When you’re a progressive string band from another part of the country making your debut at Nashville’s Station Inn, you’ll want to dress to impress, as Durango, CO trio the Stillhouse Junkies did on a Saturday night in September. Fred Kosak, Cody Tinnin and Alissa Wolf hit the stage in matching Dickies coveralls with their mid-century modern logo hand embroidered on the back.
“It was kind of an inside joke and kind of a marketing ploy for (the 2021 IBMA bluegrass convention),” says Cody of the jumpsuits. “A friend of the band in Durango is an embroiderer. We asked if she could do our logo, so those are all made on a vintage chain-stitch sewing machine. They were definitely a success. People seemed to latch on to them. We bring them out when we all feel it’s appropriate for a special occasion or big shows.”
The music was uniformly impressive as well (wink), with galloping Western movie grooves, spot-on three-way vocal harmony, exuberant jamming and songs that celebrate the place they live. “Colorado Bound” was the lead single from the Stillhouse Junkies’ new album, their second, titled Small Towns, while mountain burgs like Leadville and Ridgeway appear in titles of its 12 tracks. “Place is at the forefront of our writing,” says Fred Kosak, who plays guitar and mandolin. “I drew heavily on my surroundings, because I was this wide-eyed New Englander living in Durango. And that landscape is very powerful, especially when you're not used to it. That just infuses every part of your life, and in my case, it definitely was one of the first things I turned to when I started writing songs.”
As Kosak says, with regards to Colorado, he’s the newcomer in the band. He’d been teaching school in Boston and playing in a variety of bands and was looking for a change of scene. “I pretty much just threw a dart at the map,” he says. “I had one person I knew in Durango who said you should come check it out. I thought it might be a good fit. I wanted to be in some kind of mountain community.”
Bassist and singer Cody Tinnin grew up between Arizona and southwest Colorado with a musical family, playing trombone in his school jazz band. He dabbled on the electric bass but “felt like the upright bass was cooler.” He bought one and joined a bluegrass band. After some years away from Colorado and from music, he returned ready to hit the stage again.
Alissa Wolf is the band’s Durango native, and her journey from formal violin to fiddle has been long but rewarding. She studied classically until her late teens then mostly shelved it while she did college and a corporate job in Washington DC. Returning to Colorado was an impetus to be musical again, but with a desire to join the roots/bluegrass world she’d heard a lot of growing up. “And I started in the Irish Celtic world to try to train myself to learn by ear without sheet music, which was excruciating,” she says. Then she joined a variety of bands. “I just put myself in these places where I was forced to improvise. And I started to figure it out.”
In the small town that is Durango, these three string band musicians looking for the right path found each other, felt chemistry, and launched the trio at a distillery in 2017. They’ve now toured widely, released two albums, made the finals of the Telluride Bluegrass band contest twice, and in 2021, they won the IBMA Momentum Award as the industry’s up and coming band of the year. At that same IBMA convention, Nashville’s Stephen Mougin, guitarist with the Sam Bush Band and owner of the Dark Shadow Recording studio and label, saw the Junkies and signed them to their first record deal. That led the trio to come to Music City in February of this year to record at Dark Shadow’s homey, all-in-one situation.
“It was seriously one of the most fun weeks of our career. We're still talking about it and still laughing about it,” says Alissa. Fred adds that “it's a little bit unique to have the label owner also engineer the record, produce the record, and house you while making the record. He’d be making coffee in the morning for you. I mean, that was a really cool experience.”
The album, released in early September, is a cool experience in itself. Opener “Moonrise Over Ridgeway” sets bass, fiddle and choked guitar pulsing against each other as Cody sings the lead vocal, a song he penned about a man in a race against time. “Colorado Bound” is defined by Fred’s deep lead voice and octave mandolin, while his lyrics speak to that aforementioned passion for the state and its spirit. One of Alissa’s contributions is “El Camino,” yet another story of travel that skips along to a newgrass feel and is buttressed with a twin fiddle break with Dark Shadow label-mate Becky Buller. The tour de force may be Kosak’s “River Of Lost Souls,” an epic tale of exploration and adventure that builds to several musical climaxes over seven minutes.
The other strong impression one gets talking to the Stillhouse Junkies is a unity of purpose and a deep confidence in one another. “The three of us have this musical chemistry that I think just really works,” Cody sums up. “We all really love what each other writes, which I think is really important too, and I don't think that's always the case. We've never had a creative differences kind of discussion in this band, because it's never ever been an issue, even remotely. So it's all cool and good stuff.”
The Stillhouse Junkies will celebrate the release of Small Towns with two shows at their favorite hometown venue, the Animas City Theater on Oct. 27 and 28.
