I caught Town Mountain for the first time a couple of years ago at Pickathon out in Portland, Ore. The folks who run that festival always have impeccable taste, and make a habit of selecting bands you’ve probably never heard before, but who are sure to impress the heck out of you. And so it was with Town Mountain – a solid bluegrass quintet from Asheville, North Carolina. They returned to Pickathon again this summer, and then I wound up moving to their hometown this fall. (Sidenote: you can learn more about what I’m doing in Asheville here.)

So, it only made sense, when I decided to start a series of spotlights on Asheville’s vibrant music scene, to start with Town Mountain. Come to find out they’ve just recorded their third full-length album. When I met up with TM banjo picker Jesse Langlais last week, he brought along his laptop and let me listen to as much of the record as I wanted to hear.

Judging from my first pass (and these are just the initial mixes; they’re still planning another round, and then there’s mastering and whatever other finishing touches they decide to put on), it’s a much more deliberate musical statement than their previous Heroes and Heretics. The last disc was, as Langlais notes in our interview below, “rough around the edges.” I enjoy listening to it, but have enjoyed watching the band play live quite a bit more. Though the new disc holds fast to their signature grittiness, there seemed to be something far more fully realized on this forthcoming record. The disc, Steady Operator, will release in March 2011 and, based on what I heard, I’d definitely recommend picking it up, or downloading it, or whatever it is you do.

And now for an excerpt from my interview with Jesse from Town Mountain:

Kim Ruehl: Is the new record done?

Jesse Langlais: Mix one has been done. We’re getting ready to go back to Nashville to get mix two done at the end of the month. You know how release dates are…I think it should definitely be finished, in people’s hands sometime in March. Definitely in January, we’ll start pushing things out.

KR: I was listening to your Heroes and Heretics record this morning. It’s been about two years since you put that out…

JL: Yeah, two years ago September it was released. That was a good album. We recorded in Chapel Hill and had our friend Annie from San Francisco play fiddle on it. It was relatively successful for us. It got us some good radio play and there’s a couple of tunes I hear on Sirius, people tell me they hear it on Sirius all the time – that Bruce Springsteen song ["I'm on Fire"]…

We were awfully proud of that album, but the new album is kind of pushing the band in the direction that I think it’s gonna go. Those first two albums, we didn’t know what was going on. We were all young as musicians, the talent and songwriting level wasn’t as good as it is now. Over the five years that Town Mountain has been a band, like any band, you start to funnel your sound into what it is. It could be a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it’s a good thing for this band to have a distinct sound. In the way of bluegrass, we have a pretty unique sound. If you listen to contemporary bluegrass – at least on a commercial level, what you hear on the radio most of the time – it’s pretty polished and very…Nashville, for lack of a better adjective [laughs].

It’s slick, there’s no mistakes, it’s not rough around the edges. That’s what Town Mountain is able to maintain in the studio – that rough around the edges quality. We certainly did that with the last two. This one, I think we achieved the same goal, I just think it’s tighter for our band, but still not smooth around the edges. We like that. That’s who we are as musicians and people. We can appreciate all the great musicians in bluegrass and what they’re doing, but we try to keep the old school grittiness about the music that a lot of bands don’t.

KR: Do you all come from bluegrass backgrounds?

JL: No, actually. Robert was the one exposed to bluegrass the longest – the lead singer. He grew up in Georgia and Western North Carolina, so he was around bluegrass music. Two of the other guys are from South Carolina, but it wasn’t really part of their background. They discovered it at a fairly young age – late teens, something like that.

Me, I’m from Maine, so I didn’t exactly grow up in the bluegrass scene. I did find it, though, and once I did, I’d found my scene. Down here, it’s a way of life. It’s culture, it’s such a big part of the music. Even if you don’t listen to bluegrass you know what it is, you can probably sing along with some songs. Up north, you have to find it. But once you find it, it’s a similar community – buncha old guys playing bluegrass music, just talking with different accents.

KR: Five years into the band, do you still like each other?

JL: Oh yeah. Absolutely. The band was created…we booked a tour and thought, let’s get five friends together and go play this tour. That’s essentially how the band was started back in 2005. Our friendships were long-established before the band relationship came along. Robert [Greer (guitar)] and I are really close, we’d been friends a few years. At that time, Jed Willis was playing mandolin. He and I and Robert knew each other for years. We were all buddies. Barrett [Smith (bass)] – some of us knew him, some of us didn’t – he just fell right in. That was the core of the band, and it’s been that way for years, with the exception of Jed quitting the band and Phil [Barker] joining. We’re a really tight unit, and I think it comes off that way on stage.

KR: Do you write songs together, or does someone just show up with an idea?

JL: In the past, Robert and I have done some writing together. But over the past three or four years, we all bring songs to the table individually. Sometimes, some of us might co-write with another friend and then bring that to the table. Phil co-writes with Charles Humphries, who’s the bass player for Steep Canyon Rangers. They pen a lot of songs together and he’ll bring those to the table. But, things are always subject to change; the song can transform real quickly and contain everyone else’s ideas within an hour. You start with the song and everybody starts to put their own two cents in. That’s how we build our songs on ideas.

KR: So you guys set out to be a bluegrass band? Is that the way you plan on continuing? I say this just because a lot of the other young bands…look at Crooked Still or the Stringdusters, Mountain Heart bringing in all these different elements. The bluegrass community starts to bristle at accepting that kind of diversion. So I’m curious about young bands like you guys, if you’re sticking to tradition for good, or if you can see yourselves going in a different direction…

JL: I know exactly what you mean. I always use this analogy for Town Mountain – I get that question a lot – we certainly are on the fence of traditional and progressive. We play it in the vein of traditional, but it’s progressive in the way of some of the stuff we’re doing musically. The songs we bring to the table…we’re not playing old songs. We’re doing stuff we’ve written or cover songs that we’ve selected. We ride the line.

If you ask a traditional bluegrass lover what they’d say about Town Mountain, they’d say we’re a young, progressive bluegrass band. But if you go ask a super uber-progressive-loving Yonder Mountain Stringband fan, they’ll say it sounds like traditional bluegrass. That’s good for us. We like to be able to ride that line like the Stringdusters and Mountain Heart do, too. In bluegrass, you want to play for as many people as you can. Our audience is really divided. There are the blue-haired 65 and older folks who are holding really hard to the tradition, and then there are folks like us – the younger generation – that pull from countless genres aside from bluegrass. They like the music because it’s good, but they also have all these other influences.

We need to continue to ride that line. It’s hard, but I think we manage to pull it off right now, and I hope we continue to do that. Our influences are…we don’t even really listen to bluegrass in the van. What got played in the van the most this summer was Journey [laughs].

KR: Nice. Any Journey covers in the works, then?

JL: [laughs] No Journey covers. It would probably take a year to get one of those nailed down to perfection. Although, “Lights” could be easily done. It’s kind of like a country song, if you really break it down to the basics of that tune.

KR: I was thinking “Don’t Stop Believin’”…

JL: Oh yeah. Tassels. To pull that off, one way or another, we’d need some tassels. Preferably on pants. Leather, with maybe some diamonds cut out so you could see some of the leg [laughs].

[As I was saying…] just like the Stringdusters and Crooked Still, we listen to a lot of different styles of music, but we still have that root in traditional music. We are still playing bluegrass music, just differently than they did 25 years ago.

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