Yonder Mountain String Band’s High-Energy Bluegrass Sound Set to Make its Kalispell Debut

Just a few months removed from the release of their new album “Nowhere Next,” the bluegrass group Yonder Mountain String Band is headed to Flathead Valley Community College’s Wachholz College Center on March 7 for their first-ever show in Kalispell, and just their second show in the Flathead Valley.

The band has been playing shows in Montana since September of 1999 when they made their in-state debut at the Fine Pickin’s Festival in Missoula as part of a lineup featuring Leftover Salmon, Tony Furtado and Larry Keel. Some 10 months later, the Missoulian teased a show of theirs at the Ritz Bar by saying “the word is that these boys can kick you back to the hills with some good ol’ hillbilly licks, then turn around and cover an Ozzy Osbourne tune.”

Across more than 50 shows in Montana in the decades since, the band has apparently ventured to the Flathead just once prior to the upcoming Kalispell show, with their first foray into this corner of the state coming in 2021 at the Great Northern Bar in Whitefish, according to show records on setlist.fm.

Venturing beyond the well-worn path of their longtime tour route is something that band members say picked up during the pandemic years, and this time around they’ll be playing an even bigger venue in the Wachholz’s McClaren Hall. Banjo player and vocalist Dave Johnston said in a recent interview with the Beacon that he’s expecting “nothing less than the typical Montana bush rowdiness.”

“It’s a unique place, the entire state, I think has got a lot of unique pockets of fun people going on. And you know, we expect nothing less of the fine folks of Kalispell,” Johnston said. He added that with the band having its roots in the Front Range of Colorado, they’ve always identified with the places in the intermountain west, and the sense of adventure about its music.

“I think it’s still around, even though we’re older and it’s maybe a little tricker to the untrained eye. We know it when we see it,” Johnston said.

It’s been about 25 years since YMSB released their debut album “Elevation,” which helped herald their arrival on the bluegrass scene. At the time, the band was still just about a year old, having formed southwest of Boulder in Nederland, Colorado with a lineup of Johnston, Ben Kaufmann on bass, Adam Aijala on guitar and Jeff Austin on mandolin. The band’s current lineup features Aijala, Johnston and Kaufmann in their respective roles, and Nick Piccininni on mandolin, banjo, fiddle and vocals, and Coleman Smith on fiddle.

As Johnston and Kaufmann recalled in a recent interview, “Elevation” was recorded in roughly five to seven days. Band members showed up with songs they had written and then showed them around. There was no recording budget, or at least not a firmly established budget beyond whatever cash they could collectively scrounge up and throw together.

“We hired local friends and heroes that we knew could guide us and help us, so we didn’t waste time,” Kaufmann said. “And then we went into the studio and recorded everything a couple of times, and when they told us we were good, like ‘That was a good version, you’re done, next,’ we believed them, and that was it.”

Over the years, the band has typically prioritized touring over studio recording because it constitutes their primary source of income. Kaufmann said that they’ve historically been bad at carving out recording time amid both their heavy touring schedule and the demands of time at home with family. In their genre, he said that studio time is kind of a labor of love, but also something that bands need to do.

“In my opinion, songs have a life their own. And there’s part of that that happens when you’re writing it and creating it, there’s part of that that happens when you’re sharing it with people onstage, and then there’s the part of it where you kind of capture it in the studio,” Kaufmann said. “And all of those things, I think are so necessary for a song to have its full life.”

The new album, their 15th, came together across different chunks of recording time, with most of the songs written for it. Some of the tracks that came together for “Nowhere Next,” are in Kaufmann’s eyes “as collaborative of material as we’ve ever had.”

Johnston said that the reception as they’ve toured and taken some of the new songs for a spin in front of live audiences has been good, with audiences providing the kind of enthusiasm that the band typically looks to as a bellwether in deciding if a song is fit for the stage and their reputation for bringing high energy shows to town.

Despite the length of their run and the number of miles they’ve tallied on the road, Johnston said that as crazy as it may sound, he just keeps faith in the belief that the energy will be there when the show starts.

“I mean, 9.8 times out of 10, it is there, you know. I mean, maybe there’s a flood happening or the rain is coming onto the stage, and you can’t get enough sleep or something like that. And then it might be hard to marshal the energy, but more often than not, it just somehow appears there, you know. And you get to step into it, and it’s still a wonder to me, you know?”

Kaufmann said the energy of a show is a collective thing produced by the audience, the band, the sound engineers, and every single person working the venue.

“You just have to be in the moment of it, and I think we’ve all learned it. That’s one of the things I love about what’s happening right now with this band, is that everyone is so together in each moment as it’s happening. In a way, it’s more like that now than it has ever been. And I don’t know what makes it that way. We’ve had enough experience where you know, the band that we have, that’s playing together right now, is so good, and so keyed in with each other. There’s a joy that’s happening.”

As for what exactly the band intends to play, that’s something that will continue to develop in the leadup to the Kalispell show. Kaufmann said that band member Adam Aijala arranged the set lists for a long time, but for about the last year the responsibility has fallen to Kaufmann, who described some of the rules they like to follow.

With a deep reservoir of songs to draw from, Kaufmann said that the common knowledge from within the band is that if anyone, for any reason, wants to play a song for an upcoming show, they just have to vocalize that desire. From there, Kaufmann said they don’t like to play songs that they played the last time they were in a town, and they don’t like to play songs that they played the night before. In both cases, there’s a little wiggle room with those informal rules of set list design, which is all intended to deliver a memorable show.

Kaufmann was adamant that even though Yonder’s new album came out in early November, this won’t be a show in which they exclusively play off “Nowhere Next.” It’s long been something of a deeply held conviction of Kaufmann’s that bands shouldn’t play strictly off a new album unless a show is specifically advertised as such.

One of the last ingredients Kaufmann considers when designing a set list is whether or not they’ve received any emailed requests from fans. He said he encourages fans to reach out with stories and requests for songs, and shared of how he had recently received an email from a listener who hadn’t seen the band live in 20 years, but characterized Yonder’s music as the soundtrack to their life over the last two decades as parenthood took precedent in their life. The email requested that the band play one of three songs, and Kaufmann said he immediately added the request to his calendar.

That particular anecdote in some ways mirrors a recent experience Kaufmann himself has had with the band’s music. Having played it day-in and day-out for decades now, he said he’s been reluctant to listen to it outside of work, but found out that, unbeknownst to him, his 13-year-old son had a playlist of his favorite Yonder songs.

It’s now what his son wants to listen to when they drive to and from school, and the experience has given Kaufmann the chance to see his music filtered through his son’s wide-eyed, open-eared interaction with music.

“And I’ve gone back and listened to some of these earliest recordings and fallen in love with them again,” Kaufmann said, adding that there’s “such a purity to them,” and that the experience has been “a wonderful gift.”

Yonder Mountain String Band will perform at the FVCC’s Wachholz College Center on Friday, March 7, at 7:30 p.m. For more information, including to purchase tickets, go to https://www.wachholzcollegecenter.org/.