The Fretliners

Album review by: David Smith

The self-titled debut album from The Fretliners is a dance spurred by longing eyes meeting from across the room. It’s a novel that turns its own pages, sight strained from lack of light as you’re lost in the time of day. It’s a laugh of remembrance for the questionable stories of your life, a bit of worry that they’ll come around again, and a thankfulness for the solace of friends, family, and love to keep you safe in the here-and-now.

Friends of the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society should be no strangers to The Fretliners. The band has been everywhere from your backyard to the hallowed festival stages since winning both the Telluride and Rockygrass band contests last summer. But even prior, with member histories tied to Wood Belly, Head for the Hills, and Yonder Mountain String Band, Colorado audiences have been introduced to the quartet of Tom Knowlton - guitar, Sam Parks - mandolin, Dan Andree - fiddle, and Taylor Shuck – bass. Rest assured that this is no “super group” coming together for a one-off album or one-time show. The Fretliners are a solidified gathering of versed musicians with a vision for the years ahead to tour, to record, to thoroughly entertain.

Readers have no doubt witnessed the pureness of entertainment found at a Fretliners show. Songs flow through an emotional set of joy and sorrow, instrumental prowess and crooning notes of melody, lyrics pleasantly embedded in your psyche, and the high lonesome belted out to listen in awed reverence of the real deal. A show is a personal connection to an audience, but can it be translated in the studio; the rawness, technicality, passion, and interaction of The Fretliners captured and grooved into wax? Yes, yes it can.

Listening to The Fretliners album is a moon-cast walk through a festival campground firing on all cylinders, your ear falling upon old time, original songwriting, on high singing, hollering out jams, as your path takes you from the creek, to the field, to the forest. Songs resound with the relational grip to make them the material heard in picks to come. The old timey vibe of “Mississippi Kite” would fit into any group of sawing fiddles, and a clawhammer banjo wouldn’t be out of place, to be followed up by the singalong chorus, pass the jug times of “Lonesome Holler.” The stories brought forth in “Purple Flowers” and “The Bottle” and “Bluebird” would bring notice and appreciation to a fire ring gathering. Ending the album with “Where the Green Grass Grows” is a perfect send off, as it would be to a last song of the late-night bluegrass circle, solos passed around to jam away the evening. Though, “Suitcases & Heartaches” isn’t found in this parallel of songs rendered by festival campground pickers, as it’s truly a Fretliners hallmark that only they could perform!

 Given the continuity of the band, a frontman is not characteristic. Still, the presence of Tom Knowlton is potent. He’s that unique talent that raises a band from the everyday to the destination, from catching them next time they come around, to seeking them out on a road trip with friends. The twisted notes of Charles Sawtelle, the audience connections of Jeff Austin, the truth of voice of Bradford Lee Folk… Colorado comparisons that aren’t made lightly.

But that’s not to say he’s a frontman carrying a band in his dancing bear tattooed arms. The Fretliners collective of talent can’t be understated, as witnessed by the mandolin chop of Sam Parks in syncopation with the steadfast bass of Taylor Shuck, locked in a bluegrass bounce that no metronome could possess. It’s a rhythm as timed as the planetary orbits, and still as loose as a moonshine influenced step across a sand-tossed wood floor; notes coming upon you as does mountain air through a high country open window in the fall. Then there’s Dan Andree: his fiddle a flurry of notes that could light a wildfire, with a voice powerful enough to extinguish the flames reaching up the canopy. The four together have taken the Colorado bluegrass scene by its unkempt hair and placed a purposeful kiss upon its blushed cheek. The debut album of the Fretliners finds its rightful place with the songwriting, harmonies, instrumentation, and lead vocals of the greats of Colorado bluegrass lore: Hot Rize, Left Hand String Band, Front Range, Hit & Run, Open Road, and others who have helped to define the unmistakable Rocky Mountain high, midnight highway, raging water through a deep canyon theme of Colorado bluegrass.

If you weren’t lucky enough in time and place to take a ride with the bands mentioned above during their heyday, then now is your time and The Fretliners are your band.