Greensky Bluegrass Written Down & Quoted

The Kalamazoo, Mich.-based band formed in 2000 and was properly introduced to bluegrass fans in 2006 when they won the Telluride Bluegrass Festival competition and returned the next year on the main stage.

As a 2011 write-up from Rolling Stone on Hardly Strictly Bluegrass notes, “Much like the festival itself, Greensky are hardly strictly bluegrass and, yet, they’re representing the genre for a whole new generation.”

Shouted, Written Down & Quoted continues showcasing the quintet’s take on bluegrass, with a blend of Americana and rock ’n’ roll.

Pollstar phoned up Hoffman while the band was backstage preparing for a gig in Jackson, Miss. He discussed the group’s songwriting process, Greensky’s close relationship with its fans, and how he and his bandmates “learned how to play bluegrass together and then evolved into learning how to be ourselves together.”

The lineup also features Anders Beck on dobro/lap steel, Michael Arlen Bont on banjo/vocals, Dave Bruzza on guitar/lead vocals, and Mike Devol on acoustic bass/vocals.  

Dylan Langille / ontheDL Photo – Paul Hoffman of Greensky Bluegrass
Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, Colo.

We talked to your manager, Matt Beck, earlier this year for the Hotstar cover feature on Greensky Bluegrass and he talked about the incredible songwriters in the band. He had a quote where he said, “It’s really a song band at the core.” Can you expand on that statement, the importance of the songwriting?  

Absolutely. And as one of the songwriters for the band, that’s a true honor. You know, a big part of our band is the live performance and the jamming and the lights and the production and all that but, at the root of that, people are still very tuned in to the lyrics and the meanings of the songs. I don’t know that I ever expected to have such an in-tune audience for these things that I’m writing and singing about and it’s a real powerful relationship to know that people are real tuned in and it’s important to them.

I hear feedback from fans who ask me, “How are you singing about my life when you don’t even know me?” and things like that. Or something happened that our music really helped them through. Having people at the concert have a good time is a really important, powerful experience but also having people take the music and make it a part of their lives is profoundly powerful. I can’t even – It’s intimating sometimes when I write songs. I think to myself, “Am I really going to say this?” I read a Jason Isbell quote one time [and] he said the same thing. Sometimes when he’s writing, he thinks to himself, “Oh my lord, can I even say this?” And then as soon as he thinks that he feels as a writer that he has a personal responsibility to say it. As soon as he discovers that it might be hard to say. And I really related to that quote and think about it often.  

Shouted, Written Down and Quoted came out Sept. 23. Going off of the title of the album, what is a message that you wanted to shout about with this album?

(laughs) The secret album title. The lyric it comes from is “Sometimes things better left unspoken should be shouted, written down and quoted. So, the subtext of the album title is “Greensky Bluegrass: Things Better Left Unspoken.”

It’s a great line.

Thank you.

Ahead of the songwriting and recording process, did you have a vision for the album?

With this record most of the band was unfamiliar with a lot of the material going into the recording process – unfamiliar with a higher percentage of the music than past records. There’s been a couple of songs with the past couple, but this record was entirely un-played live, when we went in to start recording it. That made for a really fun recording process where we tried a lot of stuff. As we’ve grown as a band and as writers, we’ve become a little bit more detached to some of the little nuances and open to trying a lot of different things with songs as a group. So the beginning of the recording process was a lot of just exploration and finding a voice with all these songs and learning them all. And we didn’t use everything that we had. We had to cut some [songs] because we had a lot of stuff.

So we kind of just went into it not really knowing what was going to happen and how a lot of the songs were going to be. And that made for a really fun, heartfelt creation process.

J VanBuhler – Greensky Bluegrass

Your bio says this recording process was in two different sessions and was the longest block of recording time ever for the band. Was that because the songs had never been played live before?

We’ve given ourselves more time with every record, sort of our reward of growth for ourselves. And having more time allows us to try more stuff. There’s a certain amount of urgency and deadline that’s good for the recording process, because when you’re making a record, so much of it is about commitment that at some point you just have to commit to what you’ve created or what you’ve got. … Having more time allows us to experiment with things that we might never use, you know, some loud guitar tone or some weird vocal track. We’ll be like, “Let’s just mess around with this for a while and see if we can make it cool.” And sometimes it doesn’t work, but it sure is fun. (laughs)

You and guitarist Dave Bruzza share most of the band’s songwriting process. Can you talk about how the songwriting process works? Do you write separately and then bring your ideas together?

For the most part we both write individually and we both write a song that is finished to various degrees. Sometimes it’s just a template that’s very vague and then [we] bring it to the band and the band discusses what we can do it. Or sometimes it’s a very completed process that him or I will bring to the band and show our vision and intention for the song. And the entire band is really involved in the arranging process of it, figuring how we’re going to present it and what instrument does what role and that kind of thing. It’s really one of the greatest parts about our band, being an acoustic quintet. We always have a lot of options because we share the role of the drum kit and melodically our instruments all have these different voices. So it’s a fun process arranging how we’re going to use a song.

How long have you been playing the mandolin and when did you write your first song?

I’ve been playing the mandolin since 2000 – 16 years. I bought a mandolin two months before meeting Bruzza, our guitar player, and [Michael Arlen] Bont, our banjo player. So I was a real newbie to the instrument when I met them. The three of us have been playing music together for 16 years. And I wrote my first song probably when I was like 12 or 13. I played guitar when I was a kid and wrote songs back then, too.

Nowadays when you write a song, do you still write it on guitar?

Usually I write it on guitar. I have a couple different orders and processes. Like if I take notes lyrically first or come up with a melody idea on my mandolin or come up with a chord idea on my guitar. But the majority of my songs are written playing guitar and just sort of like writing it as I go kind of vibe.

You started playing mandolin just two months before you met your future bandmates. Did you catch on to the instrument right away?

Uh (laughs) I guess it depends on who you ask. Because I was already a guitar player and had been for six years I was able to teach myself a lot of things about the mandolin, like my musical education and my hand dexterity, so to speak, was already beyond [that of] a new player so I could conceptualize, like, “OK, if I wanted to play ‘blah blah blah’ how would I do that?” and then figure it out. So that helped me advance quickly, I think.

But there’s a famous joke in the band about how when I met the guys I really had no idea what was going on and I didn’t know what bluegrass was. And they were like, “Go home, listen to Bill Monroe and listen to this Rounder [label group] bluegrass collection, like they gave me two CDs. And then they were like, “Come hang out with us next week and we’ll see what happens.” (laughs) So, as much as I taught myself how to play the mandolin, I owe a lot of it to Bruzza and Bont for sort of guiding me. But they were also learning their instruments as well. Dave was a drummer who switched to guitar and Bont was a guitar player who switched to banjo. So we sort of learned how to play bluegrass together and then evolved into learning how to be ourselves together, which is sometimes not very bluegrass-y. (laughs)

Now, when you say it’s a joke in the band – was it really a joke? Or were you not really familiar with a lot of bluegrass music at the time?   

I guess it’s more like they teased me rather than a joke. I didn’t know bluegrass at all. I bought a mandolin because I saw David Grisman play. So I really just thought the instrument was cool and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I’m definitely the redheaded stepchild of the bluegrass mandolin.

I think it’s kind of neat that you didn’t come into it totally immersed because obviously your band is known for mixing up a lot of different genres. If everyone in the band was just a total bluegrass expert at that point then maybe your sound wouldn’t have developed as it did.

Absolutely. I think so. It’s pretty common in the bluegrass world, if you’re maybe from an area where it’s more popular than western Michigan to get brought up in playing fiddle tunes and that kind of thing when you’re a kid, going to bluegrass festivals. If you look at Sam Bush, he was a national fiddle champion when he was a kid. He’s been playing bluegrass his whole life. And I learned about it after I started playing the mandolin.

That’s pretty funny but it sounds like it’s worked out for you guys. How’s the tour been going?

The tour’s been going great. We’re on the second leg. We’re in the Southern states currently, where it’s nice and warm, which is nice.

Your bio says you play two sets of music every night. Are there different types of tunes in each set? Or is it more so that you play so much music every evening that the concert is split up into two sets?

We play not only two sets a night, we play a different show every night. We have a lot of fans that come to a lot of shows, like 30-plus a year. So our catalog of music is pretty large. Not all original but maybe over 200 songs. From show to show in one week, we’ll play the new record the most but we mix in all of our material and various covers and things from over the course of all of our catalog. We just kind of mix it up and play all of our material in a rotation [and] every couple of shows we’ll play a song again.

What’s the crowd like at one of your shows? A mix of ages?  

It’s a pretty wide variety. We have a pretty loyal fanbase that’s all different ages, from all over the country who travel and such. We put on a fun, raucous, holler, jump around, have a good time, leave your cares behind kind of show. (laughs) We try to … [create] an experience for people where they can leave their job behind and have a good time or whatever.

I think our fanbase is amazing. As a musician, I feel lucky that I look out there and see a lot of my friends and see people who I want to be friends with. I’m like, “They look fun! I’d like to be friends with them.” So we’re certainly not alienated by our fans, they’re just us on the other side of the microphones, really.

Your bio also mentioned that the band really cares about creating a large scale production. Do you and your bandmates give input about the lights, etc.?

Yeah, we have a really awesome, motivated lighting designer and our sound engineer does something really special for us. All of our crew – our monitor guy, our tour manger, our merch guy – they all take a lot of pride in the band, you know, like they’re part of it and we like it that way. You don’t see a lot of bluegrass bands carrying as many lights as we do. Our show can be psychedelic and it’s rowdy, it’s jammin’. We’re creating an experience. As much as we want to go up there and play great music we also want people to have fun.

Lastly, do you have a favorite song from the new album? Just in general or to perform live?

That’s a hard question, really. I like them all for different reasons. There’s a slow song on the album called “While Waiting,” which I’ve probably listened to the most because it’s got this restraint. It doesn’t even have all the instruments on it for the whole tune. However, that song doesn’t translate to our live performance as well. So you know, maybe for that side of the coin there’s a song called “Living Over” that’s an even longer improvisational vehicle in the live performance. I love that recording of the song. We did a really good job in the studio of presenting that improvisation, the loose performance in studio. But I like them all for so many different reasons. Dave’s tune “Room Without a Roof” [has] got this really cool atmospheric thing going on to it. I love them all or it wouldn’t work, right? (laughs)

Visit GreenskyBluegrass.com for more information.