March 17-19 | 9 p.m.
Crystal Bay Casino | Crystal Bay, Nev.
Billy Nershi just got home from his last rehearsal at The String Cheese Incident’s Sound Lab before embarking on the Winter Carnival 2017-Roots Revival Tour. For this special tour, the classic jam-grass band is paying homage to the same small mountain towns that helped shape the course of their music, families and livelihoods more than 20 years ago.
“The Roots Revival is the side of music that got us where we are today,” says Nershi. “To revisit that and the roots of why we started playing music is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while. Along with taking our music back to our roots, we’re taking the venues and style of the shows back to the roots and hitting some places that we haven’t played since 1993.”
When the band members first formed in Telluride, Colo., they began by playing ski towns around the West to pursue their twin passions of music and the outdoors.
Nershi shared with me fond memories of those early days on the road when the band played on the Alpine Meadows sun deck and at the legendary Humpty’s, as well as other local venues long since forgotten.
Listen to the single “Believe” from the forthcoming album
“I remember we played the Blue Water Brewery,” says Nershi. “And I remember specifically playing Blue Water on April 20, which is Travis’s birthday. It was a good party. And that is where Keith [guitarist Moseley] met Kristen. And now they have been married for 18 years. They met that night at the Blue Water. I also remember eating my first piece of sushi at Hiro Sushi.”
“It’s good to see everyone appreciate our rootsy sound again because we wouldn’t be where we are now without the people and musical styles that influenced us in the early days.” – Billy Nershi
Over the trajectory of their 24-year career, String Cheese’s sound evolved from straight-ahead bluegrass in après-ski bars to rock ‘n’ roll jam/electronic dance music at Red Rocks. Fans have longed argued about which style is best, with many suspecting that guitarist and songwriter Nershi has longed to return to his acoustic roots.
“Well, you know I love it,” says Nershi. “But we’ve all been enjoying these rehearsals because we’ve been focusing a lot on the rootsy-style bluegrass, [David] Grisman-style, Latin stuff. It’s good to see everyone appreciate our rootsy sound again because we wouldn’t be where we are now without the people and musical styles that influenced us in the early days.”
After a near-decade span between their eighth and ninth album, String Cheese has also been re-inspired in the studio, so much so that they decided to invest in their own workspace/warehouse named the Sound Lab.
Their 10th album, “Believe,” is scheduled for release on April 14. It was produced by The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison. The singles so far released feature a clean production true to the original String Cheese sound.
“We did that ‘Song in My Head’ album a couple of years ago, but we hadn’t recorded our original tunes for years before that,” says Nershi. “We suddenly realized that everybody’s got all these song and lyrics ideas. ‘Believe’ is the name of the song that Mike [multi-instrumentalist Kang] wrote and it just kind of resonated. It’s like a don’t’-give-up-hope kind of message.”
The nine songs on the album were written during String Cheese’s recent musical retreats to Carbondale, Colo., and Sedona, Ariz.
“We spend a week to 10 days together chilling out and writing, doing some demos on the tunes,” he says. “The result of these musical trips we’ve been on has been is that we are getting a lot of songs ideas in the moment. We can take those ideas, go to our Lab, record and come out with the tunes straight from our own studio.”
