“Tell all your friends/all of your friends/you’re livin’ better than them/you live by the ocean/you live in the land of the Grateful Dead/why, oh why, wouldn’t anyone want to live by the ocean?/why, oh why, wouldn’t anyone want to leave the Midwest?”

So sing Yonder Mountain String Band in glorious four-part harmony on the loping “Leave the Midwest,” a standout track from Nowhere Next, the LP that finds fiddler Colman Smith making his first appearance on a YMSB album and Dobro master Jerry Douglas sliding around on a few tracks. 

Coleman joins Yonder co-founders, guitarist Adam Aijala, banjoist Dave Johnston and bassist Ben Kaufmann, along with 2020 recruit and multi-instrumentalist Nick Piccininni for 11 tracks of laser-focused musicality and playful lyrics that occasionally flirting with novelty status, particularly on half-sung, half-spoken barnburners such as “Didn’t Go Wrong” with its tongue-twisting wordplay and the title track, a tour diary in song. 

Lyrical shenanigans aside, it’s the high-quality bluegrass music that sells Nowhere Next. And the album seems to foreshadow a successful run for Yonder 4.0, should this new lineup stay intact for a while.