Boy Named Banjo — live event
“Our band has so many different sides and personalities to it,” says Boy Named Banjo’s Barton Davies. “One minute we might be singing bluegrass harmonies around a condenser mic, and the next we’ve got these big, distorted guitars and pounding, rock and roll drums. This album feels like the first time we’ve been able to capture it all at once, the first time we’ve been able to bottle that live energy and share it on a record.” Dusk, Boy Named Banjo’s exhilarating new album, is indeed an electrifying dose of lightning in a bottle, one that explores the full sonic and emotional spectrum of the band’s rich, eclectic sound, from late-night, feel-good, fall-in-love party anthems to stripped-down, introspective meditations on loneliness, loss, and letting go. The writing is keen and incisive here, artfully grappling with lust and longing, hope and heartbreak, regret and redemption, and the Nashville five-piece’s performances are nothing short of exhilarating, blurring the lines between Music Row and Laurel Canyon with lush harmonies and bold, cinematic arrangements. The result is a masterfully crafted, larger-than-life major label debut from a band that continues to grow by leaps and bounds with every release, an ambitious, emotional whirlwind that embraces the bitter with the sweet at every turn. “We wanted to make a big statement with our first full-length release on Mercury,” says guitarist William Reames. ”Our influences have always been really broad and our sound has always been really wide-ranging, and we didn’t want to shy away from that. At the end of the day, this is who we are.” Launched while Davies and Reames were still just students in high school, Boy Named Banjo got its start busking on the streets of Nashville, where a passing tourist inadvertently named the group by yelling, “Play that banjo, boy!” as Davies picked outside Robert’s Western World. Performing initially as a trio with fellow classmate Willard Logan on mandolin, the group began life as an old-school string band, but their sound quickly evolved into something more adventurous with the addition of bassist Ford Garrard and drummer Sam McCullough, who joined after returning home from college. “We’re not a band that just got thrown together in the studio,” explains Reames, who splits songwriting and vocal duties with Davies. “We’re a group of best friends who’ve been doing this together since we were kids, and it shows in our music. We’ve spent a lot of time finding ourselves and our sound.” That evolution is plain to hear across the group’s remarkable catalog. Their bare bones, self-released 2012 debut, The Tanglewood Sessions, helped earn the band a spot at Bonnaroo, while their more fleshed-out 2014 follow-up, Long Story Short, led to festival slots everywhere from Hangout to Dierks Bentley’s Seven Peaks, and their pop-tinged 2021 EP, Circles, landed them performances at the Ryman and the Grand Ole Opry alongside dates supporting the likes of Kip Moore, Hank Williams, Jr., Old Crow Medicine Show, and the Cadillac Three. With their star on the rise, the obvious next step might have been to chase a hit single at country radio, but Boy Named Banjo had bigger plans. “We tour too much to live off one song at a time,” says bassist Ford Garrard, “so we decided to just quietly start cutting a full album on our own.”
Starts: 2024-11-23T18:00:42Z
Ends: 2024-11-23T20:00:42Z
Where: 217 East Houston Street, New York, New York 10002, United States
Price: $15.0