Noa Eve joins me to celebrate the long-awaited release of Late Bloomer, a debut album that blends virtuosic arco playing with the rhythmic grit of bluegrass, old-time, and acoustic music-making. We talk about the “10 years in the making” arc from Jason first hearing Noa play in the Bay Area to recording the album over three intense days in Portland, plus what it takes to bring a bass-forward project to life with a full band.
Along the way, Noa shares how touring and real-world gig reps shaped their groove, arranging instincts, and confidence, plus why Edgar tuning and a lighter, more agile sound concept can unlock an entirely different palette on the instrument.
We also dig into influences ranging from Edgar Meyer to video game music, how to chase what you’re obsessed with (even when it’s not the “linear” path), and why making music that reaches beyond “sweaty bass nerds” can be both the hardest and most rewarding goal. Follow Noa on Instagram, find everything at Linktree, and stream Late Bloomer on your platform of choice.
Noa would also like to give a big shout-out to Lauren Pierce for her support over the years. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Ten Years in the Making: A Conversation with Noa Eve
Jason: We’re finally doing this. It’s been like 10 years in the making, almost.
Noa: Oh my God, yeah, really. It really has been, huh?
Jason: I came and saw a show of yours, and I know it was early on in my time here in San Francisco — I walked from my first San Francisco apartment, and I was only in that thing for like one year, so it may be 2017, maybe even late 2016. I think you were playing somewhere in the Sunset or the Richmond. And I have this memory of you bringing your bass outside, and I was listening to some of your solo stuff, and I was thinking, “Boy, I can’t wait for this album. It’s probably any minute we’re gonna get this.” And, well, now we have it. So congratulations!
Noa: Thank you very much. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve been working on some other projects in the meantime, getting those off the ground in various ways. This is one of them — Fog Holler. It’s like a bluegrass band, which has been really, really dope to play in, and we were touring super heavily up until the past couple of years or so.
So I was like, “Well, we got a little bit of downtime, might as well try to get the solo record out now,” which I learned was a very massive undertaking. But I’m very happy with it, and it was just kind of a whirlwind. I thought it would come out sooner as well, but life does a lot of weird things you don’t necessarily expect.
Jason: Oh, yeah. Things come out when they’re supposed to come out, you know? And I’m always amazed when, if you’re touring all the time, how on earth could you even begin to work on this stuff, just on the road and all that business. But it sounds fantastic. So was this (Late Bloomer) all recorded within the last couple of years, or have you been chipping away at it for a while?
Noa: I recorded it over three days at Dead End Thelma’s in Portland last October. It was kind of just in the studio as long as they would let me stay. There was an engineer named Adam Lee who was awesome. It was just three days banging it out, trying to get everyone into place at the right time, because I’m working with a lot of awesome musicians who are also working in Portland — they don’t have open availability.
So it was a matter of figuring out how to make this work, trying to get rehearsals together. I’m very thankful and appreciative of all the work everyone put in to make this happen, just because putting together a project like this is still, from what I understand, relatively unusual. I’m very glad people were on board and helped make my crazy ideas come together.
On the Late Bloomer’s Sound and Songwriting
Jason: That’s so cool that you did it in three days. That’s impressive no matter how you did it, but you must have burned like 25,000 calories playing. I’ve been a big fan of your playing ever since hearing you — this is some serious virtuosity, and it’s beautiful — just beautiful playing. And the vocals. Is “The Middle” the only one I know — is everything else original?
Noa: Yes. I think one of the reasons it took so long to put this record together was that I knew I had some holes in my playing. I think I’ve generally had very good intuition in terms of approaching an idea and trying to shape that idea into being music. The issue is I didn’t want it to just be totally solo the whole time, and I also needed to grow as a rhythm player — something that playing with Fog Holler helped with, but also jumping into other projects as much as I could, because I was in a pop folk band in the Bay Area called JWB, which is now defunct.
I’m currently in another project called the Tradwife String Band, which is more like an old-time band. I had to really develop a better sense of groove and a better rhythmic understanding in an intuitive way, and that’s something I even struggled with in music school. I was able to play in a melodic way, trying to create a beautiful sound, but creating something more rhythmically engaging or driving — which is of course a lot of bow technique — that was something I needed to develop, and that took a lot of time and a lot of shows, a lot of thinking, a lot of trying things out and crashing and burning.
One of the cool things about playing non-classical music is — in school, you’re in the practice room shedding constantly, but the amount of performance opportunities is relatively limited compared to the time spent practicing. It’s like a pyramid building up to one event with a lot of eyes on you and a lot of pressure. But if you’re out there playing sometimes for a whole ton of people at a festival, and sometimes for five people at a bar just because you’re on the road, you get a lot of experience performing, which really helped me mature as a player and develop in the way I needed to in order to pull this off.
Jason: That’s such an interesting observation — that divide between people who are out there gigging versus, especially in the classical world, just polishing, polishing, polishing Mozart 40 slightly better, versus people drinking beer at a festival or on the road. Those reps are working on your musicianship in a very different way than locking yourself with five cups of coffee in a practice room at music school.
Noa: Yeah, it’s crazy. It took me a bit of time to adjust, because I was so used to that mentality, and then working with people who didn’t come from that world at all — they know things about microphones and how to amplify your instrument. I’m like, “What do you mean, I’m playing in a space that isn’t curated for the best acoustic sound, and people are gonna be watching the game while I do this?” And they’re like, “Yeah, actually, that’s kind of a lot of the time.” Not all spaces are listening rooms, right?
Jason: And that’s such a crazy realization, especially if you were trained classically, where if someone coughs you get a dirty glance. You listen to great jazz records of the ’50s recorded at some club, and there’s clinking and clanking in the background.
Noa: Yeah, yeah!
Jason: It’s funny, isn’t it interesting how sometimes something that might be a weakness — you work on it, and it can become your strength? The sense of groove you’ve got on this album, even in the solo bass tracks, is so strong — absolutely toe-tapping, puts a smile on your face. And I think sometimes, when we have to really spend time figuring out the things we have to, our standards become hyper-focused on that. I would never know that you ever struggled with groove. And to do it in three days — that is just incredibly impressive.
Noa: It was insane, honestly. There was some day of practicing, especially for some of the five-piece stuff. We had one rehearsal where I was able to host everyone at my apartment, but people are variously busy with jobs and other gigs. So there was one rehearsal where we had everyone for the five-piece working on “Boy Man” and “The Middle” specifically. And then we had partial rehearsals with some of the people. At that time I was like, “I don’t know if this is gonna work,” and I was fully freaking out. And then we get to the studio, we run it once, talk about some spots, do maybe three takes, and that was kind of good for “Boy Man” specifically.
“The Middle” ended up being broken up — we rehearsed it, did the instrumental, then recorded the vocal separately on top, because I wanted to get the character of the vocal right, which was something I don’t necessarily consider myself good at — I don’t consider myself a singer necessarily.
Late Bloomer by NoaBassIn Fog Holler, I play with two phenomenal singers — the banjo player on the record, Casey James Holmberg, and the guitarist on “Late Bloomer,” Tommy Schultz. I approached Tommy to ask if he could teach me how to sing, so I had to go to singing cram school.
I had developed as a songwriter for Fog Holler, but in the beginning with that project I thought I was just going to write instrumental stuff — “Edgar kind of stuff.” And then people were like, not everyone is that nerdy. There’s a lot of other considerations that go into creating arrangements and spaces where music can be performed.
As soon as you take an instrument like the bass and put it in the lead, there are so many questions about arrangement, energy, dynamics. So I was like, okay, I guess I’m gonna work on becoming a songwriter.
That’s how I wrote the only other original song on the album, “Late Bloomer,” and Tommy helped polish some of that too, because I didn’t want it to be just like a bass track.
I also wanted to do this cover I’d been thinking about for a really long time, and singing turned out to be really complex and difficult. Playing another instrument, especially a bowed string instrument, was definitely helpful in terms of thinking about the triangle that creates bow sound — it’s very similar to vocal tone.
So I had something to draw from, but getting my voice to do that while also playing with limited rehearsal — and getting the mix the way I wanted — took real figuring out. I didn’t want it to be a live record. I wanted it to be a studio album, though without all the bells and whistles of production. The amount of production is quite limited, but I wanted the chance to break things apart for the sake of clarity. It’s kind of like live music plus.
It was mostly live, but there were times when someone might say, “Oh, I want to change a couple things here, punch in for that to polish a couple things up” — very minor. I didn’t want to be doing the whole “everyone gets a million tries at their solo.” You gotta show up, you gotta be on your shit, I have to be on my shit, and we just have to figure it out as best we can. If a little studio magic happens, I’m okay with that, because I wanted the record to last.
The Hardest Track and the Edgar (Meyer) Tuning
Noa: “Fast Down” is one of the most difficult in terms of technique, just because it’s so fast, and playing in unison with clawhammer banjo is very, very difficult. Cameron is phenomenal, so thankfully we were able to do it. That was the first track we recorded, Sunday morning, early, not fully warmed up — it was kind of “I need to be able to wake you up in the middle of the night, and you should be able to play this.” But at top speed we were playing faster than we practiced. I was like, “No, please, it’s 10:00 AM, come on.” It ended up being really great, but I was like, “This feels really fast, why is this so hard?” Turns out we were playing 20 BPM faster than we practiced. Good morning!
Late Bloomer by NoaBassJason: Oh my goodness. The level of virtuosity — what you’re doing on this album is as hard as any bass concerto I’ve ever played, probably harder. I think of genres like jazz, bluegrass, even heavy metal in some ways, like shred metal — that level of skill. And how do you get up at 10:00 in the morning and bust that out? My bass section brain doesn’t even understand how you do that.
Noa: There are a couple of considerations for technique and sound prioritization that I think are part of the trade-off. I also play in modified tuning — Edgar tuning. I switched to that my second year of grad school. My professor, Chris Hanulik, was very cool with that. I made it pretty clear to him that my sense of groove was pretty bad at that time — I was able to play effectively in an orchestra, but that music didn’t resonate with me, and the sound production that goes into that didn’t come very naturally to me. I’ve kind of always struggled with that, especially with certain off-the-string strokes.
I’ve kind of always been playing on a budget, as it were. My first bass is the bass I actually recorded with on the album — it’s this old, like 100-year-old Czech bass, unnamed maker. There’s no maker’s stamp, but some insignia on the side suggests it’s probably from Markneukirchen, though no specific luthier is credited with it. I got it from a violin shop in the Buffalo area, where I’m from. I put a new neck on it because at the very bottom of the scroll there was a crack held together by a deadbolt. And then when I was in music school, the neck got damaged a separate time — an accident in the practice rooms; it got bumped and fell over.
So eventually, instead of having all these pieces Frankensteined onto the neck, I took it to Pete’s Bass Shop, and he put a new neck on it, which changed the sound in a really awesome way. But the bass is a little bit smaller, and it’s never really been a powerful instrument for big orchestra sounds — Beethoven, Strauss. There are techniques and ways to overcome those obstacles, but it’s never been the most straightforward path.
Separately, as a player — the thing that made me decide to go to school to play music is I started taking lessons as a senior in high school, and the teacher said, “You gotta check this Edgar Meyer dude out.” I heard him play and was like, “Oh, that’s what I want to do.” It was very binary — the light was red, it became green, and it stayed green pretty much since then. I’ve had to learn a lot about what I want in my own journey as a player.
I can’t say I’ve met Edgar, and I can only speak to what I’ve gleaned from my own listening, but a focus on a different kind of sound production that isn’t necessarily as powerful but may be more agile and more focused. I’m not getting really close to the bridge a whole lot — a lot of the time it’s in the sweet spot or even closer to the fingerboard, using a bow with very quick activation but not a lot of sauce behind it in terms of power. I find myself overplaying with that bow, even now preparing for the album release show. There have definitely been times when I can’t lay it down with this bow, but it generally gets the kind of sound I want.
So it’s a matter of priorities and compromises regarding technique and sound production. There are benefits to playing in modified tuning and prioritizing something lighter, but you also lose some of the richness people think of when they think of bass playing. So the long way to the short answer is: I’ve found ways to make that kind of music more accessible, while making some of the stuff that’s more intuitively part of the bass’s catalog less accessible.
Two Different Kinds of Basses
Jason: It’s so interesting — it’s almost like we have these two different styles of bass that we play. I remember having a chat with Gary Karr about how he was a huge fan of the slightly smaller bass that projects out in a way, whereas that standard 7/8 giant hunk of furniture orchestra bass — which I have in the corner, by the way — is different. I remember talking to Dave Moore about this really funky, vintage, fine-wine sort of fuzzy sound that we bass players appreciate, but it’s a very different thing.
I was actually just chatting with Hal Robinson last week about—at Curtis, and now at Juilliard too —they own these big orchestral basses. So your lessons with Hal, you play on some big 7/8 thing, but just about everybody also has much smaller, Shen-style basses in the Edgar tuning, studying with Edgar too. That’s their home base, and that’s what they develop their solo playing on.
I got the chance to meet Edgar — we were premiering his second bass concerto — this was like 20 years ago at this point — and he likes to have a bass player play his bass so he can walk around the hall and listen. So he hands me his bass, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness, it’s happening.”
My first impression is this bass is so small — I could fit Edgar’s bass inside my Jaeger Strad with room to spare. And then the ease of playing on it. And then you look at his bows, which look like they’ve been thrown into the trash compactor — he does not want that bow to come off the string when he plays. It’s interesting how different. I could hear the Edgar influence in your playing, I’m sure, but you are so much your own voice as well, so it’s really cool. I think he’s influenced everybody our age — he was kind of the equivalent of hearing Gary Karr in the ’70s, the first time we heard Edgar Meyer.
Noa: Yeah, I think he has done a lot to open space for bass players interested in different kinds of things, and that’s really cool. I’ve been fortunate enough to hang out with Paul Kowert, who is the bassist in Punch Brothers, as well as Eli Maslow, who is a Nashville guy — he’s played with Sierra Hull, and Mr. Sun.
They both went to Curtis and both studied with Edgar. I was able to hang out with them at Shasta String Summit when I was starting to really turn the corner into investigating what I was interested in doing on the bass, and being able to talk to them and get some perspective — still a secondary source, but a closer one than me staring at YouTube for hundreds of hours.
They were at a music camp over the summer, mixing and gigging, going from one festival right to the next, extremely tired, trying to be as coherent and present as possible but getting like one hour of sleep a night maybe. I’m very appreciative that they let me bother them all the time.
It was helpful because I definitely wanted — the influence is clearly there, and I’m okay with that, but I didn’t want to copy-paste his life onto my music and be like, “It’s just knockoff Edgar, we have Edgar at home.” I needed to mature as a person and develop as a player, and it took a lot of time and life experience and playing experience to figure out how to integrate this thing that’s so important to me without just regurgitating it.
He did it — I don’t need to do that. I need to do my own thing, but I can be informed by what he did, while also having this really phenomenal community of acoustic musicians in Portland, and folks I’ve met throughout my life, to try to make an album that puts the bass forward in a way I’m excited about, but doesn’t get too distant from being chamber music — that still comes across as music someone who isn’t a sweaty bass nerd could enjoy.
I’ve realized my life experience is extremely the outlier. Someone will ask, “Who’s the bass player you like?” and I’ll say “Edgar Meyer,” and they’ll be like, “Who?” And I’m beginning to understand a little more what the general public has actually listened to and experienced.
So I’m trying to make music that would be appealing to folks who haven’t necessarily gone down the rabbit hole, but is still rhythmically engaging or musically colorful and exciting — making arrangement choices about when the bass takes a solo, how long tracks are when it’s just bass, or bass with another instrument — trying to make the music speak for itself, rather than it always being the bass show. Having the music really be the focus.
Advice for Young Players
Jason: You’ve had that real-world experience. Anybody playing festivals, playing bar gigs — it’s kind of like doing stand-up comedy; you get the feedback on whether they want that or not. “Sweaty bass nerd” — I wish I could put myself in that same category; that’s my new favorite phrase.
Here’s something — I have such admiration for what you do and that type of playing. I’d have no idea — let’s say there’s somebody who’s 16 or 18 listening to this and wants to get into exploring what you’re exploring, more soloistic bluegrass-style bass playing, however you wanna frame it. You’re studying with Chris Hanulik at UCLA; that’s very much an orchestral-type decision, and we’re in such a different world now, constantly watching YouTube.
I remember my parents had recorded Edgar Meyer on CBS Sunday Morning in, like, 1992. I don’t know if you remember that program. They had this five minutes of Edgar Meyer, with a commercial break in there. I remember watching him practice Bach real slow with a metronome or something, and I watched that over and over, rewinding the VHS tape. Now we’ve got an embarrassment of riches — we’ve got your album, completely amazing, we’ve got YouTube. What advice might you give somebody who was in that stage, kind of like where you were back in Buffalo?
Noa: I would say one of the most important things — hopefully not too painfully generic — is, of course, you want to follow the things that excite you and make you interested, in order to play the music and pursue that. But also be willing to put yourself in situations that are challenging and maybe make you uncomfortable as a player.
Being able to develop the skills to adapt to those uncomfortable situations is what will make you a more well-rounded musician. And don’t be afraid to chase the things that you love.
I’ve been reflecting on this recently — I had a very strange childhood. My parents didn’t want me to have a CD player or anything like that, because they were worried it would make me antisocial. So I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of the stuff I felt like a lot of my peers or older folks did. I ended up very passively hearing a lot of different kinds of music, and all of them came across as equally interesting or cool in a passive kind of way.
But in many ways, the biggest influence on my sound choices is video game music. Besides Edgar — Edgar was the first CD I ever bought, when I was a junior or senior in high school. I bought his Bach album and his Bass Concerto album — those were the first CDs I ever bought. But up until that point, I had been playing a lot of video games, and that music infiltrated my brain in a lot of different ways.
That music can be so widely ranging in terms of tonal palette and timbre and energy and color — I think in a lot of ways that’s what has allowed me to be confident being more adventurous with compositional choices. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a bass player — I’m just a musician whose voice happens to be the bass. I’ve had to learn how to be a bass player.
I was following my ear and intuition, then going to school and thinking more critically and analytically to further refine it. But the original foundation for what I was interested in has never really changed — I think it’s just matured and grown over time, which is really cool. I guess that’s why I think it’s so important to follow the things that are inspiring to you, even if it’s not necessarily the most linear path to get there.
Jason: As soon as you said video game music, the Legend of Zelda theme just popped into my head. And you’re not the only one who’s had that influence — I remember Xavier Foley, that “Irish Fantasy,” the melody is off of some video game he played when he was a little kid. I don’t remember what.
I remember Diana Gannett, talking to her a long time ago, advice she’d give to people early on the path — she just said, “When you wake up in the morning, what are you obsessed with? What fascinates you? Chase that and it’ll probably work out in the end. It might not work out the way you expect it to, but…” So if you’re not obsessed with — not to beat up on Mozart 40 — but if that’s not your path, maybe find what pops into your mind first thing in the morning.
Noa: Yeah. Doing anything like this at a high enough level to convince people to pay you for it or listen to it is really hard — it’s a really high bar. The only way to accomplish reaching that bar is through reps and time and hours, and if it’s just like pulling teeth constantly in order to do that, it’s gonna be a lot more difficult.
You can do it; I’m not saying a person couldn’t, but it is a lot harder. For me, getting my teacher to get me to practice bass excerpts was like pulling teeth. I would do it; I would put in the hours, but every week it would feel like—it did not feel good to me.
Chris and Daniel Pendley in Buffalo both did their best working with a student who didn’t want to do it. I tried to do my due diligence; I put in my hours and filled out my practice sheet logs, but I was fundamentally like, “I don’t want to do this.”
I didn’t internalize the music, I wasn’t excited about it, I couldn’t communicate with it, and that’s probably why I struggled with groove in a lot of ways — the music didn’t speak to me.
Ultimately what we’re trying to do is communicate with these instruments — at least that’s what I think. And if you feel like you’re speaking the words someone else put in your mouth, you’re not gonna be able to say them convincingly or persuasively.
I think this is a case for being persuasive without necessarily using words — that was, honestly, my biggest takeaway from going to grad school with Chris. Chris was awesome, a very gracious and supportive teacher, phenomenal. When I told him I was going to switch to Edgar tuning, he gave me a very simple prompt: I needed to convince him.
Jason: Oh, nice.
Noa: I was basically living in the practice room after that, and I managed to convince him that what I was doing was cool and exciting, and he was able to work with that. But it was definitely a case of — I didn’t have that spark or that joy or that excitement or confidence when it was, “All right, we’re gonna work on Mozart 40 again, we’re gonna work on Beethoven’s 5th again.” That music is great, but it just never spoke to me, which made it really challenging — I couldn’t convince other people it was cool because I knew it was cool in my head, but I didn’t feel it in my body.
Jason: Yeah, totally. That’s a great way to put it. I think about this all the time — the impulse to make a life in music, for most of us starting out, was we wanna be expressive, we wanna be creative, we wanna speak through this language. Then fast-forward through music school and all that, and these days most of my professional work is subbing in San Francisco Symphony — thank you, San Francisco Symphony, for continuing to call me.
However, if I exercise my creative impulses at the symphony, that’s the last time I’m getting called, right? I’m playing someone else’s music, trying to fit in. Most of us didn’t go into music to fit in. And then you get a little taste of what you did with this album, and it’s like the opposite — how amazing is that? Of course it comes with its own challenges and unpredictability, but it’s much more — I think that’s part of why a lot of orchestral musicians get jaded. You’re in this musical straitjacket to some degree. There’s teamwork, you’re part of something artistic, but your job as the cog, bass seven in the section, is very different than what you just did with this album.
Noa: Yeah, it’s a really tough conversation. I guess me doing this, I’m very excited about it and think it’s really awesome, but it’s a riskier strategy. I guess it’s one I’m willing to take. There are potentially many reasons why certain risks are in place and why they’re unfair, but we don’t need to talk about that right now. It would be really cool if people could do what they loved and still survive. That would be really cool. That’d be awesome.
Portland, Buffalo, and the Local Scene
Jason: Yes. I love that you’re in Portland — I love Portland; my brother lives there, in fact right next to where your album debut is, in Foster-Powell. I’ve always had some excuses to go to Portland, and I was just subbing with Oregon Symphony in December. Not the optimal time to drive there — I almost got snowed in over that pass into Oregon, both ways. But what a great city, and it seems like such a great place for all kinds of music.
I’ve mostly just done stuff at the Schnitz with Oregon Symphony, but I’ve gone and seen shows, and I know a lot of folks who’ve gone into all sorts of different styles of music that have come out of Portland. Were you living in the Bay Area when I caught your show like 10 years ago?
Noa: Yeah, I was. I grew up in Buffalo, got dragged out to the West Coast by someone I was in a relationship with, went to school at UCLA, then moved to the Bay Area, and stopped being with that person. I was kind of kicking around the Bay Area — I lived in the South Bay for a while, then Oakland, then Richmond. Fog Holler was what I was doing at the time, and we were gigging constantly.
We had just come back from our first Europe tour, but then COVID happened — it was happening as we were leaving the plane; the really long lines at the San Francisco airport were just starting. I was like, “There’s something going on; this can’t be good.” And then everything shut down. We took stock of the situation, and a lot of the venues started shutting down, a lot of the spaces where we were playing music started not being a thing, and it was really expensive to live there. So we had to make a call about where we wanted to go.
For me, because I’m a non-binary trans person, Tennessee is not particularly welcoming, unfortunately — the people in political power don’t seem very thrilled about me peeing in a urinal, so not gonna do that, unfortunately. Going to Nashville seemed cool, but it also sounded like it would have its own challenges. It just kind of became, “Oh yeah, we’re just gonna go to Portland.” I’ve been here, and it’s been awesome, really, really great. I like it a lot — it’s more similar to Buffalo in a lot of ways; there are seasons.
Jason: Buffalo’s rough.
Noa: Yeah, it has inculcated a certain way of seeing the world because of how tough it is there. But Portland’s been great; I really like it. There’s a ton of excellent music, a lot of really great venues, and I’ve made some really excellent friends here playing around town over the years.
Although there’s constantly the classic musicians-never-seeing-each-other problem — “What are you doing?” “I got this gig.” “I have a gig that night.” “Do you wanna hang out?” “I’m teaching a lesson.” You never see each other, but you’re aware of each other, running around. Sometimes you get asked to go on the road with folks — I’ve been able to play with some other acts in town, which has been a better way to get to know some of the people in the scene. And then I was able to ask them to be on the album, and they’re really amazing players, playing all kinds of different stuff.
Like Cameron on “Fast Down” — I only asked them to feature on the one track, but they’re a phenomenal old-time banjo player who plays a bunch of different instruments and has developed their own way of improvising clawhammer style, which I didn’t realize wasn’t really a thing. Caden on mandolin is an extremely flexible, widely knowledgeable, extremely stable musician who plays a bunch of different styles — it was very cool improvising or learning specific stuff in a classical kind of way. Casey and Tommy are the ones I play with in Fog Holler, and they’re both excellent. Lillian, on fiddle, played with Fog Holler for a number of years, and honestly, I feel like I learned the most about playing with groove from her and Casey.
Learning how to groove with a banjo is a whole different thing, because they’re arpeggiating the whole time, and being able to lock in with that is really difficult but a really excellent skill. Casey plays with such rhythmic complexity but also intent — he just hears the music differently than I do, and I don’t claim to understand what he does, but it has informed my own playing. And Lillian is such a killer fiddler, so good — I feel like I learned a lot about how to really get good groove with a bow from her; she’s a beast. And Clayton — Clayton is such a good guitarist, it’s absurd.
He plays a lot of different styles, can kind of do it all. He played with Fog Holler for a little bit too, and I was like, “This guy’s really good, I hope he’ll be on my album.” He ended up on the most tracks of anyone on the album, which was really cool, too. There are so many good musicians, such an incredible scene here, and a really good community, and I’m very glad to be able to create a project where all these people doing different things can come together.
Jason: It’s awesome. It’s inspiring. I had a smile on my face the whole time I was listening to it. I would love to catch another show of yours — I don’t know if Fog Holler makes its way down to the Bay these days, but…
Noa: We’re working on it.
Jason: Okay, we’re working on it. Please let me know the next time you’re around.
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