The Long Road to Nashville

This is the third record I have made in Nashville, but I wanted to lean more toward our rock side since that’s where my solo band is headed. For the last few years we have been going out with drums and electric guitars. The great thing is that we really captured a lot of these songs live, except for the singers who came in later. I feel like overworking things is detrimental, so we recorded this in a week and then spent the following week doing overdubs and touch-ups. It was kind of like playing a gig.

Del’s Boys

These guests [Bill Nershi, Tim O’Brien, Darrell Scott, Ronnie McCoury] are all guys I have a connection with through festivals and recording. It has been about ten years since Ronnie McCoury and I first met when I was a teacher at the RockyGrass Academy. It’s a symbiotic relationship: They bring us into their more traditional bluegrass world and we bring them into our sort of jamgrass/hippie world. Ronnie and I are like brothers. One thing that’s kind of unique about Leftover Salmon is that we started as a bluegrass band and then started playing rock music.

Emmitt-Nershi

Bill Nershi and I are going into the studio together later this year, so I really wanted to have him involved in this project to bridge the two bands. We are hoping to record an Emmitt-Nershi album at his home studio this December. I’ve been spreading out my tunes, figuring out which songs fit with which of my different bands. That’s really fun for me after being locked into Salmon for 18 years.

The Long Way Home

We’d never played any of the three covers on Long Road before. [Producer] Gary West suggested we cover Marshall Tucker Band’s “Take the Highway,” which I had never even thought about covering [laughs], and I always related to Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home.” It captures the two worlds of “the home life” and “the road life” in a really great way. So we tried to cover that as a bluegrass number and capture Van Morrison’s “Gypsy in My Soul” like Garcia/Grisman’s version of “The Thrill is Gone.”

A Balanced Diet

We want to keep Leftover Salmon special… a reunion-type thing rather than the same old touring routine. Nobody in the band really wants to do that again. So we’ll do a festival and then go home. We didn’t know if we were ever going to put it together again. I just woke up one day and said, “I am going to call our manager and see if we could do some dates.” He already had offers on the table and then Telluride had a cancellation, so Adam from Yonder Mountain String Band suggested they call us. At that time there was no communication among us or talk of doing a reunion. Salmon was kind of dead. It was funny how the ball just started rolling: Red Rocks, High Sierra, Jazz Aspen…

Stop and Go

Really what we needed all along was to do our solo projects, as well as Salmon. But there was this fear that those projects would take away from the band. It was threatening, but now there is none of that since we have all gone and done our solo thing. Sometimes it just takes stopping—even if you never think you are going to do it again—to come back to it in a healthy way without having to feed this big machine of managers and crew members.

Successful Streamlining

We are just six band members and a manager at this point and it’s been working out fine. But when you are entrenched in the whole record-company machine you can’t see that it’s possible to go back to a grassroots level. I think String Cheese is going through a similar thing and trying to get away from their big deal. Bill and I are so similar in what we have gone through with our respective bands. He’s where I was a year ago, like, “Man, maybe we will do this again, but it is so great to get away from this giant machine.” It’s really great to see other bands come to this realization. If we’d kept going with Salmon, who knows what would have happened. We were running ourselves into the ground.  

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