DW Burnett

“Where’s my cord?” asks Vince Herman.

It’s about an hour until doors open at the New York City club Bowery Electric, a tiny 200-person spot in Lower Manhattan where Leftover Salmon is scheduled to play an intimate album release party. The Colorado-bred group spent the afternoon hosting a radio show on SiriusXM’s Jam_ ON station. 24 hours earlier, they played at a bluegrass and beer festival in Denver and 24 hours prior to that, they were on stage at a sold-out Red Rocks gig alongside Phil Lesh & The Terrapin Family Band. And, the following night, they are slated to play a happy-hour set at New York’s Brooklyn Bowl, where Herman will also take party in the We B-E-E Spelling charity game show. So it would certainly make sense that this whirlwind run could yield a lost cord.

But, Herman isn’t the type of guy who would let any sort of equipment mishap ruin his night—not at this point in the band’s 29th year. Moments later, backstage in the green room (which is painted blood red), he digs into some chips and salsa, and reflects on the last time they played a venue this small. It reminds him of a time when they were just starting out in the early-‘90s, where any bar with a sound guy would suffice. This was essentially a Downtown New York bar with a sound guy, and it would work for tonight.

“Small clusters like this in New York, you can get things done,” he says, rather prophetically. Getting things done certainly could have been Leftover Salmon’s unofficial mantra for the last three decades. Herman, along with mandolin player Drew Emmitt, have managed to keep the group together, shuffling through a handful of lineup changes, a short period last decade where they were officially on hiatus, the death of their original banjo player Mark Vann, marriages, kids and now a new six-piece lineup that they both swear has brought out the best in the band, ever.

This new lineup is the impetus for tonight’s tiny show—they’re celebrating the release of Something Higher, Leftover Salmon’s 11th official release. It’s a remarkably polished collection, a natural mix of Americana and bluegrass that sounds like their most mature set of songs to date. It’s an album they recorded in just 10 days in Tucson, Ariz. It’s also an album that every member of the band contributed original songs to, and an album that saw Herman and Emmitt truly collaborate and write a song together for the first time after all these years.

“It’s more of a collective now—a collaboration with everybody,” Emmitt says. “This record, especially. Even the last couple of records, we were leaning toward that more and more. Twenty years ago, we would write individually and bring those songs to the band. And [our new process] definitely reflects this lineup, which is a great thing. This is the best lineup overall we’ve ever had. There’s been some great lineups in the past, but it’s all the elements we need.”

Today’s iteration of Leftover Salmon includes banjo player Andy Thorn, keyboardist Erik Deutsch, bassist Greg Garrison and drummer Alwyn Robinson. The musicians’ backgrounds are quite varied: Thorn clocked in time with Larry Keel, Deutsch spent years playing in the jazzy combo Fat Mama and touring with Charlie Hunter, Garrison was an early member of Punch Brothers, and Robinson studied classical percussion and has been part of marching bands. Their new sound is bigger, but not out of control; they certainly know their way around the stage and studio but, most of all, they have a chemistry that any band would yearn for.

Outside the little red room, where Emmitt and Herman have shifted their pre-show eats from chips and salsa to slices of New York pizza, the rest of the band continues to soundcheck at their leisure. They don’t play full songs, just a quick warm-up to make sure things are in tune and coming out right.

“We are absolutely fired up,” Herman says. “It’s a real blessing to Drew and I. We just feel lucky as can be.”

Leftover Salmon came together at the end of 1989 by accident—or perhaps divine intervention. Herman’s band, the Salmon Heads, was scheduled to play a New Year’s Eve gig in Crested Butte, Colo., but some of his bandmates couldn’t make it. At the last minute, he called up Emmitt, who offered his mandolin services and some members of his own group, the Left Hand String Band. Their onstage energy was electric.

“The thing that caused the crowd to go nuts was when we would play these fast bluegrass songs,” Herman recalls. “And people were slam dancing—it was like, ‘whoa!’ We just bumped into it. They started doing that, and we kept giving them what they wanted.”

From there, Leftover Salmon was born and immediately carved out a new sound that was lovingly described as “polyethnic Cajun slamgrass.” Their shows drew jamband fans and bluegrass aficionados alike, and Leftover Salmon started touring relentlessly throughout the ‘90s, playing clubs, theaters and festivals.

That spirit of adventure and heading into the unknown still exists today, just in different forms. When the musicians showed up to start recording Something Higher in Tucson, they had only written about half of the 12 songs that would eventually end up on the album.

“I spent a couple nights in the hotel courtyard trying to craft, trying to get things done,” Herman says. “When I was in school, I always did my homework at the last minute, too.”

Emmitt was the same way. “One night, Greg and I went to see some music and I wrote the third verse of ‘Astral Traveler’ while I was at the bar that night. I grabbed a napkin and just started writing it down,” he says with a smirk.

Alan Crandall

But even with those little moments of real-time improvisation, these days, the band is focused when it comes to their studio work. For the last three albums, starting with 2012’s Aquatic Hitchhiker, they’ve worked with Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin as their producer.

“From the beginning, it felt very different than any other record,” Berlin says of Something Higher. “The guys were inspired. Once we got in and got rolling, everyone was ready. Those songs that showed up late—they’re some of my favorites. Sometimes you just have to honor the artistic process and pray that your muse will follow you somewhere.”

Something Higher, though, doesn’t sound like a band that slapped a bunch of songs together last minute. It opens with the contemplative tune “Places,” a composition that Emmitt and Deutsch worked up together, reflecting on life on the road. A number of the songs have an underlying theme of traveling but, at other times, today’s socio-political climate
is at the forefront. There’s a sinister element in Herman’s “House of Cards,” a dark, desert-rock number that finds Herman singing “this is not normal” and “love is gonna win again.” And on the bluegrass- tinged “Foreign Fields,” the one song written by Robinson, the band sounds as poignant as ever.

So does the band have a new sense of maturity?

“Oh, yeah,” Emmitt says.

“God, I hope not,” Herman says. The two erupt in laughter.

Emmitt never considered playing in a bluegrass band to be a full-time job when he formed Leftover Salmon all those years ago.

“When we started this band, it was hard playing bluegrass for a living—very hard,” he says. “There were a couple bands that were doing pretty well, like Hot Rize and New Grass Revival—but everyone else had jobs. You didn’t play bluegrass year-round. People didn’t hire bluegrass bands to play in clubs or theaters. So our concept was, if we get a drummer and plug in, maybe we could get more gigs.”

Now, years later, Leftover Salmon has become a model for a new generation of jamgrass and improv-friendly roots acts—like Greensky Bluegrass, The Infamous Stringdusters, Yonder Mountain String Band and Railroad Earth—who followed the same formula of playing the club circuit and booking bluegrass and Americana festivals at the same time.

“I was 25 years old before I jumped off the cliff to be a musician full time,” Herman admits. “I was always told: ‘You can’t do that for a living. You’ll never do that.’ But the model of a career that would be long and enduring is definitely something that the bluegrass world [supports]. I remember thinking, ‘Man, if we could do this for a long time, it’d be pretty cool.’”

The band members don’t live near each other anymore. Both Robinson and Deutsch are based in Brooklyn, N.Y., Thorn lives in Boulder and Garrison holds it down in Colorado, where he is a professor of music at the University of Denver.

Emmitt still lives in Crested Butte, a place he’s called home for nearly 20 years. When he’s not on the road, he can usually be found on the ski slopes and raising his kids. Herman lives in Ashland, Ore. and spends most of his time walking his dogs, hanging out with his wife and playing music with his two adult sons. They even have a trio going—The Herman Clan— or “THC” for short.

They still have goals as a band, too. Herman wants Leftover to book a European tour at some point soon. And their 30th anniversary is right around the corner, so plans for that are starting to marinate.

“We’re going to grow our mullets back,” Herman says.

“I don’t know if we should announce that,” Emmitt responds, causing Herman to unleash a powerful laugh.

“It took a lot of years to conquer that mullet—it really did,” he says. “But things are cyclical.”

This article originally appears in the July/August 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.