The boundaries of folk and bluegrass have for years been fertile terrain for married duos. My favorites include Robin and Linda Williams from back in the day and Watchhouse more recently. Fans love the layers of personal and musical harmony. The musicians appreciate (mostly) the closeness and making music with the person they love. Economists love the efficiency! In the past few years, I’ve enjoyed two such couples on stage and on record, and now they’re both trending from acoustic folk origins into electrically enhanced Americana, and they’re both sounding good.
Up in New York, Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff lead Nefesh Mountain, a one-of-a-kind progressive string band that has blended bluegrass, newgrass, and traditional Jewish folk music for just over a decade. Their Jan. 31 release, Beacons, is an ambitious double album with an Americana side and a bluegrass side. Then on Valentine’s Day (aww), North Carolina couple Austin and Sarah McCombie - The Chatham Rabbits - offered their fourth album Be Real With Me, a nine-song set that sees their songwriting getting more personally candid and their sound enhanced by electric textures and percussion for the first time. As they both deal honestly with being married for love and music, I can hear these recordings in conversation with each other.
The Chatham Rabbits have stirred a lot of regional pride in me, as they’re proudly from the Piedmont region where I grew up and took their name from the ghost of a string band from Chatham County, where my parents live now. The Rabbits’ established vibe is homespun and warmly throwback, propelled by Sarah’s clawhammer banjo, her lovely, old-soul country voice, and songs mostly about characters and stories gone by. That folky formula gets a shakeup on Be Real With Me, with its songs about turning 30, life’s looming trade-offs, complicated friendships, and marriage itself.
Austin and Sarah are finding a fine-tuned hybrid of old-time and Americana here, and they showed it strikingly at a recent tour-launching set at Nashville’s Analog. A drum kit, an upright bass, and an electric piano fleshed out a five-piece band that brought just the subtle beats and sonic vibes the new songs called for. I’m told the rhythm section will join the McCombies on festivals and larger stages this year, while the acoustic duo will still be the mainstay.
On the album, drums are only pronounced on a couple of songs, but pedal steel guitar supplements the sound from the get-go on “Facing 29,” a study sung by Austin about the bittersweet passing of youth and “grabbing thirty by the strap of its boots.” Sarah takes her turn with an even blunter and more vulnerable look at her stage of life on “Collateral Damage” with the opening line. “I want my freedom/I want a baby,” she sings, while confessing that managing the “paradox” isn’t always bringing out the best in her. There’s similar universality in “Pool Shark’s Table,” in which Sarah, her voice at its empathetic best, admits that the price paid for late nights and too many beers is getting steeper now that she’s crossed over the 30-year bridge. “Childhood Friends” and “Gas Money,” the hardest bopping tune on the album, both wrestle with what we owe one another and how time tests relationships.
This material made for magnetic on-stage conversation by Sarah and Austin, something that has potential - along with the fatter sound - to draw more folks into the Chatham Rabbits orbit. And a mini-set as a duo in the middle of the Analog show indicated that we, the older fans of their acoustic soft touch, need not fret. Austin explained it this way in the album’s press previews: “We’ve never been a bluegrass band, but being from NC we cannot ignore the regional influences all around us. We sampled organic tones and manipulated them into synth pads and percussive elements on this record. It feels like a natural progression because the foundational components of our music are still there, we’ve just added to it.”
Nefesh Mountain decided rather than dance on the fringes of old-time and folk rock, they’d take both forks in the road and go big with a double LP - eight songs with a “Nefesh Mountain Electric Band” and ten more with an all-star cast of bluegrass pickers in Nashville, including Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Rob McCoury and Mark Schatz. At a time when many artists are discouraged from releasing albums for various reasons, this ambitious statement offers the roots audience (and beyond) a bunch of reasons to listen closely to Nefesh Mountain’s messages of love and connection, because it’s now more danceable than ever.
Beacons opens with “Race To Run,” a song about holding true to your own sense of direction in a mad, mad world where so many are “tethered to the phone like a sinking stone.” It introduces us to a jamming, twanging, Colorado-friendly sound I’ve only heard them dabble with in concert. It proves to be a lot of fun throughout, especially since Lindberg proves to be as stellar on the electric guitar as we know he is on the acoustic. “Milestoned” keeps the energy going along with a passel of drug puns that let Doni celebrate (overtly for the first time) her 20 years of sobriety.
This duo/band has a deft touch with confronting and processing worldly division, injustice and cyber-stress without getting in anyone’s face or inviting confrontation. You’d have to have a hard heart indeed to not be seduced by Doni’s vocal on “World On A String,” a song about the many shadings in the concept of hope. And I love the way they treat the old roots gospel song “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning,” which leans into the burning with a smoldering groove set by upright bass and sparkling piano.
The bluegrass tunes commence with a propulsive tempo and superb picking all around on “Regrets In The Rearview,” born of road wisdom, about the stuff we leave behind the the stuff we’d do well to take with us. Soon comes one of the strongest songs on the whole project, “This Is Me,” a tough love letter to America that Lindberg says he wrote as a reply to the question he frequently gets about how he, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, became a bluegrass nut. The melody, song construction, and musicianship are honestly inspiring. And it pairs well with “Man From Manzanita,” Lindberg’s ode to Tony Rice, because how could Tony Rice not make one a proud American?
Two instrumentals are here - Eric’s banjo leads on the Béla-feeling “Overgrown Reel” and the tune “No Farm, No Howl” should win an IBMA award for its title alone. To close the album, they bring back the drums for a six-minute jamgrass anthem called “Keep On Growing” and then follow that with a husband-wife-guitar treatment of Rodney Crowell’s “A Song For Life.” Eric’s backing and solos here are especially tasteful and skilled.
Nefesh Mountain has carved a unique space for healing energy and empathy in the bluegrass/string band scene. Whether directly channeling their heritage, grappling with life and loss, or laying down a hot newgrass instrumental, they’ve challenged us to be more aware people while acknowledging that it’s not in our heads - the world is sad and the suffering is real. Ten years into their distinctive run, Eric and Doni prove you can tour with kids in tow, bring faith into Americana music without dividing the audience, and that artists can follow more than one beacon at a time.
Nefesh Mountain is booked to play 3rd & Lindsley on March 18.
