“Try to keep my mind clear and stay between the ditches,” sings East Nash Grass’s Harry Clark three verses into the band’s latest single, “Hill Country Highway.” While the time-honored road song is part of any good touring band’s catalog, East Nash Grass’s latest iteration of the tradition feels both timely and timeless, with a desperation to be back home but a sly nod to everything it’ll take to make it.
“Have you ever been gone from home a long time with no place to lay your body other than the bed of a thousand truckers?” asks Clark while describing the impetus of “Hill Country Highway.” “Did you ever take Stacker 3 and smoke a pack of Marlboro Skyline 100s? Have you ever driven your buddies through Rocky Mountain high roads, blinded by a whiteout? If you have, I need not say more.” And like the last leg of every good tour or road trip, the final few bars of the song host a number of false endings; the musical equivalent to hitting traffic, one last gas fill up, or the dreaded home stretch flat tire. But with a blink-and-you-missed-it run time of just over two minutes, looking back on journeys past, it still goes by too fast.
“Hill Country Highway” is the latest single from East Nash Grass’s upcoming album, All God’s Children-out August 22nd on Mountain Fever Records-with Clark on mandolin, Cory Walker on banjo, guitarist James Kee, Maddie Denton on fiddle, Jeff Partin on bass, and Gaven Largent playing dobro. With All God’s Children, East Nash Grass have whittled down their immense catalog to an all-new, ten-song collection featuring five new originals, two deep-cut covers, two tunes from friends, and a string-band reimagining of a traditional Liberian chant; a feat only accomplished by the no-rules mentality of one of the most talked about bands on the scene. A worldly blend of spirituality, connectedness, and world-class picking-members of East Nash Grass formerly accompanied Dan Tyminski, Tim O’Brien, Sierra Hull, Rhonda Vincent, and more-All God’s Children is the next chapter in their interstellar rise to greatness.