> do you play bluegrass as your main gig or as a side hustle?
Main gig, although of course the sands are shifting rapidly with regard to what that means, for precisely the reasons this conversation is so stimulating.
> Your new album is a bop.
Jeez man that's a nice thing to say. I'm really proud of it. We worked really hard on it. It has been fascinating to see and hear the responses; the story that I tell is one of "open source" and "traditional" having roughly the same meanings as applied to the intellectual property frameworks surrounding them.
I'm curious to hear what you might think of the album played in this order; I think it gives a darker and more contemplative perspective:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ucmjLc88iZdfKi9zlU5HP
> talk to other artists, especially those who are artists as their main hustle.
As you can see from the ensemble on my record, I've become friendly with a good chunk of the mainstream bluegrass world (which is a fairly tight-knit community). I think that a lot of artists are just very frustrated with the system as it is, where they are pitted against their own fans (or whomever wants to simply download and listen to their music) with the industry acting decidedly as a middle-man.
I am reasonably (but not totally) confident that musicians, and particularly purveyors of what have come to be called "the traditionals", will be among the main forces seeking to dismantle the IP system in the next couple of decades.