For the record, Wicked Messenger was one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen at the String Summit.

Ben: That was fun. That gives us a chance to be a power trio. When I was young and I said, “I want to play music,” I was not thinking bluegrass. I was thinking more along the lines of what that Wicked Messenger thing is.

So how did you discover Horning’s [Hideout, location of the String Summit]? It’s kind of a weird location for a festival.

Ben: Through the other festivals. The big one was String Cheese. String Cheese had at least one, probably two, so the word was getting out. But by that time, they were already getting so big that they had outgrown the footprint for Horning’s. We came in with something that was immediately more family friendly and starting out much smaller. And once you get there, you discover that it’s one of the best places you’ve ever been. It’s literally perfect for a festival provided that you can stay true your size limits. It has to be just right. If the thing blows up to 10,000 people, you’ve ruined it. We heard about it through String Cheese and the shows they were doing. For a while Bob Horning was able to have a lot of festivals there. Then restrictions with noise and neighbors and impact meant he had to scale it back to one or two. We feel lucky that Summit made the cut.

And what inspired the late night glow and Saturday night funk band and all that?

Ben: Mixing it up. A little palate cleanser you know? It’s a lot of string music, a lot of twang. The audience that’s coming to Summit, really the audience that you’ll see for any of the bands that are playing Summit, whether that’s Yonder or Greensky or Railroad or Leftover Salmon, an audience member at one of those shows is not necessarily a purist that needs to hear a banjo every act. In fact, probably they’re people who like all different kinds of music. So the set up for String Summit is string music centric. The center of gravity for the thing has to be string band music, modern. But every now and then, you might as well have a funk band. You might as well do something Saturday night that goes for twenty minutes at a rock beat tempo with a drum kit that gets loud. It’s a good change of pace and when you can see it works, right in the middle let everyone shake it out.

Obviously, you had to jettison a large part of the catalog a few years ago. How do you recover from that?

Ben: Initially, for the members of the band that are songwriters to try to produce more content. For Jake [Jolliff] and Allie [Kral] it does begin with having cover tunes to sing. It’s important to us to have everyone singing at least once a show. In some cases we’d like to develop their singing voices more and take advantage of – I’m thinking right now of Allie – having a female lead voice. But at the same time, it’s a balancing act because our preferences, and this is putting it mildly, is to play original music. I certainly don’t get off playing cover tunes as much as I do playing original music that one of us has written.

That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. That’s what everyone’s always wanted to do, sing our own music. But in a transition you do the best you can. If you establish, like we have, certain desires of wanting everybody to sing, until we can get a good solid handful of original material for both of them to sing, you do the best you can and try to pick songs that are compelling and that whoever is singing can get behind.

But it’s hard. The real trick, the double trick, is that if you’re writing music, for me, if I’m writing a song, I want to sing it. I wrote it. If I’ve actually been lucky enough to land a song and get it finished and it actually says something that’s worth a damn, I kind of am finding myself attached to singing it.

You can’t do the, “Well I need a song for Allie to sing in the second half of the first set, so let’s just write something for that role?”

Ben: You can. Dave’s better at that than I am right now in terms of content, generating stuff, producing material that is for that purpose. And I’ve sat down with that intention of I’m going to write a song for Jake to sing. And by the time I’m halfway through it, I can’t give it up. It’s mine.

Maybe at some point I’ll have better luck. There’s a couple songs that I’ve written in the past that we don’t really do with Yonder that I’ve shown Jake. It’s also a matter of if it’s something that he can get behind, that he feels compelled to sing. There’s a couple of songs that I can think of right now that we’re working on that are original. It’s a trick. It’s a new challenge for me to write for someone else’s voice.

It’s a good challenge. Like I said though, so far, when I get a new song – it’s not like I’m cranking out, I’m not the kind of songwriter that can crank out a song a day. It depends on the month and the year, but if I get 5 to 10 songs a year that are worth a damn, that’s a good number.

That’s impressive actually. That’s an album a year.

Ben: Yeah if I’m lucky. Things that I really feel are good and are done and ready to go. That’s still not a lot. I find myself attached to keeping them for myself. Then do you open up? Another way to accomplish what I’m talking about is to bring in other songwriters and have them work with them. Have Jake and Allie work with other songwriters – I know Allie is starting to do that – and see if writing original vocal music is something that they’re drawn to. Jake has a million mandolin songs. So far he seems content to shred the mandolin and sing harmony when we ask him to sing harmony but doesn’t really drawn to original song writing so far. And that’s probably because he’s never not practicing the mandolin. [Laughter] Everybody has the things that they shine at and succeed at and find compelling. We’ll see. It’s a work in progress.

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