Certainly since the pioneering days of Bill Monroe, nobody has questioned the mandolin’s rightful place in the bluegrass world, but the instrument is too often relegated to a secondary role. In his new solo CD, Wings of a Jetliner, set for a June 12 release, Nate Lee firmly settles his mandolin front and center on the tracks selected for this project.
Lee had always planned a follow-up to his 2017 release Plays Well with Others, but he doesn’t consider this new recording a continuation. That first CD consisted entirely of instrumentals; this one has five of Lee’s original instrumental tunes, along with seven songs chosen to fit the groove.
Lee says he knew he was going to make this CD after listening to Dan Tyminski perform at IBMA in Raleigh in September.
“Watching him play, I thought, “I’m going to do it,” and he went back to his hotel and started planning it and talking to “Professor Dan” Boner about it.
As a full-time member of the Becky Buller Band since 2017, Lee knew he wanted to use members of that band on three of the tracks that really matched those musicians. But he wanted the album to have a unique identity.
He still didn’t know what the album was going to sound like until he and Boner talked through which players were going to be on the record. Lee says the core band was put together after Dan called him as he was leaving Hattie B’s Hot Chicken and asked whom he wanted to play on the CD.
“I told him, ‘I think of the kind of groove I want first. I really like the mashgrass groove, but that’s not what I want this to be. I enjoy traditional bluegrass but I don’t want that groove either. I want a groove more like a Tony Rice type project.’”
When Boner said, “I can call Wyatt Rice if you want,” Lee said, “Yes, please!” then called Todd Phillips to play bass and built the band around that rhythm section. Rounding out the core band are Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Thomas Cassell, who joined on mandolin for “Serenity,” and Ned Luberecki, who plays banjo with the Becky Buller Band. Daniel Salyer sang harmony vocals.
Citing his eclectic interest in music, Lee said he wanted that variety reflected in the selections for this recording. He had written one of his original instrumentals, “Comealong Brown Dog” in 2014, and it was recorded just as he’s been playing it ever since. A simple melody, performed with only the mandolin, bass, and fiddle, it is one of the catchiest tune on the album. Built on a simple melody, it could be mistaken for a classic old time tune. A beginning mandolin player might pick up the melodic line easily and then spend years mastering Nate’s nuances.
The first tune on the CD, “Wonderbat,” gets the CD off to a lively start, showcasing Lee’s agile picking style. By contrast, “Quick Select” eases into a simple tune with the other instrumentalists all taking breaks. This song, Lee says, was originally written as an assignment in his music theory class at Cedar Valley College in Dallas: pick a key and fit in every chord in the key. To fit the assignment, he says, the song originally had a C#dim chord, but he removed it because it didn’t pass his “cringe rule.”
The second single and first instrumental released from the CD, “Serenity” shows signs of influence by jam bands, Sam Bush Band, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Lee says those are all things he’s listened to and spent time with, but the biggest influences were David “Dawg” Grisman and Tony Rice Unit’s “new acoustic.” Nate says that song is, hands down, one of his favorites on the record.
To round out the record, Lee and Boner looked for lyrical songs to complement the original tunes. While Lee says he “dabbles in lyrics,” he didn’t feel any of his own songs fit the project stylistically. He reached out to writers, starting with Nashville songwriter Ashleigh Caudill, and said, “Send me some songs.” They selected “Miner’s Grave,” which she had recorded on her I’m Not Fallen album.
“MIner’s Grave,” set in Ashe County, North Carolina, earns a place beside old ballads in the tradition of “Tom Dooley” or “Long Dark Veil,” sung from the perspective of a young moonshiner in jail, awaiting the hangman.
Lee says, “She sang it with opposite pronouns, but I really like to think about a song quite a bit. I have to have some kind of story in my head about what’s happening in that song. And while it’d be unlikely that a woman was working on the rails swinging a hammer, it’s possible. But there are a lot of jobs at both places. Anybody can be running moonshine or working on the rails—and anybody can end up in the same dire situation by the end of the song too.”
While Lee did the entire arrangement of “Love Medicine,” he and Boner arranged most of the songs on the CD sitting together in Boner’s office. He said they had an amazing “back and forth,” so many times hearing the same thing. Once the recording began, they also had input from the band.
“Todd Phillips is especially good at making these small suggestions: ‘Hey, if you tweak this here, it would do this thing. . . .’ He’s the reason on ‘Quick Select’ the mandolin plays solo and then there’s a section where the mandolin and fiddle play harmony while the rest of the band’s not playing.”
The selection of songs on the CD not only showcases Nate Lee’s picking and arrangement skills, but they are well-suited to his voice. The songs explore subject matter one would expect in bluegrass music—from heartbreak to farming and drinking—its moods in shades from dark to light. Giving the CD its title, “Somewhere Far Away is one of Lee’s favorite songs from the project, which features him at his vocal best in a haunting song of longing, a wistful desire to escape, whether by plane, train, or the bottle.
By contrast, “The More I Pour” is a taste of Texas swing, a jaunty celebration of drinking to drown one’s sorrows, inviting listeners to sing along:
The more I pour, the less I care;
The more you drive me to despair.
There’s no use in keepin’ score;
The less you care, the more I pour.
While Lee has sung lead vocals all along out of necessity during his career, when he first joined the Becky Buller Band, he took on a harmony-singing role. Then when a personnel change left holes in the set list, he started singing lead with the band to fill that gap.
“That’s when I noticed how much I really want to do that,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt standing just to the right of a fabulous world class singer like Becky. And I’ve always loved to hear Tony Rice and Dan Tyminski and Molly Tuttle and Allison Krauss sing, so it’s something I got more and more interested in, especially when making my own record. I could always get someone else to sing the songs, but I wanted a record that was really my music—me making music.” He credits years of taking vocal lessons from Dede Wyland and Stephen Mougin, who were most influential.
“And Dan Boner is really an amazing vocal coach himself. He coached me a lot through the process as the producer.”
The decision about where to record the CD was also important. The musicians selected for the record were split half in Nashville and half in East Tennessee. While they considered recording in Nashville, they chose the ETSU Recording Laboratory in Johnson City, Tennessee, for two reasons, he says:
“Everybody’s most effective in their own studio and that’s Dan’s place there. He’s not the only engineer that works there, but that’s where he’s most used to being. The other things I wanted was a totally immersive situation, so it made sense, going somewhere for a week where there is only the album, no distractions.” They were able to record the entire album in a week except for some of the harmony vocals and some of Dan Boner’s parts, since he was engineering as well as producing the album.
He says he is particularly pleased with the mandolins he played on the album. “I never shut up about my Pava mandolins. They just have such an exquisite tone, and Dan is able to capture that sound. It sounds like my instrument, which is really hard to do.”
With the master in hand the first week in April, Lee says it crossed his mind to consider delaying the release since they wouldn’t be able to tour or play live locally to promote the physical album but, he admits, “I made this music for me and I wanted to put it out even if I might sell less of it because the band’s not touring. As far as airplay, most of the deejays are unaffected—and people are still writing reviews. That part of the industry never halted, or if it did, it was for a short time.”
While he isn’t sure when musicians will get to go back on the road, he plans to support the album through the Becky Buller Band. Lee has another good reason for being off the road: he and his wife are expecting their first child this summer, another spectacular life-changing collaboration. In the meantime, he might be found on his back deck watching for Venus or “the lights on the wings of a jetliner.”