Yonder Mountain String Band: Next Level

Photo: Robin Vega

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Last February, Yonder Mountain String Band went Hollywood. 

Well, not really. But it was the closest they’ve ever come to living that expression, when they found themselves at the Grammys, alongside Molly Tuttle, The Infamous Stringdusters, and bluegrass luminaries Peter Rowan and the Del McCoury Band. Their 2022 album, Get Yourself Outside was nominated for Best Bluegrass Album, a first despite forming over 25 years ago. Banjo player Dave Johnston says he doesn’t remember where he was or what he was doing when he got the call notifying him of the nomination; neither does guitarist Adam Aijala. 

Still, this nomination hit a bit different and was certainly a validation of the band’s nonstop work ethic over the past quarter century.  From the group’s humble beginnings near Boulder, Colo., in the late ‘90s, Yonder Mountain’s success has been centered around their push to meld traditional bluegrass with modern improv elements, a jamgrass persona that was forged by Leftover Salmon, The String Cheese Incident and Hot Rize before them. 

So on February 5, the members of Yonder made their way to the Microsoft Theater, near the Crypto.com Arena, where the main ceremony would take place later that evening. Pop sensations such as Harry Styles, Lizzo and Adele ended up taking home the major awards later that evening while host Trevor Noah entertained the crowd. 

“It was very cool to be nominated,” Aijala says. “I’m glad we went, too. We thought, ‘If we win, that’s great, but let’s just go for the experience.’ We hung out in the foyer because some of us hadn’t seen each other yet. We were just chatting, and we saw some other people we knew, like the Dusters and some other bands. So we just shot the shit, went in, didn’t win and were totally fine with that. And then we went and grabbed some food.”

Aijala recounts Yonder’s trip to the award show with the enthusiasm of a tourist, happy that he was given a glimpse into a different side of the music world but also acutely aware that this corner of the entertainment industry isn’t totally for him. He formed Yonder Mountain with Johnston, bassist Ben Kaufman and mandolinist Jeff Austin in 1998, after the four musicians met in Nederland, Colo. Johnston and Austin both worked at the same restaurant, and the newly formed group hosted a weekly jam session there that blossomed into something more. 

The Boulder scene was thriving at the time. “There were multiple jams you could go to,” Johnston recalls. “There was a Sunday night jam and a Tuesday night jam and a Wednesday night jam. It was fucking killer. We’d get to play, make money and eat.”

The quartet’s early gigs were driven by bluegrass traditionals like “Pig in a Pen” and “Nine Pound Hammer,” along with Bill Monroe’s “Shenandoah Breakdown.” But, even then, a dose of originals populated their sets, showing an immediate desire to offer something different, something unique. At the Mountain Sun Brewery’s Christmas show in December 1998, the band did just that, dropping a 34-song, two set show that sounded far more polished than a band still in its infancy should. (They were clearly having fun too, and the foursome can be heard goofing off and joking between tunes on recordings from that seminal gathering.) Those humble beginnings set the stage for what’s become the booming jamgrass scene of today. 

Yonder continued to record and tour at a fervent pace—sometimes clocking in well over 100 gigs annually—before they came to a crossroads in 2014 with founding member Jeff Austin. As a Relix feature at the time detailed, personalities clashed and the band felt fractured; the four members started to feel less united and more like a collection of individuals articulating their own voices. Austin left, and Yonder kept things going by filling his slot with both fiddle player and vocalist Allie Kral and mandolinist Jacob Jolliff. They recorded their first album in six years, Black Sheep, and started to find a new, sustained groove on the road. 

But that was almost 10 years ago. And once again, the group recently found itself needing to embrace change. 

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To say that the jamgrass scene is thriving these days is a bit of an understatement. Billy Strings, of course, has become a force, selling out arenas across the country—he’s also covered Yonder’s “Sorrow Is a Highway” several times. But acts like the Kitchen Dwellers, The Infamous Stringdusters, Greensky Bluegrass and the Steep Canyon Rangers also continue to draw big-time crowds across the country.

“I do feel like we’re a part of why those bands are where they are,” Johnston says about the scene’s recent explosion. “Maybe not a huge part, but we’re in the mix. Music is a creative pursuit, and there are some creative strategies that make you more appealing to large crowds, and we helped move it along. So we’re psyched by that.” 

That creativity has been part of Yonder Mountain’s ethos since the beginning and continues to flourish to this day.

“Dave and I live right down the street,” Aijala says. “It’s 20 minutes from the studio. When the band comes to town, they stay with me. Dave’s got a good regimen. He has a little book, and he’s always writing stuff down.”

Though additional lineup changes during the past four years have presented a recent string of challenges for the group, this time it feels different than when Austin left the fold. Jolliff stepped away in 2020, and the band replaced him with multi-instrumentalist Nick Piccininni. Kral departed in 2022, leaving the band a fiddle hole to fill, which they did with Coleman Smith, who Aijala met at a jam session he was doing one day with Leftover Salmon’s Drew Emmitt, Greg Garrison and Andy Thorn. 

“When Allie first left, we had a list of fiddle players, and we were choosing people who were already in other bands,” Aijala says. “So it’s like, ‘Hey, do you have time to do this? Do you have time for that?’ Coleman was just like, ‘Hey, if you guys need someone to be more available, I can be that guy.’” 

The band’s latest album, Nowhere Next, is the first studio recording from this newly cemented version of Yonder, an 11-song record centered around the topics they know best—traveling, relationships, hometowns and connecting with the natural world. As with a lot of what Yonder has done over the years, there’s a simplicity to the lyrics—nothing is overcomplicated, yet the storytelling remains rich, just like the bluegrass songs they grew up on. There’s no reinventing the wheel, and that’s a good thing.

The band also reconnected with a hero from their studio past, Dobro player Jerry Douglas, who first appeared on their 2003 album, Old Hands. Douglas contributes to three tracks on Nowhere Next, adding his distinct textures to songs like “Here I Go,” “Didn’t Go Wrong” and the album’s closer, “River.” 

Douglas’ contributions are just one of many ways that the past shines throughout Nowhere Next. Most notably, the group also revived and completed several song sketches that they had previously worked on over the years for the sessions. 

“We used to say, ‘I wrote this song, Ben wrote that song, Dave wrote that song, Jeff wrote that song.’ But now we say we all wrote everything,” Aijala says. “The main thing that I love about it is having new music to play.”

The band typically records live, and because they use a bevy of acoustic instruments, they rarely plug in, instead opting to perform into a mic. That’s in sharp contrast to their live show, where they need to be plugged in order for the audience to hear what they’re doing. 

They’ve worked with John McVey in various producer and engineering capacities for nearly 10 years. In that time, McVey has noticed that they’ve matured into a well-oiled machine, one that knows what they want and how to get it. 

“A lot of things in the studio are tricky, like what people like to hear in their headphones, how they like to be positioned in a room and how mic’ing them works best. We’ve just gotten really good at that over the years,” McVey says. “They’ll sit in the studio and record a song until they get a great take, and then we’ll do some overdubs and fixes and things like that. They bring in songs that are not quite finished yet. We’ve got this trust thing going where having more ears in the room as a song gets f inished is a really good thing.”

Johnston says that the band’s knack for improv has changed since their early days. “We’re definitely playing more within the form of the song and less like, as Phish people call it, type-two jams. Although I’m constantly like, ‘Type two, type two!’ You’re communicating something almost otherworldly,” he says. 

It’s that desire to keep the traditional alive, as well as a creative urge to push their own playing, that keeps Yonder thriving—and with new members, that delicate balance has only been refreshed and augmented in recent years. 

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Yonder Mountain didn’t win the Grammy that day—Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway’s Crooked Tree took home the honor. But, after they went out to eat, they did attend the main ceremony at the Crypto.com Arena. 

“The production on the stage was amazing,” Aijala says. “We got to see Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson and that was pretty cool. I enjoyed it because I’m like, ‘When else am I gonna be here?’” 

But that surreal moment was really just a blip on Yonder’s radar, a recognition after years of dedication that remains just that—a recognition. 

Along with a mix of friends and contemporaries, they’ve also parlayed Mexico into an annual festival destination. But their Strings & Sol event, which started in Tulum, Mexico, in 2012, before moving to its current home in Cancun, is unique in that it’s garnered bluegrass fans to travel outside the country, showing just how far the genre has come in recent decades. This year’s iteration is once again a barometer for where the scene is, boasting multiple sets from Yonder, as well as Greensky Bluegrass, Molly Tuttle, Railroad Earth, The Infamous Stringdusters and the Kitchen Dwellers. Strings himself even made the trip to Mexico for the summit earlier in his career, before emerging as bluegrass music’s current international ambassador.

“It’s gotten pretty massive, although it’s mostly just him,” Aijala says of Strings’ rise. “But still, it’s pretty wild to see the size of the rooms he’s playing. I’m hopeful that will eventually help all the bands like us. I think we have a really cool, tight-knit scene, among all the bands, and we’re still meeting people. Back in the day, we’d be the only band at a jamband festival without a drummer. Then we’d play a bluegrass festival, and we’d be one of the only bands that plugged in and we weren’t even considered bluegrass.”

And there’s no doubt that Yonder will remain a key part of the acoustic jamgrass revival going forward—the band plans on continuing their relentless road attack, and they have a coast-to coast winter tour already lined up for 2025. With players coming and going, they simply look at recent changes as chances to start over, without losing track of their shared history. 

“We’d sound a lot tighter if we played the same show every night, but it wouldn’t be as fun for us,” Aijala says. “Going into the studio just allows us to look forward—to not only how it turns out on the record but also how it’s going to translate in the live show. That’s why we’re still a band.”