Don’t pigeonhole Town Mountain. They’re just playing songs how they should be played.

A surefire way to tell the difference between a band that’s been touted as a “breakthrough act,” and a band who has been in the public eye for a bit, is when the conversation turns to cell phone plans. One might assume that Bono, for example, doesn’t spend much time pouring over the details of his bill.

After playing a game of phone tag with Jesse Langlais, banjo player and vocalist for the bluegrass band Town Mountain, it’s clear that the Asheville-based band is still waiting for that breakthrough.

“I very seldom had any problems with [one cell service provider], but then I switched over to [a different provider] because it was half the cost, and now I find myself without any service on the road all the time,” he said to explain an earlier missed call.

With a wife and new baby at home, every dollar counts when it comes to attempting to live your dream of having a career in music, especially when you’re still waiting for exposure in mainstream press to convert into financial stability.

Since Town Mountain released its debut album “Original Bluegrass and Roots Country” in 2007, the band has done everything it can to pay their dues. Thousands of miles have been put on their tour van from covering the bluegrass and roots music tour routes back and forth multiple times. Plus, there have been plenty of opening slot gigs in front of such bluegrass luminaries like Ralph Stanley and Del McCoury, resulting in notices from Rolling Stone and appearances at the Grand Ole Opry, hailing the quintet as “the next big thing.”

We had a chance to speak to Langlais before Town Mountain’s show Feb. 16 at Saxapahaw’s Haw River Ballroom, where we touched on people reading too much into the title of the band’s new album, and what it means to be labeled a genre that you don’t really identify with.

Q: What led to the new album being titled “New Freedom Blues”? Is there a deep meaning in there somewhere?

A: You know, for no other reason than really I think Phil [Barker, mandolin and vocals] just kind of looks over the lyrics of all of the songs [on each album]. I feel like he’s the one who has always just kind of approached it as finding the right fit for each album. I just thought it sounded cool, but there was no kind of calculated reason behind it.

Q: This was the follow-up to 2016’s “Southern Crescent,” an album that gained the band a lot of new fans. When the time came to enter the studio for your latest record, was there anything specific you were hoping to achieve?

A: I can’t say that there was ever any kind of calculated effort as to what exactly we wanted to do, but I will say that a lot of the material was kind of outside of the bluegrass “box.” If you listen to [2012 album] “Leave the Bottle,” that’s a pretty bluegrass album right there; this [new] material just so happened to find its way into our repertoire.

When we got into the studio with a drummer, we started to realize that the songs were kind of outside of the bluegrass world in terms of content and chord progressions and melodies. They were just a little little more influenced by multiple forms of music other than just bluegrass, and I guess once we were in the studio with drums, we started to realize that a bulk of the album really kind of lent itself to drums. All of these songs are just outside of the box enough to where drums are going to help make them the songs that they are.

Q: “New Freedom Blues” seems to have a little bit more of a rock edge than some of your earlier work. Was it something that just happened naturally when you walked into the recording studio, or did you walk in ready to explore a different sound?

A: I think we really understood that a lot of the material that was coming to this album was stuff that felt ... just outside of the bluegrass world. It’s hard to say that this is kind of a natural progression, if it’s leading into what Town Mountain is going to always do in the studio from here on out. I doubt it, but who knows? I do envision the next album being similar to “New Freedom Blues.” I know that other material that I have prepared is going to lend itself to drums and might be riding that line between country and rock and Bluegrass mixed all together.

Q: One of the things that the new album has gotten a lot of attention for has been that Tyler Childers [”Purgatory”] appears on it. He made some waves this past year when he won “Emerging Artist of the Year” at the Americana Awards, when he said that he considered himself a country artist, and that the term “Americana” doesn’t really mean anything. With that in mind, with the fact that you guys have so many influences and so many different sounds, do you get kind of tired of having to explain what genre you fall within?

A: Yeah. I mean it’s a question that gets asked often, and I like the way that you ask that. There are plenty of people who are just content with playing music that people expect them to play, and I don’t know that we want to do that. I just tell people that we’re just playing the songs the way they need to be played. We’re still a bluegrass band.

We don’t want to really be considered anything other than an original band. Are we Americana? I suspect I know what Tyler was saying, and I kind of feel the same way about it. The industry tries to tell you what you’re doing, and that can kind of translate over to the consumer, with the consumer telling you what you’re doing. If you identify as being a country artist, then you’re a country artist, you’re not Americana.

It’s funny, though, because all those lines are blurred now. It’s kind of a bummer, and it’d be nice if sometimes they weren’t so blurred. Sometimes the term “Americana” can play to your benefit, but really what I think Tyler was saying was that you should just identify with who you think you are and don’t don’t let anybody else tell you [who you are], and that’s just what we’re trying to do. We’re just trying to identify what the music is that is coming from inside of us.

Details

Who: Town Mountain with Big Fat Gap

When: 8 p.m. Feb. 16

Where: Haw River Ballroom, 1711 Saxapahaw-Bethlehem Church Road, Saxapahaw

Cost: $12 to $15

Info: HawRiverBallroom.com or 336-525-2314

This story was originally published February 13, 2019 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Don’t pigeonhole Town Mountain. They’re just playing songs how they should be played.."