By Matt Hendrickson | April/May 2009 | 

Not Your Daddy's Bluegrass

Cadillac Sky soars with an upwardly mobile brand of traditional music

Ask Bryan simpson, mandolin player and lead singer for the progressive bluegrass outfit Cadillac Sky, who his favorite artist is and the answer might surprise you. Bill Monroe? Nope. Foggy Mountain Boys? Guess again. “I love Radiohead,” Simpson says, referring to the English art rockers who have been dubbed the twenty-first-century version of Pink Floyd. “They’re such a creative force. They’re digging deep and have become their own sound. That’s what we’re trying to do, where people hear us and just say, ‘That’s Cadillac Sky.’”

The Fort Worth, Texas–based band is making its mark with a second album, Gravity’s Our Enemy, grounded in traditional bluegrass sounds but veering into more exploratory territory with Beatles-esque harmonies and ferocious instrumental jams. Not to mention Simpson’s vivid storytelling and penchant for dark comedy, especially on tracks like the raucous “Inside Joke” and the twisted broken-heart lament “I Hate How Happy She Is.”

“I like to say we’re a sensitive string band on steroids with a sense of humor,” Simpson says, laughing. “There are lighter moments. We want people to walk away from our shows with a smile.” Their growing fan base is a diverse group, with everyone from college-age jam-band fans going crazy in the front to older fans nodding appreciatively in the back. “When I first heard Cadillac Sky, I heard some of the freshest music I’ve heard in a long time,” says Ricky Skaggs, who signed the band to his label, Skaggs Family Records. “Their vocals just killed me.”

The thirty-three-year-old Simpson grew up in Fort Worth, accompanying his grandfather—a dyed-in-the-wool traditional bluegrass lover—to various music festivals around the state. One of the first bands that made an impact was Hot Rize, a popular progressive bluegrass band in the late seventies and early eighties. “They showed me what bluegrass could be as opposed to what it was supposed to be,” Simpson says.

Simpson started playing guitar at age five, the fiddle at nine, and messed around in various bands through high school and during a stint in Nashville. In 2002, after he moved back to Fort Worth, a friend suggested he check out banjo player Matt Menefee at a local club. The two jammed in the parking lot afterward, and hours later Cadillac Sky was born, with a lineup now rounded out by fiddler Ross Holmes, bassist Andy Moritz, and guitarist David Mayfield.

Their revolutionary sound is honed by more than 150 gigs a year, many of them in the South, where the band members live on meat-and-threes. “Arnold’s in Nashville is the current favorite,” Simpson says. “I dream about their fried chicken and mashed potatoes.”
Old-school places like Arnold’s aren’t the only tried-and-true element of Cadillac Sky. But while grounded in traditional bluegrass, the band covers decidedly un-bluegrass songs such as “Basket Case,” from punk rockers Green Day. “There’s no need to have a preset idea of what bluegrass is and what it isn’t,” Simpson says. “We’ll stay with the bluegrass instrumentation, but we’re going to throw all the colors on the canvas and see what happens.”