Lots of audiences are used to solo performers, but bluegrass enthusiasts? Not so much. Bluegrass is pretty much by definition a band music, but consider Tim O’Brien. He’s been doing the occasional solo show for some years now, but the release of Chameleon, an album on which he’s accompanied only by his own guitar, fiddle, bouzouki, banjo and more, has spurred him to take on more solo shows, and not just at home.
Hey there everyone! Here we are again. We can’t wait for you to hear our upcoming album, Keep On Walkin’, so you can check out Aaron McDaris featured on banjo. Aaron joined our group a year and a half ago. This is his first recorded work with us and he is incredible. For you fans that have caught us live, you’ll know him as “Boo.” We have the crowd shout out “Boo!” as loud as they can instead of giving him a hand. Pretty durn funny, makes the crowd feel good and makes us laugh every time. Bet no one has ever asked you to boo them?
Editor’s Note: To kick off Bluegrass Month in May, the CMT Music Blog is proud to debut Rhonda Vincent’s new video, “I Gotta Start Somewhere.”
2008 is off to an incredible start. What a way to celebrate the new year with a No. 1 album. And WOW … 7 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard. Next to be released is the new video of “I Gotta Start Somewhere.” It’s always exciting to shoot a new video, though I walked barefoot by a creek in summer clothes in 40 degree weather and ended up with bronchitis. And do you know, they didn’t even use the creek shot.
Dallas Henry did a great job and his entire crew was great to work with. Check out my possible love interest in the video. Vance Mitchell is the guy at Clampett’s Hardware Store. Watch for him in the current Acura car commercial. It’s always fun to have guests when we shoot a video. Who would have known that the little girl in my “If Heartaches Had Wings” video would eventually become Hannah Montana? So look out for Vance. This was my seventh career video. I can’t say they’re exactly FUN to make, but they’re sure fun when they’re finished. Be sure to watch!
“If Heartaches Had Wings” video
Festival season has started in full force, and our conditioning for outdoor venues, coupled with multiple consecutive dates, has begun. Our weekend started with our departure from Nashville to Ladysmith, Va. Though rain had pounded the festival grounds just days before, it turned into a perfect sunny day. We performed two shows, our last being the festival closer, before we boarded the Martha White Bluegrass Express, en route to Merlefest in Wilkesboro, N.C. Merlefest is completely different than any other venue we ever play, and even more so this year. Read more…
Over the past 25 years, I’ve raved about a lot of new singers and bands. Few of them, alas, ever made it to the big time. Maybe that’s because I had a bad ear. More likely, though, it had to do with the long and treacherous road that lies between being “discovered” and becoming a star.
In mid-April of 2003, a friend invited me to see a family band perform. She had just taken over management of the group and thought it had something important to offer. After I saw them play, I agreed. The band — an all-acoustic outfit — was made up of a father, his three daughters and a son. The kids (who played fiddle, mandolin and guitar) ranged in age from 11 to 21. While their picking was spellbinding, it was their repertoire that won me over. In the course of an hour, they romped freely from such fiery bluegrass staples as “Wheel Hoss” and “Billy in the Low Ground” to ultra-cool jazzy renderings of “Lady Be Good” and “Summertime” to solid country arrangements of “Diesel on My Tail” and “The Grand Tour.” They even threw in an ethereal cover of the Beatles’ “All My Loving.”
Writing about the band for CMT.com, I rhapsodized “its music absolutely sparkles.” Unfortunately, that was pretty much the end of it. I never saw the band again or heard anything more of it. Naturally, I assumed it had given up the chase. I was wrong. Recently, a fellow reporter called my attention to the review I’d written five years ago of the band that then called itself Silk N Saddle. Now, he pointed out, it goes by the name Jypsi. Perhaps because the band is down to the four kids, I hadn’t made the connection. Having already praised their talent, let me now salute their stamina.
This might be the year I finally go to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado. It’s been on my mind for a long time, because the lineup always looks incredible, and you just can’t beat listening to music in the mountains. This year, I’m most excited to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova — who just won the Oscar for Once — because those songs … I don’t know how to explain it, but they somehow still affect me, months later. Hansard’s other band, The Frames, is one of the most dynamic bands I’ve ever seen in concert. I’m also a big fan of Ryan Adams and Tift Merritt, who are making their first appearances at the festival as well.
On my flight to Austin tomorrow for SXSW, I plan on reading the cover story in the latest (and second-to-last) issue of No Depression, about neo-traditionalist acoustic bands. A good number of them are going to be at Telluride, including Punch Brothers featuring Chris Thile, The Duhks, Uncle Earl and Steep Canyon Rangers. It promises to be one of those cool events where you can see a classic soul singer like Solomon Burke, and then Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby. And I’ll try to catch Sam Bush (a.k.a. The King of Telluride) just as often as I can.
One of my all-time favorite bluegrass songs is “Still Climbing Mountains” by Blue Highway. There is just something about that Dobro intro, and I love how the melody climbs and crests. That’s one of the reasons I’m such a fan of these guys. They have a knack for arranging the music to emphasize what’s going on in the story. It’s never blatant or cheesy, yet it does underscore the emotion in the lyrics.
They must get that comment a lot, because when I met them last month before a show in Nashville, they said a lot of people ask how they arrange their songs. Their secret? Well, they just play what feels right. And when they get the track down, they make sure not to overthink it, or over-fix it, to retain the natural sound. The same notion goes for their new album, Through the Window of a Train, which comes Tuesday (Feb. 12) on Rounder Records.
Four out of the five guys live near Big Stone Gap, Va., so this time they recorded close to home at Maggard Sound, rather than Nashville. Citing the funky living room environment in the studio, they all agreed that it was an easy record to make.
“In music, you can’t replace where you’re from. In bluegrass, you can’t replace being from that area. There’s like a vein of music through there,” says Shawn Lane, who plays mandolin, guitar and fiddle. (He also wrote and sang one of my favorite Blue Highway songs, “Between the Rows,” about growing up on a farm and not realizing how good you had it.)
Blue Highway tours a lot, so it isn’t surprising that traveling is a common theme on the new album. In fact, all the songs on the new CD are written or co-written by members of the band. Hard to believe, but it’s the same lineup now as when they won their first IBMA Awards in 1996 for best emerging artist and album of the year. Hopefully they’ll be climbing mountains, crossing rivers and picking at festivals for years to come.
I am not a man who plucks the subject of cleavage out of thin air, but neither do I shrink from cleavage when it is thrust upon me. So it is with serious purpose that I turn to the topographical features of Rhonda Vincent. In the liner photos for her new album, Good Thing Going, the effervescent bluegrass star once again exhibits some intriguing studies in light and shadow. One picture shows her lying on her back in the grass, pensively gazing at the sky while clasping the neck of her mandolin just to the side of her precipitously plunging neckline. Looking closely at the photo (and choking back sounds generally associated with the last stages of waterboarding), I concluded this was not a candid shot, not something that could be dismissed as the accidental slip of a strap or failure of a button. No, it was a deliberate display of the goods. And bravo for her. The peek-a-boo theme has been common to her album and publicity art since at least as far back as her One Step Ahead CD of 2003. On that cover, she strides across a street wearing a top that bares both cleavage and navel. I count this the most important advance in bluegrass music since Bill Monroe hired Flatt and Scruggs.
As one who is pure of heart, I barely took notice of Vincent’s stylistic swashbuckling until it came up at the 2003 International Country Music Conference. There, on a panel called “Country Music and Gender,” banjo player and magazine columnist Murphy Henry grouched about Vincent’s recent epidermal revelations and then flatly declared, “You don’t show cleavage in bluegrass!” That outraged me. How dare she, I thought, put such a rack on the rack? I was on the verge of withering her with a spirited defense of cleavage as an instrument of free expression, but then it occurred to me that someone might think my motivation was more carnal than Constitutional. So I cravenly kept my mouth shut. It is a shame I will carry with me the rest of my life. Forgive me, Rhonda, and keep up the good works.
If the Nashville Convention Center and the Renaissance Hotel were to disappear off the map this week, it would take with it 95 percent of bluegrass musicians in America. Whether you think that would be an improvement or not is open to debate, but there would definitely be far fewer banjos in the world.
The IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) is hosting its annual Fan Fest and Business Conference this week, with thousands of pickers from all over the world. What is normally a very serene and plush hotel is transformed into a giant picking shed with impromptu jams springing up everywhere you can fit one. Last night I hung out at the bar with lots of pickers – Mike Bub (bass player extraordinaire), Bryn Davies (Patty Griffin and others) and Andy Falco (Infamous Stringdusters) to name but a few. It was like a pre-run meet, with everyone clutching their instruments and ready to take to the starting blocks when the time came.
The discussion turned to where all the best jams would be – floors 15 through 21 are designated jamming floors – and we all made tentative plans to meet later in the night. After one last drink to calm the nerves, I jumped into an elevator and rode it all the way to the 19th floor. As the doors separated, a blanket of bluegrass music hit my ears and a group of ten or so young pickers were laughing and putting an old standard through its paces. The hotel rooms are turned into little venues, with showcases and jams taking place. Lots of folks were wandering from room to room just as I was, searching for the right place to pull out their instruments.
I found several people to pick with last night, like the Infamous Stringdusters, Buddy Merriam and Buddy Greene. I even found a great little band in the stairwell picking tunes and smoking cigarettes. I played with them until I could take the smoke no more and headed down to the lobby at 5 a.m. With no sign of the party dying away, I walked past a girl sat on the outside front steps picking her banjo as her parents listened and tapped their feet. No one seemed to think this was anything but the norm. It may not happen for 51 weeks of the year, but for one week at IBMA it is absolutely compulsory.
Not long after I wrote about Good News, a new CD by the Charlie Sizemore Band, I had the good fortune to interview him before his Nashville concert. He’s an interesting guy, since he balances a Nashville-area law firm with a bluegrass career. Before that, he toured with Ralph Stanley for nine years, singing Carter Stanley’s parts in concert, and he possesses one of the finest, most unaffected bluegrass voices I’ve come across. You can bet that’s partly from being raised in the hollows of Puncheon Creek, Ky., and its rich Appalachian musical heritage.
I asked him why he chooses to keep one foot in bluegrass, since running a law firm is obviously a more-than-full-time job. “It’s the same reason I went to college in the first place – I’m restless. I can’t stand doing the same thing all the time.” He said that music refreshes him the way that golf or fishing might perk up somebody else. He also said he doesn’t understand taking vacations, which kind of blows my mind.
On Good News, he tips his hat to Vern Gosdin (“Blame It On Vern”) and Alison Krauss (“Alison’s Band”). My personal favorite is a rendition of Randy Travis’ “Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart,” which Sizemore originally knew from songwriter Hugh Prestwood’s demo. Sometimes covering a classic like this makes me cringe, but Sizemore gets the straightforward tone of the song just right. He said he recorded the album the same way he did in Ralph Stanley’s band, with a bunch of guys standing there playing.
As a result, most of the tracks on Good News are first takes, which gives the CD a live, loose vibe, and that’s exactly what Sizemore was after: “The records I listened to growing up, that’s how they sounded. When you listen to them as much as I have, you will hear imperfections, but overall, it’s how they make you feel.”
And if you like easygoing bluegrass music with smart, clever lyrics, this one will make you feel pretty darn good.
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