really great players. It wasn’t something where I could do this freeform thing that I do, or change the tempo, or drop a measure. I had to be perfectly accurate every time.

DT: From what I heard, it sounds like it was no problem whatsoever. It does not sound like you were struggling.

KK: Well, thank you. The end result was fine, but the initial rehearsals were a bit like, “Oof. This is gonna be a hell of a ride.”

DT: In a way, it’s somewhat similar, playing the live stuff on my album. This is the first time in my life where I’m playing with some tracks. It’s a very strict arrangement and, if you veer off at any point — miss a bar, add a bar — it’s a train wreck. I’ve never had to pay so much attention, and I am easily the weak link of the live band version of all of this new stuff.

It sounds like these two projects kind of forced you not to improvise.

DT: I can definitely say that what she’s doing is much more difficult. Most of the effort in what I did with Southern Gothic was in the creation of the music, and then I was able to let someone else take the reins. Whereas, it sounds like you had to really step up to the plate and get outside the comfort zone a little bit.

KK: Well outside my comfort zone. But there was really no improvisation. I’ve been working with strings and arrangers for about five years, in one form or another. Every couple of months, I’ll get a gig with a string quartet or do a little tour. And, each time, I learn something new. It always is along the theme of, “You can actually change that. You can give directions. Just because you didn’t go to music school and you’re not the brightest kid in the class, doesn’t mean you can’t say, ‘Don’t play that.'” The process, for me, was learning how to sit in an ensemble and play a song I was familiar with but not to deviate too much from my original arrangement. But there was constant conversation and feedback among the musicians and the conductor.

DT: What a beautiful thing to get into a situation like that, where you have that type of canvas to work with. It sounds like we did the same exact thing, but we just did it so differently. You had string sections with people working together, and I had one guy trying to say, “Okay, now this is where the string sections are, and let’s do this.” I’ve got someone creating these string sections on a computer, which then we later went back and had live people play. It’s a weird process. But there are a lot of ways to get there.

KK: That’s what people want to hear, especially people who are being trained now. They realize that the people they play with are not all going to have the same background.

DT: What matters is, does someone have a vision? And is it translatable?

What are your backgrounds? Are you both self-taught? It sounds like you’re taking very different approaches that maybe aren’t the norm for people.

KK: I can’t find anyone who does the norm anymore.

DT: I was gonna ask, “What is the norm?”

Fair question.

DT: There are so many ways to get there — even when it comes down to writing the songs. Of all the different songs that have made their way onto this project of mine, no two of them came about the same way. They all started differently. They were all from different conversations. Some started lyrically and we found music. Some started with music and we found lyrics. Yeah, there is no normal. There’s just, “Does something make you feel what it’s supposed to make you feel?”

KK: I can certainly say that all my previous records started with a riff here, a drum thing there. Some songs wrote themselves in an hour. Some songs took a year to get out. I cannot sight-read guitar music, and since I play in different tunings anyway, it would just be … Well, there are, like, two people in the world who can sight-read guitar music in different tunings, and they have social problems. I am fortunate that I understand enough about music, and about intervals, and about turning a major into a minor to be able to convey that style of information to other players. I was fortunate enough to just be given enough basic information to have something like this not just explode my brain.

DT: I had this conversation with someone earlier this morning, but I would have loved to have spent some time on a theory and be able to verbalize things. But anything you ask me to do, there’s a reasonable chance I could do it, if I hear it. But there’s nothing that I can see or hear explained that would get me there. I have to hear it.

KK: Everyone comes from a different background. I’ve seen enough to know that no one who has serious musical training is going to judge you if you don’t. They’re very accepting of talent or excellence in all of its form, even if it’s a very simple thing that you do.

DT: That’s the truth. I’ve never run into it as a roadblock or something that’s stopped me from completing my gig. On a personal level, it would be nice to feel like I was more in tune with changes that are going on. I’ve found myself in settings before, playing with orchestras, and having people say, “Could we try this and this?” I hear it all going down, but I have to wait until it passes before I understand what was said. It would have been nice to have a little training.

KK: It’s never too late.

DT: Well, I’m starting to think that way now. Maybe it’s time to get back to the drawing board.

But you two have both been challenging yourselves throughout your careers, right up to these new albums.

DT: Any time I’ve ever stepped outside of the box, or any time that I’ve heard other people stretch beyond what I normally hear them do, it’s always been rewarding. I’ve always been happy when I’ve made myself uncomfortable, when I put myself in that weird spot where I had to dig, you know? And when I hear other people do it, I feel the same thing. There’s a reward there. It’s easy to stay in your little box and do what you’ve done before. But when you stretch, that’s when you really get to discover who you are.

KK: I couldn’t agree more. In some strange way, I feel the most comfortable when I’m uncomfortable. I had done two solo guitar records in my early 20s, and I’d already had a lot of success, even though I didn’t really know what was happening to me at the time. But the last thing in the world I wanted to do for a third record was another solo guitar record. I just couldn’t fathom it. So I made a record that was a little more than half-instrumental. I worked with John McEntire from Tortoise, who’s a very post-rock kind of producer. We played a ton of different instrumentation and a lot of electric stuff, which was outside the box for me, at that moment. Each subsequent album started to take on a different hue. Prior to doing the Berklee thing, my last project was a multimedia show integrating video lights to the guitar and having the guitar control what you see.

DT: There’s something in the whole process of creation that people can connect to. I’ve been a big advocate of live music my whole life. For me, there’s all the room in the world for recorded music, and people need that in their lives to take home and be able to turn something on. But I’ve found that, when I watch something being created in front of me, it touches my soul in a different way than when I hear recorded music. So, when you say your guitar can control what people see with your lights, that’s beautiful. That’s the missing element to what you get when you just hear recorded music. When you get to see the effect of what’s being created right there and feel that new emotion … oh man, there’s just nothing else like it.

KK: I agree. Especially when I see a group of people playing together and I know they’re all feeling it, and they’re hitting their stride, it doesn’t get better than that. I’ll never hear that on any record. I’ll never see those musicians onstage smiling at each other. People getting in the zone is such an incredible thing to watch, and it’s an incredible thing to feel when you’re doing it.

DT: There’s nothing else like it. There’s nothing to compare it to.

KK: I’ve been playing my whole life — since I was a little kid. I grew up playing in bands and I was normally the bass player or the drummer, but I have this strange thing happen where I can be in a room with a bunch of people, men or women, who I normally don’t want to hang out with. Maybe our tastes run a little different, but something brought us together musically. Especially as a teenager, when we would play songs that we all wrote our own parts for, and then we play them together perfectly, all of a sudden we’re sharing the same heartbeat. It’s weird, because these are guys who would otherwise be making fart jokes or talking about some stupid movie. That has rung true throughout all types of ensembles that I’ve played with.

DT: Exactly. Music is its own language. I’ve been with the same group of people for 25 years, and what we have is rare, in that we have five people who truly love music for music’s sake. Everyone is able to listen and respond. It’s a language that you speak with each other. You can be upset with somebody in your personal life and still speak words of love, musically. When you have people who you can communicate with that way, there’s beauty in music. There’s a language there that you can only hear through it being played.

I definitely think music, as a social medium, is very important right now. Not to get political, but when things are so divisive, anything that brings people together from different backgrounds is a pretty profound vehicle.

DT: It always surprises me. I remember the last time I was way outside of my comfort zone: I had gone with Jerry Douglas to Europe to do Celtic Connections, and we decided we were going to play a couple of songs we’d been playing for a while, but all of a sudden we’re playing with whistles and pipes and accordions. And I was looking at Jerry thinking, “Why would we choose this song? How can this even work?” But then I realized that we were all speaking to each other through the song? It’s like someone who spoke Chinese or French or some language you didn’t understand, but yet you knew everything they were saying. That’s how I felt with being over there. We were speaking in different tongues, but we were communicating. There’s a beauty in that.

Even just being in a crowd and watching an artist playing, I know I’m having a similar experience to the stranger next to me.

DT: Songs definitely hit everyone differently, as they listen to them. Depending on the mood that you go in with, you can draw completely different conclusions out of what you’re hearing. That’s one of the things I love about listening to music. It speaks to you in a way that nothing else can. Music has saved me, my whole life. It’s been my food. If I’m happy, I play music. When I’m sad, I need it even more.

KK: These days I’m more often the person on stage than the person in the audience. I wish I could flip that ratio because I love going to see live music. I’ve just got two young children right now. Recently, I had a friend named Matt Sheehy come and open shows for me in a couple of towns. I’d been listening to his music for a long time and I think he’s amazing. We first toured together in Italy, years ago. On this recent tour, he started to play this really beautiful song, uplifting in a lot of ways, and it took me back 10 years to listening to him play in Europe. I was suddenly a decade younger, and I was just sobbing. I was seated to the side of the stage and the lights were on me. I wasn’t trying to make a scene, but I found myself just bawling my eyes out. The acknowledgement of time passing, the feeling that something about this music and this feeling is eternal … it was a profound experience.

DT: That’s amazing. That’s what music should do.

I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of people recently who’ve said similar things. At a certain point, they find themselves playing more shows than they see, so they try to find ways to flip that around and become part of the audience again.

KK: I don’t know if you feel this way, Dan, but when being in a venue is your job and you’re backstage, I get really spoiled. There are a lot of shows I want to see, but then I think about buying a ticket, standing in line, being in a crowd. Then it becomes the last place I want to be. It’s something that’s severely lacking from my life, that I have been really missing.

DT: I share that with you. All the live music that I’ve heard, by and large, most of it was before the age of 16. From the point of being 15 or 16 years old on, I’ve always been the one on the stage, so attending shows … I can count on my two hands every show I’ve been to as an adult. It’s less than 10. Less than 10!

KK: We should go to more shows, man.

DT: I know. Going to more shows is on my to-do list. I should definitely be spending more time in the audience.

Kaki King photo credit: Shervin Lainez