Billy Strings – Highway Prayers

With an album recorded at the beginning of the year Strings is back. In the interim he’s been touring and debuting the songs. A fan delight amongst comments on his social media is that they’re now recorded. His trajectory has been vertical. Widely feted by music or broadsheet media as a precocious talent; the narrative has been that he’d kicked his early years substance misuse and grew up with a taste for rock but whose heart lay in roots music after the influence of his stepfather. Always a major bluegrass act he’s now one that’s global.

 We should treasure Strings for many reasons but not least because he’s made bluegrass an arena genre and brought it to many new ears. With so much pap filling the country charts and arenas it’s heartening, that with no compromises, he’s packing them in. He’s a musician who’s stretched the genre and popularised roots music with his rockstar vibe. This release, with its muscle car sleeve, is traditional roots music and throughout you are bathed in his acoustic mastery along with some other brilliant players in his band.

Strings wrote or co-wrote all 20 tracks and I’m pleased to see Thomm Jutz help out on three. The musicianship is peerless throughout with banjo (Billy Failing), bass (Royal Masat), mandolin (Jarrod Walker) and fiddle (Alex Hargreaves) keeping pace with his guitar pyrotechnics. Whilst faithful to bluegrass throughout there are a breadth of ideas and sounds within the genre. Three instrumentals sit with songs with his vocals that contain interesting lyrics whether a traditional dark and haunting bluegrass story about murder (My Alice), sad and happy love stories (Be Your Man, Don’t Be Calling Me (At 4AM) and Cabin Song), hell raising (Leadfoot) and smoking marijuana (MORBUD4ME and Catch and Release). On this latter song Strings tells of driving to a fishing spot whilst enjoying a smoke. Unfortunately, a State Trooper detains him by the side of the road and detects the dreaded weed. It’s all done with a Charlie Daniels’ comic tongue in cheek delivery à la Uneasy Rider.

Strings has a pleasing tenor voice and on occasion it’s a focus such as on Leaning on a Travellin’ Song that starts with just male harmony vocals over an acoustic guitar that delight or the sublime accapella Richard Petty (a dearly departed NASCAR racer) and Stratosphere Blues/I Believe In You where he slips from bluegrass to sophisticated folk. It’s maybe here that you detect the fingerprints of John Brion who co-produced the album with Strings. Seemingly Brion has no prior credentials in country or roots music yet has previously worked with singer songwriters such as Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple. An hour and a quarter of solid bluegrass might not be my chosen destination but this album is so sweet, jammed with melodies, phenomenal musicianship and enchanting vocals that I shall not complain as it sweeps up, royally, in the end of the year polls and awards.