I’m sitting here at the Stoughton Opera House with Paul Hoffman of Greensky Bluegrass, Thursday February 26th, 2015, 90 minutes before the quintet hits the stage.
I wanted to start off by discussing your new album, If Sorrows Swim. The album released last September, in my opinion, has a central theme. The theme that kept arising for me was that of facing fears, dealing with suffering and loss, and presence in our daily lives’. How would you say that theme relates to where GSBG is now as a band, 15 years later?
“I noticed the same theme as well. It’s funny after titling the album, I noticed the theme throughout other tunes, besides the one it was drawn from. For example, ‘Leap Year’, could very easily have been lended to that title just as well. There’s the comment of the ‘river of sadness like whiskey’, and being ‘afraid of living without the sorrow’. I think that I write about that thing a lot, like fear and responsibility, ‘Handguns’ was sort of the same way. The whole idea of the ‘Handguns’ metaphor is that the handgun is a symbol of power and responsibility and therefore without love, it would make less mistakes. I think that I tend to write about that a lot because I feel like it’s more, it’s like a human issue that can relate to many things. I think the longer it lasted the more it related to what we were doing as a band. It was about being afraid of throwing my life into this one basket of playing music and to suddenly wake up 8 years later or and to realize that we’ve gotten nowhere and ‘now what?’. For me a lot of those emotions translate to the way I write. You know for a lot of people it could mean many different things. It could be relationship fear. It could be fear of a loved one dying, or whatever. It’s harder for me to write from the other perspective, maybe being grateful for something, or happy about something, because it just feels more cliché or used or something. I have a hard time with that imagery. It’s sort of an unintentional thing, but it does, as you say, sort of transcend throughout the whole record, and a lot of the tunes have similar imagery that gets touched upon, it works well. I’m happy with the way it came out.
In my personal opinion, that being of a long time GSBG fan, is that the progression of your live performances in the last few years I feel, hasn’t really hit a plateau or regressed in any way. It seems with every tour you guys seem to break new ground, and sound fresh and new, which in my opinion is what makes a good live band. A band that when you hear their sound, you know who it is, almost creating their own genre or brand of music with every tour. How do you guys continue to keep evolving, without subconsciously becoming creatively stagnant?
“I know what you mean. We challenge ourselves; I think that’s important. And something that’s real important to our band and the way we make music is that we’re all fans of music that sort of transcends the capability of our instruments, and what a 5-piece Bluegrass quintet can do with no drums, keys or synthesizers and such. So we still are trying to grab onto ideas that we have not yet been able to achieve. And I think that happens when we make records. A lot of the time, when I am writing new songs, I’m thinking about ‘what have we not done yet?’. I know that I am formulaic, I know that I have a sound, I know that I have a style and if you put a lot of my songs right next to each other there is going to be a lot of similar tricks, a lot of similar word choice, melodies. But I try to be real conscience of ‘what have we not done?’ Like on this last record, If Sorrows Swim, with ‘Windshield’ it’s like a real ‘four on the floor’, ‘dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun’. It’s so simple but for years we’ve been going, ‘chun, chun, chun, chun’, the exact opposite, so it’s like, well, let’s do this. You know I’m at an Arcade Fire show, like 3 or 4 years ago, 2011 maybe, at Bonnaroo, and everyone in the crowd is singing along to all the whoa whoas, and all the choral arrangements that they have in their tunes and I’m like ‘this is so cool’. Just a different type of band, they’re not up there jamming, and they’re not up there taking guitar solos but the crowd is really energetic and into the songs, and there are sing-along parts, and I’m like ‘I wanna write like that’. So I see those kind of things, then challenge myself to do things that we haven’t done yet. And I think that is how we manage to keep fresh. We try to maybe learn songs that are hard for us to play, intentionally. Sometimes we’ll work on a song for a month, during sound checks, and we will never play it because we don’t think we could pull it off right. But we learn something from it, ya know? We know how to play Bluegrass, but there is only so much you can do with that one little thing. As many different fusions we can bring in, like ‘let’s play Motown horn lines instead of banjo licks’ and see what happens. We always want to keep it interesting for us.
What records or artists are you currently into that fans may not expect and how do they affect your playing and writing, anything you wanna throw at me. For example, I love the Lorde album and I’m not afraid to admit it, because it’s damn good.
I’m a good person for this question because I kind of get off things people wouldn’t expect me to listen to. People would expect me to listen to Rayland Baxter, his songs and music are amazing, Jason Isbell’s albums are amazing. So stuff like that you would expect, but I love all music. I just did this playlist for this thing the other day and for example I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s record a lot, I like it, I’m not afraid to admit it. I like the electronica, pop sort of thing. There is a lot learned from that. When you are making an album or writing a song, there is a lot that matters. When Jason is making a record, what I love about it is his lyrics, his passion is so sincere, and real, and his craft is so close to his heart. And when you are listening to this Taylor Swift record, ya know, there are some cliché rhymes, all the lyrics are exactly what you’d expect them to be, and you’re not going to get blown away by that, but there is something really aesthetically pleasing about a really produced hook that is catchy, and it helps me not be afraid to write that catchy hook. And to be able to step away from that and to be like ‘that’s not the most creative thing I ever did, but it’s very musically and aesthetically pleasing, even though it’s the exact melody you would expect, but for some reason every time I sing it, you wanna hear it again and again. I wanna be able to write words that matter, but I don’t wanna be afraid to use ‘hooks’ that are aesthetically pleasing for some sort of pop culture reason. I don’t think we will go make a record that is super produced like a Taylor Swift or Passsion Pit record, but I don’t wanna be so lost in the songwriting and in the acoustic nature of our music that we forget to consider what that other sort of thing could bring to the picture. So some sort of balance between all those things is really important to me. I love rap music, I love Outkast, so I’m all over the place. The thing you’ll rarely hear me listening to is Bluegrass, music with Banjos and mandolins in it.
“Tonight should be an interesting show, a balance between the sit-down, listening crowd and our crowd who wants to get rowdy. but we definitely aren’t going to hold anything back…….”
Due to the interview, I was only able to check out a few songs from Rayland Baxter, from Nashville, performing with his full band. I was very impressed with his music and look forward to listening to him again in the future. The Greensky Bluegrass show without a doubt exceeded my high expectations and I was not left disappointed in the least. One of the main highlights of the show for me was hearing all the new songs I’ve never seen live before; The Four, Demons, Worried About the Weather, Leap Year, and In Control. Also an emotional and intense “All Four” to close out the first set and an almost 20 minute “When Doves Cry”, that was so smokin’ it set the fire alarms off in the Opera House. It could have been all the haze from the stage, but I prefer to believe the former. “Leap Year” and “Can’t Stop Now” were also major highlights that helped put together one of the best shows I’ve seen in several years from without a doubt, one of the best bands on the road in 2015.
Greensky Bluegrass- Stoughton Opera House Stoughton, WI February 26th, 2015
Set One: 60:33 – The Four, Radio Blues, Working On A Building, Elephant, Lose My Way, Demons, Crying Holy To The Lord, Blood Sucking F(r)iends, All Four
Set Two: 86:27 – Worried About The Weather, Old Barns, Leap Year, Cold Feet > In Control, Cant’ Stop Now, Into The Rafters, Jaywalkin’, When Doves Cry, (Front Of Stage Acoustic) How Mountain Girls Can Live, Sitting on Top of the World