Next year, Yonder Mountain String Band will celebrate its 20th anniversary, and they’ll likely take that party on the road. That’s where the Bluegrass superstars have spent the majority of the past two decades. But things have changed within the YMSB camp over the past few years. While the Colorado-based band still tours incessantly, home and family responsibilities have limited the members’ off-road time together — stretches that used to be spent making records. That would explain the fact that there was barely more than a year between YMSB’s first 10 albums and a six-year gap between 2009’s The Show and 2015’s Black Sheep.
The group also dealt with its first defection since its 1998 formation when master mandolinist Jeff Austin opted out of YMSB in 2014 just prior to the birth of his daughter. He was replaced by former Joy Kills Sorrow mandolinist Jake Joliff, who began playing when he was 7-years-old and ultimately became the first full-scholarship mandolin student in the history of Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Around the same time, YMSB expanded to a quintet with the addition of former Cornmeal fiddle player and vocalist Allie Kral, a classically trained violinist who has toured and recorded with Keller Williams, Warren Haynes, moe., Leftover Salmon and many others.
It was the newly fashioned quintet that hit the studio to craft Black Sheep in 2015. In many ways, Black Sheep is the perfect culmination of the band’s long-established framework as young musicians who became enamored of Bluegrass instrumentation and applied their varied Rock and even Punk influences to their newfound Appalachian love. The title track is a good example; “Black Sheep” has the roiling, dark sound of an Irish Folk ballad, but there’s a propulsive insistence and a lyrical economy that could have been just as easily translated by The Stooges. More direct evidence would be YMSB’s blazing version of The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love,” a wonderful Bluegrass take on a Punk classic.
But the best yardstick of YSMB’s continued vitality as far as their hallowed touring reputation is concerned is the fact that archive.org, the massive repository of free live recordings on the internet, has added more than 300 new recordings to YMSB’s already impressive 1,400-show count. Meet the new hoss, same as the old hoss.
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This article appears in Feb 1-8, 2017.