Track By Track: Leftover Salmon _High Country_
Vince Herman, Drew Emmitt and the late Mark Vann assembled the first version of Leftover Salmon back in 1989. The group’s new album, High Country, is not only the latest studio manifestation of the band’s signature “Polyethnic Cajun Slamgrass” but also marks a turning point in the band’s roster. Herman (vocals, acoustic guitar, washboard), Emmitt (vocals, acoustic and electric mandolin, electric guitar, fiddle), steady bassist Greg Garrison and Andy Thorn (vocals, acoustic and electric banjo) recorded High Country with drummer Alwyn Robinson— who debuted with the group in 2013—and Salmon’s most recent addition, longtime Little Feat keyboard player Bill Payne, who officially joined this past fall after an extended trial run of dates. Here, Emmitt and Herman discuss the record as well as the group’s current lineup.
Get Up and Go
Drew: “Get Up and Go” is a Vince Herman tune. He wrote it about a friend of his who had been in a near-fatal car accident and was wheelchair-bound. He took this person out one day to the coast in Oregon, and he was inspired to write this song about freeing yourself from all the fetters and trappings of being caged in a house. When we recorded it, we were having a hard time trying to figure out how to place the solo and who should play it, and we had several people try it and nothing worked. So we ended up bringing in Andy Hall from the [Infamous] Stringdusters to play dobro and he just killed it. That brought the whole track to life and
we decided it should be the opening track on the record.
Vince: It’s a country kind of groove. We figured it’s a good idea to start the record with a song about kind of getting out of your comfort zone—getting off the couch and getting out and enjoying the planet. Ideally, we’d like to have people dancing for the entire first listen to the record.
Western Skies
Vince: No Leftover Salmon album is complete without a classic Drew ballad. This is one of those dreaming-out- the-window kind of tunes that Drew sings and writes so well. It’s a journey, and I guess after asking you to “Get Up and Go,” it puts you out in the highway.
Drew: I wrote this song on tour with my solo band out on the West Coast. I was just inspired by getting out of the cities of America and the strip malls to where everything opens up— experiencing what the whole western United States has to offer. It’s also about self- transformation and inner freedom and just living life.
Home Cookin’
Vince: I recently moved to Oregon and I’ve been living out my farmer fantasy and growing a bunch of my own food and chickens and all that kind of stuff. Getting to cook is just one of the most pleasurable things I’ve ever done. That’s what inspired me to write that song—moving from 9,000 feet to 1,000 feet allows you to grow a couple more things and I’m psyched about it.
High Country
Vince: “High Country” celebrates the whole Leftover Salmon thing—coming from that Colorado high country and just loving being up there in that world away from the world and celebrating our friends. Andy, our banjo player, wrote it and he spends more time up in the high country than anybody I know. He’s constantly trying to get up above tree line.
Andy brings a great, young, high-energy kind of thing to the deal. His playing is phenomenal. He makes Drew and I feel that triangle we used to feel with Mark Vann. Andy’s got such drive and is a great singer and songwriter, too. He brings the whole package. He’s a great guy to hang with, has the prettiest smile in all of show business and he’s just a ball to work with. We’re so lucky and were feeling so good about having Andy in that position that it made us want to put the band back together and do a lot more of it. [Thorn joined in 2010 during a period when the group played only sporadic dates.] So finding Andy for this project was really what brought us back.
Bluegrass Pines
Drew: “Bluegrass Pines” is a song written by Bill Payne and Robert Hunter. Bill has had the good fortune to write many tunes with Robert Hunter and when Bill was considering joining the band, he sent us all a bunch of songs and this was one that grabbed all of us. It’s kind of haunting and a really cool song. We were fortunate enough to be able to record it and I was honored to be the one to sing it.
It was a dream of mine to have Bill Payne in the band. We’d worked with him when he produced one of our records years ago [2004’s Leftover Salmon]. After we parted with our other keyboard player, Bill McKay, we were a five-piece for a while and the five-piece was working fine, but I really felt like we needed keys again—it was a big part of our sound. So Bill came out on a few shows just to feel it out as a special guest and the more he came out and played with us, the more we all enjoyed it. Right about that time, the members of Little Feat decided that they were gonna not play very much, or at all, and at our Ryman show for The Nashville Sessions reunion in September, we announced him as a full-time member of Leftover Salmon.
It’s incredible. He brings so much to the table. He’s one of the best keyboard players in this genre, probably in the entire world, and maybe in the history of rock keyboard players. He’s played with everybody—it’s ridiculous—it just goes on and on. The Stones tried to hire him; the Dead were thinking about hiring him at one point. He played with Bob Seger, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor. I mean, he can practically not name a band that he hasn’t either played with or done studio time with. He played on a Pink Floyd record for crying out loud. He is the man and we could not be happier. It has brought so much to this band and just put things over the top.
Better Day
Vince: This song talks about how good it is being alive and walking around on planet Earth. We’re just so lucky to do what we do and have the kind of days we have. We wanted to get that into a song and I think Andy did a good job of it.
Six Feet of Snow
Drew: That’s an old Little Feat tune that we’ve kind of dabbled with over the years, here and there. It just made sense to include it on this record as a nod to Bill and Little Feat. It’s one we always responded to because it’s got a bluegrassy, country feel. We cut it live, just laid it down and had fun with it.
It’s something we can all relate to. It’s dumping snow here right now, in Crested Butte, Colorado. So it’s something we experience quite often in our travels—six feet of snow.
So Lonesome
Vince: “So Lonesome” is a great Greg Garrison number. Greg’s a really good singer and a secret weapon. It’s a sort of sarcastic song about lonesome country songs. “I’m so lonesome, my lonesome’s more lonesome than me,” you know, that’s pretty damn lonesome. [Laughs.] It’s a cool little writing device that Greg uses. If a record is a housing project and all the rooms in it have their own kind of feel, then this is a cool room to step into for a while.
Drew: Greg is our bass player and every once in a while, he surprises us all and comes out with a tune. He’s a music professor [at the University of Colorado Denver] and a very heady musician. He’ll come up with these progressions and we’re like, “Wow, that’s really cool.” It’s a progression that goes all over the place and we needed charts in the studio to get it right.
Light in the Woods
Vince: This is a haunted story from Tennessee. There’s a legend of lights running through the hills at night; some say it’s the lantern of an old slave looking for his master, some say there are aliens out there. But a lot of people have seen them outside of Nashville—the lights are quite a phenomenon. Drew remembers seeing them as a kid and that’s cool when writing can dig something out of your past and bring it into the light of day.
Drew: I grew up outside of Nashville and there was a legend of this light people would see in the woods at night. Sometimes they’d see it way high up in a tree, sometimes they’d see it moving through the woods, sometimes it would turn into several lights and then go away. I was a kid—I was probably about nine or 10 years old at the time—and I thought, “Well, that’s interesting,” and I didn’t really believe it. But my parents would tell me that they would wake up in the middle of the night and they would see this thing. A lot of locals talked about seeing it and, one night, I was out in my driveway and I looked up in the woods and I saw it and it scared the heck out of me. [Laughs.] I ran back in the house and started yelling, “I saw it! I saw the light!” It stuck with me and I’ve always wanted to write about it. So this is finally the song about the light in the woods.
Thornpipe
Drew: “Thornpipe” is an instrumental Andy Thorn wrote and that’s kind of his nickname for various reasons. [Laughs.] We wanted an instrumental on the record and, once again, we just kind of played through it and had a good time with it and we didn’t get too fancy. We wanted to get a really nice, live bluegrass feel and we had a great fiddle player friend of ours, Casey Driessen, play on it. He recorded in the back of the bus at the Old Settler’s Festival outside of Austin, Texas. It’s just a fun little bluegrass romp that we had a good time with.
Two Highways
Vince: When you do this traveling for a living, sometimes you think about maybe just going home and staying there— for a day or two. [Laughs.] And as that path starts to come to your mind, it splits into two highways and Drew addresses that.
Drew: The first part of the story is that I was cooking one night and I grabbed the handle of a very hot pan and burned the heck out of my hand. I was sitting up with my hand in a bucket of ice. I couldn’t sleep, and because I was sitting there, I thought, “Well, I can hold a pen and paper,” so I wrote this song. It’s about something I’ve felt for a long time, which is the two worlds—the road and being home—and how completely different they are and yet how symbiotic they are. I’m fascinated by the two aspects of my life, how they come together and what they mean.
Finish Your Beer
Drew: We were trying to write songs for the record and I had mentioned to Vince that we don’t have a calypso song. We like to have at least one. So he went away for a while and came back with “Finish Your Beer.” We originally released it with Breckenridge Brewery on their six packs as a download. It really fit there and then we weren’t sure whether to put it on the record or not, but we thought, “Heck, it’s fun and it’s whimsical.” A major aspect of Leftover Salmon is that we don’t take ourselves too seriously and we have a good time and it definitely fits in well with who we are.
Vince: This is a plea to people to bring sustainability to the world of partying. You know, I love to have parties, we’re going to have a big old party tomorrow, but sure enough, the next morning there’s gonna be beer bottles lying around all over the place half empty. And we’re all environmentally conscious out here. We all eat organic food, we drive Priuses, we do that kind of thing, but we’re leaving our beers half empty. That’s just not sustainable and it’s my plea to the world.
