August 2020 Artist of the Month: Two Bird Stone

Two Bird Stone

Hands and Knees (September 2020)

There are a lot of great bluegrass bands these days. Perhaps too many, as after a while they begin to step on each other’s phonic turf. North Carolina/Nashville-based Two Bird Stone is different in that it often sounds like a Celtic band that strayed a bit far from home. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the band’s moniker–as in killing two birds (bluegrass and Celtic) with a single projectile. The Irish-tinged country rocker “Shoebox Money” certainly crosses a few borders.Two Bird Stone isn't the first band to use this formula, but they do it very well.

Two Bird Stone brings together four guys who have done a lot of stuff for other people, including documentaries, movies, commercials, and touring in other people’s groups: Liam Thomas Bailey (lead vocals, banjo, fiddle, guitars, piano), Chad Kelly (accordion), Judd Fuller (bass, mandolin), and Rohin Khemani (percussion). Their debut album was prefaced by the release of the single and video of “The 99,” which also has a touch of pump organ. Is it a riff on the Biblical parable of the lost sheep, or does its imploring come and find me lyric mean something else? Listen and make up your own mind. I like to see it as the companion piece to “Handsand Knees,” a reverse road song about coming home.

A lot of the band’s material falls into the love song category. Another single, “When Somebody Can See Your Soul,” is a nice corrective to the love at first sight cliché. The lyric you can feel it…/when it’s someone that you think you should know…/when somebody can see your soul reminds us that this kind of attraction is Platonic as well as physical. Sarah Siskind guests throughout the record and is a terrific counterpoint to Bailey’s vocals–a balancing sweetness to his strong, reedy voice. She shines again on “Drive It ‘Till the Wheels Come Off.” This one builds to a soaring harmony and Siskind punches her way through the mix. For the record–pun intended–this song isn’t about handing over a jalopy; the keys go to the heart. “Needle and Thread” is another nice relationship song; it pays homage to the one who stitches things together so that everything makes sense.

I found the band’s Celtic fiddle and accordion melody lines refreshing. That’s not just because of my love of Celtic music. As accomplished as many young bluegrass players are these days, too many bands have fallen into predictable patterns of short establishment of a melody line, vocal, alternating instrumental solos. That was the norm of the early days of bluegrass, but the crossover “newgrass” emerging from the 1980s disrupted the old Bill Monroe paradigm. I’m certainly not knocking Monroe or what is oxymoronically called “traditional” bluegrass–it’s problematic to use the term traditional for any music whose exact origins we know–but bluegrass strikes me as a musical form in which retro should be used sparingly. After all, Monroe, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Norman Blake and other such classic stars are mighty big shoes to slip on. By sliding into Celtic melodies, Two Bird Stone again uses a single rock to accomplish two useful things: their melody lines sway and linger, and Celtic music has already been thoroughly hybridized.

I have a reservation, though. I’ve not seen this band live and I worry that it’s so much Bailey’s band that it might be hard to capture the studio magic on the stage. Bailey sings leads, but he’s also the string lead on backing tunes. Some of the tracks, for instance, overlay banjo and fiddle–both of which Bailey plays. The album also uses Kenny Vaughan on guitar and that’s another stringed instrument Bailey plays. Unless he’s amazing at laying down melodies and using pedal playback, much of what we hear on the album would need to be altered for the stage. And, of course, Sarah Siskind has her own career.

A final caution: There seems to be another band called Two Bird Stone that plays funk, so if you go video surfing make sure you get the right band!

Rob Weir

 See also this new video of "If You Want to Come Back," which is on the album.