Chatham County Line: Hiyo | Yep Roc Records | January 26
IV, Chatham County Line’s frankly titled fourth album, and Hiyo, the trio’s soon-to-be-released 10th album, were recorded about a decade and a half apart in the same place, Asheville’s Echo Mountain.
The studio, a converted Methodist sanctuary, has become a recording destination for adventurous acts of a variety of stripes (Steve Martin, The Avett Brothers, Sylvan Esso). At the time that the decidedly bluegrass band—then consisting of guitarist and lead singer Dave Wilson, mandolinist John Teer, bass/pedal steel player Greg Reading, and banjo player Chandler Holt—recorded IV, though, Echo Mountain had only been open a couple of years.
“It was clean,” Wilson recalls. “Brand new.”
The intervening years have worn the space, he muses, but they’ve also given it an ineffable something it didn’t have before.
“It felt so cool to go back all these years later, and the stairs are all scratched up and there’s dust bunnies in the corner,” he said. “It’s just like, ‘Oh man, this place has got the mojo now.’ I mean, it had it back then, but it really is lived-in now and it’s been vibrated.”
Time has also worn and reshaped Chatham County Line. And like Echo Mountain, they’re all the better for it. Born in 1999 following the dissolution of Reading and Wilson’s previous Raleigh folk-rock band, Stillhouse, the group progressed through three straightforward and increasingly pristine bluegrass albums on their way to IV.
Through the years and albums that followed after, the group increasingly clawed at the strict confines of traditional bluegrass instrumentation. They were already doing it, really, expertly layering in Reading’s dreamy pedal steel. But subsequent albums saw the band add drums, an accompaniment often seen as a cardinal sin among bluegrass purists, and piano, stepping beyond the style’s rigid structures.
A rebellious rock ’n’ roll spirit has long defined Chatham County Line, as evidenced by the fully electrified holiday tours the group went on annually, even as they continued to famously play and sing live around a single mic the rest of the year.
That mojo is fully realized on Hiyo, a warmly futuristic vision of what old-time-leaning folk can be in 2024. It’s marked not just by earnest and energetic pickin’ and singin’, but by synthesizers and drum machines and the sumptuously reverberating production aesthetic of Rachael Moore, a close T Bone Burnett collaborator. This is all a stunning, but not altogether unexpected, evolution for the band, an affirmation of the freedom they’ve been seeking since they crystallized their acoustic prowess on that first trip to Echo Mountain.
Chatham County Line isn’t the only group pushing the frontiers of bluegrass. Wilson says that once folks like psych-grass phenom Billy Strings began to be accepted into the genre, the landscape felt wide open, and fellow Tar Heel luminaries Steep Canyon Rangers are as much an Americana act these days as they are a bluegrass band.
“It’s kind of when they quit caring about what other people thought and made an album really to move themselves,” Wilson says of the feeling he gets from some of his all-time favorite albums. “That’s kind of the moment that always makes a special record, I’ve found. And this album, I don’t know how to describe it. It was like we just didn’t care anymore.”
One of Chatham County Line’s tethers to bluegrass was Holt’s banjo, the driving engine of the group during its more traditional days. In 2020, Holt stepped away from the band after two decades to spend more time with family. An electrifying picker, his presence never held the band back, but his instrument remained the backbone of their sound.
“We were sort of beholden to a certain style, being all acoustic and using the banjo,” Wilson explains. “Dropping that instrument, it just kicks open the door to a whole new world and a whole new way to live.”
The pandemic, while certainly unwelcome, became an opportunity to gestate budding notions of what the band could become. Wilson, shaken by a time that was “so freaking weird and negative,” stalled in his concerted songwriting, instead randomly recording and writing down snippets of ideas, a process he compares to Jackson Browne’s famous penchant for calling his answering machine to get down emerging inspirations.
Building up the new live version of the group was another crucial step, as pedals and effects and amps became ingrained elements. Wilson started tuning his guitar to an open G, the way Keith Richards does, mimicking the traditional tuning of a banjo.
Another essential piece of the puzzle was delivered when Chatham County Line was cast to play members of the band backing George Jones and Tammy Wynette on George & Tammy, the Showtime series starring Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon, which began filming in late 2021. It was there that they met Moore, who helped T Bone Burnett with the show’s music, connecting them with a producer with the forward-looking vision to help the band realize its evolution.
The resulting collection is beautifully ethereal and wistful. The songs fixate on the beginnings and endings of relationships—inspired in part by the band’s own time of transition—but they keep an eye glued hopefully to the unreachable horizon. The accompanying music is both distinct and distinctly modern.
Leadoff song and lead single “Right on Time” praises a woman who was “right on time / To take my mind and start it over,” as echoing electric guitar and bass, fiddle, and drums bound through a wide-screen folk-rock vista with an old-time heart and a futuristic sparkle.
On “Magic,” angelic electronic chirps and steady drums reinforce giddily loping acoustic picking, as Wilson opines, “The night is young and the feeling’s right / I got a little buzz, but baby that’s all right,” enraptured by a budding romance.
“Lone Ranger’’ brings ghostly electric blues that echo from beyond the veil, bolstering them with soothing acoustic drone, a transfixing and effective curveball. Balancing his anxiety about spending just one night with a woman, Wilson looks backward and forward: “As a boy I lived for television on Saturdays / Cartoons, cowboys, showing me the way / I still check under, getting into bed most nights / Made mistakes but I was brought up right.”
The album’s lone instrumental, the elegiacally loping old-time interlude “Way Down Yonder,” serves as firm assurance that this is still Chatham County Line. They’ve simply left behind constraints that no longer feel important.
“The mind and the heart and the soul behind it” is still the same, Wilson says. “Harmony singing and singing together has kind of always been our thing …. We never were a flashy solo band or anything like that. So it’s really just hard work and harmony to me that makes it representative of what this band does.”
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