VIDEO: Uncle Earl, "Crayola"
For most musicians, a gig in Uncle Earl — one of the more highly regarded new-bluegrass (or newgrass) string bands on the scene — would offer more than enough in the way of regular work. The female quartet are scheduled to play the Bonnaroo festival this summer, and they’re touring in support of their sophomore album, Waterloo, Tennessee (Rounder), which was produced by ex–Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones. But when Kristin Andreassen — a stepdancer who plays a variety of instruments — isn’t on the road or recording with Uncle, she finds the time to play with the trio Sometimes Why as well as gig around town in the Jolly Bankers. She even has a new solo album in the works.
Andreassen hasn’t been doing all this from Nashville or Bakersfield but from right around the corner in Watertown. When we meet at the Town Diner in Watertown Square, she admits, while working her way through a mountainous Cobb salad, that she’s just glad to be home. “Last time I was able to be at my house was after Uncle Earl played a show at Club Passim. The girls allowed me to drive home to my house and drop off my winter coat and pick up my spring boots, since we were headed to Austin, and I was there 45 minutes before I was waving goodbye to my roommate.”
Her roommate is Aoife O’Donovan, singer for the Boston-based string band Crooked Still and — along with the Mammals’ Ruth Unger-Merenda — one of her co-conspirators in Sometimes Why. That band, Andreassen explains, is an outlet for songs that don’t fit in her other bands — songs that might not count as family fare. Most of Uncle Earl’s material is PG-rated; Sometimes Why’s repertoire includes titles like “Too Repressed.” And it’s with Sometimes Why that she’s planning to head to Ireland. “We have to plan it well in advance. We all have like a week and a half off in May, and Aoife’s family is from Ireland, so she has a cousin over there who’s booking us a tour, so it’s half a tour and half a vacation.”
What with all these musical commitments, Andreassen views time at home as precious: “When I go on vacation, I go to my house and walk around Watertown Square.” Not that she doesn’t still play as much as she can. “I’ve achieved a certain level of success, and now I find it hard to play or practice because I’m spending so much time handling the administrative aspect of making a living from music. When we’re on the road, I feel like we hardly play at all because we’re in the van and driving or getting directions or looking for an Internet connection or doing an interview. So I just play in the show. When I get home, that’s the only time I have to practice or get better or work on new material.”
Given that everybody in Uncle Earl and Sometimes Why writes songs, Andreassen found herself with a catalogue of material that didn’t have a home. There were songs she’d developed for dance troupes she’d been in, very percussive in nature, tunes based on the polyrhythms of tapping feet and patty-cake hands. There were weird fusions of old bluegrass recordings, Kurt Weill, and the Andrews Sisters. Yet it was only after a lot of prodding from her friends that Andreassen recorded her solo album, the self-released Kiss Me Hello, last year.
“Even when I started writing songs, I never thought about putting out a record under my own name, because I didn’t have a lot of ambition about touring as a solo artist. Then once I had the CD in my hands, I wondered, ‘How is anybody going to buy this album if I don’t tour as Kristin Andreassen?’ The material on my solo record doesn’t sound like Uncle Earl or Sometimes Why. It’s my own thing, and I’m too busy in those bands to put the Kristin Andreassen band together. I don’t need to do that. And there are enough solo singer-songwriters with their guitars out there hitting the open mics. The one thing I realized I could do was win a songwriting contest. Then I could put a sticker on the front of the record that says such a song won a song contest.”
With that in mind, she entered “Crayola Doesn’t Have a Color for Your Eyes” in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and the songwriters’ contest at MerleFest. A finalist in both, she won $5000 in the Lennon contest for best children’s song.
Still, she has yet to play a solo concert. “Since I already am in two successful bands, it’s pretty liberating because a solo record really is free of commercial consideration. It’s an interesting thing to navigate as a person in a band: how much of your identity becomes that band and how do you forge an identity outside the band? I’m in this band Uncle Earl that’s achieving some success. Do I just ride that and put all my energy there, or do I do something that establishes me outside the band?”
For now, Andreassen seems comfortable with a quartet who’ve graduated from borrowing vehicles to renting mini-vans to owning a 12-passenger van and having a road manager, and a trio who do their best to fit all their gear into one rolling suitcase. But before our lunch is over, she does promise to play at least one solo show in town this year. Watch this space to find out when and where.
