Pickin' and Foot Tappin' Eugene, Oregon: Moon Mountain String Band
No music better encapsulates life in and around Eugene quite like the music of Moon Mountain String Band. This lively seven-piece bluegrass group from over here in the forests of Western Oregon got its start in a picture-perfect way: founding members Dylan Plummer (he/him) and Albert Yang (he/him) playing acoustic guitars around a campfire. Soon after, Yang picked up the mandolin and got good, quick. This turned on the gas that lit the fire beneath the pair to start a more serious music venture. Another founding member, standup bass player Dave Deblaker (he/him), who knew Plummer from a previous band, was quickly there to help kick things into gear. A few open jam sessions later, the group reached its final headcount with the addition of dobro player Zachary Wallmark (he/him), fiddler and vocalist Sarah Wilfong (she/her), guitarist and vocalist Slug Kaltenbach (they/them), and lead guitarist and vocalist Shane Connor (he/him).
Moon Mountain String Band has played anywhere from 50 to 100 shows all around Oregon as of now. When asked about what the Eugene live music scene has meant to them in their time here Wilfong responded, “It seems like a wonderfully enthusiastic community. I certainly have felt very supported and people are just genuinely happy and excited to come out and listen and dance and do whatever, which is really lovely. It's a shift from (when) I lived in Nashville before moving out here and people would come out to judge as opposed to come out to enjoy, so I am here for it.” They talk about how they are often playing shows with other musicians that they love and respect, and emphasize that it's really just a good group of people. Wallmark adds “It does kinda feel like it’s just a big group of friends in this town in various loose confederations.” The group gives a special shoutout to other local artists Belltower, The Muddy Souls, Sugar Pine, Alder Street, Bonnie and the Boys, and Mckenzie Crossing.
Photo credit : Bren Brexifer
Being a band with seven members is no easy feat. Due to the large group, and everyone having dayjobs, they are left with only a couple of hours every week to get together and work on music. When it comes to writing, a lot of the time members will write the beginning of songs on their own and then bring it to the group and it goes from there. Some songs are more collaborative than others. “It’s pretty cool how like, when I write a song I’ll have an idea and I'll try to have as much as possible and then all of a sudden there's seven people playing the song that I wrote and that comes together really fast sometimes,” Kaltenbach says. Wilfong adds, ““It’s really fun to play arranger on other peoples songs too because you never know what's living inside their head, but there is often something that will spark while listening to it where it’s like ‘oh it would be so cool if we did this!’”
Their new record “Valsetz” released on all platforms December 4th, and has been on repeat in my car constantly since. This album is an indescribable listening experience from top to bottom. From upbeat, to ballad, they deliver a show stopping performance. They wrote this album in just three months, give or take, and recorded it across a total of about 3 days. I reached out to one of the sound engineers of this project, Asher Loewenstern to ask him what it was like working with Moon Mountain.
“It was great. They are all very talented musicians. They came in with a pretty clear vision and with really well thought out arrangements - so for me my main job in that situation is just to capture things as best I can. They know what the songs are supposed to sound like, and they know how they're supposed to be performed.. so you know there's not a whole lot of me producing them so much as capturing their performances because they're just so on that level musically…”
Asher’s favorite song off the album is track ten “Florence, Oregon”. He elaborated, “being someone who's from Eugene that's been to Florence a hundred times and hearing a song written about a place that you frequent is so cool.” The song, written by Connor, is about seasonal depression. When discussing the song with the group, Kaltenbach says, “I think we've all been to the sand dunes (in Florence) and just felt so forlorn.” The importance of regionality to this group of musicians is clear, and it is displayed beautifully across multiple songs off their new project. When asked to describe the album, Wallmark responded, “It really captures something local to the Pacific Northwest that doesn't really exist in the bluegrass space.” He continues, “Many of the songwriters in this group really wrote with the flavor of this place in mind and with the history of the Pacific Northwest and Oregon in mind, so its interesting kind of breaking from the historical rootedness of this type of music in Appalachia and transforming some of these concepts into a different mountainous forested region, with a different set of ecological challenges but also that rhymes strongly with the model of the Appalachia of 100 years ago.” He concludes, “One of the themes of this record is ecological plunder and challenge, historically for this region.”
So, what should you, the listener, expect from Valsetz? “They should expect to tap their feet a lot because there's a lot of really fun uptempo things, but if they listen carefully the things that are uptempo aren't always happy,” Wilfong says. She described this album as “A snapshot of a moment in time with seven friends shoved into a studio. Like it's this little time capsule.” She adds, “Something that I look forward to relistening to in five years and kind of reliving this moment.” Connor says, “If they listened to the first album, this album is more polished and refined sounding, the sound is completely different. It's the difference between a sophomore album and a freshman album. More experience and time has gone by.” Plummer replies, “Three months before recording (the first album) we had added Sarah and Zach, so we were still kind of getting the sealegs as far as like, how to play with such a big ensemble. Over the last year we've gotten a lot more comfortable with the dynamics of having so many instruments and knowing when to step in and step back.” Wallmark wraps up by saying, “One thing about this record is that we're really consciously blending tradition and novelty… In many ways this sounds like a tradition bluegrass record but then we go and do things that very much align it with kind of the more contemporary strains of what's going on compositionally, and improvisationally, so in many ways we sort of split the difference between a very old school way of doing bluegrass and a more contemporary thing.”
Moon Mountain String Band is not only a group of talented musicians, but also a lovely, welcoming, and genuine group of people with an obvious passion for the music they write and perform. My closing advice to you is that you make sure not to miss out on this. Find a show, check out the album, and support in any way you can. This is music for everyone, made by people who care, and it's made right here in Eugene, Oregon.