For almost the past ten years, one of the most skilled and versatile “bands” in contemporary roots music had only two members: Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley. When I profiled them in 2023, I called them the Swiss Army Knife of Americana: “They’d fit, with their instruments, perhaps not in your pocket but certainly into a compact car. Yet they have more tools at their fingertips than a lot of bigger bands - tools for scintillating grooves, lush harmonies, bluesy yearning, fiery picking, and lyrical beauty. That’s why now, almost a decade into an unexpected journey, Rob and Trey have become a roots country duo with no peers and few if any precedents.”
You can see how that would be a tough act to step away from. But when you join a project at 25 and realize you’re approaching 35, the original plan to make a name for one’s self might just come back and haunt a person. So now, for singer/guitar master/songwriter Trey Hensley, it’s time. “Another thing is, I wrote a lot of these songs probably five years ago, and I've had them stockpiled, just waiting on the opportunity to have a moment to actually record them,” Hensley says in Episode 353 of The String. “I feel like this is my first real record. I mean, honestly, I have some solo records, but the other ones, you know, I have reasons that I haven't listened to them in 15 years. This is different.”
This record with those songs is Can’t Outrun The Blues, a 10-song collection on Pinecastle Records that lands in a sweet spot between bluegrass and acoustic country, richly colored by Hensley’s East Tennessee upbringing. The title track launches the album at getaway car speed with in-your-face flatpick guitar. What starts with a seeming brag about a hot ‘68 Camaro steers into some dark psychological territory. Molly Tuttle joins with her voice and guitar on “Going And Gone,” and that’s not the last of the songs that could be anthems for the Department of Transportation, my favorite being “One White Line At A Time” with guest picker/singer Steve Wariner. (We need more Steve Wariner in Americana by the way.)
Hensley is the reigning IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, his second win in three years in a category that’s honored Tony Rice, Doc Watson and Bryan Sutton. His imagination, intensity and technical precision have earned him fans across music. He performs regularly with fingerstyle wizard Tommy Emmanuel. He was invited to Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Festival and he made fans of some of his rock and metal heroes like Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple) and Brent Hinds (Mastodon). He says no matter what ups and downs he’s experienced with music and its business, the guitar has always blown his mind.
“I've worked at it my whole life, and it's like even when I don't even consciously think I'm working at it, I'm working at it,” he tells us. “As much as I've played it, it still seems like I've just scratched the surface of what there is and so and I love that about it.”
Then there’s Trey’s sonorous and supple voice, a bluesy baritone that evokes Randy Travis and Merle Haggard. He says he came by it pretty naturally and never worked on it like he did his guitar playing. But it’s what got him noticed when it mattered most. And it’s not like he was an obvious prodigy. In the famous video of his Grand Ole Opry debut (age 11, invited by Marty Stuart after meeting him at a concert, 8.7 million views to date), he’s a kid who sings just fine. By the time he was pushing 20, he’d been noticed by folks in his region to the point where he was called in to sing a scratch vocal (one intended for later replacement) during production of an album by the major-league bluegrass band Blue Highway. When the band heard his voice on the track, they kept it and released it as a guest voice on their album.
When Rob Ickes decided to leave Blue Highway after 20 years, forming a duo with Trey is what he wanted to do. They released four albums and worked up one of the best live versions of “Friend of the Devil” I’ve ever heard. They were on The String as a duo in 2019. Now Trey is here and ready for his close up.
“I had these huge goals that I still have, you know, of being as successful as you can possibly be, but realistically, I just want to make music and be happy with the music I'm making. It's taken a long time to get to that point,” he says. “Like I was very happy with the music that Rob and I made. I feel like I'm very happy with my new record. I've always been hyper critical of my own playing and writing and singing. I think everybody kind of is. So it's hard to set a goal, and it's always difficult. Like, now, looking back on even the last 10 years, everything that maybe seemed like it was a difficult time then, you know, it's like, well, actually, everything was going pretty well. And everything sort of smooths itself out.”
