Not your father’s bluegrass

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, July 10th.

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Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Three homeschooled brothers raised on hymnals and harmony reinvent bluegrass.

The Luckhaupt brothers make up the band My Brother’s Keeper and their strong, new album—Wartime Cartoons—came out in June.

But WORLD’s music critic, Arsenio Orteza, says that all of the music they’ve released in the last dozen years holds up to repeated listening.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: One look at My Brother’s Keeper’s album covers tells you that you’re not dealing with your father’s bluegrass. Most feature evocative paintings or band photos more in line with indie rock. The group’s latest, Wartime Cartoons, is a photo of what might be a grandfather and a grandson, identically dressed, possibly for church, sitting across from each other in folding chairs. The man holds a large book and appears to be reading or singing from it to the boy, whose posture suggests rapt attention. It has no obvious connection to any of the album’s 15 songs. Instead, it suggests that something interesting and unpredictable lies within.

MUSIC: [Sunday Morning 9:53 A.M. (Page 364 in the Light Blue Hymnal)]

That’s Wartime Cartoon’s shortest song, the one-minute, 10-second “Sunday Morning 9:53 A.M. (Page 364 in the Light Blue Hymnal).” It may be the only song on a bluegrass album ever played entirely on an organ. It’s certainly proof that the brothers at the core of the five-member group don’t mind bending traditional bluegrass rules.

Actually, Joshua, Benjamin, and Titus Luckhaupt call what they do progressive bluegrass. The term allows them some leeway in how they present their music and in the kind of music they present. I asked what progressive bluegrass means to the band. Here’s Benjamin:

BENJAMIN LUCKHAUPT: So you’re using acoustic instruments and not heavy drums and not ever any heavy electric instruments, you’re staying within the confines of the genre, but then you’re bringing influences in from all kinds of different—different fields, lyrically and musically. So you might be really influenced by a rock band, and you’re trying to figure out a way to present those sounds but still using the acoustic bluegrass instruments.

MUSIC: [Take On Me by My Brother’s Keeper]

The group’s 2018 performance of A-ha’s “Take On Me” may best illustrate the approach. My Brother’s Keeper takes an ’80s synth-pop classic and strips it down to mandolin, guitar, fiddle, and bass. More impressively, it features the youngest Luckhaupt, Titus, hitting the refrain’s famous high note.

MUSIC: [Take On Me by My Brother’s Keeper]

The two cover songs on their latest album aren’t quite as stylistically daring. The group has even recorded one of them before, the folk standard “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” But the other, George A. Young’s “God Leads His Dear Children Along,” gets an a cappella treatment that showcases the brothers’ vocal harmonies like nothing else on the disc.

MUSIC: [God Leads His Dear Children Along]

BENJAMIN LUCKHAUPT: You know, traditional bluegrass has four-part singing, but we—you know, we listen to a lot of the Beach Boys, and we try to figure out “How can we incorporate the type of harmonies that they use into a bluegrass context?”

There’s more to My Brother’s Keeper than the Beach Boys and A-ha though. The group’s bassist, Wyatt “Sawmill” Murray, has been known to compose under the influence of video-game music. The Luckhaupts grew up in a Baptist church pastored by their uncle, where they joined their musical cousins in frequent impromptu post-service jamming. They were also exposed to Southern-gospel quartet music. The most significant piece of their story is that, from kindergarten through grade 12, they were homeschooled. Their curriculum included five years of piano, after which each added an instrument of his choice. Joshua Luckhaupt:

JOSHUA LUCKHAUPT: So at about the age of 10, we all then added our bluegrass instruments in—fiddle for me, guitar for Benj, Titus on the mandolin.

Their father, perceiving their interest in music, built song analysis into their studies. In this way, Joshua told me, the band’s foundations were laid pretty early.

JOSHUA LUCKHAUPT: And because we were in front of people at church every week, we learned that element of playing in front of others because after service we were jamming together. A big part of bluegrass is the jam circle, the idea where everybody can gather around and play some standard songs that we all would recognize and everybody gets a turn to take a break, everybody gets a chance to sing a little bit, and you learn a lot from that.

The church-organ and a cappella pieces demonstrate the kind of audacious variety that My Brother’s Keeper has woven into its albums. Consider, for instance, the very title of Wartime Cartoon’s most powerful song, “Smile! It’s the End of the World.” Its lyrics pack quite a wallop too. The song begins by taking aim at a “watered-down Gospel trickling off a pulpit.” It also paraphrases a famous quotation, often attributed to G.K. Chesterton but really from a novel by Bruce Marshall, about what men who patronize brothels are subconsciously looking for.

MUSIC: [Smile! It’s the End of the World]

But like My Brother’s Keeper’s other albums, Wartime Cartoons has light-hearted moments as well. Many of them occur in the title cut, a breezy and original slice of Western-swing meets Gypsy jazz. The song has no lyrics, so what it has to do with wartime or cartoons will no doubt spark discussion–something that all good music does sooner or later.

MUSIC: [Wartime Cartoons]

And if that sounds like your father’s bluegrass to you, you had a pretty cool dad.

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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