Shelby Means

Shelby Means  

Self-released

The singer, songwriter, and radiant standup bass champ Shelby Means and her mates in Molly Tuttle’s Grammy Award-winning band have come to perhaps not the end, but certainly a crook in their Golden Highway. Tuttle has announced the formation of a new band, which means that Means and the others are pursuing new avenues.

Judging by every gleaming song on her self-titled debut solo album, Shelby Means will not only land on her feet, she will dance her way to stardom, and soon. Because on this album, Shelby means bluegrass, and Shelby means business. Serious, beautiful, bluegrass business brimming with uncommon exuberance and heart.

Born in the bluegrass state of Kentucky, raised under the big sky of Wyoming, and currently a Lowcountry South Carolina beach town resident, Means offers 13 songs that mirror natural, American life experiences with artful detail. She wrote eleven of them, four with her husband Joel Timmons of Sol Driven Train, and she sings them in a voice full of gorgeous personality, nuance, and range.

Means also thumps that bass with spirit and lowdown knowhow, and, as she sings in the snapping “Suitcase blues” in which she laments road life away from her husband, she is “kicking ‘grass with some of Nashville’s best.” Here, that lot includes guitarist Bryan Sutton, banjoist Ron Block, dobroist Jerry Douglas, mandolinists Sam Bush and Means’ brother Jacob Means, fiddlers Michael Cleveland, Billy Contreras, and Golden Highway’s Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, plus a variety of vocal accompanists including Timmons, Ronnie McCoury, Tim O’Brien, and Molly Tuttle. A Nashville A-List that delivers. Means’ friend Maya de Vitry, ex-leader of the Stray Birds, produced the album after helping Means sift through her journals of jotted lyric ideas. Their search resulted in a stellar batch of songs, and de Vitry’s production causes them to burst like Roman candles.

Means wrote “Streets of Boulder” during her college days, the barreling blast of bluegrass all these years later the ideal launching pad for this album. Two songs in, she sings Lady Gaga’s “Million Reasons” with such romantic, touching soul in her voice, it seems the song was tailor-made for her. The band plays stunning music, echoing Gaga’s original rendition, but with mountain-style elegance by way of Sutton, Douglas, Block, Jacob Means, and Keith-Hynes’ strings.

In the traditional bluegrass rave-up “Wild Tiger Style,” Means reveals a sassy edge, and in “Fisherman’s Daughter,” an ability to conjure a featherlight but stately folk adventure. The lovely “High Plains Wyoming” is sung and played in a way that offers the luxury of being there. So does “5 String Wake Up Call,” but this time Means reveals her farm girl childhood, her dad waking her with his banjo. Her song “Farm Girl” similarly celebrates family and America.

“The Old, Old House,” by award winning country songwriter Hal Bynum, has been covered by the likes of George Jones, Bill Monroe, and the Grateful Dead. Means’ version takes you straight down a dusty country road. But overall, this new road that Shelby Means chose to travel is paved in glistening diamonds. Shelby Means deserves every one of the multitude of awards it will most certainly be nominated for.

Tom Clarke for MAS

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