HT Interview: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder

In an era where it seems like just about every other day another great jamband decides to scale back, break up, or go on the dreaded hiatus, it’s refreshing to hear that Yonder Mountain String Band has no plans whatsoever of slowing down.

In fact, quite the contrary, this weekend kicks off the band’s second annual Harvest Festival, followed by a 20-date fall tour, and capped off with a sure-to-be-epic five night  stand at the tiny Boulder Theater over New Years. Meanwhile, the band recently sold out the 9,000-capacity Red Rocks and has a studio album in the works slated for release some time next year.

[Photo by Tobin Voggesser]

We caught up with guitarist and songwriter Adam Aijala from the tour bus somewhere in between Colorado and the Ozarks to chat about this weekends festivities, the progress of the album and the State of the YMSB Union.

Hidden Track: Lots of good stuff to talk about with the band these days; I thought we could start with the Harvest Festival, since that is right around the corner. When playing a festival under your own banner so-to-speak, how does that differ as opposed to playing one where you’re one of many bands on a bill that somebody else curated?

Adam Aijala: It’s definitely cool. We’re really lucky to do what we do, and to be able to headline a festival like the one up in Oregon, the Northwest String Summit where we just had our 10th anniversary this year, or this, our second annual Harvest Fest. It’s pretty awesome. I mean shit, being traveling musicians, one of the logistical bonuses of it is just sitting in one place for multiple days is always nice.

You get to see a bunch of your musician friends and friends and family that might attend. Also, playing both of those locations, the String Summit and Harvest Fest, both of those places are really beautiful. I know that sounds like a cookie cutter response, but it’s the truth. We’re lucky as hell to do it and it’s great.

HT: I know your festivals have always been pretty bluegrass focused, but did you guys ever consider opening it up like a lot of the newer festivals? And, are you very involved in picking the lineup?

AI: We’re definitely involved, but it’s not our call. We definitely have a say though. At the end of last year’s Harvest Fest, about a month after, they contacted us and said, “Hey, is there anyone you’re thinking of for next year, so we can get on it?” So, we gave our input. You know, we really want to have a lot of the same folks back and we got a lot of them back.

A lot of times, they come to us with logistical questions like “Who do we have that’s a little less bluegrassy?” Or “Who do you think might draw tickets for a later show?” Or “What do we want during the day?” So, we kind of have to rack our brains and think about it collectively. We tend to have chain emails that go around, and we end up reaching some kind of decision.

HT: I also wanted to ask you about the album. I know you’ve been working on some stuff, could you give an update on where you’re at with that?

AI: We’ve got a lot of new material, some of which we started playing live in April. We’ve got about seven new songs and then we have a ton of stuff on the burner that’s not quite finished. We’ve done a lot of pre-production, recorded chords and stuff in the studio as well as banging out some ideas at my house with a couple of mics, just rolling through stuff to get an idea of what we have.

As far as a finished product, I don’t know, it’s kind of been on hold for a little bit, since the summer was super busy, which is generally the case. We usually have more time in every season except for summer. The whole stretch from late spring to early fall, we don’t usually have much time for studio stuff. I imagine we’re going to be delving into it here again. We have a lot of material to choose from, not just from the stuff that’s finished or close to being finished, but also some stuff that we’ve been playing for a long time that’s not on any records.

HT: Of the seven songs you mentioned and the new stuff you’re still working on, how does that compare to the back catalog?

AI: That’s a good question. It’s pretty  mixed, man. All of us are always listening to music and we have a wide mix of genres across the board, even just my own listening spans folks all the way to heavy metal, so it jumps around the whole gamut. For me, I don’t specifically say to myself, “I want to write this kind of song.” I just wait for ideas and then go from there, and I think that’s how most of the guys work.

I’m hearing some pretty cool fast bluegrass. I’m also hearing some stuff that you could easily put drums with, not that that’s definitely going to be the case. We haven’t actually said we definitely want drums on these songs. In fact, we spoke candidly about doing stuff just like we do live and not having any outside instruments on it. Just do it with us, no drums, nothing like that. But you know, it’s still at an early enough stage where we don’t really know.

There’s folky sounding stuff, there’s kind of rock n’ roll sounding stuff. That’s where most of our musical influence stems from: rock n’ roll. It’s pretty obvious why our music is evolving the way it is, you write what you know I guess. So if you’re listening to a lot of rock, it’s going to come out. And also, we’re really lucky to have four writers in the band.

HT: Kind of along those same lines, part of your appeal is definitely in the covers that you guys choose and reinvest to play in your style. How do those ideas come to the table for you guys?

AI: I would say there’s no genre that is off limits. We’ve basically gotten to the point where we’ve been playing long enough and feel comfortable enough where we can play almost any genre, at least that is within our abilities, really any song we want regardless of what type of song it is. The main theme is that we kind of steer toward when doing covers is not to pick the cliché cover. We’ll try not to pick the most popular song for example if we pinpoint a specific band. You know, we do Girlfriend is Better, which is definitely a well-known song by the Talking Heads, but it’s by no means their most popular song or Only a Northern Song by the Beatles.

We like doing covers of our friends’ music too, like we do some Todd Snider. We do that whole record of Benny Galloway’s stuff. We can do some Sean Canan songs. We know some really good songwriters, so why the hell not? That’s another point to make is we’ll take our buddies’ tunes and those are also lesser known as well, so it’s still along the same lines of not doing any cliché songs.

[Photo by Tobin Voggesser]

HT: This is just a general question for you. I’m sure you’ve noticed that latest wave in bluegrass where it’s moved along again from traditional to the jamband and newgrass stuff in our scene to now where some of these bands like Mumford, the Avett Brothers, and Old Crow Medicine Show have actually become popular in the mainstream. So, I’d be interested to hear your take on that and see if any of that has spilled over into your world at all?

AI: Well, as far as us being more mainstream, definitely not! [laughs] I don’t see us falling into that category. I think it’s great though; awareness of Americana slash acoustic slash bluegrass or whatever you want to call it can only help everybody, which would include bands like us or even Leftover Salmon or Split Lip Rayfield or more traditional bands like the Del McCoury Band, the Traveling McCourys or Alison Krauss.

I think that the music of Mumford and the Avett’s is a little more poppy than what we write, and I’m not saying that as a dig by any stretch, basically it just fits more into that popular mold, and it’s maybe more accessible. I’m kind of a fan or far out lyrics and less literal words, so that is my personal take. I don’t write a lot of literal songs. I did, and I have, and we still perform some of those songs, but that’s not where I’m at now.

But I do respect those guys a lot. I’ve never met the Avett’s before or if I did, it was a long time ago, but I’ve met Mumford & Sons a number of times and they’re funny. They’re good dudes. It’s cool to see them, because when we met them they hadn’t really blown up yet and then we saw them after they blew up, so we were messing with them, saying “You guys are huge now, are you still gonna be cool to us?” [laughs] They’re cool; they are young kids by comparison to us. You know, they are in their mid to late twenties and I’m 38. It’s cool to see those dudes and everything they are doing. They’re funny as hell and they like to have a good time.

HT: It’s always pretty cool to hear how bands like you guys go about approaching the setlist every night. Could you give some insight on how you go about tackling that process?

AI: You know how it is. We don’t do the same setlist night to night ever. We definitely don’t have templates at all. One thing we do have is our Front of House engineer Ben Hines, he’s the one who puts all of our setlists on setlist.com. So, he’ll go on there and pull out the current tour and he’ll go back to the old setlists from the last time we were in these towns and print those out in order.

For example, we’ll have all of our setlists for Harvest Fest with us when we’re making our setlists and we’ll say, “Oh, we played that, we don’t want to do that again.” We might possibly do some repeats since it’s three nights, but we can probably get away with no repeats. You know, sometimes we’ll repeat maybe one song from when we were at the same place, which is usually about a year. We’re also looking at what we played the day before. Honestly, that’s a lot for our benefit so we don’t get bored, but also for fans who might be going from show to show.

From a show perspective, the way we may a setlist is we like to keep the energy going up and down. We might do two fast songs in a row, but the few slow songs we have, we definitely aren’t going to put put together. We’ll throw in a slower song and then maybe do the different categories. You’ve got your super fast bluegrass, you’ve got your medium speed songs, and then you’ve got you kind of funky/groovy type of song. We just try to make it so it’s always changing. And it’s not just for the fans, it’s for us too. But we definitely pay attention, because we know that some people are coming to more than one show. Part of it stems from our short attention spans, which date back to 70s and 80s TV shows [laughs].

HT: To close, I wanted to ask about the State of the Union so-to-speak for the band. This year you’ve played a lot of festivals mostly, but now you have the big fall tour. Do you think you guys will keep up the same pace more or less for the foreseeable future? I know some off your counterparts like String Cheese have gone more towards focusing on festivals. So, I guess if you could just comment on where your heads are at with that stuff in mind?

AI: Yeah, I don’t think we’re in a position to do that. You know, we’ve got a lot of people working for us, Dave’s got a baby, and Ben’s got a baby on the way. So I would say we’re going to keep kickin’ and trudging along at a similar pace. We might try to do some more international stuff, but we have to be careful with that, since when you’re playing new markets, you don’t tend to make too much money. So we’ll try to get on some festivals that might pay a little better and maybe get an opening slot for some bigger bands, so we don’t have to slug it out in bars and stuff overseas if we go that route.

Other than that, we’re going to stick to our regular tour schedule, which equates to about 100 shows per year give or take ten. We still have a good chunk of time off. For the guys with kids, it’s nice to be able to bust ass, and then like with this tour we’ll be home from the middle of November until the second week of February. A good chunk of home time is always nice.

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