Mountain Grass Unit brings acoustic brilliance to The Range
On Aug. 26, Mountain Grass Unit will make its Grand Ole Opry debut. The next night, they’ll do a release show at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville for Appalachian Smoke, their first for Dualtone Records. At midnight it arrives everywhere else. Three enormous nights, back to back, in the city that the Alabama-born bluegrass band now calls home.
It’s crazy, considering that not long ago Mountain Grass Unit had to work around its members’ college schedules.
They were spread across the country and played together sporadically. Guitarist Luke Black headed to Boston to study at Berklee, while mandolinist Drury Anderson, who’d eventually join him there, was still finishing high school. Bassist Sam Wilson was at the University of Alabama studying accounting. Fiddler Josiah Nelson wasn’t even in the band yet.
What held it together, Black said in a recent group Zoom chat, wasn’t scheduling — it was history.
“We’ve known each other forever, and we’ve been playing together forever, so we’d get a couple of rehearsals in and just feel out the groove,” he said. Though challenging, “It always ended up working out, but it was a lot of pressure, especially keeping up with emails and stuff.”
Anderson said the uncertainty was real, even if it seems easy to gloss over now.
“We got management and representation around halfway through school,” he said. “It was so relieving to have things set up once we got out. It could not have been timed more perfectly.”
Becoming full-time coincided with relocating to Nashville from Alabama, and the move has been fruitful.
“It’s kind of a second hometown,” Anderson said. Having Music City as home base makes the Opry show truly special. The only thing topping it is the way they learned the show was happening.
Del McCoury, a hero of the band, announced it from the stage at DelFest. The moment came after the bluegrass legend and his son Ronnie sat in with them. Before they began, he’d told them, “When y’all end, don’t go anywhere.” Anderson called it “every bit of an electric moment as you could think.”
Another big fan is Billy Strings, who’s praised Black’s flat-picking talents on social media after they won an IBMA award for early-career excellence. “Kinda rude of him to be this good honestly; luckily for me, we’re on the same team,” Strings wrote on Saving Country Music’s Instagram account.
Strings and MGU have jammed together, and he and Black are texting buddies.
“I chat with him every once in a while,” he said. “Mostly it’s just jokes and stuff, and then I’ll get a random text from him that’s like, ‘Hey, man, you wanna come jam?’ I’m like, ‘Shoot, I’m in freaking Idaho, and Billy Strings is asking me to jam in Nashville. I gotta get home.’”
The new album is the band’s most ambitious, using a range of instruments for the first time. For the release show, they’ll reproduce everything done in the studio.
“We’ve reached out to a bunch of our buddies to come help us really play it live,” Wilson said. That includes an electric sitar and bongos on “Eagle’s Nest,” perhaps the most rocked up song they’ve done.
That track started as a stray riff Black had been sitting on for years.
“We’ve been trying to find what to do with it forever,” he said. “When we got to the studio, we just kept adding more and more cool elements to it. It’s an art project.” Elsewhere, the songwriting turns more inward.
“Wait for Me” was born during Wilson’s days shuttling between accounting exams and gigs.
“I’d play shows and festivals all weekend, then fly back and go to the library to study for my test the next morning,” he recalled. The song, he said, was a culmination of a lot of things, including the strain of keeping relationships intact while constantly leaving town.
The album itself was tracked almost entirely live, no metronome. They did full takes, three or four per song, then vocals, with no clicking and dragging parts around afterward.
“It was way more organic,” Black said. “I loved it.” That looseness extended to working with producer Vance Powell and having a real label budget for the first time.
This was in sharp contrast to their 2022 debut, which was made entirely on their own dime. Back then, Wilson said, they didn’t even have a bank account. Gratefully, Dualtone mostly stayed out of the way while they worked.
“We just got in there, played our bluegrass licks, and called it a day,” Black remembered.
Through all of it, the band keeps coming back to the same idea: none of this is supposed to feel heavy.
“Our goal at most of our shows is to create an atmosphere of a good time where you don’t have to worry about everything going on in the world,” Wilson said. “Have a beer, party, and play some train songs. We’re goofy, you can be goofy. Come and hang.”
Mountain Grass Unit
When: Friday, Aug. 15, 7 p.m.
Where: The Range, 96 Old Turnpike Road, Mason
Tickets: $42, etix.com
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.