Over the last three decades, The String Cheese Incident has built a devoted following on the strength of its kaleidoscopic musicality and commitment to leaving audiences awestruck. Known for an immersive live show that continually pushes into unexpected terrain, the Colorado-bred six-piece handles everything from bluegrass to dubstep to psychedelia with equal parts abandon and ingenuity—a feat that’s found them sharing stages with such wide-ranging artists as Lauryn Hill, Skrillex, James Brown, Billy Strings, Perry Farrell, Sheryl Crow, Zac Brown Band, and more. But in a departure for the band—Bill Nershi (guitar, vocals), Michael Kang (guitar, mandolin, violin, vocals), Keith Moseley (bass, vocals), Michael Travis (drums, vocals), Kyle Hollingsworth (keys, vocals), and Jason Hann (percussion, programming)—SCI’s eighth studio album trades all that genre-hopping for a stripped-back form of folk-rock. Arriving as the band gets set to celebrate its 30th anniversary, Lend Me A Hand showcases the full depth and character of their songwriting like never before, ultimately delivering some of their most intimate and emotionally potent material to date.
SCI’s first studio album in over six years, Lend Me A Hand (released on Sept. 8) serves as the follow-up to Believe, a daringly eclectic LP that marked their second outing with Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads. This time around, the band joined forces with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Waxahatchee), a producer whose distinct vision helped SCI to fully embrace the album’s rootsy simplicity.
The String Cheese Incident is currently touring as part of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival Tour. They will be on their own for their only Canadian stop on this leg of the tour on Sept. 21 in Niagara Falls at OLG Stage at Fallsview Casino.
Music Life Magazine caught up with String Cheese Incident co-founder Bill Nershi last week to talk about the band, its music, tour, and more.
Thank you so much for your time and congratulations on the new record, “Lend Me A Hand”. This is your eighth studio album with The String Cheese Incident and the first one in six years. Why the gap?
Why the gap? Hmm. That’s an interesting question. We’ve had new material. We released some individual recordings during that period of time. Just not an album. And then with the pandemic, we weren’t getting together as much. And, you know, I guess time flies. And then it was then we felt like it was time to do another (record). And we had a lot of material built up and we were ready to go.
Did you guys set out to do anything different with this new record than with previous records?
What, as far as how we utilize the album?
With the music. Did you try to take a different approach?
Well, you know, we’ve had different producers on every single album that we put out. We choose the producers, you know, to get because we feel like we’re going to get a certain thing from the producer. And for this one we had Brad Cook produce it and he’s very song-oriented and we just wanted to put out an album that is more about the songs and a little bit less of all the other dressings around the tunes. This, I think, really just emphasizes lyrics, melodies, and things like that. And so we’re really happy with the way it turned out.
You guys are known as a jam band. So with the new material, have you been able to incorporate the new songs easily into your live sets, and how has the response been so far?
Well, we just put out our fourth song off the album last week, so we haven’t brought all our material out. And I think it’s gonna be on a kind of a song-to-song basis to see which songs would lend themselves to stretching out in live material, in live settings, and which songs are gonna be best kept punchy and short. I do like that about the album is that it’s just this song, song keeps coming and it’s very punchy, you know? So I think we’re learning things. We, of course, still do plenty of exploring during our live shows, and musical exploring. So we’ll just see as we continue to roll these new songs out, which ones are gonna lend themselves to jams and which ones we just want to kind of get out there and nail them.
The song that’s out right now is One More Time. The video came out the same day the record came out. And it’s a tribute to your manager who passed away. My condolences to you. Was this a song you had written? And what can you tell me about this song?
This is a song that Kyle wrote, Kyle Hollingsworth. We were all pretty devastated by the untimely death of Jesse Aratow our manager, one of our management team. We really loved him. He was a great guy. Things like that happen in your life. And yeah, sometimes writing a song is the best way to deal with it and process it. And Kyle wrote a really great tune that was inspired.
Do you guys all contribute to the songwriting?
Everybody is writing. And sometimes we work together. On this particular album, Brad also contributed to helping with lyrics or melodies and the songs or just being there to say, “I like this, maybe not that, maybe we (can) go (in) this direction.” It’s open lyrically to anything that people can add to the tune. Usually, the songs are brought in by a person, at least the starting idea, and then worked on from there.
Do you have a favorite song on the new record?
There are a lot of really good ones. I can just say I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to pick (laughs). They’re all good. This is my favorite album in a long time. Possibly my favorite album that the band’s done. We had an interesting experience the other night when we were playing at the Outlaw concert, and one of the bands on the Outlaw concert is Los Lobos. And we played in North Carolina – Raleigh – is where we started the tour. And so North Carolina is where Brad Cook lives. And Steve Berlin was also there with Los Lobos. And Steve Berlin produced our album Outside Inside. And I got to introduce Steve to Brad Cook and told them that, you know, the albums that those two guys produced are my favorite two albums, that String Cheese has done, Outside and Inside and Lend Me A Hand. So, it was cool to be able to introduce those guys that had never met each other and get them talking, put their producer hats on, and talk about the records and stuff.
Awesome. This year marks the band’s 30th anniversary. Looking back, did you ever think you would last as long as you have so far? Was this something you hoped would be long-term? What goes through your mind thinking back 30 years because a lot of bands don’t last as long as you guys have?
I guess I didn’t think about it. You kind of think about it on a year-to-year basis where you’re just like, “That was a good year. I hope this year is as good as last year” or “I hope it gets better,” you know? Or whatever you’re thinking. I didn’t really think of it as “I hope we’re playing 30 years down the road” or “Will we be playing 30 years down the road?” And now that we’re here, it feels like, “Yeah, of course, we’re going to play for 30 years,” You can’t really plan because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Things happen to people. Anything can happen. People can just have a change in their lives where they decide they don’t want to play music anymore. I’m kind of amazed that we’ve gotten to this point. It’s really great. And it feels really good, it’s like having an anniversary in a marriage. We’ve been through ups and downs and all kinds of things, and we worked everything out. And here we are. Things are still going well.
Who actually started the band? I know you’re one of the co-founders. And who else started with you that is still with you today?
When it started, we didn’t even know it was a band. It wasn’t like anybody had the idea, “We’re gonna start a band and we’re gonna tour and we’re gonna do this and that and the other thing.” It was more like, we all lived in this ski town, Crested Butte. I had moved from Telluride. And what I did in Telluride was I always played in duos, trios and kind of had happy hour shows and apres ski shows. And I would cook at night. And I would ski during the day or ride my bike or go climb or whatever it was. I planned on doing the same thing in Crested Butte, you know, ski, pick up some extra money, get some free meals. The guy that I knew in town was Keith Moseley. And I had met him at festivals, bluegrass festivals mainly, and had played some music with him, you know, just like picking and picking circles and things like that. So I knew him, but I got a gig with Mike playing apres ski. I asked around who’s a good person to play music with around here. And people pointed me in Mike Kang’s direction and we got a gig and at the same time, there were a lot of bluegrass shows going on and it would be like pickup gigs. Oh, these four people are going to play. “Oh, we’re playing a show. Bill, do you want to play guitar with us on Friday night?” And I would play with Keith and different people in town and then at the same time, I was doing apres ski. And then we asked Keith if he would join us for the apres ski gig. And we got him playing with us. And then we had a gig where it was a four-piece thing that was going to be me, Keith, Mike, and Bruce Hayes, who was a good player in town there in Crested Butte. And Bruce couldn’t make it. And we were kind of thinking, “Well, what do we do now?” And those guys said, “Well, this guy Travis is coming back to town. He plays percussion. We can get him to play.” I had never met him. I had never met Travis. But I was like, “Well, okay, if you guys think he’s good and you want to do the gig with him, let’s do it.” And that was in December of 1993. It was the first time the four of us played a show together. And the response was pretty overwhelming. People were asking me, “How long have you guys been playing? This is great!” And I said, “Well, what time is it? We’ve been playing together for about six hours now.” (laughs) The response was really good. So we picked up another gig like that and then I brought the guys to Telluride because I knew a lot of people in Telluride. I had been living there for a long time and we started playing in Telluride where there’s a big music audience with festivals and all. So that’s kind of the way things got started, you know. Kyle joined, it seemed like a long time after at that point. But I think we started playing with him maybe late 95 or 96, he joined the band and then Jason joined in 2005, I think. That’s the way things got started. It took a little while before we decided we were going to actually make a run of it as a band and then we did some light touring around the mountain towns and out to Moab and things like that. Wherever we could ski or ride or climb or anything like that, you know? Those were the priorities then and now it’s 30 years later. What?!
Are there any plans for your 30-year anniversary? Like any special releases, any special shows, tours?
Well, it’s starting out well with the Outlaw tour and having the new album out. We’ve, over the years, one of the things we do is we do a lot of collaborative things with other musicians. We will back other musicians like we did with John Fogerty recently at Red Rocks and have incidents with different players. And at this point in our careers, there are a lot of really great musicians that we played with. So we’re going to try to put some things together where we celebrate that and get to get to play some shows with musicians that we have played shows with over the last 30 years. There’s people like Warren Haynes and Del McCoury and John Fogerty. We would love to do that again. We played with Zac Brown. The list goes on and on. So it would be great to celebrate our 30 years by playing some more music with these folks that we’ve had some great collaborations with.
You’re coming to Canada next week, September 21st, you’re playing the OLG Stage in Niagara Falls. You’re going to love the venue. It’s pretty much brand new. Not even a year old yet since it opened. And speaking of John Fogerty, he was there recently. Do you guys come to Canada much? When was the last time you were here?
Well, a lot of times, we would go up to like the Vancouver side. The British Columbia side. We’ve gone up and we’ve skied Whistler Blackcomb and played up there. I remember going to a show, kind of recently and I know the show got canceled because of the incredible electrical storm that came up. But I remember going up to Toronto and playing, having some fun shows over there. I don’t remember when and where all of these things happened, to be honest. But I know we have a good time when we get up there for sure. We’ve had great gigs in Toronto. We’ve had great gigs out in Vancouver and looking forward to Niagara Falls.
Looking at your tour schedule right now. Niagara Falls is the only Canadian date you have so far. Are you going to expand on that for more Canadian dates down the road?
Well, we go up there every so often and there’s no plan in place. But we’ll get back up to Canada for sure.
I’m looking forward to seeing you guys for the first time. I will be there next week. I’ll be doing photos and hopefully staying for the show afterward. I hear a lot of great things about you and String Cheese Incident. It’s a 5000-seat theatre. It sounds like it’s selling pretty well right now.
Okay.
Is there anything you would like to add at this point?
Not really. Just that it so far has been incredible. We’re just happy to be back up in Canada. We’ve had some great shows up there, and after playing our one-hour sets during the Outlaw tour, we’re going to be ready to rip for a full String Cheese show when we get up there.
How long do you guys go on stage for normally by yourselves?
We usually do two hour-and-a-half sets and an encore.
Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time and can’t wait to see you next week and wish you guys all the best.
Thanks, Joel. Appreciate it.
Thank you so much! Take care.
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