Band Of Horses
Lead guitarist Tyler Ramsey on Acoustic At The Ryman, the 10-song document of a two-night stand at the legendary Nashville auditorium in 2013
Since their debut, Everything All The Time, arrived via Seattle’s legendary Sub Pop label in 2006, Band Of Horses have steadily carved a niche in the mainstream consciousness, peaking with a Grammy nomination for third LP Infinite Arms in 2011. Their trademark sound, which sees frontman Ben Bridwell’s plaintive, Neil Young-like voice soar above densely meshed guitars, has often rubbed shoulders in their catalogue with songs soaked in the influence of alt-country and rootsy Americana. It’s this strand of the band’s DNA that comes to the fore on their latest release, a live acoustic album.
“We were recording all of the sets on that tour just really for our own benefit,” the band’s guitarist Tyler Ramsey explains. “We got to the Ryman and decided we were going to do an acoustic set first, and then play a full-on rock set after that, and it went really well. That room is magical anyway, but the people, the energy… everything about it was perfect.
“When it came time to listen back to the recordings — all the energy comes across, I think. So we decided rather than maybe piecing together a live electric record, we would release this. It was just something that we’re all really proud of. It captured that feeling we had when we walked offstage. You can feel the energy of the show and the energy of the room. I have a hard time listening to things I’ve done, but it’s got that feeling that made us want to put it out in the first place. It’s right there; you can hear it.”
Leaning on his Guild Orpheum Series acoustics and the late-1950s Gibson LG-1 he carries with him “all the time” on the road, Tyler’s live acoustic sound on the album is a blend of mic’d signal and Baggs pickup systems, although he confesses that, like many acoustic players, he’s still honing his setup somewhere along the long road to perfection: “I’m still kind of finding ‘the one’,” he laughs, although he expects that further acoustic dates in the first half of 2014 will see the guitar-playing members of the band further refining and tweaking their rigs.
Learning on the hoof
It’s not just gear that’s being worked on, either. Tyler’s current obsession with the banjo (“I’ve been playing tons and tons of really annoying, basic clawhammer banjo. Driving people away! But it totally does something for your guitar playing”) – has been partnered with the whole band aspiring to channel some good, old-fashioned Southern stagecraft into their acoustic performances.
“I live in North Carolina, and there’s a lot of bluegrass and old-time and stuff around here. To watch a bluegrass band that knows how to work a microphone is really something. I’m not saying we’re gonna get to that point, because those guys have done that for a long time. But if you ever get a chance to see Del McCoury or someone like that, they’re all around one mic and are able to mix their own show, based on who is the closest to the microphone at any given moment. It’s amazing. Someone will have a solo and they’ll come around the side and work their way up to the microphone, and somebody else will back up a couple of inches. When I think of an acoustic show, the old-fashioned style is such a cool way to go. But it’s really hard to pull off, and I think you have to work at it for a while. But hopefully, we’re going to do a little bit of that type of thing. We’re talking about it, at least for part of the show.”
The Ryman Auditorium performances gave Band Of Horses the opportunity to connect with their material and audience in a different way. “You can’t just hit a distortion pedal and have a wall of sound,” Tyler admits. “So it’s fun to explore songs in that way where you can achieve a different emotion, even. Some of these songs that we’ve been playing so loud are really beautiful and if you play them in this style, it really comes across. I think there’s a chance to almost alter the meaning of a song, in a way. Or make it have an impact that it wouldn’t necessarily have if there were five guys blasting out over the crowd. It’s an interesting experiment to see what you can do with songs that we’ve already been playing for so long.
“It also creates this connection with the audience that you don’t necessarily have when you’re playing at full volume. People tend to lean in, and you really get this amazing experience between the crowd and the performer. That doesn’t happen when you’re playing full blast and really, that’s the reward of it all.” [CV]