photo credit: Andy Hess

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When Scott Metzger realized the pandemic was going to last a lot longer than two weeks, he made an investment in himself— a vintage Martin acoustic guitar. 

“It was kind of a panic purchase,” the Joe Russo’s Almost Dead guitarist says. “I thought, ‘If this is going to go on endlessly, I want to have a really nice living room guitar—which I’ve never really had before—to just bang out some guitar stuff.’” 

So, in early July 2020, the Brooklyn-based musician trepidatiously donned a mask and headed upstate for some session work, where he played around with the studio’s 1957 Martin. “It was the happiest I’d been in months playing,” Metzger recalls. “I came home, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about that guitar.”

He started searching online for similar guitars and found one at Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville.

The only problem?

They sold it an hour before he called. But, as luck would have it, a not-yet-listed 1955 Martin had arrived the day before, which the store told him was “the staff’s favorite one that’s ever come through.” It was well-used and slightly banged up, so they offered him a deal and he went for it—the first time he’d ever ordered a guitar online. 

“I just couldn’t put the thing down after it showed up,” Metzger says. “Within a couple of days of noodling around on it on the couch, some ideas started to come— some melodies.” 

Those early ideas would eventually manifest as Too Close to Reason, the 44 year old’s proper debut under his own name. An instrumental solo guitar work— with one notable exception—the album showcases a different side of a musician best known for his work with JRAD and omnipresence on the Northeast jamband circuit. “To me, that guitar is what made the record,” Metzger says.

These are warm, delicate and slightly experimental songs—in the vein of William Tyler or Django Reinhardt—that showcase Metzger’s expansive range as a composer and a player. What’s surprising is that it’s the first time he’s put his name on a project like this.

“On some level, for 20 years, I’ve known that I wanted to put out a solo record,” Metzger says. “But, for 20 years, I’ve been busy.”

***

Metzger was raised In Lambertville, N.J., and started playing guitar as a teenager. His small town was just across the river from New Hope, Pa., where Ween was building a following. Early on, Metzger was in the band F-Hole with bassist Matt Kohut, who introduced him to Chris Harford—a then-burgeoning local guitarist who helped Ween score a record deal. In 1998, Metzger began working with Harford in a more formal capacity while simultaneously studying jazz at William Paterson University and started making a name for himself throughout his community. “I got very lucky that there was a real scene in my little town,” Metzger says. 

That same year, F-Hole was playing a gig at a coffee shop in Princeton, N.J., when Trey Anastasio and Phish lyricist Tom Marshall, both of whom grew up with Kohut, walked in. Marshall was in the process of putting together the band Amfibian and asked Metzger to join— launching the young musician into the national spotlight and helping him quickly assimilate into the local improv-music scene. Concurrently, he met and started playing with RANA, a Princeton group who were already making inroads on the rapidly developing modern jamband scene. (In a moment of serendipity, Marshall tapped RANA founder Andrew Southern to join Amfibian, too.)

By 2001, Metzger had relocated to New York and RANA had started moving in a more aggressive rock-band direction. They served as one of Wetlands’ final house bands, played regularly at storied venues like CBGB and toured heavily for five years—opening for acts as disparate as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Umphrey’s McGee, Avril Lavigne and, naturally, Ween. “I feel like we were a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of bands combining a harder hitting thing with jamming,” Metzger says of RANA. “I think that it scared a lot of people.”

Between tour dates, Metzger continued to jam with a number of other Wetlands alums and rising downtown players, turning heads with the instrumental Led Zeppelin cover band Bustle in Your Hedgerow alongside Joe Russo, Marco Benevento and, later, Ween’s Dave Dreiwitz.

After a brief stint in the jamtronica act Particle in 2006, Metzger went on what he calls a “spirit quest” and got sober. “That changed everything,” he says. “That’s the foundation for an enormous change. I shifted my focus entirely from touring nationally to being a guy on call in New York City doing sessions. Within a couple of years, I was working in the top studios with some of the most in-demand guys in town.”

And for several years, Metzger was a true working-class musician: backing singer-songwriters on local morning TV shows, picking up recording sessions and gigging where he could with musicians like Trixie Whitley, Anders Osborne and Nicole Atkins. One night around 2011, a singer didn’t show up to a gig, so he ended up forming a guitar-driven instrumental trio on the spot. WOLF!—with bassist Jon Shaw and drummer Taylor Floreth— became his main way to play around town for a spell. 

Meanwhile, he continued to jam with Benevento, Russo, Drewitz and guitarist Tom Hamilton in numerous configurations. In 2013, Bustle in Your Hedgerow were slated to perform at New York’s Brooklyn Bowl as part of the Freaks Ball, an annual event hosted by the influential listserv the NYC-Freaks. The next night, Metzger, Russo and Drewitz were to help Mickey Melchiondo ramp up his Dean Ween Group as part of the same party. When Melchiondo backed out at the last minute, Russo, then the drummer in Furthur, was coaxed into throwing together a one-off Grateful Dead cover band—cheekily named Joe Russo’s Almost Dead—with Metzger, Benevento, Russo, Drewitz and Hamilton in tow. 

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M E T Z G E R WA S BY NO M E A N S A D E A D H E A D

Metzger was by no means a Deadhead when JRAD formed. Russo knew the songbook from Furthur, so he wrote the setlist, and Hamilton was already a fan, so he took on the Garcia vocals. Metzger wasn’t exactly a singer, but they needed someone to do a few Bob Weir songs, so he got the nod. “I forget the first song he sang,” Russo says, but “we were all like, ‘What the fuck? You sound like Bob Weir.’”

As JRAD has grown over nearly a decade from a one-off to a festivalheadlining act, Metzger has become arguably the best Bob Weir not named Bob Weir, eerily echoing his distinctive vocal phrasing. Like most of the other members of JRAD, Metzger has also become part of the extended Grateful Dead family; this spring, he will even play a gig with Phil Lesh on holy ground in Stanford, Calif.

While JRAD has racked up fans by deconstructing, warping and tweaking Dead songs beyond recognition through boundless improv, Metzger has slowly grown into his own as a vocalist. “I have become a singer, I guess, but it’s still hard for me to say that out loud,” he says.

During the pandemic, Metzger upped his game by dropping a crutch he’d had from the beginning: using an iPad for lyrics. “It was driving me crazy,” Metzger says. “Seeing pictures of myself with an iPad was not my favorite thing. I hated it from day one.” 

With no gigs to play or sessions to record, Metzger spent time devoting himself to memorizing Weir’s songbook, one tune at a time. He also picked up running to help ease his anxiety and, after a day or two of focusing on a song at home, he’d try to recite each line while exercising. “I figured that if I could run down all the words to ‘Throwing Stones’ at mile 13 of running, then I could definitely do it onstage,” he says. “There’s no going back now. It changed the JRAD experience for me way more than I could have imagined.”

That ability to focus is one of his superpowers, says Russo, who has been friends with Metzger for more than 20 years.

“I feel like he’s having an infinitely better time now,” Russo says. “He’s one of those dudes that has found a way to channel his energy in such incredible ways—especially after becoming sober. He can focus on something and really take the patient time to dial something in. My proudest feeling as one of his friends is watching him really become who he is today.”

Saxophonist Stuart Bogie has also been playing with Metzger for two decades— dating back to sit-ins with RANA at the Knitting Factory’s second New York location—and frequently guests with JRAD. 

“When I play with JRAD, standing next to Scott is the best seat in the house,” Bogie says. “I forget about the audience. I forget about myself. And I just watch him move and weave through the music. He is devising and conjuring things in real-time. And he does it with a grace and relaxation that makes you feel like he’s cut the cord on the balloon, and he’s let himself just drift off into the sky. There’s no showing off, but things do get virtuosic.”

That’s part of what makes Metzger such a compelling guitarist. He’s tasteful, toneful and nuanced, taking his time to let the music breathe—until he lets it rip. “Scott’s a very patient player and kind of enjoys waiting for his moment,” Russo says. “And then when his moment comes, he just delivers.”

***

You could say patience is one of the reasons Metzger didn’t release his first solo album until age 44, but there was also a hesitancy to put himself out there. “Very little about this process was comfortable for me,” Metzger says. “That’s how I knew that I was doing something that I needed to see through because there was so much resistance from myself.”

While the pandemic and his 1955 Martin were the major catalysts for Too Close to Reason, Metzger started getting more into acoustic music in 2017 when he formed the Showdown Kids, a gypsy jazz trio with his friend and fellow guitarist Simon Kafka and his then-girlfriend Katie Jacoby, a world-class violinist who tours with The Who. (Metzger and Jacoby got married in early 2022.)

“When Scott started getting into all the acoustic stuff with Showdown Kids, you could see the glimmer in his eye for another approach for his musical path,” Russo says. 

As Metzger sat in his apartment working up melodies on his new guitar, he didn’t initially think it was for public consumption. “I started out making these tunes more as a form of personal therapy,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’ll just make a record for myself—almost like a musical diary.’” 

After recording 25 minutes of material in 2020 at Restoration Sound in Brooklyn, he sat on it, came back to it months later and—with the encouragement of Jacoby, his old friend Kohut and Royal Potato Family records founder Kevin Calabro—he decided to turn it into a full-fledged record.

Metzger overdubbed multiple guitars on most tracks to create a richer sonic palette. “On a lot of tunes, there’s an atmospheric track to fill out the sound,” he says. “The mood that I wanted was the sound of a big piano, where the sustain pedal doesn’t quite work. There’s all these overtones and this sonic mush happening that fills out the space.” 

The compositions run the gamut from jaunty, jazzy numbers to experimental ambience to multilayered fretboard workouts. On the opening track “Appropriate Wattage,” Metzger uses an e-bow on his acoustic guitar to create an ambient soundscape. “The title comes from a conversation that I had with Nels Cline, before [an improvised post-Phish] gig that we did. We were just touching base to make sure that we were bringing the right amps to the gig and that neither of us would be too loud or too quiet. Nels said, ‘I’m just checking in to make sure that I’m bringing the appropriate wattage.’ And as soon as he said it, I was like, that’s getting used somewhere.”

Jacoby adds violin to the mournful ballad “Only Child,” the one track to feature another musician. “I grew up with a sibling, so I was trying to step into the shoes of young Scott as an only child,” Jacoby says.

“The heart of my approach was getting the gorgeous and pensive melody to really sing, and I kept imagining this lonely interior world. There are these fun, subtle moments throughout the song where I get this ghost-like laughing sound with my bow, and the violin and guitar interplay that builds throughout is like a conversation in a secret language.” The tender and bright “When Katie Smiles” is inspired by a moment where he looked at Jacoby one day while working on the melody “and everything sort of clicked,” he says.

“I’ll never forget the time he played me an early iteration of the tune,” Jacoby adds. “Writing a song for someone is quite possibly the most romantic gift ever.” 

The only song that predates the pandemic is “Cafe Hidalgo,” a playful WOLF! track reworked for acoustic guitar, which came about after Metzger was asked to be part of a virtual Alternative Guitar Summit, alongside Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, during the summer of 2020. “I was just floored to be a part of it,” he says. “I came up with that arrangement specifically for that.” 

Too Close to Reason’s centerpiece is the two-part “Dream Room,” an atmospheric piece inspired by Debashish Bhattacharya’s “Hindustani Slide Guitar.” “That’s a record that is near and dear to me that I’ve spent many, many hours enjoying thoroughly,” he says. 

Metzger admits that one thing he’s struggled with over the years is defining where he wants to live musically.

“[After that gig with Cline], I said to myself, ‘Oh, I’m an avant-garde musician. That’s what I want to do,”’ Meztger says. “And then a week later, I’d go and do a session with a singer-songwriter and say, ‘That’s what I want to be.’”

With Too Close to Reason, Metzger gave himself a chance to better define who he is by finally putting his name on something he created. 

“In 2020, I had the time to slow down and not be pulled in a million different directions,” he says. “I realized I could massage all these different musical Scott Metzgers together into one document that, hopefully, is a narrative that people can follow.”