Artist
Mighty Poplar
United States
Mighty Poplar is a music group from United States. Their discography on Gatefold includes 1 record.
1
Albums tracked
4
In collections
—
Since
Biography
Five guys booked three days at The Tractor Tavern's studio space in Seattle and decided not to overthink a single take. No click tracks. No marathon pitch correction. Just Noam Pikelny and Chris Eldridge from Punch Brothers, Andrew Marlin from Watchhouse, Greg Garrison from Leftover Salmon, and Alex Hargreaves from Billy Strings' outfit standing around microphones trying to remember how to play bluegrass without twelve layers of progressive jazz theory in the way. Supergroups usually suck because everyone brings their ego and a stack of half-baked B-sides to the table. Mighty Poplar worked because nobody brought original material to prove a point. They raided the back catalog of dead heroes—Bob Dylan, John Hartford, Leonard Cohen, Norman Blake—and played them straight to tape like a back-porch picking session after hours. It is loose, slightly ragged around the edges, and easily the most fun any of these technical monsters have sounded in a decade.
Bio from The Clerk
The Arc of Mighty Poplar
The pivots — what forced Mighty Poplar to reinvent.
The Tractor Sessions
A bunch of high-profile bluegrass ringers took a rare break from their main gigs and locked into a Seattle room with an engineer and zero studio trickery. Andrew Marlin took the lead vocals, giving the tracks a weathered, unpolished center while Pikelny and Eldridge dialed back their usual math-rock complexities for raw rhythm. The self-titled 2023 debut on Free Dirt Records captured the entire exercise with zero studio gloss. You hear floorboards creaking, fingers sliding on frets, and five guys remembering why they picked up these instruments in the first place.
Influences
- Norman Blake — They put Blake's 1974 tune 'Last Train from Poor Valley' right in the middle of their debut tracklist. You hear his dry, unpretentious flatpicking philosophy all over Chris Eldridge's acoustic lines. No showboating, just heavy wood and pure melody.
- John Hartford — The band cut a smoking version of Hartford's 'Up on the Hill Where We Do the Boogie' to kick open the record. Hartford's loose-limbed, rhythmic banjo drive is the explicit blueprint for how Noam Pikelny anchors the group's uptempo cuts. It is technical mastery played with a wicked grin.
- Tony Rice — Eldridge was a direct private student of Tony Rice, and that shadow hangs over every acoustic run in this group. You hear the clean, ringing syncopation and cross-picking attack that Rice patented with the Bluegrass Album Band. Without Rice's template for modern traditionalism, this record does not exist.
- Bob Dylan — Marlin dug up Dylan's Basement Tapes cut 'Let Me Die in My Footsteps' for the record's political centerpiece. You hear Dylan's early rambling folk cadence completely transformed by Hargreaves' fiddle counter-melodies. It treats the song like public domain folklore rather than holy scripture.
- Bluegrass Album Band — In the late '70s and '80s, Tony Rice, J.D. Crowe, and Bobby Hicks formed a pickup supergroup to play first-generation standards better than anyone else alive. Mighty Poplar lifted that exact working model: elite progressive players gathering for a weekend to hammer out traditional shit for the sheer joy of it.
Discography
Their records — most-collected first.
Related artists
Around the web
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