Photo by Dave Vann

It’s a hot afternoon in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Yonder Mountain String Band’s Jeff Austin is just finishing his sixth pork taco of the day. He gets up and comes over to a cardboard photo cutout in the back terrace of a Mexican taqueria in downtown Tulum, where he poses for a tourist picture with me before conferring briefly with his manager about his schedule for the following day. “I’ve been going nonstop since I got here,” he says, lighting a cigarette and pausing as if on cue for irony. “I haven’t been able to spend any alone time with my girlfriend.”

As soon as he’s done with the smoke, he goes back inside the taco shack – the third one he’s hit this afternoon – and meets couples from Boston, San Francisco and Baltimore. These are fans who, instead of going to Hawaii or The Bahamas or Thailand for their vacation, have trekked down to Mexico where they are spending four nights at an intensive hands-on festival called Strings & Sol, headlined by Yonder Mountain String Band.

It’s a first-year, high-level destination event, held at an all-inclusive beach resort, and it also features Leftover Salmon, Railroad Earth and The Infamous Stringdusters. Most of the fans eating at the banquet tables in the taqueria came to the fest primarily for Yonder, and many of them even sport the band’s merchandise (along with a significant number of Steal Your Face logos). The lunch is part of an optional excursion, a three-hour taco crawl across Tulum, which Austin dreamed up and which he is hosting with the same level of animation and enthusiasm that he brings to the concert stage. At the start of the crawl, Austin stood at the front of the chartered bus and declared, “When you eat with people, you bond with people. So today, we’re going to bond.”

The first taco crawl sold out so fast that Austin asked the promoter, Cloud 9 Adventures, to add another. So, for the second day in a row, he’s stuffed himself at taquerias and taco carts across Tulum as he mingles with fans, signing autographs, posing for pictures, recording video messages for people’s kids, and discussing everything from the obvious (food, music) to the specific (mandolins, marriages). Austin’s bandmate, banjo player Dave Johnston, says that Austin is a natural ringleader and a gracious host. Though he’s talking within the context of Yonder Mountain’s live shows, the description also works for a taco crawl.

“You can’t throw an event and then go stand in the corner,” Austin tells me on the beach the following evening. “Especially with food.” Some of the stops on the first day weren’t up to snuff and he took it personally. He insisted on better tacos for the second round. “If my name is on something, I’ve learned that’s not something I can take lightly anymore,” he says. “When I was 25 years old, stoned out of my mind, I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever – it doesn’t matter what happens.’ If somebody photographs me at six in the morning and I’m high on acid – whatever.”

But that was during his roaring 20s. A decade later, Austin’s a little more attuned to quality control. “I’ve become more conscious of it,” he says. “It’s trying to stand on my own two feet instead of trying to lean on anything. That’s a consciousness I’ve come to.”

It’s a position that’s indicative of his shifting perception of the band as well. As Austin, now 38 years old, moves into Yonder’s 15th year, the group is more mature than ever before. They’re taking their career – as well as their music and their concerts – more seriously. During the next week, all three of Austin’s bandmates will echo this sentiment.

Yonder Mountain String Band is coming of age.

Photo by Dave Vann

The day before the taco tour, Yonder guitarist Adam Aijala led his own excursion, taking a group of fans deep-sea fishing. Leftover Salmon’s Drew Emmitt and Railroad Earth’s Carey Harmon also led their respective boats but Aijala’s was the clear winner, having caught (and released) a sizable sailfish. Wearing a Black Flag T-shirt and drinking canned beer on the afterdeck, Aijala had on his vacation face – after all, he was trolling for game fish on a boat somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

He looks young for his 39 years. His calm demeanor brings to mind one of his old nicknames – Zero. As Johnston explains, “You watch him play and you watch his expression and you don’t really see a lot of extra movement.” And while that sort of stage presence may stand in contrast to Austin’s, it’s the perfect bearing for a fisherman.

“I’ve done a lot of ocean fishing but never caught a fish like that,” Aijala tells me on the bus ride back to the resort, afterward. “It’s pretty cool.”

He’s also never played an event quite like Strings & Sol. Produced by the same skilled team that creates Jam Cruise, Mayan Holidaze and Panic en la Playa, Strings & Sol stands apart from all of them in that it is quite specifically geared toward bluegrass. We’re in the state of Quintana Roo. This is Mayan territory. The closest banjo shop isn’t anywhere near here. It’s a long way from the Delta, a long way from the Tennessee hills and a very long way – 2,605 miles, to be exact – from the band’s Colorado headquarters.

Yonder plays three complete shows over four nights. And while they also host an annual festival back in the States – the Northwest String Summit at Horning’s Hideout in Oregon – Strings & Sol is unlike any adventure the band has embarked on before. But get used to it because it’s going to be an annual affair. If Strings & Sol is not your father’s bluegrass festival, then you can be sure that Yonder Mountain is not your father’s bluegrass band.

Considered outsiders by bluegrass purists but bluegrass ambassadors by fans of most other types of music, the four distinct individuals that collectively form Yonder are all equally anomalous when it comes to their respective histories with the art form. Aijala and Johnston came to bluegrass via the Grateful Dead when they both, separately, discovered Jerry Garcia’s band Old and In the Way. Bassist Ben Kaufmann’s gateway was Phish. And, to this day, Austin considers himself a “certified nerd of Phish music.” He still sees them live as often as possible and isn’t afraid to admit that nothing gets him off quite like Phish does. Down at Strings & Sol, on a stage that sits directly on the beach, Yonder covered Phish’s “Sand” and the Grateful Dead’s “Althea.”

The Del McCoury Band’s Jason Carter – bluegrass royalty – joined Yonder on fiddle for all three of their Strings & Sol shows. But during their final set, they brought up Umphrey’s McGee’s Joel Cummins on keyboards – a representative from the parallel jamband scene. (The bands now share a manager and have been longtime friends; Austin released the 2010 album One Man Show with Umphrey’s guitarist/singer Brendan Bayliss under the moniker 30db in the wake of each of them having gone through a tumultuous divorce.) This is bluegrass without borders. Screw the purists.

“The thing people always forget is that I’m not from the fucking old hometown,” says Austin. It’s the final night of Strings & Sol and while we chat outside at dusk, the resort staff sets up a Mexican fiesta in an adjacent outdoor courtyard, complete with a mechanical bull. “I didn’t milk cows,” says Austin, unaware of the bull. “I was a latchkey kid. I watched cooking shows on PBS while my mom was working her third job of the day. I wasn’t in the hills, fiddling with gramps. I grew up watching Monty Python and bad sitcoms and listening to pop music on the radio. That’s what I write a lot of, lately. I have a big handful of new tunes and they’re very hook-oriented because that’s what I grew up listening to.”

He sings the classic riffs to The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and “Start Me Up,” scanning my face for the instant recognition he knows is coming. “You don’t need 400 notes to make something catchy,” he says. “It can be three or four notes.”

But – and this is relatively new – what is considered “catchy” by radio standards can now include the kind of instrumentation favored by a group like Yonder Mountain String Band. Indeed, it’s a ripe time for various forms of traditional American string music, thanks in part to a group from England – Mumford & Sons – who play a bastardized version of Americana (and were the subject of a Relix cover story late last year). It sounds great but it doesn’t sound much like Yonder. And yet, ever since Mumford & Sons exploded on the charts, it’s all anyone wants to talk to the Yonder guys about.

Photo by Dave Vann

The moment I mention the inescapable topic of the “new resurgence of Americana music,” Austin tenses up some and lights a cigarette. “Do interviewers in every interview over the last two years mention Mumford & Sons in the fucking interview?” he asks, almost irritated but ever gracious with a healthy undertone of humor. “No, it never comes up. I can’t imagine why you’d mention it. I’m going to go stab myself in the eyes for about an hour now.”

He takes another drag and nods to a passerby. “It comes up all the time,” he levels. “Not in our discussions, but when we’re talked to, sure.”

Earlier in the conversation, Austin had started humming Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” to demonstrate a point. Naturally, I recognized that tune as easily as the Stones numbers and just as instantly. “Three-quarters of the people in the world know that,” he says. “It’s two notes. It’s effective. You think of a lot of The Beatles’ hooks – those are cycles around a certain thing that grab a hold of you. If I’m trying to do anything nowadays, then it’s write something with a simple, revolving hook that sinks deep and it’s repeated. There’s no sitting around and saying, ‘How can we be as big as this band?’ That never happens. It’s, ‘How can we be truer to ourselves?’”

And the answer tends to point further and further outside the lines that Yonder drew for themselves when they first formed as a band. “I think Yonder is growing up in a way, threatening maturity,” Kaufmann writes in an email to me after flying home from Strings & Sol. “We’ll see. I certainly have been in a place of reexamination.” The only member of Yonder who doesn’t live in Colorado anymore, Kaufmann moved to California a little over a year ago because he couldn’t take any more winters at high altitude.

“For the longest time, I thought we could only be entertaining or compelling if the tempos of the songs were fast,” he says. “And I mean Yonder-fast. That’s even faster than you think it is. But I just don’t buy that anymore. Personally, I am writing less and less bluegrass-style music. It’s hard to express certain ideas in a satisfying way if they have to be set to a bluegrass beat. The issues and things that are interesting to me – that I want to write about, that I want to sing about – don’t have that bluegrass vibe as much as they used to.”

Yonder is a bluegrass band with four musicians who hesitate to call it that and who are less concerned with the label than they are with the music itself. The thing is, there wouldn’t be such a premium placed on definition – nor such a scrutiny with it – if we were talking about a rock band. If a particular rock band had, say, a tuba player, nobody would argue that they weren’t a proper rock band. Of course, they’d still be a rock band.

But Yonder is not a rock band. They’re a bluegrass band that rocks out. And, again, we’re talking about a bluegrass band that covers Phish, the Grateful Dead and The Beatles. But, we’re still talking about a bluegrass band. That said, there isn’t any guarantee that they’ll stay that way. As Kaufmann points out, as they get older and their creative drives evolve, their songwriting does too.

All four members of Yonder are songwriters, and the band is supportive of each other’s efforts and insistent on having all four voices heard. When discussing their recent developments, directions and interests as songwriters, they’re all quick to point out that they only speak for themselves, individually. “I can’t speak about how the band is changing because I can’t see the whole picture,” Johnston says. “I can only answer that with regard to myself.”

Yet, when talking about their own piece of the puzzle, all four members tell me similar things. While they may not see eye-to-eye on everything and don’t hang out together much outside the band, as musicians, as songwriters and as performers, they’re all behaving more professionally.

Photo by Dave Vann

“Our ears are more open,” says Johnston, who, at age 39, reflects on the fact that he’s become less self-conscious as a songwriter and more confident with age and success. “Maybe the band is a little less self-conscious about [songwriting] in that regard, as well. Everyone is a little more self-assured in what they’re doing and readily acknowledging the true potential of what we have.”

When Yonder went in the studio to record what would become The Show, back in 2009, producer Tom Rothrock (Foo Fighters, Beck) proposed that the band stomp on a kick-drum. Which is exactly what Mumford & Sons did later that same year.

“We thought, ‘Nah, that would never go over,’” laughs Austin. “And now, that’s the fucking thing and it makes arenas full of people go nuts. We sit there and go, ‘Fucking Rothrock can see the future!’ The guy helped write fucking [Beck’s] ‘Loser,’ for God’s sake. That changed everything. Everything. You can argue it, but look at the facts – it did. We all kind of went, ‘Shit. OK.’” Austin takes a breath, shakes his head and glances down at the table. “It comes up a lot, but it’s not like, ‘Let’s write a song with that feel.’”
“I’ve written in Nashville and sat in circles and said that sort of thing,” Austin continues, talking about a song he wrote with country songwriters Shawn Camp and John Scott Sherrill. “And you know what happened when I did that? The song got picked up, it charted and it got Grammy-nominated.”

The song, “Fiddlin’ Around,” appeared on Dierks Bentley’s 2010 hit album, Up on the Ridge. “That’s what happened when I did that,” says Austin. “It works. It fucking works. In every genre, there can be a formula that works. It’s just, do you want to do that?” Austin’s own feeling, of course, is no. He doesn’t. Nor do his bandmates.

“I don’t want to sacrifice the music or what we do with the hope that we’ll be famous and rich,” says Aijala. If a Yonder song somehow became a runaway smash, then they would ride that as far as it went, naturally. But, he says, “I don’t want to write a half-assed song that appeals to bovine America, as Bill Hicks would say. I’m just not interested.”

Yonder Mountain String Band haven’t released a new studio album since 2009. That’s four years ago. In music industry terms, four years equals a lifetime. Entire bands are born and die within that frame. Careers are made and lost. Whole genres come and go. And yet, for Yonder, those four years have been part of a steady continuum. They’ve grown their audience, organically – steady as she goes. If bluegrass is a style of music that reveres the past and which makes a virtue out of looking back, then Yonder place a higher premium on the present tense.

Various band members tell me that there isn’t a five year plan, other than perhaps being able to play fewer shows and have it work out financially so that they can spend more time at home with their families. But they’re looking at ways to do this without changing anything about their music. On this point, they stand united and steadfast. So, they aren’t using a kick-drum – unless, of course, one of them feels compelled to use it for a certain effect in a song, but certainly not because that’s what worked for another band. Maybe they never got to experience the catapult effect of the music industry’s flights of fancy, but they’re all the happier because of it.

“When we were trying to push the songs off of the first record, they were like, ‘You have to bury the banjo more,’” says Austin, from a semi-secluded spot on the beach, near the resort’s dive shop. Austin’s an avid diver and he enjoys the solitude of being 60 or more feet underwater. In the distance, Yonder fans swim, snorkel and sunbath. It’s a surreal scene and we get distracted for a moment before focusing back on the topic at hand. “We were like, ‘We’re not going to bury the banjo any more – the banjo is in the fucking band. We’ve already got drums on the track and keyboards.’ We’re not going to bury the banjo. That’s ridiculous. Then, it’s not Yonder Mountain String Band anymore.”

Photo by Dave Vann

As we talk, the sun sets over the Caribbean Sea and we take notice of it. It’s a little out of place talking about banjo in the Yucatan, but we roll with it. In weird way, that just demonstrates the point. “Now, you can’t turn on the fucking radio without hearing somebody strumming a banjo,” says Austin. “It’s at the forefront of each band. There’s a lot of play behind all that stuff. That’s the music business.” But, he points out, Yonder funds their own records. So dumping something like $200,000 into a record that’s going to sell 11,000 copies makes little sense (both of those arbitrary figures were specified by Austin).

“It’s great being No. 1 on the bluegrass charts, but unfortunately, the bluegrass community doesn’t sell a lot of records,” he says. “You can sell 500 records and be No. 1. Yes, it’s a moment of pride, but it’s also a moment of reality. You can crack the Top 10 on the Billboard charts by selling 25,000 records.” He shakes his head in disbelief.

As for going four years without a new studio disc, the greater truth might just be that there wasn’t a need. There still isn’t. They have plenty of new material and they already recorded a few songs in Chicago for what will probably become an EP, but recording their next full-length isn’t even on the schedule.

“Once there was a time when the only focus was Yonder Mountain, and that was it, and now there’s a shift and it’s genuine,” Austin admits. “I say that openly. People want to make more babies, people want to be able to be home more, people want to come up with a creative way to tour where we’re able to spend more time with our families. As we’re getting older, your priorities begin to shift. It’s not that one thing means something more than the other thing; it’s how do you place those things to make them both get the amount of attention they deserve?”

Kaufmann doesn’t disagree with Austin’s assessment. But, he says, “Ultimately, it just hasn’t felt all that compelling to get back in the studio. We haven’t met or had a strong connection with a possible producer for a new album.” Then he adds, “And honestly, it feels like life has just occupied us in other ways. Tour. Childbirth.”

For the record, however, Johnston’s wife gave birth to a new baby girl less than a week before Strings & Sol, and it didn’t interfere with the shows. In fact, it was an induced labor so that he could make the gig. He acknowledges his wife for being flexible enough to let him still “go down to Tulum and drink tequila and play banjo” immediately after welcoming their second child.

Like bands from both of the genres they draw from – bluegrass and jam – Yonder has made the live show their priority. And it’s paid off. They’re able to play places that are more used to hosting rock acts than bluegrass bands – places like Red Rocks.

That said, Kaufmann admits that he does want to release more recorded music, more frequently than the band has in the past. But what actual form that’s going to take is still up for debate.

“For us, I’m not sure the album format is the best way to do that,” he says. “Right now, I’m advocating for releasing a series of four song EPs – four songs, four singers, four songwriters. We’ll see how passionate and persuasive I can be about that. I’m almost convinced that, at this time, it’s better for us to hit up a studio on tour, record a song and then, release it. I think that style of recording would fit into our collective flow more easily than finding two week stretches of time where we fly to LA and record…I’m really into the EP idea.”

As for capitalizing on the resurgence of Americana, Kaufmann agrees with his bandmates that it’s nice to see but whether or not it will have any effect on Yonder’s success is yet to be determined. If it does, then it will come from the industry side, or the audience side – Yonder might be changing but they’re not pandering.

“I imagine that there are kids out there whose first introduction to the banjo will come from Mumford & Sons,” says Kaufmann, aware that he comes from a generation whose first exposure to the banjo was Jerry Garcia. “That’s called taking the country out of the woods. But I want consistent growth. If we’re going to play for more and more people, I want it to be sustained. I don’t want it to be because of a hit song that you then have to play every night for the rest of time. We’ve been doing ground work for 14 years – in the trenches and working hard. The payoff for that is a music career.”
“I think Yonder has the potential to be quite a bit more popular than we are now, and I do think we’ll get there,” he adds. “But I think that we’ll get there slowly and we’ll earn every bit of it.”

And if that means nurturing a fan base that’s willing to pay thousands of dollars to travel to Mexico to see the band perform a string of shows on a tropical beach, well then, so be it. Traditional bluegrass will always be traditional bluegrass. Fads will come and go. But, one way or the other, the future is coming. And Yonder Mountain will be ready for it.