Here’s a quandary to contemplate – if Magoo are a progressive bluegrass band, and they do seem to be such, how come the train they sing about on Can’t You Hear That Train is producing a smokestack that “goes up a mile high“? So, it’s a steam train then – and there’s no suggestion in the song that the engine being referred to is an S160-Class reconfigured to run cleaner and safer on oil rather than coal – and it’s pretty obvious that the song isn’t set in North Yorkshire so how could it be anyway? So it’s a coal burning steam engine – does that count as progressive? And it appears to be running a scheduled passenger service. But that’d mean it would have to be somewhere like the Harzer Schmalspurbahnen or the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, and could a narrow-gauge engine really produce a mile high plume? Man, this is a real worry here at Americana UK towers.
It’s less of a worry for Magoo, the Colorado based bluegrass band, as guitarist Erik Hill says, “Can’t You Hear That Train started as a classic train song–Your girl is leaving on a train and there’s nothing you can do about it. I wrote it about five years ago and just let it sit. When I pulled it back out last Spring and played it for the band, that’s when it really came alive and the jam found its way in. We always have a lot of fun playing the song live.”
Magoo is made up of Dylan Flynn (dobro), who won the 2024 RockyGrass Dobro Competition, Erik Hill (guitar), the runner-up in the RockyGrass Flatpicking Contest, Courtlyn Bills (mandolin), Denton Turner (bass). With two EPs out and a handful of singles, the group is gearing up to share a body of work that calls on their roots while pioneering new paths – their debut album, What A Life, is out February 27th.
