Black River Review

[footsteps on rocks] [Adam strums guitar] – Adam: Well… – Tim: Let’s play that new song.

– One, two, a one, two, three, four.

[Tim joins in with banjo] – I been looking for a new emotion Can’t seem to find the time Running about out of options, girl When the wind blows back in time We got a beautiful situation – Adam Stariha: Musically, I would describe ourselves rock and roll mixed with acoustic music, whether it be country music or bluegrass music or folk music.

And then, yeah, spread a funky bit bass player on top of that and gives us our own flare there.

I grew up just outside of Superior, the city of Superior in the town of Superior on the Black River.

– Tim Leutgeb: I grew up in Duluth, opposite of Adam; same class in high school, different side of the bridge.

We grew up fishing, canoeing, camping, playing in the woods, swimming in the lake, swimming in the rivers.

Doing just about anything you could do outside.

– Adam: Yeah.

– Tim: …is a big part of how we grew up and what we did, even though we grew up on opposite sides of the bridge.

– Prettiest girl I ever knew – Adam: Bluegrass has the perfect relationship with that outdoor feel because you can do it anywhere.

You don’t need to be plugged in anywhere and what better place to play your guitar than around a campfire or just outside, wherever?

– Tim: You know, there’s hardliner traditional bluegrass purists that believe it should be played a certain way.

You know, I grew up playing Suzuki method violin and every note had to be played exactly right.

And the idea of doing that again with bluegrass, kind of, I don’t want to do that.

I just want to play and have fun and play how I want to play.

– We have taken so many influences from rock and roll, country music, bluegrass music, funk, soul, R&B, among other genres.

– Tim: We play songs that other bands play, but we play them a little bit differently because we learned them a little bit different and that’s– bluegrass has this tradition of passing things down aurally.

Like, you sit around a campfire, and you learn a song from somebody.

Then you learn it the way they know it; not the way they learned it maybe, it changes.

– Adam: And these songs have been traded off, you know, for decades and decades and passed down.

When I first start a song, my creative process, it usually starts with me sitting down just noodling away on my guitar, whether it be just playing with some chord changes, or sometimes I’ll have words or lyrics pop into my head and just kind of go from there.

Once I’ve got the shell of a song, you know, some verses and a chorus, I usually bring it to– whether it be one of the guys or the entire band– and they kind of just, they fill in all the cracks, and just sweeten the whole thing up.

– Tim: We’ve got some instrumental songs that we play that follow, like, a fiddle tune format, which is A-A-B-B.

So, it’s like an A part and a B part are the two different parts.

But a lot of the songs Adam writes follow kind of the verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.

You know, classic rock singer-songwriter structure.

– Adam: The music that we play is definitely part of our identity.

I mean, singing songs about the Black River, where I grew up or singing about lakes that we live around or just different life experiences that we’ve had.

One of the greatest things about music is that it brings people from all over, all different walks of life together.

– Tim: Music allows you to travel the world without ever leaving home.

I’ve played music that was written hundreds of years ago.

When you sit down and read somebody’s lyrics or read somebody’s sheet music you kind of get inside of their mind a little bit, and you can kind of wonder, “Like, what were they thinking?

Why did they write this?”

or “Why did they write that?”

or “What were they trying to say or express?”

So, that’s, that’s a super fun kind of bridge that music opens up.