Twisted Pine

I stumbled onto Twisted Pine at IBMA a few years ago, at the Lincoln Theater in Raleigh, NC. I had no idea what to expect. Intrigued by their name, I stayed glued to my seat.
Out walked a couple of young musicians from the Boston MA area. They jumped right in on a (an original) very bluegrass sounding song, with great musicianship. So far I’m tracking along – when I hear a flute taking on what I presume would normally be the banjo part? What?? I stood up to see if I was hearing correctly. And I never returned to my seat for the remainder of the set. It worked so well! When the band finished with a cover of Bill Wither’s hit, “Use Me,” I was hooked.

I’ve seen them perform a few times since, and I’ve never been disappointed. When the opportunity arose to catch up with them on the road, I was delighted to grab a few minutes to learn more about this fringe, bluegrass act. Bass player, Chris Sartori, told me they all met through the Boston music scene. Each were in different touring bands at the time, and they all happened to be on the same bill one day. “That’s how we met, and became friends,” Chris said. “And you know, eight years later, here we are.”

The band started out with a more traditional bluegrass sound in the beginning. Chris’s first show with the group was at the Gray Fox Bluegrass festival in 2015. “Our sound has been evolving sort of dramatically, for many years,” he explained. “We all have this common thread of bluegrass; it’s our roots. But we have all of these other influences, that over the years, organically took shape, and wove their way into the tapestry of this band. Our iteration now feels like it’s the most evolved and realized form of what we want this music to be.”

Why A Flute
Anh Phung, from Chilliwack, BC, joined the band a little later as their resident flute player. “They were at a folk conference in Montreal, and I just happened to be there,” Anh recalled. “It was during a bit of a transitional period for them. We had been friends for so many years already, and it’s always exciting to meet up with your friends at these conferences. We had already been jamming together a lot at these conferences, or in hotels, and in the lobby. So it was the perfect situation. They invited me to sit in on a showcase. And then I sat in on a few more showcases. It was never really a planned thing. But we clicked in terms of musicality and personalities. We just had this really clear connection. I don’t think they said, ‘let’s find a flute player to replace this guitar that we used to have,’ you know. It just worked musically. I think that’s how it is with any musicians who like jamming. Who do you have chemistry with? Who do you have connection with? I think that’s why I really ended up here.”

“One of the elements of what makes this band go, is that it’s just a general sense of not thinking too much about what the rules are, or how it’s supposed to work, but rather, just going with, ‘oh, this; this feels good,” Anh added. “This drives us musically, so who cares? Whatever you call it, at the end of the day; it’s music.”

“We’re always kind of figuring out what we call our sound,” Chris added. “It depends on who asks the question sometimes what the answer is. One thing we do say it is, is funky Americana. Fringe Americana is another one that gets thrown out a lot. Some people like to call us progressive, like a progressive string band, or progressive bluegrass. I think we definitely have major elements of that as well.”

I offered that the name itself, Twisted Pine, was a fair description of what to expect when watching the group perform. When I hear it I think, ‘ok, this is gonna be different,’ but in a good way. It kind of gives you this sense of exactly what you guys are going to do.

“It was more like a happy accident, honestly. We were just in need of a name at one point, because we had a lot of gigs, and the band was starting to take off. And it became this kind of name that we grew into. It’s like a very earthy, kind of bluegrass type of reference. But it has a twisted element to it. We sort of just took to it more than we were intentional about the name,” Chris said.

Original Music
When I asked about their songwriting process, fiddle player and lead vocalist, Kathleen Parks, had this to say. “I guess I’m the primary songwriter that started bringing original music to the band. Now, it’s very, very collaborative. I still like bringing things to the band, but they’re very apt to change it as how the final song plays out. But I definitely, from my perspective, know the different sounds that this band can make. So I feel like it has influenced the songs that I bring. I also believe that there’s no limits to what we can do, so if something is really out there, I bring it to the band and we figure it out together. And now we write together too, and it’s a really, really fun experience,” she exclaimed.

“The writing was never intentionally bluegrass from the start. The style that we were all learning started in the Bluegrass world. But the writing always stems from something else, like many different genres, lots of pieces, and definitely there’s very much a funk, R&B sound to this band. While I’m very much into the whole Alison Krauss realm, which I still love to tap into very much, there’s also influences from artists like Aretha Franklin, Mavis Staples, Herbie Hancock, and Jethro Tull,” Kathleen said.

Just The Covers
Mandolin player Dan Bui added, “I really do think you can take any song or any tune, and arrange it for different instruments, and it doesn’t have to necessarily be like, ‘this is this style.’ So that means I have to play it in this style. That’s why; another thing this band does really well is cover songs. There’ll be these random covers from any genre, and we’ll just make it our own. I think that’s a testament to what we can come up with. You can really take any song or any tune and just arrange it for what you have. We don’t think about it too hard. There is not any real set of criteria. Other than if we’re vibing on a particular song or an artist at the time. The Bill Withers song just happened organically. He’s an example of an artist who can just be so deeply groovy and funky, but still, he played an acoustic guitar. It just happened over time. We just started playing it and it just came out that way.”

Twisted Pine is definitely not your grandparent’s bluegrass music. Yet, the band seems to connect with a broad spectrum of age ranges. “A really rewarding thing about playing in this band is the types of people that come to our shows. It’s really just anybody who loves music deeply. There’s no one specific demographic that we see being the main demographic at our shows,” Chris said. “And we like it that way.”