Adam Greuel

Adam Greuel called in from the road at eight in the morning, the morning after a rain-soaked set at Blue Ox, headed west with a cooler full of Wisconsin cheese for friends in Wyoming. It was the first episode of this show recorded on a weekday, and the first before noon.

Telluride, twice

Adam went to his first Telluride Bluegrass Festival as a fan, at 17 or 18. He had been to smaller festivals in Wisconsin and Wyoming, but never one of the big ones. David Byrne of Talking Heads was on the bill. The whole thing, he says, was formative.

A few years later he was back with Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, a string band that formed in 2010 after its five members met at college in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. In 2012 they entered the Telluride Band Contest and took third place. At the time, he says, nearly every well-known progressive bluegrass band had come through that contest. It was the clear path.

What he remembers most is what happened away from the contest stage.

"I don't know that we made as many fans at Telluride Bluegrass Festival in the band competition as we did picking around the festival."

Those fans went home and told their friends about the young band they saw. That, he says, is how things started happening.

On the road with the Dusters

From about 2012 to 2019, Horseshoes was grinding. They opened for Greensky Bluegrass, The Infamous Stringdusters, the McCourys, Yonder Mountain String Band and Railroad Earth. That is how Trevor first heard them, opening for the Stringdusters.

Adam had loved the Stringdusters since early high school. He had their first album, Fork in the Road, and listened to it at his high school job. Mandolinist Jesse Cobb, a founding Stringduster who now plays with The Unfaithful Servants, is a fellow Wisconsinite, which may be how the record found him. Getting to tour with them was an honor.

"There's something really cool about people who are more successful and know more and are perhaps more skilled, but they're also very willing to share that with younger folks."

Weekend warriors

Trevor asked why so many bands now tour regionally. Adam gave two answers. For Horseshoes, life changed. He is the only full-time musician in the band now. The others have other jobs, so the band plays more like weekend warriors, and he says that suits them.

The bigger picture is harder. He thinks it got trickier to sell tickets after COVID, and cheap hotel rooms are gone, so long tours make less sense than they used to. Mid-size bands and small festivals feel it most.

"Buying this ticket in advance, buying a CD. That stuff really matters."

A band for every mood

Adam plays in a lot of bands, and he says he loves them all about equally.

The High Hawks is a country rock and roll band with Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon, Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth, and Chad Staehly, Brian Adams and Will Trask. They have two albums, the latest Mother Nature's Show. The name came out of a phone call among the members, and for a while Adam wore little wings on stage.

Rucksack Revolution is a duo with Sarah Vos of Dead Horses, in the spirit of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Adam Greuel & the Space Burritos is his country rock band, named for his love of the Flying Burrito Brothers and Col. Bruce Hampton's "space is the place." And Berens & Greuel is a comedy duo with Midwestern comedian Charlie Berens, with two albums out.

"They're all part of my life, and I really do love 'em all. They kind of scratch different itches."

Cosmic Nudge

The best studio story involves Kyle Tuttle and Jared Pool. During the pandemic, Adam had studio time booked at Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota, and his original plans for it fell through. Instead of canceling, he called Kyle and Jared a day or two before and asked them to fly in. They had no material ready.

They taught each other songs, made some charts and recorded until it felt right. Some of the songs had been written earlier, when Adam and Kyle were picking together in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The record became Cosmic Nudge, released in 2021 as Tuttle, Pool & Greuel. At the time of the interview, the trio had reunion dates on the books in Colorado, and Adam hoped for a second album.

Guitars and rivers

Adam plays Bourgeois guitars. For about ten years his stage guitar was a Bourgeois Vintage D he named Bender, the guitar of his hardest touring years. When Bender was gone, Bourgeois helped him with a Touchstone Signature. Later a friend found a guitar in Canada two serial numbers away from Bender. Adam has it now. It plays and sounds the same.

Losing Bender taught him to hold things a little more loosely. Friendships and love, he says, matter more.

Off stage, he fishes. He guides fly fishing trips, and when he tours he looks for a river wherever he lands.

"Fly fishing is the way that I balance the chaos of being on the road."