Well, you missed this band’s Cat’s Cradle show earlier this evening, but that’s no excuse not to check out Chris Eldridge’s wise words. Then head to the band’s MySpace and grab a Punch Brothers record at CD Alley.
In the past few years, fans of traditional folk and roots music have witnessed a revival of sorts in this uniquely American genre. From The Avett Brothers to Chatham County Line, there’s no doubt that acoustic music is coming back with a vengeance. Punch Brothers is no exception to this ever-expanding group of musicians that blur bluegrass lines. The band’s most recent record, Antifogmatic, is an intriguing, exciting experience, and seeing the quintet perform onstage is truly breathtaking. Guitarist Chris “Critter” Eldridge took the time to talk to Dive writer Allison Hussey about the band: its sound, its style and its nemesis.
Diversions: You used to be a member of the Infamous Stringdusters. How did you make the jump to Punch Brothers?
Chris Eldridge: Well, I met Chris Thile. He was the first Punch Brother I met. I met him in about 2001, at a festival in Colorado called Rockygrass. And I met Noam Pikelny, I think, the following year at another festival called Merlefest. So there were already some relationships that existed. I started the Stringdusters with some really good friends of mine, Chris Pandolfi and Andy Hall, and we were kind of getting going. And along the time that band was getting started, Thile called the rest of us up to work on a solo record. He had just split up from his wife, and he had a lot of creative energy that he needed to do something with, so he decided he would write this 40 minute through, composed, classical kind of oriented suite, which would become “The Blind Leaving the Blind.” He asked Noam and I and some other people, Gabe Witcher and Greg Garrison, if we would be involved and do that with him. We said yes, and it was definitely just going to be a Thile solo record, and we got together and started playing. And it felt really special. I just kind of did both for a while, and at some point there was just not enough time to do both of them side by side, so I ended up going and playing with the Punch Brothers.
Dive: How would you describe Punch Brothers to someone who had never heard of you before?
CE: The first thing I would say is that we look like a bluegrass band, but we don’t necessarily sound like a bluegrass band in the traditional sense. We all have a very wide appreciation for music from kind of all across the spectrum. You know, I think I can speak for everybody — I’ll just speak for me. As much as I love Bill Monroe, which is a lot, I love The Beatles just as much, or I love Radiohead just as much, or I love listening to Glenn Gould just as much, and everybody else in the band, I can confidently say, basically feels the same way. So, for us, our approach is to try and not discriminate based on genre classification. In other words, just because we have a banjo and a mandolin and a fiddle in the band doesn’t mean that we want to be constrained into playing just the music that has traditionally been played on those things. Like, we love hearing Bach Brandenburg Concerto Number 3, so why not play that on these instruments? If we feel like we can hopefully do it justice and shed some kind of light on it, because it just hasn’t been heard on these instruments, I think it’s just all about playing. Diversions: Kind of going along with that, you guys always play really funky covers on tour. Is that just a result of the band’s diverse taste in music? I heard that you guys were doing “Gronlandic Edit” by Of Montreal?
Dive: Kind of going along with that, you guys always play really funky covers on tour. Is that just a result of the band’s diverse taste in music? I heard that you guys were doing “Gronlandic Edit” by Of Montreal?
CE: Ah, yes. Yeah. That’s just — Of Montreal, by the way, is so ridiculously great —
Dive: Yes, I agree!
CE: Yeah, I mean, that’s how that came about. Really, Thile was the first one to fall in love with Of Montreal, and he was so into it, and as you might imagine, he gets — he is incredibly excitable. When he gets into something, he’s into it with a fervor that you just don’t see out of other people. So, he was way into Of Montreal and he had been wanting to cover that tune for a while, and then [bassist] Paul [Kowert] got really into them as well. I’ve recently gotten way into them. But yeah, Thile just started playing it, I think, one day at sound check, and Paul and I kind of knew enough of it that we just started singing along and it was fun. And then someone was like, “Aw, man, why don’t we just learn that for real.” And we did. And it’s been a really fun, bizarre one. We don’t play it that often, but it’s really fun to get to play all of these songs that otherwise would seem — I don’t know what they would seem. But it’s fun to get to play songs like that.
Dive: Do you have a favorite song to play? Not necessarily a cover, but even a Punch Brothers song?
CE: Favorite song to play — To be honest, no, not really. I might, in a given night, have a song that I enjoyed playing, but they all kind of—Just for me, to get to play them, they all kind of take on different challenges from night to night. And it’s always—Ideally, we want it to be really good, but it kind of—at its best, you’re really in a state of play, that’s why they call it playing music, and the song kind of—the songs where I feel like I get there from night to night changes. Sometimes playing “Kid A” by Radiohead is really fun, just to try and sink into this electronic landscape that isn’t really there, but to try and make that happen is fun. Other times, it’s really fun to play Jimmy Rogers by way of a Bill Monroe tune, the “Brakeman’s Blues,” just to kind of get out our bluegrass and just kind of ride on auto pilot, because that can be really fun, too. It totally depends.
Dive: One thing I notice when I listen to the new record, “Antifogmatic,” it sounds like I’m just sitting in the middle of the room, and everything is just playing around me.
CE: Oh, great.
Dive: How did you guys accomplish that?
CE: Well, that, the credit for that goes all the way to Jon Brion. He produced the record and was just an absolute magician in the studio. We tracked in this room called Ocean Way Studio — Oh God, actually, don’t quote me on this…it’s early in the morning, I’m sorry….but anyway, we tracked in this great room in Ocean Way, out in LA, and Jon has worked there a ton, and it’s an old room. It was built in the ‘50s, I think basically for Frank Sinatra, and back in those days, the technology was really limited compared to how it is today. In other words, you didn’t have tons of—you didn’t have the same EQ options, you didn’t have the same reverb options, you didn’t have the same compression options. Basically, how you’d try to get a good sound was you played music in a really good-sounding room, where all of the reflections of the room worked out really well and through really great mics and mic placement. And Jon was really old school about his approach. He’s worked in this room a lot, the room sounds absolutely phenomenal. And also, if you start using crazy technology, Pro Tools and basically trying to manipulate things other than just edits, using digital technology, it’s just not that honest. It doesn’t present as true a picture. And Jon really wanted to record it the old school way, and so he just spent an entire day kind of sitting in the middle of us, testing out different mics, and placing mics throughout the room just to basically capture exactly what he felt we sounded like, or were capable of sounding like, in the room. He wanted to capture all the progression that the instruments had, he wanted to capture the sound of the instruments actually decaying in the space, so we had some mics off in the corner, and it was really amazing. We spent a whole day just setting up microphones and getting mic placements and where we sat in the room. We’re all thrilled with the result, and that’s all thanks to Jon.
Dive: What makes Noam [Pikelny, banjo player] the “attending nemesis” of the band?
CE: He’s mostly the attending nemesis to Thile — the loving, attending nemesis. But no, I guess to all of us. Noam, of course, is incredibly quick-witted, and nobody can win with Noam in a battle of quickness or wit or just — Noam basically just wins all the time. That’s basically it, though.
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