Bluegrass’s new guitar god comes back to his earthly home.
Billy Strings
★★★★
Me/And/Dad
ROUNDER. CD/DL/LP
Bluegrass has forever been the domain of family and friends, led by bands who share actual blood or bonds so deep they seem to be common-law kinfolk. Such lineages have been a gift for traditions, for preserving techniques and perpetuating songbooks; they’ve also been occasional hindrances to evolution, heritage slowing the changes in a form with endlessly intriguing potential. Guitar phenom Billy Strings, it turns out, is happy to dazzle on all sides of that divide.
Me/And/Dad, a sterling and sweet collection of 14 reverent takes on bluegrass or country standbys, is the most traditional album the young iconoclast has ever made. Where previous records and, most especially, his magnetising live shows glide into psychedelic sprawl, he plays the likes of Flatt, Monroe, Watson, and even the Oak Ridge Boys straight and snappy here, like a note to self-validating his own bluegrass bona fides. The band around him is a first-call bunch: mighty bassist Mike Bub; fiddler Michael Cleveland, one of the most moving instrumentalists in the history of the United States’ backwoods music; and Ronnie and Rob McCoury, the banjo and mandolin players from bluegrass’s modern first family. Dobro paladin Jerry Douglas even stops by for a moment of pining strings. Oh, and there’s a second guitarist and singer, this record’s reason for being – Terry Barber, the man who raised Strings as dad.
Strings had a notoriously fractured childhood in Michigan. His biological father overdosed when Strings was two. Drugs overrode their family dynamic and his childhood, the home becoming a pipeline of sorts from meth use to jail. But then there was the guitar. Barber showed the pre-teen Strings how to move freely among bluegrass and classic rock, an ethos that guided his ascent into the highest echelon of contemporary players. Me/And/Dad, then, is a hell of a homecoming, Strings having assembled a band of bluegrass dreams as a public display of affection for the man who first took him there.
That powerful storyline aside, the music still moves: Barber’s ragged delivery of Life To Go, a George Jones classic about the sad perseverance of a prisoner, feels real and lived in. Strings offers one of his most vulnerable vocal takes yet on John Deere Tractor, a tender note home to a country mom from a son stuck in and troubled by a city; it feels like a letter from the road, hungover and threadbare. And the playing is flawless and charged, from Cleveland’s steam-engine fiddle during Way Downtown to Rob McCoury’s edgy delicacy during Frosty Morn.
Still, as is so often with bluegrass, it’s the family ties that will get you. Maybe it’s Barber and Strings’ mother, Debra Apostle, harmonising on the closer, or Barber telling Strings at one point the band sounds so good “it makes me kind of crack a little bit.” Billy Strings is, at the very least, a key component of bluegrass’s future; it’s galvanising to hear how comfortable he now is with its – and his own – past.
Me/And/Dad is out 18 November, via Rounder.
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