In 2016 Ryan Adams was riding on something of a wave after the success of his 14th album entitled Ryan Adams, which featured some great songs like Kim and My Wrecking Ball, not to mention the track that was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Song, Gimme Something Good. The album itself was nominated for Best Rock Album, but lost out to Beck’s Morning Phase.
Adams’ continued success and popularity led to invitations to appear at the 2016 Newport folk festival and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in June 2016, appropriately named in his case on this occasion as he brought with him some new backing players, The Infamous Stringdusters, a perennially popular bluegrass outfit, and the truly excellent singer and harmony vocalist Nicki Bluhm. Which is where your humble writer saw them when the unnamed supergroup appeared on the programme list, one wondered what a New York rock’n’roller manqué might learn from a progressive bluegrass outfit from Nashville and a chanteuse from California. The Stringdusters are incredibly prolific having released 17 albums and 4 EPs since 2007, their albums being a mix of standard bluegrass as per their debut Fork in the Road, some more americana stylings as on Laws of Gravity, a Grammy winner for Best Bluegrass Album, a couple of tribute albums faithful to the music of Flatt and Scruggs, and Bill Monroe, and more progressive multi-genre albums that touch on world music and latin vibes as on their latest album 20/20. And all these styles are accomplished (a cover of Mr John’s Rocket Man for example) using just their typical bluegrass acoustic instrumentation.
Nicki Bluhm is a very talented songwriter who has released 8 studio albums (4 solo), the latest of which is the well-received Rancho Deluxe which dissects the journey that Bluhm took, moving from California to Nashville after a messy divorce and a fading career. The album is very much on the California country rock side of americana with a largely laid back mid-tempo feel to it.
So the players got together for Adams’ 75 minute set (they had actually only met a couple of days before and began working up the songs with little time to practice). At Telluride, that’s all you get unless you are the featured and last artist of the day. Adams also had something of a chequered history at Telluride where the audience is a little unforgiving (a set with the Cardinals a few years earlier fell very flat, so expectations were guarded); but from the off, the atmosphere on stage and amongst the 10,000 audience was magical. Unusual for an outdoor festival setting, you could hear the music in detail throughout, even over the audience talking. Adams was on fine form both musically and temperamentally and joked with the audience about how one of the songs had come about – “one of the Stringdusters texted a message about a particular song, “F sharp to G sus”. Adams texted back, “#what?” After telling that story he introduced the next song by saying to the boys in the band, “Capo second, J flat, suspension of disbelief”.
The song I have picked was part of the setlist but was not necessarily the track I intended to profile, but at both Telluride and Norfolk the only available videos seem to have been taken on iPhones (or the like). So here we are, courtesy of the Steven Colbert show– a stunning performance of a stunning song in the Adams repertoire taken from the album Heartbreaker, highlighting the instrumental expertise of the Stringdusters and the wonderful harmonies from Bluhm, not to mention Adams’ beautiful whine and wistful lyrics, here is Oh My Sweet Carolina. Enjoy!
