Bluegrass and Billy Strings
Somewhere in my head, I carry a little list of bands that represent perfect self-contained mechanisms, regardless of category: the Modern Jazz Quartet, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo Quintet, and the Chieftains. Now there’s another: the band led by the bluegrass singer, guitarist and songwriter Billy Strings.
I’m late to Billy Strings; three Grammys late, to be exact, all for best bluegrass album of the year in 2021, 2025 and 2026. He’s been around for a while but I didn’t catch up until his new album, So Much for Goodbyes, which is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve heard this year — particularly a wonderful track called “Lucid Daydream”, which bends the bluegrass format in a very compelling way.
Last year Strings was invited to support Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson on a few dates of their Outlaws tour, and cancelled his own summer dates in order to do so. I found a clip of his cover of “Tangled Up in Blue”, not from the Outlaws shows but from his own gig in Hartford, Connecticut in July of this year, and I think it’s completely brilliant — nothing radical in terms of reinterpretation, but in sheer spirit and love of the material it’s up there with the very best of Dylan covers.
Like “Lucid Daydream”, it’s also a great demonstration of how good he and his band can be in what is anyway an idiom rooted in the joyous expression of instrumental virtuosity. He’s a superfine picker, kind of a turbocharged bluegrass Mark Knopfler, as the short solos on the Dylan song demonstrate, but he’s matched every step of the way by Alex Hargreaves on fiddle, Billy Falling on banjo, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, and Royal Masat on string bass.
Together they show how an old-time diasporic music form can be brought right up to the present. I’m just sorry it took me a while, in this instance, to find that out. But better late than never.
* The photo of Billy Strings, taken at a gig this summer by an uncredited photographer, is from his Facebook page. So Much for Goodbyes is out now on the Reprise label.
