Railroad Earth with The Infamous Stringdusters
Where: 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Info: $25; 800-955-5566; 9:30.com
If you have a hankering to see Railroad Earth, don’t miss this week’s show.
Although the band members are known as the ultimate road warriors — logging thousands of miles each year — they’re finally going to slow down early next year and take some time for writing.
“That is part of the plan, taking time off … settling in and starting to look toward making the next record,” said John Skehan, the mandolin player for the group. “We realized, unlike this past year, where we kept touring right through January and February … we needed to have some time off the road.”
That decision is underscored by the announcement early last month that bass player Johnny Grubb soon will leave the band to spend more time with his growing family. Keith Moseley, bass player for The String Cheese Incident, will fill in for Grubb when the band plays Jam Cruise soon after the first of the year.
“It’s a little bit insane,” Skehan said of the band’s adjustment to the announcement. “It is hard and I’m still sorting it out. We will figure out a way to fill the gap, but Johnny will be with us right up through New Year’s Eve.”
The lineup change may have hit the members of Railroad Earth harder than it would musicians in many other bands. Though many musicians talk about how their bands formed organically, Railroad Earth is one of the few that can substantiate that claim. The band, which is often classified as bluegrass, developed after a group of musicians in northwestern New Jersey jammed together, on and off, for the better part of 10 years.
“When we started, we only loosely had the idea of getting together and playing some music,” lead vocalist and songwriter Todd Sheaffer said. “Over a six-month period, we started working on some original songs as well as playing some covers that we thought would be fun to play.”
When the eureka moment hit and the band formed, members adopted the name of a Jack Kerouac poem as its name. The gritty, all-encompassing worldview Kerouac embraced meshed perfectly with the various genres that create Railroad Earth’s sound.
For example, violin player Tim Carbone considers himself a rock ‘n’ roll guy who has Celtic and jazz influences. Sheaffer is also a rock guy. Yet Andy Goessling, who plays everything from acoustic guitar to pennywhistle, is definitely from a bluegrass state of mind. Skehan just joined forces with New York-based mandolin player Todd Collins to release a CD of Baroque music, “John Skehan & Todd Collins Perform Mandolin Duets of Emanuele Barbella (C. 1710-1773).”
But for all their disparate interests, the members of Railroad Earth are confident they’ll be back and strong next year.
“We don’t know [what 2010 will bring] until we really get into it,” Skehan said. “In the spring and summer, there will be the usual amount of festivals and we’ll be there, rolling right through them.”
