Banjoist Noam Pikelny has been a fixture in the bluegrass, jamband and festival communities for a decade thanks to his time with noted roots acts like Leftover Salmon and Punch Brothers. But most of the country first heard his name just last year when he won the inaugural Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. The award helped land The Punch Brothers on late night TV and anointed Pikelny “the banjo world’s next big thing.”

It also inspired him to return to the studio to record his first album in almost seven years. Produced by fellow Punch Brother Gabe Witcher, Beat the Devil and Carry a Rail is something of an all-star effort featuring Martin, Punch Brothers leader Chris Thile, Tim O’Brien, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Chris Eldridge, and Mark Schatz, among others. Later this fall, Pikelny will also hit the road in support of the traditional bluegrass disc with his own solo outfit. Shortly before the album’s release, the banjo ace traced his love of Yonder Mountain String Band to his first Late Show appearance.

Let’s start with some background info. It has been a number of years since the release of your first solo album. In that time you’ve achieved newfound fame with Punch Brothers and also won the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. When did you first start working on this new solo release?

I’ve been gathering tunes on and off for the past four or five years and constantly bringing the material to produce in the writing room. So I had lots of ideas that were kind of stacking up and tunes that were starting to materialize over the last few years. It was early this year—in about February—that I looked at the calendar and realized if I don’t do a record right now it’s going to be a long time—well into 2012—before I have a chance to go into the studio again. Punch Brothers are heading into the studio this week to put together a record and most of next year is going to be devoted to touring behind that record. So it was a goal of mine to get back into the studio—after all this time had passed since my first release in 2004—and just by looking at the calendar and seeing what I can master tune-wise, here’s the chance to do it. So the plans were put into motion, and we recorded the record over the course of a week in April this year.

You mentioned that you’ve been amassing ideas for the past few years, would you say that some of these songs were written with Punch Brothers in mind? Or were they mostly songs that you felt didn’t fit with the Punch Brothers repertoire?

I’ve been sitting around with my banjo and working through ideas, and I’ll make little voice demos on my phone. If I come up with something that I like—it could be a short three or four-second musical idea or it could be a part to a tune—a lot of times I’ll bring it to the band and those types of things are really just seeds for a whole song. There are certain little snippets of things that are more appropriate for the band and, at that point, there’s so much room for development and expansion that you kind of bounce an idea off the band. If people are interested, we can move forward and it could turn into something that I had never imagined it would be. So I wouldn’t say that the songs on this album are rejects from Punch Brothers writing sessions whatsoever. Most of them are things that I never presented to the band because I thought they would be best served in a more traditional format.

[This album] is sort of a new version of a traditional instrumental album, and some of these songs were things that I’ve had for a long time. This song “Day Down” was something I had for four or five years. The first part of that one—in fact—was part of a song I had worked on and brought to Punch Brothers. We ended up using the second half of that song so I had the first half of “Day Down” lingering and wrote something new for the second part. There were a lot of ideas, and a lot of new things that were stockpiled once the band started working on my solo record. I tried to write some things that would cater well to the musicians. Things like “Boathouse on the Lullwater”—those songs kind of came in as a result of sing-alongs with the banjo and trying to write a melody that would sound great on a dobro. I had Jerry Douglas in mind for that song, as soon as I knew I was going to have an opportunity to play with him.

One of the more surprising songs on your solo album is a cover of Tom Waits’ “Fish and Bird.” Given that your goal was to make more of a “traditional sounding” bluegrass album, what led you to Tom Waits?

I was admittedly unaware of Tom Waits music until a couple of years ago. I don’t know how I could’ve missed it because it’s just right out there in front of everybody for the taking. But I never got behind Tom Waits until a couple of years ago when some friends of mine played the album Alice, late-night one time, and I was really blown away by the record. I always thought that that song “Fish and Bird” would be a really fun song to work up—it is just a beautiful tune. [Singer] Aoife O’Donovan lives in New York as well. We sat down about a year ago at this point and just had a jam session in a friend’s apartment. I asked her if she knew the words to that song, and she had played around with singing it before. So we worked up a little duet version of the song, and I asked her to sing it on the record.

We rearranged it for a full band, and I was a little hesitant to do that. I think of myself as an instrumentalist, not a lyricist. I was a little apprehensive at first about putting vocals on this record—it felt out of the blue to have some other singer on this album of mostly instrumental music. I went back and forth, and [Punch Brothers fiddler and album producer Gabe Witcher] made the argument that playing behind a singer is a strong suit of mine and it should be something that’s represented on this record. The more I thought about it, I kind of agreed with him that it was an aspect of my playing that I wanted to showcase. And, if anything, it is an important task for any musician to be able to play supportively behind a singer. For me, there’s nothing really as satisfying as getting to play with a wonderful singer, which is why I also brought in Tim O’Brien. Having my two favorite singers in the entire world was a little bit of a selfish endeavor ‘cause I really wanted to record with them, but I think other people may appreciate it as well.

You mentioned Punch Brothers fiddler Gabe Witcher, who produced this album. I heard this was actually the first time he acted in a traditional producer role. How did he get involved in the project?

We spend so much time around each other. He’s a musician that I really trust, and I feel like he really understands and knows what I’m capable of. He could be a really good judge of a really good moment for me—what’s a transcendent moment or what’s a mediocre moment—because he’s heard me play too much at this point.

And Gabe has been really extraordinarily involved in all of the Punch Brothers recordings, way beyond just playing violin and singing. The work that went into the music beforehand [is almost a producer role]. He spent a lot of time in the studio when he lived in Los Angeles. He’s always wanted to get into producing records and learning how to engineer and just kind of figuring out what things translate well in the studio. I took notice when we were making the latest Punch Brother record—he was just kind of a sponge, trying to absorb as much information and wisdom as possible from the producers and the engineers like Jon Brion, who it was a real opportunity to be around. He’s one of the greatest producers and artists that’s on the map right now.

So I was aware of Gabe’s interest in doing this—he was also very encouraging to me. When I decided to make this record, the team really came into focus quite quickly. I knew Gabe was the right guy, and I knew it would be a good challenge for him to actually be the official producer and take the record from start to finish. It was also very convenient: we were able to use our time on the road with Punch Brothers to prepare. We’d meet in hotel rooms, work on arrangements and finish a few songs that I had hit some stumbling blocks on. So there are a few co-writes between Gabe and I on there. I also thought it’d be a really neat shift to have Gabe in the control room producing a hero of ours. Just for Gabe to produce Stuart Duncan’s track on the record was a neat scenario. Gabe is a guy that’s really familiar with Stuart’s playing as well as Jerry Douglas’ playing. At first I think it may have been a little intimidating to actually get feedback from these guys who are such intellectuals to us. After a little while it was really natural and we moved forward.

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