Mumford and Sons might have helped bring old-timey elements to pop music, but those looking for something more sincere or traditional need look no further than The Infamous Stringdusters. The band plays bluegrass tunes that are fresh and exciting while staying true to its Nashville roots.
Diversions editor Allison Hussey talked to award-winning dobro player Andy Hall about the deluxe edition of Silver Sky and the band’s efforts at flying free from a record label.
Diversions: Silver Sky originally came out in the spring. What made you want to put it out with the live record rather than just putting out the live record by itself?
Andy Hall: Well, the live record and Silver Sky — both of those albums were albums we’d put out sort of on our own, and we had just got out of a label contract. So we were excited to get these records out. We released them with not really much infrastructure.
They’re probably some of the best music we’ve put out, but because we just released it on our own, they didn’t really have the reach that we would have hoped for. So we partnered with SCI Fidelity recording space here in Colorado.
So we packaged them both together, and we added a bonus track that we recorded of a Grateful Dead cover, “He’s Gone,” and got this music that we did last year that didn’t really have much of a voice because we sort of released it on our own rather quickly.
Dive: What have been the biggest challenges with releasing material yourselves as opposed to with a label?
AH: You know, there’s a lot of upsides, which is you get to decide the timeline on which you release music, you have total artistic control and you can just market it how you want to market it.
What we figured out is that we know our audience better than almost anybody. So we know how we want these albums marketed, but the challenge is that we’re not a record label.
We don’t have the people, the infrastructure to really do everything that needs to be done for a proper release. And so, that was a huge challenge, and that’s why we partnered with SCI Fidelity as a partner. We know when we want things released and how we want it released, but they have the infrastructure to get it where it needs to go.
It’s great to release stuff yourself, but you definitely need someone who has people who can actually work on it as opposed to just our management, who were trying to release the record.
It’s nice to have artistic control, but you also need people to help you with the details.
Dive: You mentioned the challenge in having your record reach more people, but with this release, you’ve kept it limited to specific independent record stores. What made you want to do that?
AH: That was the one area that we didn’t really reach. It’s not that difficult to get your music out there digitally. That’s pretty simple. But we felt like there’s still a lot of awesome record stores that are out there, and people who like independent music still tend to still go to record stores.
It was just something unique. In addition, we released a vinyl of both of the albums, and so with vinyl sort of having a resurgence, the main place people get that is at record stores.
We thought, “Wow, this is a whole avenue here that we didn’t reach on our own.” So we decided to do an actual physical release as well. And when you go into record stores, independent record stores, it’s amazing the amount of music that’s in there and the amount of new music that’s in there.
I think a lot of it had to do with releasing the vinyl and also just having the physical CDs available in all of these areas and all these places all over the country.
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