It’s bluegrass – but with a difference. The sound is there: the driving banjo, the edgy mandolin and searing fiddle, guitar runs that weave through their interplay like a Dixieland trombone, and a rock-solid bass locking down the rhythm and the soulful vocal harmonies.
But Banjo Dan and the Mid-Nite Plowboys come from Vermont, a state far from the Southern epicenter of bluegrass music, and their songs, like the northern explorers of a bygone era, roam freely to the outskirts of the American experience – the human experience. Songwriters Dan Lindner, Eric (“Willy”) Lindner, and Alan Davis craft ambitious, visual narratives, telling stories of sailing ships and logging camps, the Canadian wilderness, and a stark New England burial ground; there’s a locomotive charging across Vermont’s green countryside, and a blackbird perched, silent and ominous, on the branch of a maple tree. And of course there is love – sweet, fulfilling love on the one hand, loneliness and despair on the other.
Then there are the instrumentals, dynamic and exploratory, with roots in Bill Monroe’s bluegrass tradition, but also in traditions found far from Kentucky, in the homelands of their forebears.