Photo by Dean Budnick
On November 3 2006, singer/guitarist Bill Nershi announced that he planned to leave The String Cheese Incident, a band he formed in 1993 with mandolin player Michael Kang, after a few final months on the road. The group—which had gradually expanded over time to include drummer Michael Travis, bassist Keith Moseley, keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth and percussionist Jason Hann—had splintered over the preceding years due to personality and stylistic differences, and the group went on hiatus during the summer of 2007.
Almost a decade later, the members of The String Cheese Incident have not only reunited, but are also pumping out more collaborative music than ever, thanks to a series of songwriting trips and a new studio that allows them to record and release fresh tacks whenever the inspiration hits. After reuniting for a few shows in 2009, The String Cheese Incident truly returned in 2010 and have ramped up their road during the past six years. They also released a new studio album in 2014, the Jerry Harrison-produced Song in My Head, and have seemingly figured out how to showcase their divergent interests in bluegrass, country, electronica, rock and jazz within a full-band context through their new Sound Lab project.
Shortly before The String Cheese Incident head to the East Coast for performances at Scranton, PA’s The Peach Music Festival (8/12) and Brooklyn, NY’s Kings Theatre (8/13,8/14), Nershi discussed the band’s recent summer run, their latest batch of songs and how String Cheese ramped things back up a decade after their “big compromise.”
Earlier this year, String Cheese started releasing free material online through a section of its website called The Sound Lab. The initial announcement described it as a place not only to showcase new songs outside a proper album format, but also as an opportunity to present demos, remixes, alternative cuts and other recordings. Can you talk about the band’s initial decision to start releasing material in such a different way?
We finally got our own place—a place where we can rehearse and record. We’ve been talking about it for a little while, but it’s hard to get the whole band together to go in on buying a building. We finally dove in and did that and got a place in Louisville, CO, and that has everything we need. It has warehouse space, it has rehearsal space and it even has space for the guys who live out of town to crash when they come to town to rehearse and get ready for tours. We’re excited about that, and we had Jerry Harrison come out to do some recording with us.
We’ve also had a few of these writing trips. We went out to Sedona, AZ, and just wrote some tunes together. As you notice, we’ve been posting songs as free downloads on our website all summer long—we had another new song come out before our shows [this weekend] in New York at The Kings Theatre. It’s called “My One and Only” and it’s a song that Kyle wrote with our friend Bonnie Paine, who also plays in Elephant Revival, and we have more tunes coming out after that, too.
We have more recording times scheduled, so we’re hoping the Sound Lab is going to give us a better platform to get songs recorded in a timely manner, mixed and mastered and out to the public. We don’t want to wait till we do a whole big album project, which always takes a really long time between when the songs are finished and the album is available to the public. It can be a year between when you play the first note on a recording and when we finally release that recording. It seemed like a good time to try something different. On any given day, we can record something, start the process of overdubbing and, boom, put it on the website.
I’ve heard that String Cheese is also working toward a proper full-length album with Jerry Harrison behind the boards. How do these new songs fit in with that project?
Well, the way that we’re working it is—since we have a lot of material now that we have recorded and released, one tune at a time—once we get this particular group of recordings all released, then we will also put that into album form and make it available. That’s the plan as of now, anyway.
Since the time we made our trip to Sedona and wrote a lot of this material that’s coming out right now, we’ve also made another trip to Carbondale, CO, went into the studio and wrote more songs. So we have another group of tunes that we’re gonna start finishing up and start recording. We have tons of new original material that we’re working on even beyond the stuff that is coming out right now. It’s exciting to write a lot of music and have this platform that allows us to record and release it so quickly.
Given this new model, do you plan to hold back from playing your new material live before releasing those songs in The Lab or on a studio album?
Well, at this point with the Sound Lab material, we’ve waited until the songs have been released to play them live. It’s a bit different. In the past, we’ve played some songs for a couple of years before recording them. With this, we’re letting people check them out and listen before we take them into the live settings. We’re just trying something new and seeing how it goes.
String Cheese have written in a variety of ways during the years. You’ve each brought in individual ideas and fleshed them out as a group, reworked solo material for the band setting, worked with outside writers and collaborated as a unit. How did these songwriting sessions compare with the way you wrote for previous albums?
In the past, most of the tunes were written by individual members of the band then brought in, and we would arrange and maybe add to them through the group process. But when we go out to these different places for a week or so and get into these writing sessions, there’s more group collaboration. We might come up with an idea for a type of a song and come up with a progression and just starting playing it. Different people will come out with ideas for melodies and, later in the day, people will break off and go write some lyrics. Sometimes different configurations of the band might have different ideas and work on them—it doesn’t have to be all six people at a time. Maybe Mike and Kyle will sit down and work on an instrumental hook for a tune, or Jason and Trav will work on a drum part or a percussion part. So there’s a lot of different ways that it can go. An amazing amount of material has surfaced during these sessions.
The first time we did one of these retreats was two years ago, and last year we did another, and then we decided to make it an every-year thing. We’ll block out some time on the schedule so we can go take a trip and get away from everything—the normal day to day things that happen at home—and go to some place where we can totally submerge into the music.
I want to say these are musical retreats, but that sounds a little like going to bible camp. [Laughs.] We’ve been very productive with these trips, but we may also pick a day where we just say, “Fuck it. We’re gonna go for a hike today,” and find some place up on a mountain or out in the desert and then come back and have a little dinner, play some more music. It’s good creative atmosphere, and we like it a lot.
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In certain ways, your new approach sounds like a reaction to Song In My Head, which sounded very cohesive but also grew out of some songwriting sessions that took place during String Cheese’s hiatus, when you were writing for a variety of solo projects. The band has always covered a wide spectrum of sounds and has continued to bring new styles into its DNA as the group has evolved. When we last spoke, shortly after you started touring full-time again in 2016, the band has started to incorporate a variety of new African and Bollywood influences. Are there any specific genres you hope to add to the String Cheese palette?
We don’t want to stagnate and also don’t want to say that something isn’t a “String Cheese song” because it doesn’t adhere to a certain sound. We are trying not to limit what the String Cheese sound is and also hopefully continuing to evolve and be interesting for us and listeners—one this is that I have been playing a little more electric guitar on these songs.
It’s something that, like I said, we’re just starting to get into, and the potential there is really great—to really hone in, but at the same time feel we can explore different ideas. We can write a ska song, or I can write a country or bluegrass song and, because of Sound Lab, we have a place where I could go, “You know what? Maybe I won’t sing this song,” or maybe I can even give it to a different band who I know can really lay into this style of music and bring in some people and create a song that is very un-String-Cheese. But it’s still a song that’s created from one or more of the String Cheese minds.
We could also create a song for String Cheese and not do it in the normal, straightforward String Cheese way. We can look at the personality of the song and let it dictate a very different direction and make it totally electronic. We are trying not to limit ourselves and to continue to put out great music. The worse thing is to say, “Oh, that sound won’t work for us—this is what our sound is and we don’t want to change it and to accommodate this song.”
You mentioned that Jerry Harrison, whose Talking Heads songbook you have covered for years, has been working with the band in the studio. This is the first time String Cheese has worked with an outside producer for two albums in a row. What about his production approach worked so well last time around?
I really liked the way that he really represented us on Song in My Head. He didn’t try to change the band’s sound and reinvent. He just did a good job at letting the best music come to the surface on that album. So we worked with him again on a lot of these tunes that are coming out of the Sound Lab. We do hope to work with different producers on different material that comes out of the Lab so that the different style can be fully fleshed-out, depending on the different types of music we create out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever find that one production partner for our careers, but we’ve been enjoying working with Jerry Harrison so far.
Shifting from songwriting and recording to the live show, let’s talk about your current summer tour that will wrap-up in Brooklyn this weekend. You’ve played with a number of guests from a number of different genres, including some big hometown shows at Red Rocks with Hot Rize and Kamasi Washington.
Red Rocks was super enjoyable this year. It just blew my mind. We’ve played Red Rocks 36 times, and I think it has really taken 36 shows to get the vibe of that place and feel good and comfortable and ready to rip there. This year had some incredible moments—Kamasi was excellent. It was good to meet him and play some music with him. He’s taking off like a rocket but was super, super nice. From the first note he played on stage with us, he got the vibe of the band and everything. We also enjoyed having the rest of his band up there, too. And we then played a few tunes with our friends Hot Rize. That’s always fun, because that’s more going back to the roots of how the band started. We used to cover a couple of their tunes back when we first became a band.
The thing that blew me away on Saturday night was that, after the show was over, the seats were still full in the amphitheater, and the lights went on and our sound man put on Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” Nobody left—they just kept dancing to this song and singing along. It was one of the most awesome moments that I’ve ever had playing music, and I wasn’t even playing. I was just standing at the side of the stage watching these people dancing like they had the time of their lives and nobody wanted to leave. Everybody was dancing together—it brought me to tears watching all these people. I felt like the band was just a big part of the setting. The vibe and the degree to which they were enjoying the night blew my mind.
It’s been almost 10 years since String Cheese Incident went on hiatus and, during the past three years, the band has toured more than it has in a decade. Do you feel that you have all found a proper balance between your group work, solo projects and family priorities?
I feel like we’re having a resurgence in the band and the amount of time that we’re spending on String Cheese, now that we’re recording and having these musical retreats. The public sees us play our 40 shows or whatever we do a year, but what they’re not seeing is that we’re spending probably another 40 days or another few weeks every year rehearsing. We’re spending another two weeks a year going on trips and writing. We’re spending another month a year in the recording studio. So the amount of time that we’re playing music together has really ramped up during the last few years. We still have the time for family—we still have that balance there—but I’ve weighed down how many side projects I’ve been playing in, because the commitment to String Cheese is starting to ramp up again. I usually play a lot of side projects. We’re feeling it. We feel revitalized and enjoying playing music live and in the studio right now, so it’s been good for us.
This weekend you were supposed to be part of The Gregg Allman Incident at Peach Festival. Like your similar collaborations with Zac Brown, Lauryn Hill, Keller Williams and others, String Cheese were set to back Gregg on a set of his songs, as well as Allman Brothers classics. Unfortunately, that show was called off after Gregg cancelled his upcoming dates due to health reasons. Can you talk a little bit about how that collaboration initially came about and how you plan to celebrate his music at Peach?
Well, I’ve been an Allman Brothers fan since I was in high school. I love their music and was super stoked to play with Gregg, as was the rest of the band, and I’ve been working out setlists with Scott Sharrard, the guitarist from the Gregg Allman Band. It was tough to hear that he had to cancel for health reasons. We’re all hoping that he’s back on track soon. So we’ve been working on these tunes and, even though Gregg can’t play, we’re going to continue to go with an Allman Incident. Now, it’s going to be the “Allman Brothers Family Incident.” [Laughs.]
Of course, as soon as people heard that Gregg was sick and unable to play the show, everybody rallied. All these musicians playing the festival, especially Les Brers, are going to be part of Allman Brothers Family Incident. [Ed. Note: Allman Brothers Band/Les Brers members Butch Trucks, Jaimoe, Marc Quiñones and Oteil Burbridge along with Scott Sharrard and Les Brers keyboardist/longtime Allman family member Bruce Katz will join String Cheese during their Allman Brothers Incident.] So we’re staying on target right now. When I hang up with you, I’m going over to the Sound Lab and we’re going to play some Allman Brothers tunes. It’s a lot of fun. I love this music, and I’m looking forward to Peach Fest.
