Sharing a new song with the band can feel like baring your soul to a room of people who know exactly how to hurt your feelings.
Yonder Mountain String Band makes that process feel less terrifying. “Good As True,” the group’s new album due out in March, came together as each member brought in songs from different headspaces, then handed them over to a band that’s spent nearly three decades learning how to say “yes,” “no,” or “maybe cut it down to three minutes” without anyone storming out.
“There’s something really daunting about sharing a song with the band,” said banjo player Dave Johnston. “What if nobody wants to play the stuff you come up with? But you never really know.”
As it turns out, the band did want to play exactly what each other came up with. After months of writing on tour, workshopping ideas together and paring ideas down, when necessary, the band pieced together the final cut that would become “Good As True,” Yonder’s 12th studio album, designed to hold up just as well coming through a car stereo as live on stage.
“Good As True” will be released March 27 via indie label Thirty Tigers on the band’s own Frog Pad Records, a setup that mirrors how Yonder operates internally: collaborative, self-directed and largely uninterested in outside voices telling them how a record should sound.
That trust is not accidental. Johnston and guitarist Adam Aijala have been writing and playing together for nearly 30 years, long enough to know when to push an idea forward and when to let it go.
“Most people take that stuff personally,” Johnston said. “We all have ideas we think are great, and then you bring them to people and they’re like, ‘Well, it’s not so great.’ Adam doesn’t take that personally, and I don’t either. That makes it possible to keep things moving.”
Aijala agreed. “I use Dave as a bellwether to see if something’s worth pursuing,” he said. “There’s no ego. If he doesn’t like something, he can say it, and I’m not hurt by it.”
That dynamic extends across the band. Alongside Aijala and Johnston, longtime bassist Ben Kaufmann anchors the group, with multi-instrumentalist Nick Piccininni and fiddler Coleman Smith rounding out the current lineup.
Piccininni has been with the band for six years and co-wrote material on both this album and its predecessor, despite never having co-written with a band before joining Yonder. Smith, the newest member, makes his studio debut here, bringing a classically trained, cross-genre fiddle style that expands the band’s sound without changing its center of gravity.
The album wasn’t solely written after a hairy divorce, or during an existential reckoning, or in a windowless studio after someone’s dog died. Instead, it was built piece by piece by a handful of people who have a healthy enough relationship to tell one another when a lyric works, when a chord needs to change and when to cut a song down because no one’s going to play the extended version on the radio.
“There isn’t one songwriter going through something and writing a whole album about it,” Aijala said. “You’ve got four people in different mindsets coming up with ideas. If there’s any common theme, it’s that the music is as good as, or better than, reality.”
The album opens with “Brand New Heartache,” which was released as the album’s first single in January. The song took shape during a deep dive into Tom Petty’s catalog following his 2017 death, a reference point that helped steer its rock-leaning structure without sanding down Yonder’s string-driven core.
The song is classic Yonder — fast, stringy, upbeat and toe-tapping at first, but upon closer listen, the lyrics are quite lonely. It’s a perfect song to play on the highway with the windows down, even if you’re hysterically crying behind your sunglasses. Johnston described it as capturing the moment when loss and forward motion exist at the same time.
Another standout on the album is “Barroom Feather,” a 16-minute closer recorded live in the studio with no overdubs, no roadmap and very little rehearsal.
“Good As True” was recorded live in the studio, a choice that helps explain why “Barroom Feather” feels less like a constructed epic and more like a moment the band stumbled into together and decided not to mess with.
“We just said, let’s turn on the microphones and see what happens,” Johnston said. “There are ambient moments and musical scenes that complement what the song’s talking about. It came out a lot better than I think any of us expected.”
Aijala remembered hearing Johnston’s demo, which already had a sample drum track layered in, and being reminded of “Midwest Gospel Radio,” a similarly long and unstructured song from Yonder’s self-titled record released in 2006.
“We didn’t overthink it,” Aijala said. “We just played. It’s nice not to take it too seriously.”
That balance between taking the work seriously, but not yourself, is what has kept Yonder Mountain String Band not only intact, but also excited to release new music. It’s likely harder than it sounds when the band has been together for nearly 30 years and its genre sometimes treats tradition like a fragile antique instead of a living thing.
The band’s current chemistry also reflects an evolution that longtime fans will recognize. Following the death of founding member Jeff Austin in 2019, Yonder has continued as a collaborative unit, folding new voices into an existing framework without abandoning the democratic instincts that shaped the band in the first place.
For Aijala, writing new material has less to do with themes or statements than with whether a song will survive on stage.
“We’re not trying to write hit songs,” he said. “The whole point of writing new stuff is having something we can play live. I don’t really like songs that only work as studio recordings.”
That focus, he said, has kept the band interested in making new records after nearly three decades (the band formed in 1998). New songs shake up the set list, change the feel of a night, and give the band something to look forward to on stage.
“Having new music and putting those songs into the setlist can re-energize the whole band,” Johnston said. “On any given night, it brings the energy up because we’re not playing the song I wrote almost 30 years ago.”
Johnston added: “Even if you make a crappy song, you’ve made something. You’ve contributed … You’ve maybe made the world feel a little less oppressive just by sitting down to do one thing that isn’t an errand or a task.”
Much of the band’s collaboration happens informally, backstage, before rehearsals, or at home. One track, “Long Ride,” reached a turning point during a stretch on the road last year, when it finally felt more like a finished song than a promising vignette. Aijala and Johnston both live in Boulder, just a mile apart, and still write together regularly in person, making it easy to revisit songs between tours.
For now, the band’s focus is on touring, mostly in a fly-out pattern that has them gone for long weekends and home during the week, at least until May.“Our families are here,” Aijala said. “I’ve been here since 1997. I lived in Nederland for 11 years, then moved to Boulder full-time in 2009. This is home.”
Johnston echoed the sentiment, while acknowledging Boulder’s shifts.
“Boulder has changed a lot,” he said. “It’s more gentrified. The acoustic scene isn’t as much of a presence as it used to be. But I still feel like I belong here. I don’t want to make my way anywhere else.”
He added, “Plus, I don’t dress well enough for L.A. or Nashville.”
Staying put has made it easier to keep the rhythms of the band intact, both onstage and off. But Yonder’s core dynamic — from the music, the live shows, the trust, the not-needing-to-cry-in-the-studio-bathroom-because-your-bandmates-are-mean — remains intact.
“Good as True” drops March 27 and presales are now live at yondermountain.com. To check out the band’s touring schedule, visit yondermountain.com/tour.
from The Denver Post https://ift.tt/hfjeYuN
Comments
Post a Comment