Mike Devol: I have some memories of seeing the band before I joined. I don’t quite remember the first time, it might’ve been when I went on a date to a Greensky show at this brewery in Kalamazoo. At least I thought I was on a date, I don’t know if she would’ve called it a date. [Laughs.] Greensky was playing not on a stage or anything but just at the end of a bigger room on the floor by the windows.

This had to be 2003, and at that time I was still in music school studying classical cello. I was also into the jamband thing. I had discovered Phish and weed and whatnot. So I was going to shows and kind of dipping my feet in the scene, but I was still a music school, classical cello kid.

There was something about the string band thing that had already begun to appeal to me. Dorkily, I thought “Nellie Kane” and “Old Home Place” were Mike Gordon songs. I also remember I was listening to the Alison Krauss & Union Station Live album, which was a big first bluegrass record for me.

So I remember thinking that Greensky was a cool band. In Kalamazoo they were doing something really unique and this idea that some Phish kids, Grateful Dead-fan college-aged kids from Michigan were playing in this bluegrass band was kind of radical to me. It was very alternative to what was happening at the time.

I hung out with kids, who were into jambands like me. We were going out and seeing Umphrey’s, who were everywhere in the Midwest then, and seeing Phish because they finally came back. A lot of my friends were musicians themselves and everybody was starting some kind of funky jam rock band. I was like, “Instead of that, these guys are starting a bluegrass band.”

The first couple of times I saw them, they played traditional bluegrass songs, along with some of the songs that ended up on their first record, Less Than Supper. These were Paul, Dave and Mike’s attempts to write bluegrass songs, which already showed a bit of their own unique voices.

They were a bluegrass band and as a cellist I thought it was cool. I guess I appreciated the dynamics of the string band. I could sort of make a loose parallel from what I was up to in string quartet and chamber music and stuff like that.

Reading sheet music sort of eliminates the improvisational qualities of it, but there’s the energy of listening and following. There’s also no one true leader at any time, but it’s this chemistry of people playing together. I saw that in its most primitive stages with Greensky.

I was kind of souring on what I viewed my life was going to look like as a classical musician. Instead of spending my life in rehearsal I wanted to get out there and play. I wanted to travel, even though I’ve spent plenty of my life in rehearsal, which is also something that I enjoy.

But when I had the opportunity to join, I was happy to take it. I had just become friends with these guys and I guess that they thought they could bear to spend time in a van with me.

I think my parents were like, “You’re doing what?” But they were also supportive. I told them, “I’m in this band now and I’m going for it,” and they’re like, “Okay…”

So thanks mom and dad for supporting me. But that’s how it started. I was a fan. I thought they were doing something cool, and then I saw an opportunity for myself to maybe exist in the music business somehow via Greensky, who I just thought had the heart. [Devol originally assisted the band in a promotions capacity.] Then it turned out they needed something else from me, and it was recently the 21 year anniversary of my first gig with the band.

Anders Beck: The first time that I saw or heard the band was about 20 years ago. I was playing in the Wayword Sons at the time and I think it was when we did some co-bill shows where one night Greensky played first and one night the Wayword Sons played first. These were little bar shows where both bands were driving around in little vans.

We were sort of hanging out in the green room and there was an instant kinship. I ended up playing with them, as I always ended up doing. [Laughs.]

I was coming from the more bluegrass background with Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band, so we spoke the same language of bluegrass and were similar ages. It was like brothers in arms out there on the road kind of thing.

I remember thinking, “That’s a cool a little bluegrass band,” because that’s what it was at the time. At that point, I certainly didn’t know I was going to join them.

There was a period after the Wayword Sons decided that it was not going to be a full-time touring band when I had to make a decision as to whether or not I wanted to continue to pursue playing music professionally or go back to my real life. So I talked to some elder statesman in Durango, Colorado and was like, “I feel like I should try this thing. I want to keep doing this.” They all sort of said, “Well, you’re young. The worst that can happen is you go play for a couple years and then stop.” This was around the time I joined Greensky. So that was always the plan, I just didn’t know how farfetched of a plan it was.

Then shortly after I joined the band, things started getting bigger for us. We were going from bars to small theaters and people were showing up. One of the cool things about Greensky is that we really built it from the ground up fanbase-wise. We toured so much that we’d go back to towns and cities a couple times a year. In February, we’d go to a town like Lawrence, Kansas and there’d be 200 people there. Then we’d go back in November and there were 500 people there, so it was clear that whatever we were doing was working.

The whole premise was one fan at a time, one city at a time. We’d play a show in some dumpy bar and blow the socks off of however many people were there. Then they’d go and tell three of their friends that they had a great time. Somehow it worked. [Laughs.]

When I joined the band, we were playing relatively traditional bluegrass. We were standing around a single microphone. Then one day I showed up with a pedal board, and slowly but surely we turned into what we are.

Devol: We felt like up-and-comers for a long time. We were out on tour opening for Yonder or Railroad Earth and teaming up with other buddies of ours in the genre. We just had this energy.

We were out there scrapping and we busted ass. Our touring history is insane with how much we’d played. Our m.o. was “We’re going to claw our way to the top through relentless, aggressive touring.”

Bont: I think came down to the presentation. It reminds me that Paul used to do our booking along with a lot of other things. He carried a lot of that load, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s a totally type A control guy, but that’s been to everybody’s benefit. I think Paul’s ambition and drive is sort of what has continued to push us into whatever’s next.

Before we had management, he was our manager. Before he had booking, he was definitely booking us and doing all that shit. He used to call clubs and he’d have to tell them, “No, no, no, we’re a bar band.”

He had to convince them that we were going to play loud, we were going to play fast and people were going to dance. Then we had to prove ourselves once we got there, but he used to have to make those calls.

I think a lot of our progression and growth has come from our ability to dial in the sound. When we’re calling clubs and saying “We’re a bluegrass band, but this is a rock show,” you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is on that a little bit. It’s taken a lot of time and a lot of great engineers to help us create this full, loud rocking sound.

We used to play around one microphone. I love doing that. It’s a very bluegrass thing and we’re good at it, but we couldn’t accomplish what we wanted to accomplish sonically, and we couldn’t have that same sense of force we’re going for in that sort of arrangement. My bass is a rock bass. Sometimes I’d tell myself, “Holy shit, my bass is loud!” People would occasionally come up to me and be like, “Man, your bass was really something!” That’s when I’d realize, “Oh, we’ve probably crossed the line.” [Laughs.]

Beck: Yonder was probably the band that made us realize “You can do this in these big clubs.” Then as we grew, we put a lot of effort into figuring out how to make it work. We had a couple really great sound engineers who spent a lot of time on it with us.

I remember when we were out opening for Railroad Earth, telling Tim Carbone that we couldn’t really afford a front of house sound guy. He said, “Listen, you can’t afford not to have one.” That’s because it’s hard to make bluegrass sound good. You can have a ton of feedback in a big rock club and it can sound like shit. So we spent a lot of time working on that together with the premise that if we’re going to go into the Fox Theatre in Boulder and the night before is a reggae show or Umphrey’s and someone goes to that show and then the next night they come to Greensky, we don’t want to sound less powerful. So we put a lot of effort into that over many years.

Devol: It’s hard to pinpoint a moment when it felt like we were old salts but we’re one of the bands now. We’re not the new thing anymore. We’re one of the bands who has really defined what an era of jamgrass has looked like.

I see younger bands now who have come up and I take pride in the fact that I can see a little bit of Greensky in them. Maybe it’s the ethos or the energy or they’re modeling their sound after us or maybe just their touring schedule.

I feel like I’m talking about us in the past tense but it’s very much present tense here even, though I’m approaching that critical point in the ratio where Greensky will have been half of my life. I don’t know a lot of people my age who have been working on the same project since they were 23 in a way that they can continue to support themselves. We’ve worked hard and I’m grateful for that.

Hoffman: We just did a re-release of If Sorrows Swim for a record club with a big package. We did a track by track and I was sort of stunned. I’ve known personally for a long time that Swim is my favorite child, which you’re not supposed to have, but I think with that record and with Handguns, the record before which we self-produced, that’s when we became the band we are now.

That’s not to say that we haven’t been evolving ever since. Hopefully my songwriting has been maturing and growing, but those were really important time pieces in our story. If Handguns is kind of when we figured out what we wanted to sound like and who we were and how to do it, Sorrows was us coming back in and making an album that was definitive.

When I listened to that record from top to bottom, it was really obvious to me. We still play all of those songs in rotation. We play different sets every night and approximately every five nights we reset the cycle. Some songs we only play in a cycle once a year, some songs we play every couple cycles. We play something from If Sorrows Swim in almost every cycle of live shows. They’re just the band’s defining songs.

I think I’ve written better songs since, but something there is just so definitive of who we are and what we became. This was also at a moment in time where we were reaching a lot of new people. I think we switched from clubs to theaters in that era. New people were discovering the band and those songs every night, and those songs were growing.

As a musician or an artist, I want to think that we’re getting better and better every time, but saying that record is important or definitive or quintessential doesn’t necessarily mean better.

Sorrows Swim is when a lot of things came out, like effects, the way we sang, the way I wrote and they kind of just stayed there. It was definitive of who we are and then we just continued to be who we are.

Beck: We made a commitment to the thing, and something we decided pretty early on was that if we’re going to spend all this time presenting this, let’s present it really well—almost fighting above our weight class. Things just flowed from there. It was create your own reality.

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