This episode’s show notes are an adapted transcript of the show. Audio recommended!
The Infamous Stringdusters felt built for the long haul from their earliest days. To be sure, I don’t often have such visibility into the personalities and motivations of bands in their formative years, but I was in the right place/right time with these guys. We ran in the same circles in Nashville in the 2000s. I saw an early rehearsal at Madison TN’s famed “bluegrass compound” on the banks of the Cumberland River. And I got to see version 1.0 of the Dusters play at SXSW in Austin just as Sugar Hill Records was inking a deal with them.
I witnessed their big night at the IBMA Awards in 2007 when they were named Emerging Artist of the Year - and when their debut album Fork In The Road and its title cut won Album of the Year and Song of the Year respectively. I worked on press material and videos for the band and at times felt like a member of their team. I was certainly a super fan from the outset, recognizing their musicianship, their well-distributed vocal abilities, and their feeling for how to nurture the bluegrass genre’s heritage while offering something very fresh.
Even more relevant to the conversation in Episode 354 of The String, while there would be two pretty natural personnel changes in the first few years, the guys who make up today’s quintet radiated with respect for each other and with desire to seize their moment. They quite literally banded together for the work and sacrifices it would take to break through and build a lasting career, which they most certainly have done.
And as I’ve mentioned on the show before, back when I had three members of the band on The String in 2022, I had the privilege of following them on the road, documenting one of their earliest tours in Colorado for their record label in a film we called Four Days Of Infamy. I mention that for two reasons - the movie comes up in the conversation in the hour. And I have to be a full disclosure journalist on this one. I don’t have objective distance on these guys. I’m a fan and friend and because of that I think I understand this outfit and their important place in bluegrass history pretty well.
For the record, Version One of the Dusters - the band that released Fork in the Road and won all those early plaudits, featured Chris Pandolfi on banjo, Jeremy Garrett on fiddle, Travis Book on bass, Andy Hall on dobro, and the two who would move on. Mandolinist Jesse Cobb was there for three studio albums and the building years but left in 2011 to pursue a life on the West Coast. The band went forward without a mandolin. Chris “Critter” Eldridge was the first guitarist and he got an offer to join Chris Thile’s first post Nickel Creek band, the one that became Punch Brothers. When he left in 2007, the man who came on was Andy Falco. That catches you up with today’s quintet.
So now’s the perfect time for another visit, because 2026 marks the band’s 20th anniversary, and they’ve marked it with a new album featuring 20 new songs called 20/20. While my 2022 show pieced together three one-on-one interviews, this time I got three members - Pandolfi, Garrett and Falco - together in person at WMOT’s East Nashville studio for a group conversation.
One theme that emerges early on is that the band has felt a tug back to the core bluegrass sound that inspired them early on. While they’re famous for having evolved into one of the leading lights of jamgrass, they feel space - in their own hearts and in the music scene - for the yearning blues of the OG sound. Chris Pandolfi:
“Bluegrass is cool right now. It's a lot cooler than it was when we started out 20 years ago. Now, not the music. The music was always the coolest thing ever, and that's what drew us together. That's why we started this band. But as Andy said, especially earlier in your career, you're really trying to make a mark, and you want to do something different. You want to stand out from the crowd. And so in some way, it's a full circle evolution for us, because now we know who we are. We know who our fans are, and we get to just play the music that we love. And I think 20/20, is very representative of the fact that we've come back to bluegrass. But part of it is also just what's going on in the outside world. You know, there was a time in our career where we pushed that term away because it wasn't really helping us out on a business and publicity front, because we were kind of ahead of the curve.”
20/20 features songs written and sung by every member of the band, starting with Working Man Blues - not the Merle Haggard song but a new one by Andy Falco with the refrain: “A working man may never be/ Left alone to live life free/ To keep up with the bills to pay/ He'll have to work another day.” He talked about the A&R process.
“We really wanted to take our time with the songwriting, as opposed to making a plan and then you have these deadlines. We had the idea of doing 20 songs for 20 years, but we weren't sure we were going to have 20 songs that we thought were good enough, you know? It turns out we ended up with about 50 songs all right to pick from that were all contenders. This (“Working Man Blues”) was one of those songs (where) I felt like I wanted something that was really more trad bluegrass sounding and also a very timely topic. I know it's certainly how I was feeling. And so that's where that song came from.”
As for Jeremy Garrett, lead voice on my favorite bluegrass song on 20/20 “Wounds Won’t Take To Healing,” fielded my question about what the guys do, after 20 years on the road, to stay sharp and motivated?
“Well, you got to stay hungry, and it's easy to do in the music industry these days. So that's helpful to me, you know, hustling. I'm doing very well in the industry, and I've built a good life for myself, but I still feel like I have a ways to go, and so I like to push myself. The one thing for me I need is I do side projects. I have a couple of different other business ventures going on right now. And I definitely have other musical projects - solo albums, and I’ve been doing this since I was just a baby, basically. And I have hundreds, if not thousands of songs that I've written that might not necessarily fit in this situation. I want to do them myself. So I do my solo bluegrass projects, and I hire musicians that really challenge me, people that are at the top of their game. I learn those things, and I take them and bring them back to this band, and it makes this band stronger.”
The Infamous Stringdusters have another busy spring and summer ahead of them, including major festivals Merlefest, DelFest, Telluride, ROMP, and Grey Fox. They’ll be headlining the Ryman Auditorium on July 14. More dates here.
