TOWN MOUNTAIN
STEADY OPERATOR
Pinecastle Records
PRC 1174

Town Mountain hails from Asheville, N.C.’s fertile bluegrass scene. They are among a crop of young musicians in the area (which includes the Steep Canyon Rangers) who are producing quality original traditional bluegrass material. Their third album, Steady Operator, showcases their writing and their tightly integrated band sound. Phil Barker, the mandolin player, has penned most tracks with Jesse Langlais (banjo) contributing three.

Although the album notes don’t say so, the energy in these songs sounds like they were recorded live in the studio, a feat that can only be successfully pulled off by a group that has played hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of music together. The variety in the material suggests that the band is equally at home on a festival stage or in a smoky bar room late at night. A couple of standout cuts could easily become bluegrass standards. “Come Break My Heart” crosses a Jimmy Martin feel with a honky-tonk groove to form a catchy heartbreak tale. “The Humble Shepherd” captures the Biblical story of the burning bush with a call-and-response chorus impossible not to sing along with.

Lead vocals are mostly handled by guitarist Robert Greer, who has an appealingly straightforward delivery. His voice has that hint of an edge to it that lends intensity and vitality to what he’s singing. The band shows off its instrumental chops as well. Jesse’s banjo tune “Fallin’ Off The Wagon” has a distinctive little hook, while Bobby Britt’s version of the traditional “Flannery’s Reel” embodies everything that is good about slippy-slidey old-time and bluegrass fiddling. Town Mountain is a standout among young touring bluegrass bands on the scene today. Steady Operator should help cement their reputation as a group to keep your eye on in the future. (Pinecastle Records, 2881 NC108 Hwy E., Columbus, NC 28722,www.pinecastlemusic.com.) CAH

It’s clear as soon as you put on the first tune of Town Mountain’s new album Steady Operator; these boys know what they’re doing. The clean, crisp licks and runs featured throughout the album showcase the talent of the gifted members of the band. Town Mountain walks a thin line between traditional and progressive bluegrass, playing original tunes with a traditional sound but more progressive work musically. Asheville located bluegrass band Town Mountain has been playing together since 2005, when they won the Colorado Telluride bluegrass band competition.

Steady Operator has it all; deep, meaningful lyrics and powerful instrumentation to back them up. Fast paced songsSparkle City and Come Break My Heart will get you on your feet and dancing while ballad Five Shots of Whiskey will pluck at your heart strings. Diggin On the Mountainside features eco-conscious lyrics “they’re coming in from out of town, they cut the timber and stripping the ground, rich folks diggin’ on a mountainside, come to build their castles high” shedding some light on the controversial issues of timber harvest and mountaintop removal. Not to be overlooked Humble Shepard is a gospel tune re-telling the story of Moses and the Burning Bush. If you haven’t yet, preview the album and pick up a copy here.

We got the chance to see Town Mountain live at Merlefest 2011 on the Americana stage. The guys loved to interact with the crowd from the stage and the crowd certainly loved them. The youthful energy and raw bluegrass sound had all ages absorbed in the moment. After the show we set up above the festival and shot the photo at the top of the page. We encourage you all to check them out if you have the chance!

For more info on Town Mountain, visit TownMountain.net

Town Mountain’s forthcoming release (due May 10) made my list of albums to watch for in 2011, so I’d be remiss in not suggesting you catch them at this year’s Merlefest. One of the finest up-and-coming bluegrass bands on the scene, Town Mountain plays a brand of music whose rawness and grit is a driving force. Besides their impeccable instrumentalism, lead singer Robert Greer has a voice you won’t soon forget. 

Local maverick-bluegrass outfit Town Mountain is getting ready to release a new album, Steady Operator, on Pinecastle Records. The official release date is in May, but the band is throwing a pre-release party on March 19, so that their Asheville fans can get a copy of the new disc before anyone else.

Town Mountain is a five-piece, modern-traditional collaboration, meaning, the band uses the standard bluegrass instrumentation — guitar, fiddle, banjo, bass, and mandolin — but focuses on writing original music, as well as finding obscure covers and doing them Town Mountain style. I caught up with two of the founding members, Jesse Langlais (banjo) and Robert Greer (guitar and vocals), at the Universal Joint in West Asheville to talk about the new CD, their recording process, the Pre-release party and, really, all things Town Mountain.

What makes Steady Operator different from your previous releases?
Greer: We recorded this one live in the studio, we haven’t recorded another one that way.

Why did you want to record this album live?
Langlais: We all agreed that to set Town Mountain apart from other bluegrass bands, we needed to record what we’re all about, which is a live sound. A lot of the albums that are getting cut today in the bluegrass world are using the same formula: first you lay down your rhythm tracks, then you overdub everything and it starts sounding really homogenized. About 90 percent of our album is live.
Greer: There we are few spots that required some overdubs or some isolation, but the core of this album, the foundation of the songs, is recorded live.

Town Mountain had Grammy-winning bassist Mike Bub produce this album. Why did you want to work with Bub, and what was it like?
Greer: In his 13 years with the Del McCoury Band, Mike Bub recorded eight or nine albums live in the studio. When we knew we wanted to record that way, he was an obvious choice due to his experience. He was a pleasure to work with. He is so knowledgeable about country, bluegrass and old-time music, and he’s a great multi-instrumentalist.
Langlais: He’d grab your instrument and say, “Try something like this,” and play something amazing.
Greer: He had some tips and tricks about how to get things flowing for live recording. One of the biggest things he taught us was how to punch in as a band. You play the song the first time through as a band, with no click track. If you need to try something again, you can just play along with the song for a little bit before that place. Someone needs to replay his solo? Bam. You can do it as a band.
Langlais: As a producer Mike Bub has an exceptional grasp of the individual abilities of the players, the potential of the band, and is able to really bring out the best of what’s before him.

What is the songwriting/arranging process like for Town Mountain?
Langlais: Individuals tend to bring a song to the table, and then the band gives input on how the song will come together. Arrangements are very band oriented.
Greer: One thing that we think is a real strength of this group is that when new material comes along, we will try any idea at least once, to give it a whirl and see how it sounds.
Town Mountain and the Shannon Whitworth band just swapped members, Jon Stickley for Barrett Smith on bass — want to say anything about that?
Greer: It makes sense that you say “swap,” because there is no replacing a guy like Barrett Smith. We’ve been doing this for six years this summer, and when you’re in a band, so much more happens than just music. We are very fortunate to be able to bring Jon Stickley into Town Mountain, not only for his musicianship, but one thing we don’t have to do now, is break in a new personality. We’ve known Jon for ten years or so. We just did like a sports team trade, all very friendly, serendipitous.

What can people expect from the Grey Eagle show?
Langlais: You can bet there will be some jack-assery shenanigans, a passing of the torch; there will be some pageantry involved. Also pyrotechnics, smoke machines, go-go dancers. The Black Lillies will be coming from Knoxville to open up the show. Then we’re going to play the album, probably verbatim, with Barrett on the bass. After that we’ll have the ceremony, if you will, inducting Jon Stickley, and then he’ll play on a set of new songs we’ve been working up that no one has ever heard before. Kind of like, here’s what the new Town Mountain is all about.

— Stacy Claude is a local musician, freelance writer, and author of Asheville Roots Music Review at avlrootsreview.blogspot.com.

Columbus, NC – February 21, 2011 – Pinecastle Records is proud to announce that it has signed Town Mountain to its roster. The band brings a unique energy to the label with their mix of mostly original material that creates a hard-driving, no nonsense, foot stomping bluegrass sound mixed with slow country crooning and a honkytonk edge. Town Mountain safely brings it all together in a way that has wowed not only their local Asheville, NC music scene but also crowds across the country since their first national tour in 2005, which they capped off by winning the prestigious Rockygrass Band Competition. Town Mountain features Phil Barker (mandolin, vocals), Robert Greer (guitar, vocals), Jesse Langlais (banjo, vocals), Bobby Britt (fiddle), and Jon Stickley (bass, vocals).

Musical influence, fine-tuned vocals, precision crafted instrumentalists, and charming stage presence are all ingredients in what makes a sound…unique. One more ingredient that is essential in producing this sound: new songs. Town Mountain has the capacity to bring fresh and exciting material to their high quality music. With topics ranging from love lost and heartache to the weariness of a midnight drive across America’s heartland to politically charged topics that most steer clear of. You will find that Town Mountain’s songwriting is heartfelt, sincere and honest. Their upcoming album, Steady Operator, has an official street date of  May 10th and the band is planning a CD release party at The Grey Eagle in Asheville, NC on March 19th.

“This album is a culmination of thousands of miles traveled across America, playing for audiences as diverse as the traditional bluegrass crowd to the hippie jam band contingent in big cities and festivals to pubs and house concerts. Diverse audiences that have one thing in common, a love for inspired, original, well played music, performed with a spirit that appeals to fans of all types and ages.” -Mike Bub, Steady Operator Producer and Grammy winner with The Del McCoury Band

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.

Asheville bluegrass band joins Grammy winner Jim Lauderdale for concert at the Grey Eagle

The Asheville based group Town Mountain began their first year together in 2005 by winning first place in the prestigious Telluride, Colorado bluegrass band competition. Still together and going strong, their blend of progressive, traditional and original music has a distinctive, contemporary sound. The five piece band joins country/bluegrass/newgrass two-time Grammy winner Jim Lauderdale this weekend for a collaborative double bill at the Grey Eagle.

“The core of the band is Robert Greer on guitar and lead vocals, Phil Barker playing mandolin, Barrett Smith on bass, plus me on banjo,” said Town Mountain member Jesse Langlais. “We all sing. Bobby Britt from Chapel Hill is with us on fiddle. He’s a phenomenal fiddle player and he’s been with us for about 10 months now,” said Langlais.   The band has used a few different fiddlers but this configuration’s clicked the last 10 months and they just recorded a new CD together with Grammy winning producer Mike Bubb, former bass player for the Del McCoury band. “He is a phenomenal musician and brought a lot of ideas to the table and we used them,” said Langlais. Recorded at Hill Creek Studios in Canton, N.C., for now it’s self released like their previous two recordings but the band is open to the idea of a label.

Town Mountain has a distinctive sound. “Our music kind of rides the line of progressive and traditional,” said Langlais. “If you listen to the music itself, it’s pretty traditional. We write a lot of our own material, and when you look at the songs and lyrics, you might lean  more to the progressive sound so we are kind of able to ride that line and pull from all of those areas, whether it be Hank Williams and Bill Monroe or Newgrass Revival and Sam Bush,” said Langlais. Not being pinned in one category is important to the band.  ”We might play Travis Tritt or the Band; we don’t just play traditional bluegrass. If you look on our iPods, there might be a lot more of other things than bluegrass. We listen to a lot of Steve Perry and Journey in the band,” Langlais said.

Original song writing is critical to the group. Like most bands, creative levels change continually. “It ebbs and flows, in the summertime it’s hard to write a lot,” said Langlais. “I gather ideas and then when fall and winter comes you get it on paper,” he said. Barker is the other primary songwriter in the group. Their combination of styles and songwriting drew them to Lauderdale. “We had booked that October 9 date a while back and wanted to include another person we really respected and looked up to. We were throwing names around and we kept coming back to Jim Lauderdale.  He’s from North Carolina, he’s a phenomenal singer and songwriter, he kind of walks that line like we do, between traditional and progressive,” said Langlais. The group also saw the potential for a lot of fun backing up Lauderdale.

A song writing superstar, Lauderdale’s work has been recorded by Patty Loveless, George Jones, The Dixie Chicks, John Mayall, Kathy Mattea, Lee Ann Womack, Vince Gill, George Strait and many more. A  Grand Ole Opry regular, he’s toured with Lucinda Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ralph Stanley, Rhonda Vincent and Elvis Costello, among others. A versatile choice for the evening, he’s as much at home with a jam band as a country music star.

“The show will start out with Jim solo, then Town Mountain will come in and do a set of new music, stuff from the album, then a short break, ” said Langlais. “We are going to come up with a set list and collaborate on a set together, back him up in the second half. We are really looking forward to that,” Langlais said. The musical content may range from Stanley Brothers tunes to original material with a lot of spontaneous interaction thrown in.

Town Mountain will arrive at the Grey Eagle fresh from hosting their showcase at I.B.M.A. (International Bluegrass Music Association). A spring CD release will mean even more national festivals and touring next year. “We’ve come this far and this is that year that we say, we are in this for a while,” said Langlais. “We are really close friends having a good time together. As long as it can stay that way I think the band will keep moving forward,” he said.