The Lonesome Trio
The Lonesome Trio’s Sugar Hill Records debut is an album that has been, arguably, twenty years in the making. The three band members — guitarist Ed Helms, bassist Ian Riggs and mandolinist Jacob Tilove – have been creating music together for almost as long as they’ve been friends, after meeting at Oberlin College in the early nineties. On the surface, that music blends acoustic folk, bluegrass and a hint of lovelorn country. At its core, though, it’s the sound of friendship, of camaraderie, burnished over time: warm-hearted, welcoming, occasionally wistful, often slyly funny. Songwriting and playing continued to bring them together even as their lives and careers took them in separate directions and coasts – with Helms a successful actor, Riggs a full-time musician and Tilove an architectural historian. For years, the trio shared its songs with family and friends, as well as those clued-in fans who could find them, and they always made time at the end of each year for an annual holiday gig at the comfortably grungy Parkside Lounge in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Now they’re extending their reach with the release of the trio’s long-anticipated, first full-length album, on Sugar Hill Records, a set of all-original tunes they recorded over two weeks, with engineer and co-producer Gary Paczosa (Steep Canyon Rangers, Sarah Jarosz), at the Echo Mountain studios in Asheville, North Carolina.
The guys were so elated at the prospect of these sessions that Helms actually penned a tune about the experience before they were even scheduled to arrive which now serves as the opening track and scene-setter for the album. As Tilove recounts, “Ed wrote ‘Asheville City Skyline’ like the week before we started, he was so excited to get there and record. It takes you through the whole experience: traveling down, recording and leaving and being so sad to leave. And we hadn’t even gotten there yet. It seemed like the perfect way to kick off the album, a love song to the whole experience.”
“That song is really a story about what I wanted the experience to be,” admits Helms, “a little bit of a fantasy. What’s the opposite of going down memory lane…projection lane? But it wasn’t that far off. And the best part of it was Asheville has no discernible skyline.”
“It was great to be in the studio for two weeks, singing every day and playing,” says Riggs of the basement space at Echo Mountain where they really did work. “By the end of it, I just wanted to keep going. That’s pretty much all we did there. We went out maybe twice. I lost a lot of Vitamin D because we never went out in the daytime. It was a blast. It was great working with Ed and Jake; everyone was very supportive of each other. It was a very productive time.” Most importantly, he notes, “We decided early on, there would no guests. All the instruments would be played by us, and there are a bunch of different instruments on there – vibraphone, piano, organ, autoharp. Ed plays the trumpet. That was news to me.”
“We have a lot of great friends who are amazing musicians, all of whom would have happily jumped into the fracas,” Helms elaborates. “But we decided right out of the gate that the three of us needed to do the whole thing. But we opened the door to lots of additional instruments and layers. The only rule was that we do it ourselves. I’m proud of that. It was more important than any crispy perfection in the execution and I just love it. That’s our spirit. There is no sound on that album that didn’t come from the three of us. It’s a really strong statement of what we sound like and what we can do. And there are a wide variety of styles on there.”
Helms and Tilove had started playing together after they became roommates in their sophomore year at Oberlin College. Somewhere along the way – everyone is fuzzy on how – they enlisted Riggs, an Oberlin Conservatory student focusing on jazz and classical music. Their college combo was dubbed Weedkiller and they were warmly received on that famously iconoclastic campus, even during the heyday of MTV and grunge. Riggs left to complete his studies in jazz at the New School in Manhattan, while the others made their way to New York City after graduation. That’s where they regrouped, began to compose original material, and adopted an evocative new band name. The city is definitely in their songs: Riggs’ “River in the Gutter” is a countrified lover’s lament, but with a particularly plaintive, NYC point of view. For Tilove, whose day job requires him to scrutinize the landscape of the city, songwriting for the Lonesome Trio takes him away from New York, even when he is still walking down its streets: “I wrote ‘Appalachia Apologia’ on the way home from work one day, when I was really fried. I saw it as an urban trail song and I wrote it on a manila folder on the subway.”
Helms’ burgeoning acting career, which has included roles in NBC’s The Office and hilarious turns in the three Hangover films, took him to Los Angeles, but that didn’t really disrupt the band. In fact, it only made their appearances feel more special, especially their holiday gigs. As Riggs puts it, “Every show is like a reunion show.”
In addition to their annual gigs in New York City and the occasional visit to L.A., the Lonesome Trio has appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and, for the third year running, will be part of the Bluegrass Situation Superjam at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, where fellow guests have included the Avett Brothers, Del McCoury, and their buddies, Punch Brothers. (Chris “Critter” Eldridge and Noam Pikelny were two of the biggest cheerleaders for the Lonesome Trio’s recording adventure, long encouraging the guys to simply go for it.) But the group has also played for the Hangover crew in Bangkok, managed a side gig in Cambodia and, more recently, played by the banks of the Colorado River. Explains Tilove, “We were on a raft trip for ten days. Ian made a washtub bass literally from one of the washtubs they were using.”
Despite the distance and their disparate daily careers, music clearly remains the tie that binds. As Tilove notes, “There’s this way of communicating through music. For example, when I see my brother there will be an expression, something unsaid, that cracks the both of us up and other people will wonder what made us both laugh. And music is the same way. There is one song, ‘High Road, Low Road,’ where Ed does a harmony with me. Every time we sing that there is something about our voices together that makes me so happy. Just the sound. And I have sung it a couple of times with other people and it’s never been quite the same. It’s the sound of all our voices together. It’s more than the sum of its parts, more than just friends playing and making music, it’s a deep thing.”
That’s why this album – a chance for the world to hear the songs these three have shared and tinkered with for years – is simply called The Lonesome Trio. Says Helms, “We talked through a lot of ideas of what to title it and Jake felt strongly that it should be self-titled. I was on the fence; I lean toward irony and something cheeky. But I’m glad we settled on the self-titled because it’s the most literal, descriptive and accurate name for the album. It’s who we are. It’s a little unrefined in places but it’s unapologetic. I’m super-proud.”
The Lonesome Trio’s Sugar Hill Records debut is an album that has been, arguably, twenty years in the making. The three band members — guitarist Ed Helms, bassist Ian Riggs and mandolinist Jacob Tilove – have been creating music together for almost as long as they’ve been friends, after meeting at Oberlin College in the early nineties. On the surface, that music blends acoustic folk, bluegrass and a hint of lovelorn country. At its core, though, it’s the sound of friendship, of camaraderie, burnished over time: warm-hearted, welcoming, occasionally wistful, often slyly funny. Songwriting and playing continued to bring them together even as their lives and careers took them in separate directions and coasts – with Helms a successful actor, Riggs a full-time musician and Tilove an architectural historian. For years, the trio shared its songs with family and friends, as well as those clued-in fans who could find them, and they always made time at the end of each year for an annual holiday gig at the comfortably grungy Parkside Lounge in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Now they’re extending their reach with the release of the trio’s long-anticipated, first full-length album, on Sugar Hill Records, a set of all-original tunes they recorded over two weeks, with engineer and co-producer Gary Paczosa (Steep Canyon Rangers, Sarah Jarosz), at the Echo Mountain studios in Asheville, North Carolina.
The guys were so elated at the prospect of these sessions that Helms actually penned a tune about the experience before they were even scheduled to arrive which now serves as the opening track and scene-setter for the album. As Tilove recounts, “Ed wrote ‘Asheville City Skyline’ like the week before we started, he was so excited to get there and record. It takes you through the whole experience: traveling down, recording and leaving and being so sad to leave. And we hadn’t even gotten there yet. It seemed like the perfect way to kick off the album, a love song to the whole experience.”
“That song is really a story about what I wanted the experience to be,” admits Helms, “a little bit of a fantasy. What’s the opposite of going down memory lane…projection lane? But it wasn’t that far off. And the best part of it was Asheville has no discernible skyline.”
“It was great to be in the studio for two weeks, singing every day and playing,” says Riggs of the basement space at Echo Mountain where they really did work. “By the end of it, I just wanted to keep going. That’s pretty much all we did there. We went out maybe twice. I lost a lot of Vitamin D because we never went out in the daytime. It was a blast. It was great working with Ed and Jake; everyone was very supportive of each other. It was a very productive time.” Most importantly, he notes, “We decided early on, there would no guests. All the instruments would be played by us, and there are a bunch of different instruments on there – vibraphone, piano, organ, autoharp. Ed plays the trumpet. That was news to me.”
“We have a lot of great friends who are amazing musicians, all of whom would have happily jumped into the fracas,” Helms elaborates. “But we decided right out of the gate that the three of us needed to do the whole thing. But we opened the door to lots of additional instruments and layers. The only rule was that we do it ourselves. I’m proud of that. It was more important than any crispy perfection in the execution and I just love it. That’s our spirit. There is no sound on that album that didn’t come from the three of us. It’s a really strong statement of what we sound like and what we can do. And there are a wide variety of styles on there.”
Helms and Tilove had started playing together after they became roommates in their sophomore year at Oberlin College. Somewhere along the way – everyone is fuzzy on how – they enlisted Riggs, an Oberlin Conservatory student focusing on jazz and classical music. Their college combo was dubbed Weedkiller and they were warmly received on that famously iconoclastic campus, even during the heyday of MTV and grunge. Riggs left to complete his studies in jazz at the New School in Manhattan, while the others made their way to New York City after graduation. That’s where they regrouped, began to compose original material, and adopted an evocative new band name. The city is definitely in their songs: Riggs’ “River in the Gutter” is a countrified lover’s lament, but with a particularly plaintive, NYC point of view. For Tilove, whose day job requires him to scrutinize the landscape of the city, songwriting for the Lonesome Trio takes him away from New York, even when he is still walking down its streets: “I wrote ‘Appalachia Apologia’ on the way home from work one day, when I was really fried. I saw it as an urban trail song and I wrote it on a manila folder on the subway.”
Helms’ burgeoning acting career, which has included roles in NBC’s The Office and hilarious turns in the three Hangover films, took him to Los Angeles, but that didn’t really disrupt the band. In fact, it only made their appearances feel more special, especially their holiday gigs. As Riggs puts it, “Every show is like a reunion show.”
In addition to their annual gigs in New York City and the occasional visit to L.A., the Lonesome Trio has appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and, for the third year running, will be part of the Bluegrass Situation Superjam at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, where fellow guests have included the Avett Brothers, Del McCoury, and their buddies, Punch Brothers. (Chris “Critter” Eldridge and Noam Pikelny were two of the biggest cheerleaders for the Lonesome Trio’s recording adventure, long encouraging the guys to simply go for it.) But the group has also played for the Hangover crew in Bangkok, managed a side gig in Cambodia and, more recently, played by the banks of the Colorado River. Explains Tilove, “We were on a raft trip for ten days. Ian made a washtub bass literally from one of the washtubs they were using.”
Despite the distance and their disparate daily careers, music clearly remains the tie that binds. As Tilove notes, “There’s this way of communicating through music. For example, when I see my brother there will be an expression, something unsaid, that cracks the both of us up and other people will wonder what made us both laugh. And music is the same way. There is one song, ‘High Road, Low Road,’ where Ed does a harmony with me. Every time we sing that there is something about our voices together that makes me so happy. Just the sound. And I have sung it a couple of times with other people and it’s never been quite the same. It’s the sound of all our voices together. It’s more than the sum of its parts, more than just friends playing and making music, it’s a deep thing.”
That’s why this album – a chance for the world to hear the songs these three have shared and tinkered with for years – is simply called The Lonesome Trio. Says Helms, “We talked through a lot of ideas of what to title it and Jake felt strongly that it should be self-titled. I was on the fence; I lean toward irony and something cheeky. But I’m glad we settled on the self-titled because it’s the most literal, descriptive and accurate name for the album. It’s who we are. It’s a little unrefined in places but it’s unapologetic. I’m super-proud.”