Pedal steel guitar

but i mean boys uh yeah i'll hang out with tim you guys should come to the pool on saturday we'll talk we'll talk um okay we'll talk all right we have a guest today uh james austin johnson you guys know him from saturday night live he's a comedian uh he's from damn he's from nashville teneke bro i you know so so he's definitely shaking off some uh religious ghosts which is what i want to get into

Yeah, but he's going to go toe-to-toe with you on your pedal steel shit, your Roots Americana.

Yeah, he's a Roots Americana category.

He leans way more Dylan than we do, but, you know, still birds of a feather, right?

Americana, kind of sort of hokey, sort of roots, kind of roots kind of thing, sort of Americana.

I

gotta get Pedal Steel into my life and knock the LMFAO out.

We talk about roots a lot, because I know it's a category, but what does it mean? It's a thing that we've explored, because I know what Americana means in my mind, but what do you think pushes something into the roots category? Have y'all,

The bridge came out of it.

That's Greg Leis, beautiful guitar player and pedal steel.

And I heard him play on Katie Lang's An Genue album.

I love that album so much.

It's different, and I like that it's a really personal song.

Amidst the social-political songs, the album needed that relief.

And again, Greg Leis makes his appearance on Pedal Steel, and it's just gorgeous.

And me, like, feeling like here I am again in another failed relationship.

One week, he let me record, because I was into recording, too, and I had a little stereo Sony two-track with a tabletop Dolby unit that had just come out.

And he let me record a week of The Dead, and it was the week Garcia was also playing Pedal Steel with the new Riders of the Purple Sage.

And they were doing two shows a night, which is insane if you think about it.

I mean, two shows a night is work.

You know, that's how strong my love was on that list, as were so many songs.

Because I love writers, and I just love songs.

But yeah, it felt like it could take a pedal steel.

That's my base point.

I honestly don't even remember that solo, because it was one of the songs we didn't play live.

We played Last Resort, and I'd play Pedal Steel on it, but we never played that song live.

For some reason, I don't know why, but...

Henley may have done it in his solo show.

And so you wrote that song, you produced that song, you played all the instruments in that recording.

Yeah, I did everything except for Pedal Steel, but it took me about two days to do all that.

I guess it must have been brewing for a while because that was one of those songs you just get in the studio and it wrote itself and produced itself.

That was easy.

And I'm not sure if they all play every instrument that I, as much as I looked online to see who was playing what, I think there was, I think there's a bunch of, I think it started as a home recording project and that's so people were doing lots of different things.

This album also notably has a cameo appearance by Nashville wizard Spencer Cullum playing Pedal Steel on the song Whale Song.

When we had Michael Eads on the podcast, and you should listen to that episode if you hadn't, we talked a lot about the Nashville scene that isn't the Nashville music scene that is famous the world over, i.e. not the sort of country and western scene.

And YK Records is heavily focused on that scene and music from there.

But anyways, he keeps me straight and, uh, keeps us going all the time.

Sean Altman joined the band a few years ago on Pedal Steel, even though I think we mentioned earlier when we were just chatting a little bit, it was kind of maybe foreshadowing that in 2015, we were first trying to get gigs around town.

We went to Sean's studio and recorded our first demo.

in like a bedroom.

What's one instrument that you wish you could play? Hmm.

Hmm.

Uh, well, I always wanted to play pedal steel.

That's my,

when he was our other guitar player.

The collaborations in that band and now Shannon Bourne and right through the thread, running right through my own stuff is Garrett Costigan on Pedal Steel.

Working with these guys, I think, through collaborations, and I would hope that they would think that too.

And I'm sure they would after a

So I gotta pick my times because usually, you know, you'll have all these artists, you have all these people coming up.

You guys always have cool new strings, you know, guitar strings, acoustic base, pedal steel, and, um, but your booth is always very popular no matter where it's situated at the NAMM show.

Yeah, well we hope so.

No, and then, and don't, don't worry, we're all...

Um-

I pay a lot of attention to that, you know, 'cause I mean, I bought thousands of packs of guitar strings over the years.

And it's like, but, you know, and, and, and when you're laying down your money for whatever instrument you're putting them on, whether, you know, guitar, ukulele, banjo, pedal steel, bass or whatever, 12-string, it's like going, you're making an investment and you wanna make the best choice, and so I always look at the metals.

Mm-hmm.

I'm like, was an early progenitor of it.

Like, we had Petal Steel on, like, Yolk and the Fur going back to, like, 2018.

Yeah.

But I feel like it's kind of...