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Hello, this is Matt, and you listen to Bluegrass Channel on the podcast for anyone and everyone who loves Bluegrass.
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Hey everybody, welcome back to Bluegrass Jamalong.
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I have a bite-sized episode for you this week, and that's just a short um episode that's taken from something I put out before that I felt like it was worth sharing again.
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And the reason with this one is uh it was the IBM Awards last week.
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Billy Strings won Entertainer of the Year again.
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Um he's won it a few times, and it just got me thinking about what an extraordinary thing is going on there because Billy is not only bringing big audiences and mass appeal to what he does, um, he's also really, really grounded in Bluegrass, um, including being at IBM A.
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And you know, he feels like he's really stepped back into that world a lot in recent times.
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You know, his last album is a bit more kind of back to basics.
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There was the live record with Brian Sutton, he gave the keynote at IBM A last year.
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Just feels like like he's as integrated into that as he's ever been, and at the same time, he's out there sort of stretching some boundaries.
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And so it put me in mind of an episode I put out three years ago, and I went back and had a listen to it just for myself, really.
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But I thought it'd be cool to pull a bit out and share it with you.
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So you're gonna hear about 10 minutes of me chatting with Marcel Ardans from the Lessons with Marcel YouTube channel um about Billy.
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And although this is three years old, I feel like it all still holds up, you know.
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I feel like the stuff that we're talking about is just as relevant, even though Billy's got three years more under his belt now.
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Um, and so I wanted to share it.
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And a couple of things to note it is an older interview, so like it's been at before, um, but it's it comes from a fascinating episode where I talk to Marcel about what he's learned from transcribing so much Billy, uh, but also so much Tony Rice and Molly Tuttle, and we also talk about one of his favourite guitarists, Trey Hensley.
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So there's a much longer episode this has come from, and I'll stick a link in the show notes if you didn't hear that first time around.
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Um, and also in this, Marcel plays a bit of guitar to illustrate some points.
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And when we did the recording, it all was all coming through fine, and I could hear it really well.
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But when I went back and listened to the recording, because the guitar didn't have a separate mic, it's a little bit phased and a little bit distorted.
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But I've left them all in because they really illustrate the points he's making, and they mostly sound okay, like it's not great quality, but it's you can hear what's going on for the most part, and I think they're useful.
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So I've left those in.
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Um, but yeah, just a really interesting conversation about Billy's sort of bluegrass roots, but his progressiveness and what he brings.
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Like it's I really, really enjoyed this, and I really enjoyed listening to it again.
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Um I hope you enjoy it.
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As I say, it comes from a longer episode, so if you want to check that out, there's a link in the show notes.
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Uh, but yeah, I'll let you listen to my conversation with Marcel Ardans about Billy Strings.
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Billy Strings is uh is an interesting player for a lot of reasons.
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Uh I I do think that his his his whole catalog, if you look across his whole career, I think you can find something that you like.
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Because he's certainly done more traditional stuff and he's certainly done like more progressive stuff.
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And I I think depending on the bluegrass musician you're talking to, they probably have a favorite era, Billy already, even though his he's so young, right?
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His career isn't isn't decades long yet.
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It's really interesting because I used to be uh Billy's mandolin player, Jared Walker, a while ago, and he talked about the first few gigs that he did with Billy, and he said they were simultaneously the most traditional and the most progressive thing he's ever done.
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Which is quite quite a balancing act, you know.
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Yeah, that that doesn't surprise me.
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That sounds kind of right on the money for for Billy.
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Um I think that if you listen to uh Billy's early material, it's really easy to see how influenced by Doc Watson he is.
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It's basically all Doc Watson licks.
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And um and coming from someone who's transcribed a lot of Doc Watson and a lot of Billy, um, what's interesting is he doesn't always get it uh note for note, right?
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So even in the beginning area, when it's when it's really close to Doc's playing, he's not playing exactly what Doc played.
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He's not grabbing it that perfectly, which means that he's already developing a little bit of a personal voice, right?
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He's like um Doc Watson-ish.
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Load full transcript
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I think that I think that one of the like most obvious licks, and this is this is interesting to me, um, coming from people who are maybe more familiar with Billy and less familiar with Doc Watson.
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There's a lot of new fans in Bluegrass from Billy.
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And so there's kind of been this evolution where uh a lick like this, we associate with Doc Watson.
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You can hear Doc do that in um like Black Mount Rag.
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You can hear him do it in just a ton of songs.
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He plays uh Beaumont Rag, right?
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Somewhere he includes um this minor to major third that's split across two strings, right?
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So they ring against each other.
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And Billy was, I mean, still is, uh, but especially in his early materials, really fascinated with that lick.
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He does it all the time.
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He does it in G as well.
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So people probably uh peg a lick like this is kind of a uh a Billy Strings thing.
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And you can hear that grind against those two notes.
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And it's not, I wouldn't call it a Billy Strengths thing per se.
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I would think that it's just a it's a really smart bite from Doc Watson.
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You know, he's just uh referencing his hero over and over again every time he plays that lick.
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And he loves he loves to find those and and sort of hang on them for a while as well.
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In fact, like he repeats notes quite a lot, doesn't he?
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He'll sort of hang on one note or hang on those sort of semi-tone sort of gaps quite a lot as a sort of a point of tension or setting something up so he can go somewhere else.
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Yeah, totally.
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And that's kind of like a uh uh that's like a very early bluegrass move.
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If you listen to players like George Shuffler and Bill Napier, um, or even pre-Bluegrass players, you hear a lot of repeated notes.
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And um that's not something you hear in the modern era, right?
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In the modern era, you hear like runs where it's constantly a different note and every eighth note is filled.
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That kind of thing.
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And then if you listen to older breaks, you'll hear more like they like really will hammer home these melody notes over and over again.
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So yeah, Billy Strings is kind of a um it's almost like this.
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The natural progression of bluegrass guitar um went from like early players, Bill Napier, George Shuffler, right?
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Early Bluegrass League guitar players.
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And uh, you know, Don Reno did like some rockabilly stuff.
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There's there's all kinds of these different interpretations of what bluegrass guitar are, and none of them are really um like specific.
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None of them is like, oh, that's what guitar does.
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All of everyone's kind of figuring out a different thing.
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Bill Napier does a lot of the repeated note, George Shuffler does a lot of cross picking.
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Once again, Don Reno does a lot of the rockabilly kind of thing.
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And if you if you you know get all the way up to the 60s, you get someone like Tony Rice, and it's like, oh, this is what guitar does.
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And and Billy Strings is like is like the I don't want to say he's the anti-Tony Rice or anything, but he kind of took everything in a different direction.
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It's kind of like steampunk or something, where they're like, hey, you know, what if what if everything was like made out of copper and you know, cogs and and and steam power?
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And Billy Strings kind of did that.
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He took all these early um bluegrass guitar styles and made that progressive, as opposed to following the natural evolution, which is I think really, really cool.
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Who else has done that?
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No one.
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Yeah, totally.
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And you know, we'll come on to talk about other players and and Tony Rice in a bit, but it's definitely a a Tony Rice sort of influence runs through so much of bluegrass guitar now and to here, like and not just the sort of the licks, but also sort of Billy does a lot of cross-picking as well, and um and right and he he talks about he talks about that actually, and sort of I've heard him talk about it on stage, but he loves the traditional nature of what Jared Walker brings on mandolin because he's a you know uses a lot of double stops, a lot of tremolo, also consciously doesn't play super clean, he's not like a Sierra Hull or and I think that is an element of that in Billy's band, you know, uh a sort of a real rootsy feel, however they take it and however far off that they might go.
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There's a an element of really wanting to ground it in that.
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Yeah, it's a funny, it's a funny balance that you strike in bluegrass, where um not to be too much of a doomster, but um the traditionalism is kind of a lie, right?
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Bluegrass is by its very definition a progressive genre.
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Um, you know, it comes out of 1945, right?
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Bill Monroe's the guy.
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He gets all these instruments together and they all play a certain way.
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And uh and he even dictated, like, oh, maybe maybe we could have accordion.
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No, I don't like accordion, right?
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Bill Monroe listened to the Dobro and was like, Dobro isn't part of it.
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Bill Monroe listened to like lead guitar.
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He was talking to Doc Watson, like, hey, should Doc Watson join the Bluegrass Boys?
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And he was like, No, Doc, I don't think you're right.
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So Bill Monroe did have a really kind of progressive guiding hand.
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So it's it's funny that we look back at Bill Monroe as traditionalism.
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And like you're saying about Jared's mandolin plank, you can see that as traditionalism, but it's actually, you know, at least for that time, it was very progressive.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And so the where where a bluegrass band decides to draw that line is kind of arbitrary, right?
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There's some bands out there that think traditionalism, yeah, is this 1945 sound.
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You know, maybe people are, you know, I I I don't want to say this, but maybe they're a little sloppier or something, right?
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Maybe it's less clean.
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Um, or other people draw that line and say, like, no, this 1960s era is like, this is what bluegrass is supposed to sound like.
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Or other people draw that line like the 1980s, they're like bluegrass album band, that's real bluegrass.
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You know, that that's what feels like traditionalism to that.
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And that it's arbitrary, I guess is the word, right?
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You draw that line wherever you want.
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And um, I think Billy has done an interesting thing because he's kind of drawn that line in multiple places.
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It's a very progressive act, but he references a lot of very traditional bluegrass.
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Yeah, and there seems to be a definite sense of him being very aware that his audience is not a bluegrass audience, and also not a bluegrass audience.
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So he's if he bring he plays a song that would be known to a bluegrass audience, he goes out of his way to point out where it came from so that people who don't know the sort of the history will go and check it out.
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He's not doing it to sort of say that he's doing it specifically to say go and check this out, this is where it came from.
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Yeah, yeah, exactly.
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I think that's uh I mean,
probably the best thing that's happened for the genre in in forever.
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Um, in that a lot of times I think when bluegrass, you know, pops off again, it's kind of exciting again.
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It's kind of based on this uh traditionalism lie.
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For instance, the the old brother Warathao soundtrack for people that were alive during that.
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I'm sure some of you were like us.
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Yeah.
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Um that that that was a big boom, right?
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Everyone started playing like traditional music when that movie came out and that soundtrack dropped.
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And yeah, there there, I think there was a little bit of like disingenuity kind of buried in that, where everyone was like, oh, this is what American music is, this is what traditional stuff is.
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The music from that album is from a ton of different decades, right?
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It's yeah, it's a pretty good spread of sources and types of genre and stuff like that.
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So it's always funny when people point at that record and they're like, it's a bluegrass record.
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Well, it's it's kind of not.
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Some of it's old time, some of it's like much more gospel, some of it has this like field hauler kind of vibe.
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They're they're they're different things.
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Yeah, very very little of it is a straight bluegrass album.
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It's true.
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Um and the uh uh another big boom for everyone was like the old Chrome Medicine show, Double Makes 3, the sort of wagon wheel generation, which I think I'm part of.
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Um the all of those people that came in were like, Oh, this is traditional music, this is what it is, and it it wasn't really that.
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So I love that when Billy comes on stage, he's like, Oh, this is from this artist, or this is how I learned this, instead of saying, Oh, this is traditional American music, this is just what it is, right?
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He doesn't blanket statement say that he's like, No, let me tell you the specifics.
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Yeah, and I think that's really cool because there's a there's an element of like there's a there's sort of freedom about very much wanting to root things and reference things and be part of a tradition and also just entirely do his thing.
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Because there's something like I saw Billy live for the first time this year, and the first time was in a really small venue, and it was felt more like a traditional sort of bluegrass show, and then the second time was in not even a big venue, but a bigger venue, and they did the full-on kind of face melt Billy Strings experience, and yeah, it it reminded me very much of watching Neil Young play with Crazy Horse, in that the band is sort of there to get him to a point that he can go somewhere other than where he started off, and the audience play a part in that as well, particularly like Billy String's show, you know, the really vocal, loud, engaged audience, and it's almost like he wants to go on a journey, and you're welcome to come with him, but you need to help him get there, and so it's about energy as much as anything else.
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It is, yeah.
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And he I think he achieves that with his guitar playing using um using a lot of like jam band and rock and roll tricks that bluegrass isn't um I don't know, isn't uh saturated with yet.
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And so it it has this kind of new modern sound.
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One of the things that he does a lot are these repeating licks, and uh that kind of goes with that conversation we were having earlier where modern bluegrass players, you know, the template is to play different notes over and over again, right?
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It's this kind of like a snake that leads up and down the fretboard, and um and Billy doesn't do that a lot, right?
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We get a lot of repeating licks um where you know we'll get like you know, kind of these rock and roll, like or you like the Jimmy Page one.
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Billy isn't afraid of including those, whereas a normal bluegrass musician would be like, that's not bluegrass, it can't repeat, can't repeat the phrase over and over again.
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But when you put those into uh into a normal bluegrass line, they feel great.
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Whoops.
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Oh yeah, that's the that's the point, right?
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Yeah, and he he doesn't like he likes to leave leave a gap as well and sort of accent off beats and and make things there's a like a willingness to make things quite angular at times as well.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, you um kind of in some of those cross-picking lines too, this one that he does a lot.
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That kind of thing.
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That kind of stuff that he does is is very interesting.
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And like you said, it feels very angular, right?
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The pattern is in threes, it's not really sitting with the eighth note perfectly, and then there's a bunch of dissonance in that like root note, major seven, dominant seventh, up and down, back and forth in different patterns.
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It's very cool.
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And he he'll repeat that, you know, for like four measures and just let you kind of like sink into this weird, you know, unsure space.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And I think it it's sort of um it can be a way of pivoting from one thing into another thing and kind of just changing the energy level or shifting the gear or just just making something stretch out beyond the traditional forms of a bluegrass song.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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You can imagine um Billy kind of breaking multiple uh rules in a row.
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Maybe we're doing that angular thing.
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Maybe we're repeating an out.
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We're referencing tradition now.
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That would be a very like Billy Strings thing to do.
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And uh and it's kind of got everything we just talked about wrapped up in it.
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And I think one of the things I this, you know, uh this is um a thing that maybe divides people too, and it's he do he sort of does what Chris Theley does playing mandolin, in that he his physical movements, which may look a bit random, are often it looks like they're often designed to point something out in the music you may have missed.
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He's sort of he's almost directing your attention to what he's playing by the way he's moving his body, he's sort of going, look at this.
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Yeah, really interesting.
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Yeah, you see that uh um you see that in those repeating patterns where sometimes they don't fit squarely in time, right?
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If you imagine there's like eight, eighth notes in a measure, if he's repeating an idea that only has five notes in it, well that idea, you know, those aren't going to divide evenly, right?
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The idea is gonna be sort of on the beat, off the beat, over and over again.
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Sometimes you'll see him, you know, rock his body with his own personal pattern as opposed to the the pattern that the band is establishing, right?
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You he's like pointing out, oh, feel how interesting this sits with the beat.
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And he'll want you to experience that rather than to experience the the groove you've been experiencing all along.
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Totally.
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And so you find I don't know, it's very easy when you talk about um like any instrumentalist with guitarist, particularly.
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It's it's easy to think about their lead playing when you talk about their style, but often like rhythm playing is as much a you know, then the choices that people make and the way they weave in and out.
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And um, that's more obvious with some players than others.
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And I wonder if you had any particular thoughts about Billy's rhythm playing.
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Billy kind of plays that, like um maybe not exactly, but kind of in the same vein of like the Jimmy Martin rhythm.
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Like it's very heavy-handed, it's very forceful.
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Um and it's completely different from um the the modern aesthetic, too, right?
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A lot of modern players have gone away from this heavy-handed traditional rhythm.
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They're playing kind of this floaty uh like Tony Rice kind of thing, right?
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And Billy doesn't do that.
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Billy plays it very straight ahead, um, which which is very interesting.
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It's also a shame to talk about because you know, there's maybe there's not a ton there to talk about because it is so straight ahead.
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Um I think what's more interesting about Billy's rhythm is maybe that he's okay with presenting different grooves.
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Um, so not everything is this bluegrass back beat sort of boom chuck boom chuck.
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Not everything is that.
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He's got a ton of songs that he's recorded that don't have that groove.
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And I love that.