On the road again
AMERICAN BLUEGRASS ROCK BAND TRAMPLED BY TURTLES HAS RETURNED AFTER A LENGTHY BREAK
Dave Simonett didn’t know what to expect when he and his Trampled by Turtles bandmates inally got together at a cabin last October.
After a decade of being stuck in a van and then a tour bus together, the members of Minnesota, USA’S widely loved acoustic sextet went a full year without ever being in the same room together. They agreed to meet up at banjo player Dave Carroll’s family lake place near Grand Rapids, Minneapolis, for a weekend.
As the members started arriving at the cabin, though, so came the news: Tom Petty had passed away. For a bunch of dudes in their 30s and 40s who mostly grew up in smallish Midwestern towns, that was a big one.
“We went down to the lake with a Bluetooth speaker and listened to just about every record of his,” said Simonett, frontman of the group and also the one responsible
for shelving it.
Along the way came lessons about how life is short, music is forever and a great band like Petty’s is a rare ind, not
to be undervalued. No wonder that we had a new Trampled by Turtles album that came out last Friday, just half a year later.
With a title that opti-
mistically points to what lies ahead for Simonett and his crew for the rest of the year, Life Is Good on the Open Road, the new 12-song collection, is the band’s irst record in four
years. It also marks the end to an almost two-year hiatus from the stage.
“We played music together late into the night, and late into the next night, too,” Simonett remembered from the cabin. “It felt like only one day had passed since we were last together, not one year.”
One listen to Life Is Good on the Open Road conirms that sentiment;
it sounds like Trampled never left. The gallop-paced banjo and iddle in the opening tune
and irst single, Kelly’s Bar, sounds as familiar and distinctive as the lyrical references to Red Wing and Winona and the adventures found in between. There’s more manic and rapid-ire
string picking — from the band that proudly wore the “Ramones of bluegrass” tag — in subsequent tunes such as Blood in the Water and Annihilate.
The record also boasts plenty of slower, more melodic, lushly textured tracks in the vein of the band’s game-changing 2012 single Alone, including the contemplative but celebratory title track and the album’s rearview-mirror-tinted I’m Not There Anymore.
“We’re right back where we started off,” Simonett sings midway through the record, words he’s all too happy to echo when asked about how the album came about so quickly after the long lull.
Still, not everything was same-as-it-ever-was when it came to making the album. The time off made a difference emotionally, if not so much musically. “It never felt like the band was on autopilot or anything, but it had been our fulltime job for a long time,” Simonett said. “Now, I’m more excited about playing with Trampled than I have been for years.”
So if everything came together so smoothly and cheerfully after the break, why did Trampled by Turtles come apart in the irst place? “It was
really my fault,” Simonett said. “My personal life was super-chaotic at the time, and creatively I really wanted to make the record that became the Dead Man Winter record.” A more electriied
side-project/moniker he started around 2011, Dead Man Winter
became the vehicle by which Simonett wrote his most personal album to date, Furnace, written as he retreated to a temporary home in Red Wing following a divorce. He said he needed to “clear the decks” to get through that dificult record, which came out to strong press and favourable fan reaction at the start of 2017.
While Simonett focused on Furnace, the other members of his original band took on a wide variety of projects. Bassist Tim Saxhaug started a ilm-production
company in Grand Rapids while also touring in Dead Man Winter. Fiddler Ryan Young rejoined his prior band Pert Near Sandstone for some gigs while also producing them and younger acts in his home studio.
Cellist Eamonn Mclain played with
Lucy Michelle’s band Field Trip. Banjoist Dave Carroll settled into a new home life in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and gigged a little around the ski-resort circuit. While tending to his small farm north of Duluth with his wife and two kids, Berry stayed active in the Duluth music scene, playing various acoustic gigs with friends and making a traditional Irish record with Teague Alexy.
While they admitted to getting burned out by Trampled’s demanding schedule before the hiatus, Berry and Simonett both sound unequivocally eager to get back to playing shows again. They’re booking gigs through the fall, including European dates.
“I didn’t ever want to take touring for granted. It’s what I always wanted to do. I’m lucky to get to do this,” said Simonett. “So I’m trying to remember that it’s pretty great to travel the world with my best friends, even if sometimes it does get hard.”
And if they ever lose sight of that again, Simonett and the rest of the band now know that taking a year or two off won’t mean the end of the road.