Town Mountain tours a lot. Somewhere between 130-150 shows a year, with significantly more days spent traveling, they’re nearly always on the road together, a tarheeled traveling family. Hailing from Asheville, North Carolina, I talked to Zach Smith, the band’s bassist, about their upcoming tour, including a show at The Soundry in Columbia, MD, and how to survive living on the road.
“It’s hard to find a day when all six people are genuinely bubbly and good. Robert (Greer) and Jesse (Langlais) have being doing it for upwards of 13 years. [But] we eat good on the road, like pho and ramen. We take the time to recharge, even though some days there is no time.” Ultimately, Zach says the most important rules to surviving the road are to “eat good, have open communication, and always crack jokes. And then be introspective, check in on yourself.”
Not so different from being in a close romantic relationship, a marriage, or a lifelong partnership. And, if any musicians are honest, the people in your band are a kind of family, sometimes getting more time than spouses and children.
The band is on a brief break before heading out on the road again for a Halloween weekend, and then re-upping the tour through the winter. A year removed from releasing New Freedom Blues, their trailblazing record that uses bluegrass as little more than a framework from which to begin the song, Town Mountain continues to expand their sound, even promising a hint of drum or telecaster in the upcoming shows – though it might be less than a feature or more of a novelty. For New Freedom Blues, the songs manage to straddle the lines between bluegrass, honky tonk, heartland rock and roll, and even some of that jamband sound.
“With albums past, they’d have a song come to the table that was very much not a straight up and down bluegrass tune, maybe it was more funky, maybe it’d have more of a jamband beat, like a half-time beat, so people’d come to the table and they’d mold it to fit bluegrass. But now, with this newest album, we just kinda played the tunes the way they were written. It was kinda freeing.”
Zach emphasized that, “We’re not reinventing anything, but we’re using what we really love to listen to to make our own music.” That includes music like ”[John] Hartford and JD Crowe when they really got country with it,” which lets the music breathe in a way that’s different from much of the bluegrass genre, allowing it to appeal to both the purists and those outside the scene.
New Freedom Blues isn’t exactly a political record, but it’s also not exactly not a political record. Most specifically, standout track “Life and Debt” offers commentary on the nature of debt accumulation in our society, especially influenced by an event Jesse Langlais remembers encountering in college. On his first day at college, lines of banks at booths practically gave away credit cards with lines up to $3000 to college kids who couldn’t (and didn’t) know better, a kind of first step into a lifelong recovery from debt. The lyrics have a sharpness to them rarely seen in bluegrass, and as Zach says, “Jesse is very precise with what he puts on paper, as far as lyrics go. So there’s no filler, and there’s a lot of hidden meaning in that tune and other tunes, like subtle nods to political and other things.”
Town Mountain are bringing their expansive sound to The Soundry on November 1st, a show the band eagerly anticipates, calling it a cool room with a great sound, comparing it to The Hamilton, one of Zach’s favorite venues. And they promise a few surprises.
