Photo by Melissa Steinberg
While at DelFest, I had a chance to converse with Yonder Mountain String Band’s Ben Kaufmann. Our discussion covered song selection, some of their interesting new approaches to music, how song writing works in a band with multiple contributors, and what makes the Northwest String Summit special.
Most bands come out and cover bluegrass classics. The person who told me that I needed to see Yonder told me that you covered “Crazy Train.” No one else was doing that. What was the inspiration for that?
Ben: We didn’t really want to play trad bluegrass covers. You pick them in jams or picking sessions or what not, but for someone like me singing about “My Little Girl in Tennessee” or picking a bluegrass thing or a standard song, it didn’t feel as authentic as singing a rock and roll cover that was actually something that I grew up listening to when I was younger. With the exception of Jacob [Jolliff], none of us grew up listening to bluegrass. We all grew up listening to rock and roll, or other forms of music, but not bluegrass. None of us are southern. Two of us grew up in the suburbs outside of a bit city in Massachusetts. Dave [Johnston] grew up in a suburb of Chicago. Allie [Kral] grew up in a suburb of Chicago. When we were thinking about what to do – we’re going to pick a cover tunes, what do you want to sing? – we would pick songs like that.
And also in the example of “Crazy Train,” you have to imagine that back then it was 1998 or something – 98, 99 – and where we were, what we were trying to do, we were literally the only example of a bluegrass band with no drums, that lineup, anywhere for any of the festivals, or places where we were playing. It was literally the only example. You had Leftover Salmon and String Cheese but they had drums and they had moved beyond their beginnings with “traditional” bluegrass and developed into larger rock and roll things. For us we wanted to say, “Yeah, we look like this bluegrass band but we also rock. Let’s prove it to you.” “Crazy Train” was a pretty obvious choice; it’s one of the more obvious covers that Yonder has ever done in terms of straight up, here’s a popular song that you might semi regularly hear us play. Usually the rule was if we’re going to pick a cover tune, it needs to be fairly obscure. But there’s nothing obscure about “Crazy Train.”
Back in the day, it’s sort of a way to get your foot in the door. Predating the Internet or immediate mass communication, when people would hear about us, it’s amazing how people in those early years – even five, six years down the road – “Oh, you guys are the bluegrass band that play ‘Crazy Train.’” You aspire to be known for something else, but if it gets you to come to a show, yeah, we’re the bluegrass band that plays ‘Crazy Train.’ Not anymore, there’s a lot of examples of acoustic bands – same lineup – no drums is the prerequisite.
Greensky [Bluegrass]
Ben: Greensky has taken it the farthest, but I would need more than two hands to count the bands that are able to have successful music careers, without a drummer, who are playing sort of hybrid bluegrass music. But flashing back to 16, 17 years ago, we were young kids, we couldn’t really get that loud. We needed to make a name for ourselves. We wanted people to come see us. So pick something clever to do like “Crazy Train” and it gets the word out. In that situation it did. I still hear people say, “I heard about you because you’re the people who play ‘Crazy Train.’”
One thing I was noticing was with Wicked Messenger [an electric spin off band that played NWSS in 2014], Yonder Mountain Punk Band, and electric Yonder announced at this year’s String Summit, is there a movement a little away from that traditional sound?
Ben: Not really. In fact, with the new lineup, when we were just starting to play out with the new group, everything comes back. Everything took a step… backwards isn’t the right word… but bringing everything closer to home. We were becoming quite a bit more bluegrass than we ever had been. Simply because, you’re needing to begin a new musical dialogue and you want to start with a common language. That’s bluegrass. Now the branching out and the experimentation can happen again, but in order to really tighten up as quickly as possible, you go back to your roots. The other things are ways that we can let our other influences out or do with that are different or weird.
With Yonder Mountain Punk Band, that was for a Halloween thing but Dave [Johnson] and Adam [Aijala] – it rubs off on us – but they grew up skateboarding and listening to punk rock and being little bastards. We wanted to find something cool to do, so we did that. That was more consolidated work that we did to get ready for that show than anything we’ve ever had to do. It was more rehearsals, more practice time, all for songs that are a minute and a half to three minutes long. It was a ton of work, but by doing that kind of work together you get better and can see big improvements in short periods of time. It had multiple benefits.
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.
