This New Bluegrass Band Offers Diverse Sounds on Debut Album

Boulder-raised Dylan McCarthy and the other members of Jake Leg are no strangers to the Front Range bluegrass community. McCarthy, the group's principal songwriter, and his talented bandmates have been pickin', grinnin' and impressing local listeners in a talented assortment of Colorado-based acoustic groups over the years.

"We know each other from the local scene," says McCarthy, who plays mandolin and sings in Jake Leg. "Eric Wiggs, our guitarist and lead vocalist, was in a band called Masontown. I was in a band called Thunder and Rain for a while. And Justin [Hoffenberg] has been in Long Road Home for a long time. We had all been orbiting each other while playing in different projects."

Jake Leg, whose name alludes to a Prohibition-era moonshine-related ailment, grew out of a Béla Fleck-inspired project that started in 2019, not long before the pandemic took hold and sidelined most of the live-music industry. While playing together and pushing through COVID times, the band's musicians eventually experienced a desire to focus on some original material.

"We started playing together in All Wheel Drive, which was a tribute to the music of Béla Fleck," explains McCarthy. "The band still performs sometimes. It was myself, Eric and Justin and some other folks, including Troy Robey, who also played bass in Jake Leg initially. While we were doing that project, Eric and I started talking about creating a group where we would do our own music, and we also tapped Justin for that. Troy played bass for us at the beginning, and then Aaron [Hoffenberg], Justin's brother, took over the bass slot last August. But it all came out of that Béla Fleck project."

Jake Leg played under its thought-provoking moniker for the first time in October of 2021, when the budding group got the opportunity to open for banjo player Tony Furtado at Swallow Hill and eTown. McCarthy says the band had needed an official name, and he suggested Jake Leg because he had written and recorded a fiddle tune with the same title.

"We kicked around a bunch of possibilities, but that one stuck," he recalls. "We wanted something that didn't immediately scream 'bluegrass band' but that wasn't too far from it."

Back in his twenties, McCarthy did a brief stint in Boston studying at the Berklee College of Music before returning home to Colorado. Now 31, he and his wife live in Lyons, though he spent a few years living and going to school in Denver before settling in the foothills. McCarthy pens the lyrics and sings harmony on the stylistically varied range of tunes that Jake Leg performs, while Wiggs takes on lead vocal duties and plays guitar. Justin Hoffenberg, meanwhile, is on fiddle, and the bass player for the new album is Bradley Morse, who is also a member of Masontown.

The group's first full-length release, Fire on the Prairie, includes eleven original cuts and was recorded at Vermillion Road studios in Longmont. Jake Leg will celebrate its arrival with an album-release show on Saturday, May 11, at eTown Hall in Boulder.

"In 2022 we put out a couple of singles to showcase our music at the IBMA [International Bluegrass Music Awards], but this is our first full album," McCarthy says. "Eric has a studio in Longmont called Vermillion Road. Bands including Meadow Mountain and the Cody Sisters have recorded there. He is very tapped into recording techniques and has relationships with people in Nashville and the bluegrass studios there. He helps us get our tones to sound the best they can; he's very meticulous about that. I'm really happy with the way our record came out. We're a four-piece with no banjo, so it can be easy for it to sound kind of thin if you aren't careful, but he did a really good job of making everything sound big and full."

Jake Leg pleasingly cuts a wide swath in terms of grooves and textures on Fire on the Prairie. The album's title track is a pulsing tune in the progressive bluegrass vein with a dash of country. The debut also includes a good measure of classic bluegrass picking alongside thematic explorations such as the 4/20- and relationship-inspired "High and Lonesome," the drinking- and relationship-related  "Don't Need No Whiskey," and the festive, toe-tapping "Floyd Hill."

"As the songwriter, I'm very close to all this material," says McCarthy. "I try to deliver the tunes to Eric as close to finished as I can, but it's great to get his input. When you're writing, it's easy to get in your own head, but part of the process that's nice with having him as the vocalist and the main singer is that I get his input. He might tweak a few things, and then he sends me a demo of him singing it so that I can hear it more objectively. I'm writing the songs, but they go through some changes with the help of the other guys. They usually stay pretty close to what I had in mind, but I'll get feedback like, 'Hey this isn't really a chorus, this is more of a bridge,' or stuff like that.

"I found it super helpful to get some fresh ears on my work; you get to sitting over the notebook and not noticing some of the things that other people pick up on," he continues. "I like that part of the process. It's harder to do that when I'm just singing it to myself. I wrote all the tunes on the album, but we put it together as a group. The thing we're kind of going for is that while we really love bluegrass, we're also trying to offer something that hasn't been done all the time by other bands."

McCarthy and company were also honored to receive production input from banjo player and bluegrass jack-of-all-trades Chris Pandolfi of the Infamous Stringdusters. During the album's creation, Pandolfi spent a couple of days with the group, running through all the songs and offering advice.

"Chris offered his input here and there, and he took the meat of what we had and elevated it to make it as cool and interesting as it could be," notes McCarthy. "We love staying close to bluegrass, but we try to push and pull in different directions, be it country, rock or folk, and to give it a spin that isn't just trying to sound like Flatt and Scruggs."

Jake Leg successfully expands the legacy of the high and lonesome sound to incorporate a range of rootsy feels. McCarthy says the band will be dipping its toes into playing on the road later this summer, with dates in Flagstaff, Arizona, for Pickin' in the Pines, and then at the IBMA Bluegrass Live! festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, in September. After that, it's on to Nashville for a visit.

"Right now, the main priority for us is getting this record out," he says. "The focus has been mostly on our music, but we intend to get to more gigging soon. We're excited about the album release and the eTown show. There will be a set for the Cody Sisters and then our set, when we'll play the full album. After that, we're going to open up the stage to festival-style picking with a bunch of folks. We'll have an instrument check downstairs for people so they don't have to carry their instrument all night, and every ticket comes with a copy of our CD."

Jake Leg and the Cody Sisters, eTown Hall, 1535 Spruce Street, Boulder, 7 p.m. Saturday, May 11. Tickets are $30.