I find myself pulling into a park I’ve never seen in a part of town I’ve rarely been to meet the women of Wicked Sycamore. A sunbright solid blue afternoon, the suddenly massive fields of Leakin Park – the honest-to-goodness largest continuous park in an urban setting in America (take that, Philly and Fairmount Park with your split locations) – where Lainie Gray (mandolin, vocals) works for Outward Bound, a nonprofit leadership program that encourages discovery and journeys. It’s a fitting place to meet the band, under tall tall trees alongside sweeping meadows, the kinds meant to carry their songs on the wind.
I find Lainie (who guides me to a spot with big red NO PARKING symbols) having just finished working for the morning. We await Juliette Bell (guitar) to meet us, planning to add Madeline Waters (cello, vocals) on speakerphone, talking about Outward Bound and the importance of helping people, the community, eventually alighting on a shared joy for music. Each of us fresh off live shows in DC the night before – the whole band saw Molly Tuttle the night before at Pearl Street Warehouse, whereas I took in the Jim James show at the 9:30 Club – we inevitably turned to music, to the surging bluegrass scene, and wound our way to Wicked Sycamore.
They started playing together, in some way, shape, or form, back in January 2015. They think. Around then, anyway. Lainie met a woman at an open mic in Essex, MD, who introduced her to Juliette Bell, “this awesome guitar player”, celebrating the idea of an all-female band. They added Madeline Waters as a vocalist (and cellist, it turned out), along with a rotating cast of horns and percussion players, eventually forming The Outskirts, a blues rock and funk band. That cast of changing players – and the inconsistency implied by rotating – resulted in the three of them transforming their sound, beginning to play acoustically, eventually rebranding down the line as Wicked Sycamore, ditching the drums and the horns for good, but maintaining their all-female status, which bears repeating and emphasis.
In the modern music scene – all of it, not just bluegrass – female musicians are chronically underrepresented by the radio, many festivals, and venues. Plenty of great female artists rise to the top – Brandi Carlile, I’m With Her, Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert all come to mind – but so very many are painfully underrepresented despite their incredible talents. This is all to say that Wicked Sycamore is in a male-dominated world and still killing it, finding their sound and working hard to strengthen it.
Lainie said the band hit a point when they realized, “This is it. We’ve found our strong point.” She laughingly added that when they first started The Outskirts, the only other act that shared a name with them existed in Russia; by the time the three of them found their acoustic sound, more than a few bands by the same name roamed the American highways and bars, necessitating a change.
It sounds neat and tidy, but it took time to get to that point, having been Wicked Sycamore for about two years now. More recently, they’ve experienced an almost-meteoric rise in the local music scene, having played and then won the Charm City Bluegrass Battle of the Bands, opening the main stage of the Charm City Bluegrass Festival, and helped open the Kingman Island Bluegrass and Folk Festival, as well as playing Sofar, and various places around the DMV area. This past Thursday, they played the 9 Songwriter Series, a special collaboration where musicians follow a kind of round-robin format and provide improvisational support to other songwriters and musicians, adding textures and support the songs might not already have.
For those of us who have followed their music and seen them live, their playing feels tighter and cleaner, their harmonies even more in sync. “The Charm City thing definitely lit a fire under our asses[…] I don’t want to say we were casual before that, but we thought, ‘We’ve gotta make this set fire because we’ve only got 30 minutes to impress,’” shared Lainie, adding that each progression pushed them to make the set even better, even tighter. And a big part of that increasingly textured and deft instrumentation is the talent they each have cultivated.
Juliette has played guitar for more than 20 years, beginning almost exclusively as a jazz guitarist (and adding drums), eventually finding her way to jamband and bluegrass music over the years. Madeline came from a musical family – her father was a classical pianist and her mother played guitar, piano, and was kind of a “folk going to the redwood forest and playing folk music all night” person – beginning with the piano but moving to the cello in 7th grade. She progressed to classical orchestra, chamber groups, and made friends with folks in the folk, bluegrass, newgrass, and jam grass scene, eventually finding her tribe. Lainie experienced the most winding journey to her mandolin, having long emphasized ballet dancing as a core part of her artistic identity, though having also played bass clarinet through middle and high school; she picked up bass for a boyfriend’s garage rock band before playing bass in The Outskirts and eventually picking up the mandolin in service of the song for Wicked Sycamore, learning the instrument for their EP.
I asked them how they form their setlist and select covers, how exactly everything seems so seamless between their songs. Juliette emphasized that their cover choices “have to showcase something our songs don’t [and] serve a need that is not met by our own music,” while Madeline added, “we pick songs that we enjoy ourselves, first and foremost, but we also try to hone it to our sound and try to do something a little bit different that has our style.” I asked, when they talked about some of the songs they like to cover, who would be their pipe dream collaboration, they collectively articulated that I’m With Her and the three women who make up the band would sit right at the top of the list, along with Punch Brothers and “anything Chris Thile has touched.”
For what it’s worth, I’m With Her is playing DelFest. So is Wicked Sycamore. Maybe a pipe dream could become a reality?
Wicked Sycamore got hooked up with DelFest through Phil Chorney and Adam Kirr of Charm City Bluegrass, who have partnered with DelFest to feature regional acts, adding Wicked Sycamore, Plate Scrapers, and Man About a Horse for the new Bloody Mary Bar in the back of the music hall.
“They’ve given us a lot of wonderful opportunities. They’ve been talking about this [relationship] as a kind of add-on for how to connect the two festivals because they’re far enough apart that people can go to both,” and they can support each other, said Madeline. “It’s one of my favorite things about it, is this community of musicians – it’s why I love DelFest, I’ve been doing it for SEVEN years, and it’s such a COMMUNITY.”
That community emphasis is a consistent theme for DelFest, contributing to a culture of caring around the event. They encouraged me (and everyone else who is going) to go to as many late-night shows as possible, to wander from fire to fire, to listen to as many stories as possible and to experience as much of the festival as the brain and body can handle. After all, we’ll sleep when we’re dead.
Lead photo by Matthew Ruppert.
