Just as Crooked Still were entering the most productive and demanding period of recording their newest
album, Some Strange Country, a surprise snowstorm enveloped Haunted Hollow Studio in
Charlottesville, Virginia. The unforeseen deluge trapped the band, leaving them unable to go down the
driveway – much less into town. “I think that really made something special happen for the last half of
the session,” reflects vocalist Aoife O’Donovan. “There was no place to go, no way we could leave. I
managed to break my computer the first day we were there, so I didn’t even have that.”
“We didn’t get plowed out until the following Tuesday,” bassist Corey DiMario adds. “Luckily we had
enough food and enough beer to get us through.”
Being suddenly stranded in such close quarters was an apt coda to two years of near-constant travel and
performance for the restructuralist string band. Their relentless touring schedule neatly mirrors their
ongoing journey through the winding corridors of traditional American song. With circumstance
removing nearly every distraction, the quintet of DiMario, cellist Tristan Clarridge, banjoist Gregory
Liszt, fiddler Brittany Haas and O’Donovan honed in on their unique refraction of roots music,
recording their most personal, visionary album yet: Some Strange Country. “The music is not just
‘alternative bluegrass’ or whatever people used to call it,” Haas remarks. “It’s at another level now:
artful, but still grounded that funky, string band thing.”
Available on May 18th on Signature Sounds, Some Strange Country is expansive yet intimate – a
powerful document of five distinct musical voices working in concert to explore and redefine their
relationship to tradition. With the current lineup now well-settled, Crooked Still has tempered the
youthful intensity of their previous incarnation with a richness and contrapuntal complexity that borders
on chamber music while never losing touch with old-time music’s swaggering, ragged pulse. Haas and
Clarridge, who joined in 2008, have progressed from eager if tentative newcomers to full-fledged
contributors to the band’s multifaceted sound.
“It is now, more than ever, a collaborative process,” O’Donovan adds. “On this album, everyone felt
comfortable contributing. Sometimes having all this input is frustrating, because there are five cooks in
the kitchen, but in the end, it is exciting. This is why you’re in a band and not a solo artist.”
With four original compositions nestled alongside radically re-imagined traditional fare and a surprising
take on the Rolling Stones’ “You Got the Silver,” Some Strange Country boasts more self-composed
material than the previous three Crooked Still albums. “There is a lot more original music than there has
been in the past,” DiMario explains, “but it’s not just in the original songs.” The group’s inventive
arrangements – a necessity considering their defiantly non-traditional line-up – have long bordered on
re-composition, with the melody of the song at hand suspended in insightful new harmony and
counterpoint, which in turn is always guided by the sentiment of the original lyric. Some Strange
Country marks the fullest flowering of that process – to the point where composed interludes (such the
one within the Sacred Harp spiritual “Distress”) arise from the arrangements as fully-formed pieces in
their own right, yet somehow still connected to the source: an aching echo, a reverberation of the song’s
still-breathing story.
“I know people say, ‘I wish you did more original material,’” O’Donovan observes, “and there’s a lot to
be said for bands who only do their original compositions. But the point of Crooked Still – and what I
love about it – is rediscovering this old music and making it new. These songs still have so much life in
them, and I love being able to reinvent them and put a modern stamp on them.”
The potential of the five-piece configuration is explored to wondrous effect on Some Strange Country,
with nine-time Grammy award winning co-producer and engineer Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss and
Union Station, Tim O’Brien, Dolly Parton) on hand to further enrich the textural possibilities. “It has
become more of an ensemble-based project,” DiMario explains. “The focus is on ensemble playing and
the arrangements now.”
“Gary had interesting ideas about effects and other things to add – things that we wouldn’t necessarily
think of,” Haas says. “Like the organ part on Aoife’s song ‘You Were Gone,’ which is a drone that gives
it a strange depth. For part of “Calvary,” Aoife is singing through this little toy – one of Gary’s
daughter’s toys, which has this little microphone that distorts your voice. That’s not something we had
done before.” Such subtle effects blur the line between distant and close, between modern clarity and the
crackling limitations of primitive technology – a line that Crooked Still has long explored via purely
organic means.
In several instances, Clarridge, Haas, and DiMario (bow in hand) would gather around one mic and
record quasi-orchestral string textures that were then subtly mixed into the track to thicken the sound.
“This is the first record that we’ve been comfortable experimenting with those options,” O’Donovan
explains. “We did more with overdubs and taking advantage of the fact that we have a little string trio in
our band.”
Still, technical devices remain secondary to Crooked Still’s uncanny gift for expanding elemental
components into dazzlingly complex, collectively conceived arrangements, best exemplified by their
take on the Child ballad “Henry Lee.” “We were all on the same page as to how to go about it,” DiMario
recalls, “but the arrangement is very intricate, so it was a long process to bring it from the original
source recording by Peggy Seeger to our arrangement.”
“It’s definitely is the most fully realized arrangement on the record,” O’Donovan adds. “It’s a long
piece, with so many different sections and parts. The end of that song was particularly difficult, with the
rhythmic displacements, but it really does put the listener in this murderous frame of mind.” While the
arrangement spirals into and out of each little movement, it is O’Donovan’s voice – plaintive, yet rich
with sinister undertones – that guides the listener through every twist. “I’m a visual thinker,” she
explains, “so when I’m singing ‘Henry Lee’ I have a very vivid image in my head of a woman lying in
bed and a man knocking at the door…” O’Donovan’s vocals throughout are enhanced by an enviable
group of guest harmony singers, including Ricky Skaggs, Tim O’Brien, Sarah Jarosz, and Annalisa
Tornfelt (formerly of Bearfoot, now of the Pacific Northwest all-star outfit Black Prairie). “We were
very careful to match the right song to the right harmony singer,” O’Donovan explains. “In every case,
they help to make the song. To have artists like this be willing to come in and sing on a Crooked Still
records is so amazing.”
Both vocally and instrumentally, the profound and near telepathic ensemble interplay throughout Some
Strange Country marks the album as a staggering new development for this adventurous outfit. Rarely is
a group of musicians this gifted willing to work so intently to fashion a unified sound. “When Crooked
Still agrees on something, it’s a non-specific sort of consensus,” DiMario concludes. “It’s an intangible
feeling that guides us to what songs make sense for us to take on and what everybody does with those
songs. Even after nine years, there’s still something very magical about finding an old a cappella ballad
recorded in someone’s kitchen one hundred years ago and transforming that into something that makes
sense for Crooked Still.”