Arm in Arm

For every copy of Steep Canyon Rangers' Arm in Arm sold (up to 2,000 albums), Wicked Weed Brewing will be donating $10 to Haywood Street's Downtown Welcome Table, an Asheville, NC-based organization that provides a fine dining experience meant to counter the notion often held by those living on the streets that "handouts, hand-me downs, and leftovers are all I deserve." Whatever you call it – history, collective consciousness, experience – the Steep Canyon Rangers have a lot of it. As kids, they grew up listening to the rock, Americana, jazz, and blues that would one day inspire them to pick up instruments and make music of their own. A few years later they were young men on university campuses, playing bluegrass together at house parties and college bars. Now, after two decades as a band, they’re grown men with families, touring the world as GRAMMY Award-winning musicians, famous for high-powered live shows. Their new record, Arm in Arm, is an homage of sorts, both to the early influences that first sparked their dreams of playing music as well as the bluegrass tradition that initially carried them. It’s also an homage to the relationships that have borne the Steep Canyon Rangers to this moment, where their music is reflective of exactly who they are as artists, performers, collaborators, and friends. It’s funny to hear a GRAMMY Award-winning band that’s been together for over twenty years and inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame talk about new possibilities, but age has a way of making things feel new, and the vibe on Arm in Arm feels new, but is it? The music is certainly a departure from the band’s earliest days of wearing suits, picking and grinning around a single microphone, but perhaps it’s also a return to the even earlier days when these men were young kids influenced by the sounds of electric guitars and skull-rattling drums. The music on Arm in Arm is brand new, but maybe it’s old. It’s expansive, evolutionary, and fresh, which is to say it’s pure and original. Whatever you call it, this is the best music the Steep Canyon Rangers have ever made.