Steep Canyon Rangers bring ‘Morning Shift’ and more to The Guild

Steep Canyon Rangers spend a lot of time on the road, but to record their most recent studio album, 2023’s “Morning Shift,” they headed to an unusual spot, a rural, historic inn in the community of Bat Cave, North Carolina. The unique setting inspired an atmospheric quality to the album that highlights one of the band’s superpowers: songwriting that conjures a powerful sense of story and place in a sound that melds bluegrass, Americana, roots and more.

The band have recorded 14 studio albums, taking home the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album for “Nobody Knows You,” and have also recorded three collaborative albums with actor, comedian and banjoist Steve Martin. The group still performs with Martin, most recently in shows with him and his longtime collaborator, fellow comedian Martin Short.

“Morning Shift” marks the band’s first album without founding member Woody Platt, who left the band in 2022, with the aim of spending more time with his young family.

The band is also due to release a live album, “Live at Greenfield Lake,” on Aug. 30.

Ahead of their show at The Guild Theatre on July 25, we spoke with Rangers bassist. guitarist and vocalist Barrett Smith. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity).

Palo Alto Weekly: How has the tour been going?

Barrett Smith: Great. You know, it’s funny. It’s kind of been going on for forever because we really constantly tour. We don’t take a long chunk and say we’re just going to be on the road for the next few months. We constantly come and go. We’ll come home for a few days and take off for a few days, then come home for a few days. So the tour has been going really well for the last like 25 years.

Palo Alto Weekly: You’ve been with the Steep Canyon Rangers for about six years now, but you have longtime ties to the other band members. What has your time with the band been like, teaming up with these musicians you’ve known a long time?

Barrett Smith: My relationship with the band is interesting, because we’ve all been so close for so long. And I was there when the band was formed and have always been in other bands that are like comrades of the Steep Canyon Rangers and really close with the guys, personally. When they needed a bass player, they brought me on, because the band has such a culture of being really close and almost like family. Since then, to answer your question,  it’s been wonderful. It’s a great group of people who love making good art together. And it’s pretty dreamy.

Palo Alto Weekly: You also have a side project with (Rangers mandolin player and vocalist) Mike Guggino. How did that come about?

Barrett Smith: That’s been going on a really long time. That’s another example of how close we all have been for all this time. Mike and I have been playing traditional Italian music for, I mean, probably 20 years. I’d say that it’s a pretty cool, unique thing. There’s a tradition of string music that comes from Italy, and then develops in America as well, with Italian Americans, almost like if bluegrass had been invented by Italians instead of like British Isles immigrants, this is what it would sound like. It’s a genre that’s dying right now. We are here at the last moment, kind of keeping it alive. Very few people in the world play it, and Mike and I play this really beautiful music. Every chance we get, when we’re not on the road with the band, we go and perform this music.

Palo Alto Weekly: “Morning Shift” is the first album without Woody Platt. How did you all approach creating the first album with that new dynamic?

Barrett Smith: It was so interesting. Losing Woody — which was, of course, all in really good terms. It was just time for Woody to go home and not tour anymore. And that was what he did. Woody is a founding member and such an important part of the band. Going on without him was daunting, but everyone really stepped up to the plate, and we got a new guy, Aaron Burdett, who’s great and has really become a great friend and fits right in with the band, and we somehow really landed on our feet through that transition.

Strangely, these days, we say over and over again, it’s almost like we’re better than ever right now. It’s like the transition of losing Woody, it was a little bit of a trial to go through, and we came out of that trial way stronger in ways we never imagined. 

When we went in to record “Morning Shift,” we approached things really differently. We got a producer, which these days we normally don’t do — we produce it ourselves, because we have such an organic way we work together. With so much time together, we can do it ourselves. But we thought, ‘hey, let’s get a producer and somebody to help call the shots and wrangle things.’ It was Darrell Scott, who’s an old hero of ours and now a great friend of ours. That’s the main thing, the producer. 

Then also, we all believe in Aaron as a band member, so I think we approached that project with a lot of kindness and confidence around Aaron and making sure he felt welcome in the way we do things in the studio.

Palo Alto Weekly: What inspirations did you draw on for “Morning Shift?”

Barrett Smith: I think, a couple things. The band’s writing previously had come mostly from Graham Sharp, the banjo player, and now Aaron’s a prolific writer, so he’s writing a lot. It seems that the writing is just getting better and better somehow. A lot of the inspiration for the album was coming from the songs, the stories and the characters and the songs. We were really inspired and directed by our vision of who those people were and the songs and the stories that they were bringing to us. 

Secondly, the location of where we recorded the album was a really strange, special thing that we did. We went to a cabin, really in the middle of nowhere. It’s a community called Bat Cave, North Carolina, close to Asheville. If you can picture beautiful mystic, misty Appalachian Mountains, hollers and that kind of thing, that’s where we were, and it’s this really cool, old lodge that we converted to a recording studio with the help of an engineer named Dave Sinko, and our producer Darrell, we turned the place into a recording studio. It became a giant character in the story itself. It turned out to be a really intense, really strange, really fun experience. We moved in together for a week and slept under the same roof, ate meals together and worked all day. The place and the experience of recording it, more than anything, come to find out, that’s the inspiration for the album — what makes it feel the way it feels.

Palo Alto Weekly: The album has mostly originals. What drew you to include Robbie Fulks’ “Fare The Well, Carolina Girls?”

Barrett Smith: Darrell just made us. We’ve got all these songs. Graham is writing, writing, writing, and now Aaron’s writing, writing, writing. We have a massive surplus of songs. The idea of putting a cover (on the album) — and this was true of the instrumental as well — we had no intentions of doing that at all. Didn’t want to. And Darrell really insisted, I don’t remember what the reasoning was, but he was like, ‘you really should put a cover on this, and you should really put an instrumental tune.’

We wrote the instrumental song (“Old Stone House/Handlebars/Chimney Rock”) because Darrell made us and then it’s so good, it’s like, ‘man, he was right.’ He was very right about all that. And the “Carolina Girls” song is dynamite, you know? 

I mean, that’s why we got a producer for that recording project, in hopes that he would make such good decisions that we wouldn’t have made otherwise. The cover and the instrumental are the two most explicit examples of him taking the reins, making us do something we didn’t want to do, only to find out it was definitely the right thing to do.

Palo Alto Weekly: What would you say that the collaborations with Steve Martin have brought to the Rangers’ sound?

Barrett Smith: The first thing that comes to mind is that he’s exposed us to so many new things because he operates on such a high level, and people who operate on such a high level want to work with him in any capacity, because in addition to being a really, really cool guy and a good friend, he’s an iconic American artist. Being exposed to a bunch of great ideas and people and scenarios and art through him has really changed the band. We’ve taken innumerable things from our experiences with him and incorporated him into what we do. 

We have a drummer in the band, specifically, because when the band was touring with Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, that project needed a drummer. 

So the drummer came on, and then the band looked around and said, ‘Hey, we could really change things dynamically with this.’

I can’t even begin to count the ideas that come from our collaborations with him. They made us up our game and be like, ‘We can be really good in these ways that we never imagined, because we see him doing it, basically.”

Palo Alto Weekly: The band will be releasing a new live album next month. Why did you decide to release a live album?

Barrett Smith: Just all of a sudden it became so clear to us that here we are, year in, year out, playing live shows. That’s what we do. Every once in a while, we duck into the studio and make an album. And now if somebody pulls up Steve Canyon Rangers on Spotify or Apple Music or something, or goes to the record store, that’s the representation of the band that they have. We’re really proud of our albums, but they’re different than the live experience. The live experience is really what we do and we take a lot of pride in it. 

We have these magical nights — like, whatever is going to happen on Thursday night (in Menlo Park) is going to be magical in some way and unique. We all of a sudden realized, we don’t have a good representation of what we actually are, and we need that partially, to explain to people, ‘you all should come see this band live, because that’s really where it’s at. That’s really what we do.’

We recorded a few shows, and the idea was we would find all the best stuff from these shows, and cobble together a sampler of a bunch of great live moments. Then the more we batted that around, we were like, “Well, that’s not really how we do the live show. Let’s take one of those shows and make it the album,’ which is what we did, which seemed truer to what we do. The album is actually this one show that we did in Wilmington, North Carolina, which is a city on the coast. There’s a cool amphitheater we play every year, where it’s always a great vibe, great people.

Palo Alto Weekly: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

Barrett Smith: We’re really excited about this show coming up. We have a long history of coming to the Bay Area, not specifically to this venue, but we love coming to this part of the world. It’s really special to us. 

Palo Alto and Menlo Park, that zone right here, culturally, is really special to us because a lot of our roots are wrapped up in the Grateful Dead, for sure, not just the Grateful Dead, but a lot of the cultural things that surrounded the Grateful Dead. When I’m in that area, I think about Jerry Garcia being there, and him coming in contact with Ken Kesey and all that really exciting cultural, psychedelic, historical stuff happening, and kind of tapping into that a little bit when we play a show there. So that’s fun for us, too. 

The Steep Canyon Rangers perform July 25 at The Guild Theatre, 949 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. Doors are at 7 p.m., show at 8 p.m. Tickets are $36-$83. For more information, visit guildtheatre.com.