The Beauty and Pain of Greensky Bluegrass

By: Dennis Cook

Download a free “Handguns EP” here!

Greensky Bluegrass by Jamie VanBuhler

The second word in Greensky Bluegrass‘s name sets up an expectation that their far-ranging, open-ear music doesn’t conform to. Yes, there’s banjo and mandolin and no drummer, but this is modern music, relevant to today’s sensibilities, aware of tradition but utterly unbound by it. Put on Handguns (released October 4 on Big Blue Zoo Records) and immediately one hears a young band hitting on all cylinders, as together, confident and compelling as they come. A low, humming empathy informs their playing, not unlike Yonder but subtler, each solo over the album’s fourteen tracks right and tight, voices slicing through to the listener in stories that refract our workaday lives with understanding, clear-eyed truthfulness and no small measure of compassion. Where Greensky really has it over the competition is their songs, a steady growing catalog filled with wise, street smart, contemporary hymns for folks struggling to believe in anything at all.

Based in Michigan, Greensky Bluegrass consists of Anders Beck (dobro, lap steel), Michael Arlen Bont (banjo, vocals), Dave Bruzza (guitar, lead vocals), Mike Devol (acoustic bass, vocals), and Paul Hoffman (mandolin, lead vocals). Four studio albums in, the quintet has cemented what makes them unique, hitting that sweet spot where creativity flows like a crystal clear mountain spring. As fine as Hamdguns is – unquestionably a 2011 standout – there’s the sense we’re witnessing evolution in quick time with Greensky right now, a group blossoming into something way beyond their original roots in bluegrass and ready to take on all comers in the string band game.

Anders Beck by John Margaretten

“We are certainly not playing traditional bluegrass music, and that’s something I’m really proud of. It allows us to do whatever the hell we want,” says Beck. “Sure, the instruments are typical bluegrass instruments, but that’s really the only thing that grounds us to the bluegrass world. From there, we have no rules. We try to bring in our influences from all over the place and make the music that is us. It’s hard to put into words. We all have so many influences, from bluegrass to jam band to classical music to hip hop to rock ‘n’ roll. We’re not trying to make any one of those; we’re just a collaboration with five people with all those influences between them.”

The way Greensky plays together has an empathetic overlap. There are solos – and usually damn tasty ones – but the general mindset is more group-oriented.

“I would agree with that,” says Hoffman. “I think we play well as a chamber unit. Being in a drum-less band requires you to do a lot more. Not to say bands with drums can’t do it, but it’s easier to be lazy [with a drummer]. We’re constantly putting the focus on the texture of our music, what it feels like. Since we play a lot of things that are not bluegrass-y, we’re forced to think musically and not locally with our instruments, like what a mandolin is supposed to do in a bluegrass band. We’ve had a lot of experience at live shows doing things with our instruments you’re not supposed to, Michael Jackson tunes or whatever. And that comes back to our original music and shows us what we’re capable of as a chamber group. When we’re playing live and improvising, even when one guy is soloing, we’ve become really intuitive about what each of us will do musically and how to best move as a unit instead of just playing a solid groove under somebody’s solo.”

Paul Hoffman by Chris Monaghan

There is a tremendous amount of listening in Greensky Bluegrass. Unlike a lot of string players, there isn’t a monomaniacal focus on one’s own instrument, where a guy will comp serviceably as he bides his time until his next spotlight. With this band, ears seem constantly pricked up, ready to catch a hint of where the other fellas are going, each anxious to follow, accent and explore with palpable immediacy.

“In the past, we’ve been criticized for looking so serious onstage, but we’ve been working on it in the past year or two. It’s because we’re all listening really intently,” says Hoffman. “Showmanship is different in every band. Some have a real show and dance moves and they’re not as serious about their songs. Early on, we listened so intently that we sort of forgot we were performing and people were watching us [laughs]. We’ve gotten better about it, loosened up, and now we have a lot of fun onstage. We want the crowd to have a good time. We want them to like the songs and appreciate our musicianship when we solo, but the bottom line is they work hard and when they come to a show they deserve to put their life behind them and embrace what they really like. We want them to have fun and feel rewarded.”

New Album

So, with an album title like Handguns it makes one wonder are you gun guys?

“I’m not. It’s funny, we fired off a shotgun for one of the songs on the last record and now we have an album called Handguns. It’s just a good image for me as a writer, though I would like to own a handgun. I have shot one and they’re fun to shoot…if used for fun,” says Hoffman. “Interestingly enough, as we looked into the advertising campaign for the record, we investigated using Google Ads placement and you’re not allowed to use the word ‘handguns’. They don’t want you target marketing people. For example, I recently looked around the web for a new mattress and now anytime I’m on the web – Phantasy Tour or whatever – the sidebar advertisement is for mattresses. They know I want a mattress. Then, I thought about someone who thought about buying a handgun online once and then every time they were having a bad day and online a 9 mm would pop up in the scroll bar. It’s really interesting.”

“I guess I like guns. It’s bullets I’m more worried about [laughs],” says Beck. “We didn’t even realize [the album title] would be controversial. It was just about to come out and people told us it was edgy. Really? To us, it’s always just been a song not a national debate subject. That’s how locked into our music and worldview we are, where we don’t even know that handguns are an issue. It’s an edgy title? Oh shit, we just printed thousands of these things!”

Hoffman and Bruzza are the primary songwriters in Greensky, each a distinct voice yet harmonious together in the way the divergent perspectives in The Band once meshed.

Dave Bruzza by John Gatta

“Handguns was a long-time-coming album. I don’t write songs as fast as some bands we know and a lot of that is due to how much we play and how little I’m home. I sort of require a solitary environment and some time to write tunes. I like to experience a little boredom or something and sit down and pick up a guitar feeling that nothing needs me. I can just sit and explore, and sometimes they come to me quickly and sometimes they don’t,” says Hoffman. “The oldest song on the album is ‘All Four,’ and we started playing that live around January of ’09. I wrote it in the fall of ’08, so this album is a span of two and a half years of writing for me. There’s a lot of different subject matter and a lot of styles of writing. When I first started writing for this band, I couldn’t figure out how to make what I wanted to do work lyrically with bluegrass melodies. I just couldn’t go on about mountains or Blue Ridge or something [laughs]. Then, I just started being honest and writing songs I like.”

“I compose on guitar,” continues Hoffman,” and I can’t play bluegrass guitar that well. So, I play it in a more singer-songwriter way, and then bring it to the band that way. Then we approach it the way we do with any song, trying to see what works and how we can improve it. In some ways, writing doesn’t really begin until I involve them. I can’t play mandolin alone the way I do with them. It’s truly an ensemble process.”

Greensky Bluegrass by Jamie VanBuhler

“I’m a really big fan of the songwriters in this band, and it’s a big part of why I joined this band. I was late to the party after everyone else. I only joined four years ago, and anything I got involved with at that point had to have killer songwriting, which is one of the main things that captures my attention and keeps me interested and excited about a project,” says Beck. “You can be the best band in the world instrumentally but if the songs aren’t genuine and great then it’s not for me. In the bluegrass genre, it’s really easy to be cheesy, lyrically, and that’s one of the things I’m proud that we are NOT. Even the bluegrass tradition of using words like ‘lonesome’ doesn’t work for me. Are any of us really lonesome anymore like they were when they were wrote what became bluegrass standards? We’ll play ‘Sitting On Top of the World’ because it’s a good song, but we’re not going to write it again.”

“I really respect Paul and Dave’s lyricism as songwriters,” continues Beck. “It’s interesting how different it is to come at each of their tunes. Every time I approach a new song with them it’s always exciting. Having two really good songwriters makes it interesting for me and opens me up to two different spectrums.”

“The way Dave plays the guitar is so rhythmically driven and solid that I think I know what to expect from him when I write a tune. Then, when I bring it to the band Dave plays something totally different and I add this mandolin chop and it becomes this different thing. I’m like, ‘Wow, what happened here!?!’ Sometimes they go far from where I came from and sometimes it’s really similar,” says Hoffman. “Just as we’re really intuitive of each other when we improvise, the same goes for the songs. My favorite tune on [Handguns] is ‘Don’t Lie,’ which Anders and I wrote together. It was a two pieces of bread kind of tune. He had this hook he’d been playing forever and didn’t know what to do with it, and I’d written the first three verses of the song and didn’t know what to do with them. We were hanging out on one of those days where you do an early load and hang out all day, and I said, ‘Let’s put those songs together. Let’s make your hook the hook of my song.’ And it turned out so cool on the record. I was just shaking my head as we put it down. We sculpted that song into what we needed. I can’t believe how ‘Greensky’ it is, how bluegrass and not-bluegrass it is. If anyone asked me, ‘What’s your band like?’ that would be the one song I’d play them.”

Greensky Bluegrass by Jamie VanBuhler

With Greensky there’s never a sense that they’re aspiring to be another band or modeling their moves after someone that’s come before. In fact, they exhibit a hardheaded dedication to chopping their own musical path, often through mighty thick terrain, and the dividends in terms of originality can’t be underestimated.

“We’re lucky to be at a point in our careers where we can do that AND have it work,” says Beck. “Enough people like us – we’re not Yonder or Railroad Earth sized all over the country yet – that we can take our risks and see how things fly.”

In acoustic music, there’s a tendency to be a little too good-timey, where reels and party tunes dominate. Greensky challenges this notion with subject matter that’s not always comfortable. It’s a rarity in the scene in which they operate, though speaking frankly, this band isn’t long for the string band circuit. The songwriting on Handguns gives kindred cousins like The Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons a serious run for their money, and one senses Greensky is just one lucky break within the larger machinery of the music industry away from taking the same sort of leap into a much broader audience.

“There’s a lot of different kinds of songs on the album, though I do write a lot of serious songs that use unique, often awkward metaphors that make people think. But our band is balanced with the overall catalog and jamming – for lack of a better term – or maybe playfulness is better. The album has a really dark tune I wrote with all the distortion and fun studio stuff we did and we follow it with a silly, old time rag tune with kazoos,” says Hoffman. “There’s a unique blend between Dave and I. In the beginning, he sang most of the songs because I knew so little about bluegrass. I was probably the most trained singer in the group in the beginning because I was involved with choir and a really active music program in high school. I learned how to sing harmony with [Dave], and as I started singing lead some the timbre of the band changed. It is really different, and I’ve heard some fans say, ‘That was a Dave show’ or, ‘That was a Paul show.’ That makes me smile because I don’t really think about it anymore. Dave has a really unique thing he does as a singer. It’s a really sincere approach, and I dig it. We’ve been mistaken for brothers for years, and we often just tell people we are brothers. But that goes a lot deeper than two dudes that have long, brown hair.”

Greensky Bluegrass by Jamie VanBuhler

The studio is becoming an increasingly important part of Greensky’s sound as they appreciate the differences and opportunities it affords them versus the live setting. Subtle, effective touches abound on Handguns, building up layers and complexities that barrooms and theatres full of rowdy people don’t allow.

“That’s a huge thing for me,” says Hoffman. “There are some people who say, ‘This is never how we’ll sound live,’ but the album and the record process is about the songs and the band. I always wanted horns on ‘I’ll Probably Kill You’ and nobody ever said, ‘We can’t have horns because we don’t have horns in our band.’ We break a lot of the rules. Well, not break them but we do a lot of things that aren’t standard in bluegrass. But you say something like that and you’re wrong. Even a far bluegrass band is modal and bluesy and different, even if they do a different percentage of it. A lot of time is spent talking about the Bluegrass Left and the Bluegrass Right, but it’s more of an open idea than anything else.”

One key bluegrass trait Greensky retains is the ability for this music to happen anywhere, anytime as long as folks got fingers, instruments and voices ready to wail.

Greensky Bluegrass by Brian Hockensmith

“I love that element,” says Hoffman. “We got a lot of press a few years ago at All Good for playing all night long for people after official music was over. We just picked all night, which we used to do a lot. Somewhere in the touring schedule that gets hard because of the need to hit the hotel, drive to the next town, or some logistical thing that stops all of us from doing an all-nighter because one or two of us need to do something else. [At All Good], we thought, ‘We’re the only band here that can pick out in the campgrounds. Every other band would require some compromise of their lineup or power. We’re out here and can do it and feel a social responsibility to do it for the people.’ And it was awesome! Even years later, I meet people who are super fans now and discovered us at that campground at All Good.”

Is there any temptation to add more electricity as you explore studio work?

“Yeah, certainly,” says Hoffman. “The tune ‘Bring Out Your Dead’ was such an awesome experience for us in the studio, producing our own record and working with a guy who has a bunch of cool equipment in his studio and is literally a wizard. Making all those distortion tones with old amplifiers and microphones that have flaws that are desirable was just amazing. Now we all want little amps that we can overdrive for moments like that live. It creates a new sonic space for us. Our instruments, besides that romantic side of being able to come out anywhere and play, have limitations. In our live show we’re constantly pushing that boundary and figuring out how we can do more with a mandolin or banjo – all without adding drums. We just need to add some tonal variables to the instruments. We’re figuring out how to make the dobro sound like an organ. We’re constantly discovering new things, and we like gear. We’re rockers at heart.”

“We often joke about that point in a band’s career that always seems to come along where fans decide, ‘I like the last album better.’ We always joke about it: ‘What if it’s this album?’ But I don’t know how the hell we’re going to top [Handguns],” says Beck. “So, maybe we’ve finally made that record with Handguns, and I’d maybe be okay with that. What we’ve made here – whatever it is – is really cool.”

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