A conversation about friendship and bluegrass with the Boston five-piece string band.
“A for effort.” “Little of this, little of that.” “Loud.” These are just a few of the answers that the five members of Grain Thief shouted out when asked to describe their music without using genre labels. When guitarist Patrick Mulroy threw out “second coming” as a joke, bassist Michael Harmon, without skipping a beat, replied with “the plague.” This kind of lighthearted spirit and effortless banter is immediately evident in Grain Thief’s music. When I met them at a pub in Somerville to catch a weeknight jam, they were jammed into a booth, musical instruments and friends in tow, performing to a noisy crowd as if it were their living room. During the interview, they even asked me not to reveal the name of the pub in order to retain the intimacy of these informal shows.
For Mulroy and Harmon—joined by Zach Meyer on the mandolin, Tom Farrell on the resonator guitar, and Alex Barstow on the fiddle—friendship comes first. Grain Thief is a vehicle that enables them to do what really matters: hanging out with each other and just playing. It should be no surprise then that playing together comes just as naturally to the band as did their formation as a group, despite the fact that they come from disparate musical backgrounds—all the way from punk to classical. How did they become a bluegrass band then? “We all had some connection to bluegrass and traditional music, and as we started the band, we got into it more,” Mulroy says.
Essential to crafting their sound was the New England jam scene. Despite bluegrass’s lack of roots in the area, the scene is extremely vibrant, making for a tight community of enthusiasts and performers. “Once you start hanging around these scenes is when you start playing it more and more,” Mulroy adds. Their exposure to the Boston bluegrass community also has a strong influence on Grain Thief’s unique ability to pull from diverse musical styles and transform them to reflect their own personal lives. “Lyrically speaking, we’re writing about our lives in New England and doing it with those instruments,” Harmon reflects. As a result, their music feels familiar and comforting, yet imbued with a stubborn New England spirit.
However, figuring out who they are as a band has been an evolving process, evident in their second record, Gasoline. “Released into the void” right after the pandemic hit, as Mulroy says, Gasoline is a departure from the group’s first album, Stardust Lodge. While Stardust Lodge, which was released in 2018, experimented with the boundaries of the catch-all Americana genre (they even had an electric guitar!), they stuck to five acoustic instruments on Gasoline in an effort to hit a more targeted and authentic sound.
“We wanted to challenge ourselves more,” Barstow says. “When you are restricted to five acoustic instruments you have to be a lot more creative.” This decision also came out of the band feeling a split between their recorded music and live shows. In order to create something that more closely merged the two, they recorded Gasoline just as they would play live: in one room as an ensemble, joined by producer Dan Bui from Twisted Pine. “We’re going out and playing as a string band,” Harmon adds. “So why would we lay something down on a record that isn’t that?”
The resulting album is intimate and raw, showing how far Grain Thief has come in the development of their sound and in their relationships with each other. This is a band that thrives off spending a lot of time together—to the point of hunkering down on Cape Cod during the dead of winter to work on Gasoline. When the pandemic hit, this kind of close collaboration ground to a halt and they were forced to work on post-production and promotion without seeing each other at all. Even though the band was put on hold, Barstow says, “There was no world where we didn’t come back and do this.” They emphasize that their relationship with each other is a friendship before anything else, which seems to contribute to their strength as a band during a time when many music groups have broken up.
Almost a year after the mid-pandemic release of Gasoline, Grain Thief is playing this record for the first time to live audiences. “We didn’t have a chance to bring it into the world in ways aside from digital streaming,” Harmon says. “So it’s very new music for us to play.” I joined them for one of their first live shows in over a year and a half at the City Winery, where they stand before an intimate audience in their now-familiar ensemble cluster. As my first foray back into concerts, I couldn’t ask for anything better from a show. This is a band that lives and breathes live music, and they are clearly at home on the stage—inspiring admiration, and almost jealousy, in their visible display of close friendship and musical prowess. From the mandolin to the resonator guitar, Grain Thief is triumphantly announcing that live music is back and here to stay. With a spate of upcoming shows and new music on the horizon, they are an exciting and fresh voice in the Boston bluegrass scene.
Photos by Joe MacFadzen