Interview by Kris Miller and Brendan Hamilton. Photos taken by Miller and Hamilton at the Southern Sun in Boulder, CO (7/28/08) and Oskar Blues in Lyons, CO (7/26/08).
Formed in Athens, Georgia, in 2001, the Packway Handle Band is currently in the midst of a U.S. tour following the January release of their third studio album, a self-titled, independent effort. They play a distinctive style of bluegrass that melds the old and the new in impressive four-part harmonies and energetic live performances gathered around condenser mics. On Monday night, the band was kind enough to sit down with us before their show at the Southern Sun in Boulder, Colorado. The Packway Handle Band is Tom Baker (banjo), Josh Erwin (guitar), Andrew Heaton (fiddle), Zach McCoy (bass), and Michael Paynter (mandolin).
In Stereo: Our first question is a pretty basic one—why bluegrass? We’ve read that you all have backgrounds in rock, so what is it that drew you to this particular genre?
Josh Erwin: When we started playing, it was Tom, and Michael and I, as far as bluegrass and this arrangement. We’d all played rock and everything like you were saying, but this was just a new, creative way to play music. I’d never sang with anyone else before and done harmony. I don’t think anyone else had either. It just happened to be, like, “Oh these are cool songs, let’s try to do this,” and Tom had a banjo and his brother [Doug Baker] came out and everyone was playing and that was that. It was just a different way to have something to do.
Michael Paynter: It actually worked out really well when Tom’s brother Doug came out, because he was very adamant about us learning songs and putting together harmonies, and I think the harmony aspect was something that drew us all into it more. But it is interesting that of all the different genres, we landed in bluegrass, because there are so many different mediums, but it works for us, at least so far.
In Stereo: How did you guys learn to harmonize so well? That’s not something you typically see, of men, in a band, necessarily. Was it Doug that got you guys harmonizing or did you go for any formal vocal training?
Tom Baker: Doug was present at the beginning when we first started doing it, but after that it we just kind of got hooked and kept doing it, and kept practicing it. We definitely didn’t have any training, and we definitely have gone back to a lot of those earlier songs and rearranged them as we became more, critical, better maybe.
In Stereo: We wanted to ask about your recent album, the self-titled one. We noticed a big difference from your previous albums. A lot more emphasis on original songwriting; in fact, all of the songs in there are original. It’s the first time you’ve done this and seems to be pretty unique for bluegrass bands. Also you’re working now with instrumental pieces. We were wondering how you reached that point in this album and if it’s a new direction in general for the band.
Andrew Heaton: There’s now at least three of us writing songs, and actually recording songs is more cumbersome now than writing them. We’ve always got a backlog of songs now. I mean, we’ve even got some that we’ve never done before that we might do tonight just for variety. But the next CD we have that’s a full-length studio album, I’m positive that it’s going to be all originals. If it isn’t all originals, then we’re going to have a bunch left over and we’re going to have to put them on the next one. I think we’re all on the same page that if we get some really cool cover songs that we really like, unless it sounds like something we should do in the studio, they’ll probably end up on live CDs and we’ll spend our studio time making our own songs. I think that’s where we’re going, anyway.
In Stereo: When are you guys planning on going back into the studio?
MP: We haven’t even started thinking about that. There’s definitely enough songs to do it, but right now I think we’re focusing on touring again and being out on the road.
JE: This album hasn’t been out for more than six months. January 18, I think, is when we released it.
AH: Strategically, I think the thing that we would want to put out next is probably another live album, because I think we could do a lot better one than the last one we put out. But I guess we’re going to see if there’s a way for that to happen and if we find a way to get good live recordings. I think that would be the best plan, but maybe it won’t work out that way. Who knows.
In Stereo: By contrast, you’ve got the album before this current one, “(Sinner) You Better Get Ready.” We were really struck by it as writers. You can throw all the artworld buzzwords at it, like “paradox” and “irony” and all that. We love the aspects of homage there, to the whole bluegrass gospel genre, but we’re also really struck by the satirical elements, the humor of it, especially considering the current political and religious climate and we were wondering if you could comment on that. What was going through your minds when you came up with that album?
AH: This whole thing started, amusingly enough, with the fact that I had been in a band with a girl [Leah Calvert] who plays the fiddle and she sings and we were playing with her a little bit at the time, and a lot of the songs happened to be gospel songs. We were talking about, “Oh gosh, these sound good.” And those were some of the more straightforward ones. Then, we thought it might be funny to make a gospel record, because our harmonies are good. That’s one of the mainstays of bluegrass gospel, it’s not so much the solos as the harmonies. And we thought it would be funny to make a bluegrass gospel record that had the last track that was Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” So that’s where the joke started. Then, as soon as we thought about it, we started digging up every strange gospel song that we had ever seen, and ones that make you question, “Are you kidding?” And we mixed those in and those became more in number than those that are sort of more ordinary. Then the whole thing of recording it in the backyard and all that made it more feasible. Anyway, it all seemed like it was a really funny thing, and I know there were a lot of times when we were recording that certain songs, to us, sounded so extremely satirical, that we thought that there might be a chance we might be lynched or something like that when we put it out. But it hasn’t been anything like that. We’ve found that people who like satire and humor and share a lot of things in common with us understand the satire in it, and people who would normally just buy a gospel record and listen to it just purely for the sake of it being a gospel record will listen to this and they won’t notice anything abnormal about it at all. We’ve never gotten a complaint that I know of, just about the album. We’ve gotten complaints about shows, where we may have done something abnormal while singing gospel songs, but I haven’t received one complaint about the album in general. The only complaint I can remember about any album was, in “Chaff Harvest,” there’s that picture of you [Michael] at the urinal, and some guy wrote to us and said that he really didn’t understand why we would do that, but not…
MP: I don’t remember that.
AH: Yeah, somebody wrote one of us …
TB: I don’t remember that either.
AH: (to Tom) You’re the one who told me. He wrote you. He said he wanted to get us in a festival, but…
unknown: That was the Bluegrass Museum.
unknown: Oh, yeah.
AH: Anyway, not take up too much time, but for the gospel one, we haven’t gotten anyone to say, “This kind of disturbs me that you’re making light of these things.” People don’t see it that way, strangely enough.
JE: A huge cross-section of people listen to it and either take it completely seriously or they’ll see the whole satire that y’all are talking about. It’s still a big mix of songs. I guess there’s a couple on there, like “Talk It All Over [with Him],” that one, and the Bill Monroe [“Wicked Path of Sin”], I guess those are a little bit more common for bands to play and cover. But there’s not as much satire going on in that as in, like, “Sinner Must Die” [“Sinner, You Better Get Ready”].
In Stereo: Leah Calvert, is that the lady you were talking about, Andrew? Any plans for anymore collaborations with her in the future?
AH: Who knows. Who knows. We’re going to see her at IBMA in Nashville in October but before that we’re probably not going to run into her but who knows what will happen. But there’s no plans.
In Stereo: Is she in another band?
AH: She’s in a band from Atlanta called the Dappled Grays.
In Stereo: So what’s your dynamic on the road? Do you guys get on each other’s nerves a lot? And what do you travel in?
JE: The red van over there.
MP: Obviously we’re all different people and when you get people together long enough, things arise, but it’s actually sort of reached a pretty good equilibrium now, there hasn’t been too much strife going on, but our personalities are all pretty flagrant. There are definitely times where it just clashes but I guess that’s true with anybody.
JE: Yeah, how we’re traveling right now, this is a two week run that we’re in the middle of right now. In the past, we’ve done these things like six weeks out. The longest one we did was ten weeks. And we went to Burning Man Festival in the middle of it. It was just absolutely insane the amount of time we were together. It was, like, the habits we get into, we went through three bottles of hand sanitizer or something. People were passing this nasty shit around. I don’t even know. It’s like living in a locker room, you know what I mean? But it is hard to be around anybody for a long period of time. We’re like married people here.
MP: That’s how the rumors start.
JE: Exactly.
Zach McCoy: You start to notice little things about people. Well, I do. It helps me kind of pass the time. You know, like our guitar player swinging one hand more than the other when he walks, or…there’s too much to say about Andrew, so I’ll just go past that, but yeah, I enjoy it, and we all kind of take it light. Sometimes it kind of gets on your nerves when you’re not in a good mood but everybody else is and they’re just slamming you the whole time. But, I enjoy it. I’m sure most people would grow accustomed to it.
AH: I think, especially from having joined the band and been outside of it at first, and having been in other bands, and seen other dynamics, I think the people in this band actually do get along with each other extremely well. And even then, it’s extremely difficult over long periods of time and in the circumstances we’re in. If you didn’t get along extremely well you’d be absolutely hopeless. I mean, just a suicide mission. Even, with people being amicable and that sort of thing, it’s just, I don’t know. What do you say, Josh?
JE: I definitely agree with that. I think we do pretty well in the grand scale. I can understand now why bands do break up with such regularity.
AH: And animosity.
JE: And animosity, yeah, involving lawsuits and stuff, but I think we actually do very well under the circumstances because, when you’re on the road, it really is like twenty four hours a day. We often sleep five people in the same hotel room. If that’s not obscene I don’t know what is.
In Stereo: All in one bed or two double beds?
JE: There’s been, like, every variation you could imagine. There aren’t too many places we haven’t slept.
ZM: There are, you could kind of say, sleeping partners who we’ve, I guess, chosen…
JE: (laughing) Here we go.
ZM: Josh and I tend to wake up early, but, funny enough, we don’t sleep in the same bed. It’s kind of a love-hate relationship between Andrew and I sometimes. So, the bed stuff can get rough.
MP: (laughing) The bed stuff can get rough?
ZM: I don’t know. Tom, our banjo player, likes to sleep on the floor a lot, so that kind of frees up two beds to divide amongst four people. The rhythm section typically has been sleeping together, as of lately, so, yes, there you go.
In Stereo: Real quick, side projects. I just listened today to Andrew’s new EP. Is there anything else like that brewing for you guys?
AH: That old-fashioned CD. Those were just tunes I wrote a long time ago. With old-time tunes like that, you play them at festivals, you turn around, and somebody starts claiming that the tune you wrote was actually a traditional: “My grandfather taught me that, that’s a traditional.” So I felt like I had to record it in order to get it copyrighted and that kind of thing. And actually, I bring it around with me and occasionally I’ll sell one, but that really wasn’t the point so much as getting it copyrighted. You know, all of us record things, and just mess around from time to time. I’ve always recorded things from time to time, been in other groups, put out other albums, and that sort of thing.
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