Largely known as a so-called “progressive bluegrass band,” The Infamous Stringdusters can take credit for being among a new crop of artists and ensembles that have spawned their music from a traditional template and, in turn, reaped the rewards that accompany popular appeal.
Like fellow travelers, Leftover Salmon, Trampled By Turtles, Yonder Mountain String Band, and Greensky Bluegrass, the Colorado-based combo — which currently consists of Andy Hall (dobro, lap steel, and resonator guitar) Andy Falco (guitar), Chris Pandolfi (banjo), Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), and Travis Book (bass) have never been afraid to expand on bluegrass basics and bring it forward. They do so in part by sharing it with a newer and often younger audience that’s been drawn to their upbeat approach, and a sound that carries with it a jam band attitude and a freewheeling sensibility.
That demonstrative delivery has not only reaped an eager and energetic legion of followers, but any number of critical kudos as well. They include three awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2007 — Emerging Artist of the Year, Album of the Year for their first full-length album, Fork in the Road (tying with J.D. Crowe and the New South’s Lefty’s Old Guitar), and Song of the Year for the album’s title cut. In 2011, they were nominated as Entertainer of the Year by the IBMA and also nominated for a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance for their song, Magic No. 9. The following year, they secured their first Grammy win for Best Bluegrass Album, only to secure another Grammy nomination for their 2021 effort, A Tribute To Bill Monroe.
Hall, a constant in the band since the beginning, can claim his own accomplishments as well. Like his compatriots, he’s been unafraid to branch out on his own. A recent solo album, A Universe Within, ventures well beyond anything fans might expect from Infamous Stringdusters realms. It’s experimental, an instrumental album cloaked in an ambient aura — soothing, meditative, and decidedly intriguing.
We recently had opportunity to speak with Mr. Hall, who graciously caught us up on all things Stringdusters, and of course, his own offerings as well.
You’ve been with your band, your day job of sorts, for quite a while now, and if our math is correct, you’ll soon be reaching a special anniversary.
We like to date our inception as 2005. That’s when we started recording our first album, Fork in the Road. And that’s when most of the current band members — everyone except Falco — joined, and everything kind of got rolling. So yeah, we’re 19 years in right now.
So next year will make 20 years. What are we going to do to mark the occasion?
Well, that’s a great question. We are working on a new Stringdusters album. In fact, the fellows just left my house yesterday, where we showed each other new material and new songs. So theoretically, we’ll have our 10th all-original studio album for our 20th year as a band. And as you know, bands come and go, so it’s hard to make them last. So it feels really cool to just know that we’re still going strong, and that we still enjoy it, and we still love working on music and playing live, coming up on 20 years.
At the same time, the band has been so influential in any number of ways. Call it newgrass or a populist approach, but clearly you have succeeded in bringing a traditional genre into modern environs. You’ve been able to sort of straddle the line between the classic and the contemporary so to speak. You were one of the first bands to really do that, and to get that movement going. Would you agree?
It’s funny. We don’t think that way. Only until you get to a certain point, do you start to look back. You start to speak to young artists who are coming up, and they tell you that they’re looking up to you as being very influential. A lot of where you feel like you fall in the music business, and what you’ve done, or your place in it, is all in hindsight.
For the longest time, we were kind of the new, young, kind of newgrass band. But there were a few people doing some things before us. Yonder Mountain String Band was around when we started, and they were really very influential for us, because they were the first bluegrass band with drums. That was kind of helping to take their music into rock clubs and bigger venues and stuff. So we learned a lot from them in terms of the production and how to put on kind of a bigger rock type show. They had lights and stuff like that, and any bluegrass band I had seen before them didn’t have like a light show or anything like that. It was a very, very rudimentary type of show with the focus solely on the music, on the playing, and the singing.
So Yonder Mountain brought sort of a bigger production element to it, and so we kind of learned some of that from them. But also, we had all individually cut our teeth in Nashville for years, for a decade or more, trying to just hone this bluegrass craft.
It was a real transition at the time, no?
I don’t know that too many bands had done that, and then we went to try and put on sort of a rock show with that bluegrass kind of foundation. A lot of the bands that were coming up, they played some bluegrass, but they just kind of went at it as 20 year olds, and just started going for it. We started the band when I was 30. So we had already had a decade plus of kind of like graduate school bluegrass, so to speak, in Nashville playing with other musicians. So there wasn’t really anyone else in that sort of position when we started. But you don’t really know that until you’re looking back on it all. There were actually probably a few other bands doing it at the time, but I don’t think any of them are around anymore.
We think of bands like Greensky Bluegrass and Trampled by Turtles, but it’s sort of a limited circle there. Those are the bands that kind of come to mind as contemporaries.
Everyone’s very unique. Us, Greensky, and Trampled by Turtles are all very different bands and we all had different pathways, but we were part of kind of a small group of bands that are still around that started back then and are still trying to make our mark on things. And, you know, all those bands have done amazing things. But yeah, it’s really cool to see the wheel turning, and to see the new bands come up, and continue to take what you’ve done and enhance it, and do their own thing with it. And so the circle goes around, and that’s one really cool thing about having been around a while. You begin to see this wheel turn, see the influence of new and old and all kinds of things going down, and all the different things. It’s a great place to be having been around for a while, because you have a bit of a broad view of the music business, and you have experience, and so it’s fun to see.
The following that it’s generated is interesting as well, sort of a spin off from the old Grateful Dead vibe. It’s more than the music. It’s almost like a cultural phenomenon in a way, right?
Yeah, and I love that. That is one of my favorite things about the music. That’s why I think I like bluegrass. It had a real appeal with Grateful Dead fans, Phish fans… it was the cultural element. Bluegrass has always had that. It didn’t start as professional music, it started as mountain music that families would play together for parties and for revelry, and just to let loose and let steam off. People had hard lives back in the day, so it was rural music, and really almost solely cultural in a way.
Slowly people began to play it professionally. Bill Monroe really solidified what bluegrass was, and so a band, like the Grateful Dead, did something with rock music, where they made it a cultural family phenomenon with their fans, and they developed their whole own culture. So the Grateful Dead influence and the cultural heritage of bluegrass makes for a very welcoming community and something that people enjoy.
The influence is obvious…
Bands like ours have taken a lot from the Grateful Dead in definite ways, like changing our setlist every night, where every show is different, and there’s a fair amount of improvisation. And so there is something different to see every night, there’s something different to experience, and the band is affected by the unique energy of each crowd, and vice versa. Every night is a different experience. And then people also know that they’re going to see friends, or maybe make different friends if they go on tour for a number of shows. Different people jump on, different people jump off, they see friends, and get to become better friends through the course of a tour. I think people yearn for that connection, that in person connection, you know, now almost more than ever. It’s fun to be able to provide a sort of a venue for real personal connection. Especially in the age of the internet where you need a real life connection.
Given that you’re bringing bluegrass into the current age and, you’re reaching a new audience, do you get the impression that some of the traditional bluegrass fans feel like all these young upstarts are taking their music away, that it’s too modern for their tastes? Is it able to mesh well, from the new to the old, and from the old fans to the new fans, and that sort of thing?
Well, there are definitely different sort of camps of bluegrass, but, you know, some of that difference is cultural. With traditional bluegrass, particularly, in the southeast, you have a real connection to gospel music and religion and traditional Southern culture. And that’s a very unique thing. We have three New Yorkers in the band, so we grew up differently. I actually played in a heavy metal band in high school. I played death metal. That was what I knew. Then I began to get exposed to blues, and through blues, I got exposed to bluegrass and fell in love with it.
So our influences were not those traditional cultural influences that a lot of traditional bluegrass has. We came at a kind of wild and wooly time and from all walks of life, and learned bluegrass as an art form. But we didn’t embody the culture of tradition where it came from.
So those differences continue, even in how the show is presented versus how a traditional bluegrass show is presented. Our show is probably more in line with like how a Grateful Dead show might be presented. There’s just sort of some natural, regional, cultural differences that I think are almost more than the musical differences. There are so many incredible, quote, unquote, traditional bluegrass bands that I would love our audience to hear, because they’re just so incredible. But there are some sort of regional barriers and cultural barriers that sometimes don’t get crossed.
Those barriers can be broad though.
But yeah, there is always some tension between traditional and progressive. And, you know, people are doing things with the music that don’t fit the traditional mold. And sometimes that creates some tension. But I feel like at this point, it’s all kind of blown wide open, and people will do whatever they want, with a banjo or with dobro, or whatever. And with the age of social media and the internet, we’re exposed to so much so quickly that the barriers and such seem to be breaking down faster than ever.
So now the group has a new album, Songs from the River, which is more or less a compilation or a greatest hits, or what would be the best description?
What binds them all together is that we write a lot about nature and particularly rivers. It kind of became a bit of a joke among some of our fans. It became clear that we obviously have a real connection to rivers. We do long river rafting trips together as a band. We’ve written songs about it, and so we decided to sort of coalesce that theme into a compilation, because I feel like it really describes a big part of us, and our connection to nature as a band. We never set out to just write a lot of music about nature or rivers in particular, but that’s what we did and that came very naturally.
And a lot of that came from some of our earlier days, when we did like rafting trips together. There’s a connection that you get when you spend days and days on a river that’s pretty deep and meaningful. Most people don’t really think much about a river, especially out west here. Where we live, water is more scarce, and rivers are very valuable, as well as the snow melt that feeds them…the whole process. So our connection to rivers became clear, kind of through our fans, really. And then we decided, why don’t we really highlight this, the way it’s highlighted by our fans. It’s a thread that runs through us.
So we decided to see how many songs we have like that. And it’s it’s a large compilation, I don’t remember how many songs there are, maybe 25 songs pulled from our records and our solo records. So that’s sort of where the the concept and idea all came from. I guess you could say, “A River Runs Through It.”
Your love of nature becomes apparent.
There’s obviously a big connection between bluegrass and nature. And you find that in Colorado. I think a big reason we moved out here is there’s this connection between roots music and the outdoors. It has to do with people looking for authentic experiences. We all like bluegrass, we like playing instruments, we like real stuff like that. And then we like being outside fishing, rafting, whatever, so there’s definitely a connection there. We kind of live that pretty thoroughly.
Above all, your music is so thoroughly melodic. They’re more than s imply instrumental workouts. They actually coalesce as songs.
It’s cool to hear you say that. You hope that comes across. That is one thing we as a band have worked hard to try and do, to create songs. We use the playing to support the song and vice versa, and not fall back on either one exclusively, but kind of let them both intertwine, the musicianship and the song writing.
And not many people can claim they won a Grammy!
It’s exciting. I mean, the Grammys are cool because they recognize not just the big mainstream acts, but also more niche styles of music, whether it’s bluegrass or blues or jazz. So it’s an opportunity for some smaller genres to get to be part of the bigger stage and the bigger world of music, and all that. So it’s a cool event. You get all dressed up and bring your significant other. It’s a real treat.
Members of the band have also done solo albums apart from the band. So what inspires you to branch off and do your own thing? It is a thirst for creative freedom?
I’ve made quite a few solo albums in the last 20 years or so. But for me, usually they’re really dobro-centric. And so really, it’s just an opportunity for me to dive deep into slide guitar stuff. They’re usually pretty specific on that. It’s really me just having a chance to push myself musically, and just do just dobro-centric stuff, which is part of a much more broad spectrum. It can’t be all dobro-centric, so I take the opportunity do it. Those albums are really a way for me to express my connection with my particular instrument, and to write songs for my particular instrument, and kind of scratch that dobro itch.
I just put one out last year called Squareneck Soul. A square neck is like the neck of the dobro that I play. Most guitars have what would be called a round neck where you grab it with your hand, and it’s held up. A square neck is played flat, and you don’t wrap your hand around it. So it almost looks like a two by four. It’s like a big square neck. They call my type of guitar square neck, as opposed to a round. So I call that “square neck soul.”
It was really connected in a very personal — and professional — way then?
Yeah, I wrote all the songs for it in just like a few weeks. I just wrote every day and just did this dobro-intensive album at my house by myself, writing for my instrument and just writing, writing, writing multiple times a day. So I did this whole album very kind of quickly. I wrote it all in a few weeks, booked the session, recorded almost the entire album in three days in Nashville with some amazing players like Sierra Hull and Brian Sutton, and Wes Corbett from the Sam Bush Band, and Billy Strings on guitar, and Travis Book, our bass player, and everyone did an amazing job. It was a very quick thing. I wrote it all very fast. And I just wanted to write music that was sort of like fiddle tunes for dobro, where you have fairly simple melodies that all these great musicians can solo over and stretch out on. I didn’t over-compose it. I wrote jam session type of tunes. I just wanted to have a palette for the musicians to sort of interact and improvise over.
So yeah, it came out really cool. I was really happy with how it came out and I’m proud of that one. It did exactly what I wanted it to do, which is just to give me a deep dive into the dobro, and push myself hopefully one step further on it.
