Support for this WXAV podcast is being provided by Bookies, new and used books, located at 10324 Southwestern Avenue in Chicago, with a second location at 2015 Ridge Road in Homewood. Bookies specializes in new and used books. Their selection includes new releases, children's books, and bestsellers. For more information and upcoming events, please visit bookieschicago.com.
You can also find them on Facebook by searching Bookies Chicago. This podcast is being brought to you by WXAV 88.3 FM and WXAV.com. WXAV, bringing the best podcasts to you. So Chris, I have to ask, it's the ubiquitous question, how are you holding up in this COVID-19 world?
Oh man, you know, just like all of us, it's weird, everything's pretty strange, but it's okay. I've kind of enjoyed being home like this. I've never actually been home this much, I don't think, at any point in my life, because even when I was a kid, we were, we always lived in the same place, but we would go places like every weekend. And my dad was a musician, so I'd go with him, or like we'd go to a place up in the mountains in Western Maryland.
I'm from Virginia, kind of D.C. area. So I don't think I've ever been this stationary at any point in my life, and it's been kind of great. Like I had no idea what it felt like to wake up in my own bed every night for, you know, five months without interruption.
It's been kind of cool. You know, I was wondering, can you share with us how you first discovered folk music and acoustic music? Well, you know, I kind of come by it honestly in the sense that my parents both met through the five-string banjo. My father played banjo in a bluegrass band called The Seldom Scene.
It was, you know, they were a really kind of influential band. And so I would, you know, go out with them on the weekends and hear them play. And, you know, they'd play at festivals with all the, you know, Bill Monroe and Tony Rice and just everybody. You know, they were kind of one of those, they were peers with all those people.
And so I was kind of exposed to it a lot through osmosis. And also, like I said, my parents were both banjo players. That's how they met. And so, you know, my mom was bombarding me with five-string banjo playing when I was in the womb.
And so it's just kind of been a part of my life always. Now, that being said, I always loved music, but I didn't initially take any interest in the kind of music that my folks played, because that's often sort of the natural way of things for kids. You know, I wanted to play electric guitar. And my friend Jay Starling, whose father was John Starling, the lead singer for The Seldom Scene.
Jay's two and a half years older than me, and he started playing electric guitar. And he was sort of a prodigy, got really good, really fast. And my older brother, Ben, also was a really good electric guitar player. So I kind of wanted to be like those guys.
And so I started playing electric guitar, and I was really lousy at it, like super bad. But, you know, eventually, you know, my interest started to change. I started checking out all kinds of different music, and I really got obsessed with music. I got super into it kind of in my early teenage years, you know, probably 9 to 13 or 14.
I mean, it was a thing that I did and was excited about. And when I was about 14 years old, my mom gave me a record by Tony Rice one year for Christmas called Acoustics. And at that point, I'd been listening to a lot of jazz and kind of like, you know, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and Chick Corea and Alan Holdsworth, all this kind of wild stuff. And when I got this, my mom got me this Tony Rice record.
It had this sense of rhythm that was so familiar. It just felt really nice at home. Because Tony Rice, of course, for people who are listening who aren't familiar with him, is the great bluegrass guitar player, the kind of all-time. He's the guy who defines the sound, in my opinion, of bluegrass guitar.
But he also was a really wide-ranging musician who did many different things and changed the music in many ways. And jazz, you know, he hooked up with the great mandolinist David Grissman, and he kind of did all this stuff. And so that's the music I heard, and I could relate to it, and it was sort of sophisticated like a lot of the other music that I had gotten into. But it had this grounding in kind of string band music, bluegrass, the pulse that's kind of just inherent in that music.
And I think because I'd grown up around that stuff, you know, it just made sense. And I got really into it, and then it's kind of been off to the races. That's awesome. Now, you mentioned earlier that your dad was the banjo player for the group The Seldom Scene.
But you were actually able to join The Seldom Scene and play with them for a little bit. What was it like being able to play music with your dad and go on tour with your dad? It was really cool. I mean, of course, at first it was like pure nepotism, you know.
I mean, I could play, but there were plenty of other people who could play great guitar, too, who weren't playing with The Seldom Scene. But, you know, it was really fun for me on the level of getting to learn from these really great, super-seasoned, you know, just consummate pros, you know, really. And so that was really cool. And then on a personal level, it was really beautiful for me to get to spend all that time with my dad because, you know, my parents got divorced when I was very young.
And they always maintained a really great relationship despite, you know, what must be insane going through a divorce. But they always were friendly and stuff. But I fundamentally grew up in my mom's household. And so it was really cool later in life that I could go and spend all this, you know, time, like quality time in this really particular way with my dad when I got a little older.
And we'd go play gigs. We'd play music together. We were traveling together. It was really cool.
I feel super lucky to have, you know, gotten to do that that way. So, Chris, I was wondering if you could share with us the story of how you started playing with Julian Lodge. Yeah, well, Julian's really, truly one of my favorite musicians on planet Earth. He's one of my favorite musicians ever.
I mean, Julian is a super dear friend, but he's kind of a constant inspiration. So that project is super near and dear to me, even though we don't get to do it very often. We initially met at a Punch Brothers show back in 2008 in Boston. We were playing at the Museum of Fine Arts, and Julian was living in Boston at the time.
He came to the show because Chris Thiele and Baila Fleck were going to play on his first record. And so I don't think he actually met Thiele yet. So he came to the show just to kind of say, hey. And he and I wound up, you know, he stashed his guitar backstage before the gig, and we started talking because, you know, guitar players stick together.
Birds of a feather and all that. And so we played some tunes that night, and it was really, really enjoyable. And we just kind of hit it off. And he'd grown up in the Bay Area around David Grissman, who I mentioned earlier when I was talking about Tony Rice.
David Grissman, you know, being one of the all-time great mandolin players and probably the first real pioneer of bringing mandolin into kind of modern American string band music. Like, I mean, you could say Bill Monroe, you know, was creating modern American string band music. It was super modern and radical. And when we look at that old bluegrass now, it seems like it's been around forever.
But if you hear David Grissman's music, he was kind of integrating all that, the bluegrass stuff, with kind of more sophisticated harmonic ideas, some more sophisticated rhythms, kind of bigger forms. Just all kinds of cool influences. And so anyway, he was this titan, and Julian grew up really close to him, and they started hanging out. And Julian was this jazz guitar prodigy, and Grissman would invite him over and then send Julian home with, you know, an old Martin from the 30s, like a Martin Triple O guitar.
And so Julian always had this secret, you know, he was this jazz guitar prodigy, but he had this secret love of flat-top steel string guitars because he'd hang out with Grissman, and he'd play all these, like, super remarkable instruments. And so when we kind of got together, you know, I kind of was meeting this guy who had this, like, secret passion, you know, that he loved these flat-top steel string guitars. And it was just kind of a really exciting first meeting. And we stayed in touch, and eventually he moved to New York.
And, you know, when I had a gap in the Punch Brothers schedule, I just said, like, let's do something. And we did. And a lot of times it's funny. The only thing it takes to get something started is just the conversation.
Or just say, like, let's do something. Okay. Like, can we put a date on the books? Yeah.
You want to start on November 13th? Yes. Okay, great. And then all of a sudden you've got a project because there's a date on the books.
And that's kind of what happened with Julian, but it turned out to be this really beautiful project that's certainly super sacred to us. So now your main project over the last decade or so has been the Punch Brothers. For you, what has it been like to see the band grow and evolve over the years? You know, it's funny.
From my perspective, it's all just felt very natural. I feel very fortunate to be a member of that band and to have relationships with those people and, you know, that we kind of get to, you know, kind of have this super long-term musical journey together, you know, where we're just kind of pushing ourselves and pushing each other. And so, I mean, when I think about our first record, what it really was, the centerpiece of that record was a piece, a four-movement suite that Chris Feely, our mainland player, wrote. And he was going through a divorce.
And he was playing in Nickel Creek, which is another band that he is in at the time. And I think he just was kind of early, mid-20s. I think he was kind of a place where he really – and he's also super brilliant. I mean, Feely's – you know, he's kind of off the charts brilliant.
And I think he had all this crazy stuff that he just wanted to get out of the system. And he started writing this piece, and he kind of called all of us together to work on it because normally, you know, he was – on his previous records, he, you know, had, like, all of our heroes, like Bela Fleck or, you know, Edgar Meyer or, you know, Jerry Douglas, those guys were playing those records. But this thing that he was writing was just going to take a lot more work than those guys probably were going to be willing to give to it. And so he called all of us, but it was this really, really ambitious project.
And so it kind of established right out of the gate this paradigm where we were willing to work really hard and push ourselves really, really hard. And that first record really was, you know, his music more than anybody else's for sure. Now, over time – so that just kind of established this paradigm. We were willing to work hard and just do a lot of stuff.
Over time, we started writing music together and trying to, you know, just compose things as a group. And Feely, of course, he's just based on his personality type and the way his brain works. He still has, like, a huge and maybe in some ways dominant influence on music to this day. But after that first record, we really started writing everything together.
And so there's kind of a progression, I think, of just how we learned to write better music for us as a band. We figured out how to write stronger parts. We figured out how to write better parts. You know, all of us were listening to all kinds of different stuff all through the years.
And obviously, your tastes change. And so to me, it's just been a very natural progression, a result of the stew of the five of us just being together, learning from each other, listening to music, loving music, working on music. It's just kind of unfolded in a sort of natural way. By the way, sorry, that's my dog Stan in the background.
Oh, man, no worries. He's probably just going to bark, but we'll be all right. Is there any new music on the horizon? Well, you know, we are going to – like everybody else, we had a bunch of stuff on the books.
Not a bunch, but we had stuff on the books for this past summer, and it got canceled. But we're going to be circling up this fall for a little while, and we'll see if we get anything out of it. But we – you know, everybody's – we're going to convene and really kind of just work on music, workshop music. Maybe – who knows?
If anything good comes out of it, we might record some of it. We'll just see. We've got about a month together. And it's a very – in the past, we've had more of a game plan.
We've had, like, more time to kind of plan. This is sort of like we're going to get together and just go. Although that's – I'm pretty excited about that. What I consider – and actually what we consider to be our first record was a record that came out under Thiele's name called How to Grow a Woman from the Ground.
And it really is the first Punch Brothers record in many ways. But we had six days from the first day we got together, you know, and played the first of the – there were 14 songs on that record. We played the first of those 14 songs for the first time to the time that we, you know, finished the last take, like, in the recording studio. It was a six-day span.
That's, like, that was really, really fast, especially for 14 songs, especially considering some of that stuff had some, you know, arrangement and complicated bits in there. And I really love that record because it has a real life force to it. It's just kind of – it's kind of unpolished and just super – it's an honest expression of what, you know, all of us sound like in a room playing music together just as ourselves, which I find to be really fun and compelling. So I'm looking forward to this new – whatever, you know, whatever happens in November, if it winds up amounting to anything or not, who knows, but I'm quite looking forward to it.
So, Chris, you know, WFCV is a college radio station, and I was just curious, what kind of impact did college radio have on your career, but also are you a fan at all of college radio? Oh, man, college radio is so great. You know, college radio is amazing because the way it gets programmed – so I went to Oberlin College in Ohio, and we had WOBC, and it was staffed, of course, like most college radio stations, by just all students who had all these, you know, slots throughout the week. And they got to just play.
They had the opportunity to dedicate two hours to whatever they thought was cool. And, you know, young people are super enthusiastic, and young people tend to love to share things. And so the idea of giving college students who are super enthusiastic and loving – and they love to share things – a platform where they can really share all this stuff that they're, like, super geeking out on musically and they really care about that doesn't really get represented on mainstream radio, certainly commercial radio, is beautiful because you can just hear and discover all kinds of music that you simply wouldn't stumble across otherwise. And today, it's weird.
You know, the Internet obviously brings us, you know, the whole world at our fingertips and all that. But also, it's not really that – because there's so much stuff available, it's not that easy to just find new stuff. There's such a – you know, you can drown in options. And so to have, again, a platform like college radio where you have DJs who are super into whatever it is that they're doing, you can just kind of turn it on and have it on in the background and just hear cool music that you never heard before.
And then you can go do your research if it speaks to you. So I think college radio is really, really, really valuable. I'm grateful for it. So, Chris, if there was one album you would recommend everyone listen to on vinyl, what would it be and why?
Ooh, good call. Well, man, that's a great call. You know what? I'm going to go with something that's a little specific to my heroes and my influences just because people may not know it.
And that would be Church Street Blues by Tony Rice. It's a really – to me, it's like this super Desert Island kind of disc. And it was a record that – he was one of the most beautiful singers ever in bluegrass. And, you know, like I said, he went off and played all this instrumental music with David Grissman.
And he had been kind of like the superhero of the bluegrass scene of the day. I mean, he was like the – as far as being a lead singer. And he just stopped singing. And people were really sad about that.
But after – After he'd kind of not been singing for a while, in the early 80s, he made a series of records where he did start singing again. He had a brother duet record with Ricky Skaggs, this really great called Skaggs and Rice. That's also worth hearing on vinyl. He started making these albums called Bluegrass Album Band, where they were just playing super, you know, hard-driving, ass-kicking bluegrass.
But it was all these modern guys doing it. But then, to me, like, the crown jewel of that era of him coming back to singing was this record called Church Street Blues. And that's just him playing guitar and singing. And that's it.
His brother Wyatt accompanies him on, like, two or three instrumentals on the album. But otherwise, it's just Tony Rice playing and singing these beautiful songs. And the guitar playing is incredible. And it's so elegant.
The music's so elegant. His singing is so beautiful. It sounds like a trumpet, but with, like, a trumpet that can say words. And it's just, it's killer.
It's a real Desert Island disc. It's a constant reference for me and kind of a lot of people in the string band music community, just because the level of musicianship is so high. But it's ultimately all about heart, too. It's not like an exercise in technical virtuosity.
It kind of shows everything that's so beautiful about Tony Rice. So that's my long-winded answer, like all my answers about my favorite, the record that everybody should go on vinyl. And that was my conversation with the one and only Chris Eldridge from the Punch Brothers. I want to take a moment to thank Chris for giving so generously of his time last week.
We really appreciate it. Please be sure to follow Chris on all the social media platforms. Also visit his official website, chriseldridge.net. Thank you very much for listening to this WXAV 88.3 FM podcast.
Be sure to visit our website, WXAV.com, for more information on your escape from Ordinary Radio.