JH: How did banjo become your instrument? Who were your influences and how did you get into bluegrass?
GS: When I started playing banjo coincided with when I got into bluegrass. I did not grow up listening to bluegrass. I was into the Grateful Dead in high school and I got into the banjo from Jerry [Garcia]. That’s really when I first started getting into bluegrass. And, I had a teacher in high school who turned me onto Norman Blake. You start hearing Vassar Clements, Peter Rowan, David Grisman and people like that in Old and In the Way and you start connecting the dots. The same thing with Norman Blake and John Hartford and New Grass Revival and all that stuff.
I was a saxophone player in our school jazz band through high school and when I got into college, I was playing on the soccer team. It took up all of my time. Eventually, I ended up having surgery around Christmas time my first year in college. I then had all this time and I kind of drifted away from the soccer team. I pawned my saxophone and bought a banjo when I came back from Spring Break that year. While I was recovering from surgery, I started teaching myself banjo.
JH: You bought a banjo because you liked the sound from what you heard from Old and In the Way and such?
GS: The banjo was the sound for me that defined bluegrass the way I heard it. The banjo was what I gravitated towards.
JH: When did you know you had a gifted voice? Did you grow up singing at all?
GS: No. I still don’t think I have come to that realization quite yet. I guess I have taken my voice just more in the context of the band. You know, Woody is our lead singer, and when I come into sing, it is just kind of like a change-up and something to give a little different flavor. I have certain parameters. I don’t try to do too much. But, there are things that I can do when I sing that Woody does not do given just how low and sort of rough my voice is.
I have always loved singing and when we were first learning to sing, I would sing mostly the bass or the baritone parts. I love how it is kind of like your job in bluegrass as the banjo player to be the baritone singer. That’s like J.D. Crowe: play the banjo, sing the baritone. It just seems like those two things go hand in glove. I had a couple of old J.D. Crowe bootlegs that I just treasured because the sound was pretty bad, but the way it shook out was that pretty much all you heard was the banjo and the baritone vocal. Those were like my practice tapes. I really treasured them.
I still feel self-conscious about singing, but I feel a little better about it. Every time someone comes up to me and says they like my voice and my singing, it makes me feel a little better.
One thing we try to do as a band with voices is that we recognize that different voices stand out at times in songs. So, we may not necessarily have one voice singing the lead or one voice singing exposed the whole time. We have tried to keep our vocal arrangements really interesting which I think has been good for me as a singer.
JH: How did the Steep Canyon Rangers come to be and when did you realize music was going to be your career?
GS: Woody, Charles and I were buddies in college before we started playing music together. We hung out with the same circle of friends and we sort of discovered that we were all kind of getting into the music at the same time. Sometime near the end of our first year of college, we started playing together. It was really just: “let’s get together and try to figure out how to play this music.” We just loved hanging out playing songs and trying to learn how to do it. We had a couple of songbooks like Pete Wernick’s songbook that we just wore down to the pulp. While we all had musical backgrounds nobody came from a really focused musical background.
It is how we spent all of our time. We were fortunate that when we put the band together we didn’t have any expectations or outside pressure. When we were starting in Chapel Hill for all we knew we were the only bluegrass band within 10,000 miles from there. Obviously, once our eyes were opened a little bit, we realized that we were in the middle of North Carolina and all the best bluegrass bands live right here. But, for us, we were on this island of a college campus. If we were trying to pick a genre our friends would like or we thought we would be successful at, it would not have been bluegrass. But, we started playing a couple shows at little local bars. We had tons of friends who would come and pack it out. We would know maybe twelve songs and just put those on cycle.
JH: And, at some point, obviously, things started taking off while you were in college?
GS: Kind of as college was coming to an end. But, everybody else still sort of had different ambitions. I taught school for a year coming out of college. Everybody still wasn’t quite decided on it, but we stuck together and we were doing a few shows here and there, mostly around the Piedmont in North Carolina, and then we would drive out to Colorado in the summer. We would love going to RockyGrass. We would enter the band competition and it would be fun, but then we started taking it a little more seriously and we won it one year! At that point, we didn’t have families and we didn’t have mortgages. We didn’t have any of that. So, we were like yeah, we can make enough money to live on playing music. This is no problem [laughs].
We have been blessed. Woody, Mike and Charles all have really good business sense and have really put a lot of thought into that side of it. We just stumbled into this situation where everybody has very complementary talents and everyone has kind of grown into their roles. And, just keeping everyone together has definitely been the biggest thing for us: keeping the same group of guys together.
JH: It seems like a little bit more jam or improv going on in your performances these days. Is that true? If so, is that a conscious decision for direction or is this just how the band has evolved organically?
GS: Coming from my background, loving the Grateful Dead and stuff like that, it just seems like a natural part of the music. But, for us, we play performance arts centers one night then for a big dancing field of folks who want something they can get down to. So, we have put a little conscious effort into saying when we’re doing this type of show, let’s put in this song and with this song, let’s just stretch this part out. It is something more recent and it is fun.
In the earlier years when we were playing those really hard-core bluegrass festivals, the arrangements of every song were just airtight because you go on before the Lonesome River Band or after Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver. You are just going to sound like a slob if it is not right. So, that was a big focus of the band early on: to just get those airtight arrangements.
But, it has been good for us every once in a while to say, “Hey, we don’t need to stop right now; we can just kind of make this up,” and we kind of know where we are starting and we know where we are going. Usually, we get there without running into the guardrails too much.
JH: You know where you are going, but not everyone does. When you bring the song back around and the crowd goes wild that must be pretty fun, I imagine.
GS: It is. It actually works in most settings. This crowd (at DelFest), they kind of know what is going on. But, you see other crowds when they realize that we’re just flying by the seat of our pants and they get up on the edge of their seats a little bit more.
JH: You write a ton of songs. What is your song-writing process? Do things come out in large chunks? Do you do the music first or the lyrics?
GS: I wouldn’t say they usually come out in large chunks. Usually, it is just like a little bit of inspiration and then I put in the work on top of that. I try to keep my eyes open for the inspiration and when it hits, pay attention to it, and don’t take it for granted. Then, from there I apply the craft and the work that goes into it because it is a discipline, I think, for the best songwriters. There are exceptions, but, I think, in general, the best songwriters just go back to it day in and day out.
I try not to force it. If there is nothing that I really want to write about then I won’t do it. For me, it is a very emotional thing. If I write a song and it makes me laugh or cry or something like that, I feel like it has done its job. It may not be anything anyone else wants to hear, but I will be satisfied with it.
JH: As far as inspiration, you have some classic lines in your songs. For example, “You’ve never done nothing for love” (from Monumental Fool). That sticks out because it says so much. Do you get these classic lines and work the idea around them or is it more that you decide to write about a particular person (in this example)?
GS: I think more than anything the lines that really end up being the special ones are not always what you start with. You don’t have to start from brilliance. You can start with an idea of where you’re going or some images or something like that. Then, as you work on it, if it is working, things will just start coming to the fore. In that example, that was one of the last parts of that song I wrote. So, for me, when you’re putting together a song, you’ve got the verse, of course, and if you’re doing a bridge, then it needs to sound a certain way. Sometimes, you just have the music kind of lead you there and do it the Mick Jagger way: we need something to go: blah, blah, blah with this many syllables and rolls off the tongue like this. And, then, you keep that in your head and write it.
But, some songs are different. The last song I wrote I was driving my daughter to field hockey practice and when I got her there, I was like, “Hold on, I just gotta sing this into my phone really quick before we go across the parking lot.” It turned out being a song I was really happy with. You really have to be conscious not to take it for granted; not let it go and say, “I’ll remember this” because it will be gone, and I will be beating myself up.
JH: Can you share a couple of your favorite songs that you wrote and explain why they are your favorite?
