In late April Yonder Mountain String Band stunned fans with the announcement that Jeff Austin would be leaving the group. Yonder had kept its original lineup intact for 15 years and the departure of the quartet’s founding mandolin player caused consternation for the band’s many supporters. As Ben Kaufmann and Dave Johnston reveal in the candid discussion that follows, the decision to move forward and begin a new era (along with guitarist Adam Aijala) was not taken lightly and followed many years of consideration and some measure of angst. However they now appear sanguine about the future of Yonder and what the coming months will offer.
Kaufmann begins the dialogue, while Johnson jumps in a bit later, caught up in practicing his banjo.
BK: To start things out, let me say that for Yonder 2014 is now a time of rediscovery and reconnection almost like I’m going back to my early teens when I would come home from school and I would retreat to my music room because music was the only place in my life that I found safety. I grew up without any religion, I never had a conversation about spirituality and what that means versus religion. But as I’ve gotten older music is the only connection I’ve ever had that I’ve internalized that could even be close to being described as divine. Music is the only thing I’ve ever had that has brought me a sense of connection to something bigger. The most powerful, pure and for lack of a better word divine experiences in my life have all been music-related.
My father was a musician and he gave me the gift of music from an early age. I’m raising my boy like that too—music is the second language that I have to teach him. Four years of Latin in high school doesn’t really cut it. I teach him music and sharing that is something very sacred to me.
That is something that I can share and that is something that was shared with me and with these changes in Yonder, that’s the thing I’ve realized: over the course of the last 16 years while it was extremely exciting and we achieved no end of firsts for a bluegrass band, as it went along the sacredness of the experience became less and less and less. The success became greater and greater but by the end the sacredness was lost.
What do you attribute to that?
BK: On the one hand the very normal stresses of being on the road and all of the normal things that any band would talk about. But for me it also seemed like the heart of the whole thing had become compromised.
When Yonder first came out of the gates, it just connected and went big really quickly. We hit it at the right time and it seemed like everything just started to grow and grow and grow right away. So while the first couple of years were lean years, every time we went back to a place there were more people, every time we went back to a place people were more excited about us and that’s great. But within the band there were clearly different motivations. What gets you off? And for me the thing got me off was not that the crowds were bigger or that people cheered louder, it was always about sharing.
While there is tremendous joy and magic in it, life is hard and I write music and play music because I’m trying so desperately to make sense of all of this craziness that I see and the joys and the sorrows and the whole experience. Music is the way that in three and half minutes with some rhyming words, I can share my experience—these are the things that I’m thinking about and this is what I’m trying to make sense of. A song is a great question that you put out—this is how I’m feeling, is anybody else feeling this too?
What I need out of it is to have that purity and when I felt that going away, it was compromising my connection to something divine and began to sort of darken my soul. I’m still learning about my place in the universe and what I’m even doing here but I felt the darkening and the contraction and as I watched it continue I realized that it would be the worst failure for me because music is going to be how I figure this thing out—that’s what I have and it has to be bigger and it has to mean more than simply are there more people here in Atlanta than there were the last time we played Atlanta. It has to be more than the business and that was a very powerful realization to come to all of a sudden and recently. I finally made peace with myself that it is about more than success—it’s more than how many people are in the audience, it’s more than if somebody cares to write something nice about you in a magazine. It’s way more personal than that and to watch it sort of become corrupted for me was something that I couldn’t live with anymore.
If I were reading what you just said without any additional information, I likely would assume, “Well this must be a quote from the guy who is leaving the band.”
BK: I don’t think the way things were ending up was good for anyone. I mean you can boil it down to the cookie cutter promotional thing that you’ve got to point out, saying “After a long discussion we all decided to move along for creative differences” and yeah that’s true. But it’s so much deeper than that. I mean you get two paragraphs to put up online to say that what’s happening and kind of why but we just started talking about deep, personal, spiritual stuff and you can’t put that into two paragraphs and have it be anywhere close to really expressing what my heart is trying to say.
We got to a place where we were not achieving our highest good—not even close. It’s like sex without love, it can be enjoyable but at the end of the day it’s not going to be the true satisfaction that you need. I’m a sensitive artist. I’ve always been overly sensitive, I feel like I walk around with my heart exposed and I don’t want to change that at all, that’s my power. And so when we get to this place and ask the hard question—there are so many reasons why I could tough it out, there are so many reasons why I could say, “You know what, let’s just give it another tour, another year or whatever.” But then we’re old and tired—the heart of the thing isn’t in it and as a sensitive artistic person that just sounds like the death of art and I can’t have it die.
It became a situation that simply couldn’t continue. The four of us had this great conversation and we actually put all the cards on the table—we’ve reached this point and now it’s time to get down to brass tacks, how do we all feel about this, is anybody happy? And nobody was happy. There’s an element of tragedy in this thing and I’ve been thinking, “What do I want to share here? What’s okay to share and what’s too personal to share?” Because I want to be respectful but as I thought about it I did want to share this because I think it explains where I’ve been coming from for the last 10 years with this band.
Was there a precipitating incident that you can talk about?
BK: No, not in the short term. The heart and the balls of this band are coming from some place pure—experimental, improvisational, in the moment creation. That requires an extraordinary amount of faith and trust in each other. You all have to be on the same page and over time it just became clear that we weren’t. We were in it for different reasons, wanting different things out of it and I felt like there was a terrible compromise. I thought I could continue to sacrifice certain elements of my own peace and of my own joy so that we could continue because I can make you the list of pros and cons and number one thing at the end of the day on the list for why we should keep it together was the paycheck and what a stupid career decision it could possibly be to blow this thing up. And that’s okay, it’s legitimate but like I said I am a sensitive artist and it was way too sacred and way too important to me to let a paycheck or fame or some grasping at a weird thing like that overrule something that is just so much more important and vital to my world. I can die poor but if I’ve been true to my heart and music and how just intertwined those two things are, it became more and more and more clear.
Maybe when we’re all 65 or 70 and nobody gives a shit about us anymore we can all write four versions of our tell-all-book about the bullshit that went on but when you boil it all down you get to a point where you just sit there and you go, “Oh my god it’s not working.” How do two parents know that, “Yeah we’ve got these kids and we’ve been sticking it out for the kids but it’s time.” It’s not good for anybody, everybody’s suffering. You know at some point you’ve got to make a hard decision and you make those lists—why should I stick it out? And you go down the list and you tally it all up and all of the things on the sticking it out side of the list at the end of the day they were bunk. It didn’t work for me anymore, something had to change. I felt myself suffocating and suffering in a way that as a sensitive artistic person was killing me and I can’t have that.
It just affected every aspect of my life—my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kid. My kid is two years and a couple months old and I realized if I was answering honestly, my son had never known his daddy to be doing what he loved to do, which is odd because music is what I love to do. Music is so much a part of me—I would say I’m almost half music and the other half I’m fat and bones. But I’d come home from tour like I’d just been to the fucking front line and it would take me two weeks to become even remotely okay and then I’d have a week at home where I sort of felt okay and I could connect with my wife and be cool around my son and then I’d have another week that was the week before I’d have to go back out on tour and that was spent in a state of terrible anxiety and just darkness because the environment was so toxic. So and talk about failing as a father and a husband…
But all of this still sort of begs the question to my mind, which is in terms of the direction that you now see the band headed, does this address all of those concerns? Do you feel that wherever the band is headed creatively will remedy everything that you’ve just expressed?
BK: I don’t know. All of the things I’ve been talking about are really personal work, these are the personal sort of things that were exposed and this just happened. I mean we’re really close to ground zero but what it did do was put the magnifying glass over what’s really important to me. And beyond important, what’s vital to me is being able to live a life of feeling full and rewarded in the ways that are truly important. I know that we’ve got a way better chance now of having that come into alignment than we did. Will I be able to achieve this super high place that I’m talking about? Yeah I hope so, that’s my intention but now it’s sort of like reconnecting with the energy that will make that manifest and that energy had been lost, my connection to it had been being lost over a period of years.
And so this dovetails back into what 2014 is for Yonder and in my opinion it’s a time when we gather together friends. We’ve got myself, Dave and Adam in the band and now we get to bring in all these other different musicians to make music together—to play, to have fun, to jam, to write, to sing, to record and the whole purpose of it for me is rediscovering how I can connect to music when music is joyful and that’s what it has to be. I think that if I didn’t believe that it was possible and if I didn’t believe that all the building blocks were there then Yonder would have simply just broken up. I think we’re in a better position to achieve that than we were two months ago without a doubt.
Dave Johnston had joined in during Kaufmann’s previous response
DJ: I think what Ben is expressing and kind of what I feel like too is that collaboration and camaraderie between people is why we are traveling, that is why we go where we go. One of Yonder Mountain’s strong suits is that we evoke a very real sense of camaraderie and it’s entirely genuine and between the four of us I think it began as genuine but I think that sense of camaraderie and collaboration can breed a sort of power or self-importance and people get swept up in that. I wouldn’t point fingers necessarily, I mean who wouldn’t get swept up in that thing where we can create this stuff pretty much by the seat of our pants. It is a very powerful thing.
I don’t know if you’ve read Jules Verne and I haven’t read Jules Verne in a long time but being on a tour bus is sort of like being in the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. I believe he described it as the “traveling eye”—you see all these different things outside of where you live but you always return to the same room [Laughs]. So it takes on a sort of no exit quality—you can leave but you can’t really ever leave. I think the psychology of those locations and junctions starts to wear down on the camaraderie and it starts to wear down on the collaborative effort and suddenly the four of you, who used to be each other’s most important audience members are less important. So you want to make sure that the band loves playing with each other and that’s an important part of it and maybe that got lost in the shuffle.
Jeff was always such a physical, demonstrative presence on stage. Have you considered whether you might present yourselves differently in his absence? I know you did some dates without him earlier in the year [while Austin welcomed the birth of a child].
BK: When we went out in January it was the first time that Yonder had performed without Jeff. We’d had experiences where Dave had missed some shows, Adam missed some shows when his wife was ill, I missed some shows when my father passed away and when my son was born, so we’ve all had experiences of what it felt like to be in the band and playing as Yonder when one of us wasn’t there. But January was the first time we had the experience of what is it going to be like when Jeff is not there. Over the course of the decade and a half that Yonder has been around, Jeff increasingly became a focal point. That’s a very natural part of who he is, how he expresses himself and what he needs out of the experience of performing. I think he very much enjoys being a center of attention and he is the way he is because that’s how he gets out of the experience what he needs.
It was a point of anxiety for me because I felt that in Jeff’s absence it fell to me to be not the front man but certainly the guy who steps up to the microphone and greets the audience and has the banter in between the songs and that was going to be a new responsibility for me. And then I realized in thinking about how to approach it that Jeff is so unique I couldn’t just go apples for apples—I couldn’t affect some jumping around flamboyant persona, that’s not who I am. I realized I had to approach it in my own way and then I realized that for the last decade it felt like there had been less and less space for any of the other three of us to really discover who we were if given the chance to step up to the mic and mc the show or lead the show. I had no idea and then I realized that the reason I had no idea was because there was no room or space given for that to happen.
So it was a learning process and I had a fair amount of anxiety going into that January tour simply because as is the case for me, if there is something new that I’m about to do and I have no prior experience, I get anxious about it. I’m a worrier and that lasted until we took the stage for the first time and I was able to be myself—I was able to be heart-centered and gracious and appreciative. Not jumping around, though—on the one hand I’m tethered around a large instrument that’s got its own foot on the ground but that’s also not my style. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to play the thing slow. I like to believe I’ve got a good sense of humor but it’s not flamboyant and you would be able to sniff out as false if I started to behave that way, you would know that’s a bunch of bullshit. On the one hand you have to do the Michael Franti thing: “Hey, how you feeling?” that gets everybody to cheer. But there’s more for me and I intend to express something about this deeper connection with music that I have, share a little bit about that because it is just so powerful but it continues to be a learning experience.
I do not think I’m ever going to be a guy jumping around gesticulating and making crazy rock n’ roll faces—that’s not me and I’m not going to do something that isn’t authentic. On the other hand that January tour was the most fun I’ve had playing music in my life and I’m obviously discounting the high school party where I got to play in some band and got laid for the first time. But it was the most enjoyable, connected pure musical experience I’ve ever had and that was the information that I needed.
It’s sort of like this feeling that the universe presents these opportunities you need to have. You might be scared of them and you may not want them, you may not think you want them, they may make you nervous but I needed that experience to realize there is another way. I’ve been thinking about some of the things I wanted to share and how personal I wanted to get but maybe it is a good time to share this…
The inner dynamics of Yonder have never been easy. It’s always been slightly combative and I’ve always found it to be very challenging. The interpersonal dynamic element of it has been the hardest part for me.
A little bit more about 10 years ago my father passed away and he gave me the gift of music from a very early age. He gave me the language of music, an ear for music and a love for music. My mom might argue but I think my father was my biggest fan—he certainly loved Yonder Mountain and he told me pretty much from the very beginning how special he thought it was. And when he would speak to me about that stuff I really listened. He was in no small way a guide for me. I looked to him to answer questions.
When we found out he was sick, the doctors were spot on, they said he had a month. For the last week he became paralyzed and he couldn’t talk but for a lot of terminally ill people, their body shuts down and it looks like they’re on their way out but they come back in the last couple of days. They come back really strong. We hadn’t been able to speak for a week but the last couple of days before he died he was able to speak and basically the second to last thing he ever said to me was, “You got to keep the band together. You don’t know how special it is and you have to keep the band together,” and then he died. And that’s heavy.
Well that was 10 years ago and every day certainly any time things got so bad where I went, “This can’t continue,” the words of a ghost echoed through my head and I just heard him say, “You got to keep it together, you have to.” Well as time passed I would hear his voice in my head and answer it, “Dad, this can’t be what you meant.” Things got so painful where I thought if I could only speak to him again I would ask, “Are you sure this is what you meant? Is this really what I have to do?”
It was the tour in January where I finally made peace and knowing the joy I felt that month playing music—I know he would not have meant to keep sticking it out, keep going, keep fighting for something that I finally concluded was an illusion. Whatever that thing was that he identified, keeping that thing going came at too great a cost. I think if he had been alive the last year and I could have shared with him the full truth of what was going on, I think he would have told me, “My god Ben, please do what you have to do for the sake of your soul and your happiness.” I think that maybe he was trying to express something when he didn’t really have the words or the strength. He had a couple sentences worth of strength but really that’s a much, much bigger conversation. And so for 10 years I did everything that I could and fought with myself to just keep the thing together, sometimes through tough love—“Suck it up and look at all this good stuff you got going. Look at this success, tough it out, shut up and just keep going.”
But it was killing me. It was killing everything good about me. And I just realized after that January tour it couldn’t have been what he meant. He was speaking 10 years in the past. It was a different time then and if I could have spoken to him a month ago I’m sure he would have said something different. But for 10 years I’ve been haunted by that and I only just sort of got over it or reached a different conclusion. It was a very powerful moment in my life.
That’s obviously a profound and personal experience…Given all that, headed into those January dates when Jeff couldn’t appear, did the three of you anticipate that this might be where the band was ultimately headed or did that happen after the fact?
BK: I didn’t think that at all. That thought wasn’t anywhere in my experience.
DJ: I can say too that I had not anticipated our current state based on what we were going into in January.
BK: If anything I thought that that experience would maybe bring us back in a way that produced a reconnection. I guess that’s probably what I thought—that it would be a very, very good thing and would probably lead us to connect again in a way that was better, that we would all realize, “My goodness look at this special awesome thing and maybe we can all really buckle down and start doing the work necessary to keep putting new, fresh energy into this thing and ride the ride for another 15 years.” But that didn’t happen and I think for me because of the magic of that January tour, to have the next tour happen and have everything sort of just be back exactly like it was prior to it by comparison, it just hit that much harder and that was when it started to become very clear that something had to change.
Moving forward, in looking at the guests you’ve announced, it seems to me that you don’t necessarily feel that Yonder Mountain String Band needs to be a four piece. Is that assumption correct and if so, to what extent do you feel that a mandolin has to be part of the equation?
DJ: We haven’t like set anything in stone, we haven’t taken any options off the table. We could be a five piece band, we could be an orchestra [laughs]. I think the real important thing at the heart of it is the way that Adam, Ben and I relate to the world and the way we relate to our lives making music together. So it’s definitely going to be the three of us and, you know, I love playing in a five piece, I love playing in a four piece, I love playing in a three piece except I only think a few people have seen the Yonder Mountain Trio. So I don’t know, we have nothing set in stone about it.
But I think that when you go into the next phase, when you go into it with an open mind and an open heart, it kind of clears your listening up a little bit and you can really listen for the thing that’s going to maintain the engine fired. We’re going to find the right octane to our gasoline that’s going to keep burning us down the road. It’s super exciting, it’s kind of like I just got this really great book and I’ve heard all about it and I can’t wait to start reading it.
BK: If I might interject here, speaking as the bass player, unless we’re talking about having a new member being a drummer, then in my opinion having a mandolin in the band is absolutely essential. In a bluegrass band the bass and the mandolin are two halves of a whole. The bass and the mandolin are the drummer—you’ve got the bass doing the bass drum and the mandolin is the snare drum and they both work together in a complementary way to produce a drive or a bedrock of music that’s crucial. So I anticipate that a mandolinist is a very needed element to the sound.
I have been kicking around the idea of “Wouldn’t it be cool to turn it into a five piece?” There’s also been part of me that’s been kicking around the idea of “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a female in the band?” in terms of bringing some sort of new energy, maybe even something that feels more complete or more whole, to strike a balance in that way. I’m pretty confident that I would like to have a mandolin player in anything that we put together but in terms of a 5th member or who the mandolin player is or maybe they play mandolin and dobro and kazoo, I can’t be too focused in a fine way right now. I have to have a wide sort of view because otherwise we may miss the person walking right next to us who is the perfect answer, the perfect complement to what we are doing. I think that sums up 2014 for me—a wide open experience playing with as many people as we can, playing with friends, making new friends, playing with people whose own ability calls to us, people we’re excited about, people we want to get to know more—seeing what feels right because that’s the thing, music especially for us doesn’t have to look a certain way but it does have to feel a certain way and that’s something you only know when you experience it.
So that’s 2014 and speaking personally by 2015 I like the idea of having a permanent lineup whether that’s four people or five people or whatever because then you can really start to tighten it up. As an improvisational outfit, a lot of the jamming is instinct but a lot of it is by logging miles together, playing gig after gig with each other, you learn how to anticipate, you learn how to get inside each other’s heads, you learn how to complement or set something up and you need to log those miles together in order to really have that thing dialed in.
Was your decision to enter the studio in May a product of these changes?
DJ: We were kind of hoping to get into the studio anyway this year. It seems like there’s a lot of music that’s coming out, it seems like there’s a little family of tunes that has popped up either that have been finished and played a little bit or are about to be finished. I guess that was our intention—to have time on the books in the studio and just get in there and be in that framework and in that moment. It’s hard for me to have any specific expectations other than we have some really good, kind-of-interrelated songs that I’m willing to explore with these two guys and I’m really pumped to just get in there and make a record.
We’ve spent so much time traveling and we’ve spent so much time in the energetic exchange of the live performance that I think it’s really fun to get together with these guys and write, edit and participate in that way. I believe that on stage the interactions that we’ve had in the past and in the future are all basically writing in the moment. That’s what we do and we have our particular framework for how we are going to do that on stage but in the studio the frameworks are different. I think it will be really good for our musical discipline and our performance discipline to be in the studio again and I think that was mainly what we were driving at before these changes came about is we just need to get in the studio and turn on the dial, fire up the machines and see what we come up with. In that spirit we’re just going to try to maintain that schedule.
I feel like it had been our intention either way. It’s been a while since we put out a full-length record but that’s just me.
BK: I think you’re right Dave, it is absolutely time to get back into the studio We’d been talking about being in the studio since the beginning of the year. It wasn’t on the books in January but we were holding the space and put down the deposit. The thing about Yonder, at least one of the things that’s happened, is we regularly have new songs but we are rarely in the studio. So what that means is you get something new and you play it and then you play it live and then you play it again live and by the time you actually get into the studio again all the new songs you’ve had become old veteran tunes, live tunes and there is a certain excitement about having new material in the studio that nobody knows.
When we parted ways with Jeff we had some new questions: “How are we going to use this time? Are we just going to go in as a three piece? Are we going to bring in other musicians? Are we just going to lay down basic tracks? Are we going to go in and do something maybe more experimental?”
Well we are going to have a fourth musician come in and record with us in the studio—Jake Jolliff, who was the mandolin player in Joy Kills Sorrow, I guess they’ve taken a hiatus. We got turned on to Jake through some mutual friends. As soon as the news came out that we were parting ways with Jeff, my phone started to blow up and half of those messages were from fans going, “Call me please, what the hell is going on?” And the other half were from musician friends, who were just throwing out suggestions as to who might be cool to get to know and play some music with and Jake’s name came up a lot. For me, I like to pay attention to these coincidences and we happen to know Jake’s manager really well, so we were able to make a connection and speak on the phone a little bit.
So we are going to bring in this new player who is really an extraordinary musician. It’s sort of a jaw-dropping thing for me to see some of his stuff online. There’s a brilliance to what he does and that’s really exciting in and of itself. But the thing I’m really excited about is that while he’s been on site at the same festivals as Yonder, he’s never really heard Yonder. So we’re going to have this experience with this guy coming in with no preconceived idea of what he thinks that we think we need him to do. There’s going to be a pure, creative experience happening and that was something I didn’t anticipate. I thought we would be going in with people we either jammed with before or who were either passingly familiar or intimately familiar with Yonder Mountain and what they think it is. I’m so happy that that’s not the case because it means that we may actually be gearing up to make something really cool and that’s what I need right now—I need that new stuff, I need this new input.
We’re at a new beginning and now I really feel the need to start taking steps like this is the beginning of a new journey. I have a hard time expressing how excited I am that the situation is unfolding where we are going to be playing with somebody who is so extraordinary talented and yet has no preconception as to what he’s supposed to do. So we can all stand there next to each other and see how we play, see what it feels like and it will be something new and pure—that’s awesome.
