The Path I Chose to Walk

2021 | Folk

— track 1: “Hold You Up”

Dylan James (Lewis): [“Vines”] just seemed to end up being one of my most requested songs. As far as what it means to me, I guess it was just an analogy that I came up with about trying not to get distracted by things or else the path that you chose to walk would get overgrown with vines. Basically, do what you're trying to do, and try not to get distracted. And honestly, why did we choose it [for the music video]? It's really other people's input. I mean, if you would have asked me without anyone else's input, "What do you think the best song you wrote is?" I probably wouldn't have ever thought it was "Vines," but I just get the most positive feedback. So I thought, "Well, we should put this one front and center.” The [album] title is kind of named after the song. “The path I chose to walk” are lyrics from that song. It [also] just seemed like a good energetic song. And [Morgan] also had a vision with filming at Spearfish Canyon, which is what we did.

Morgan Lee (Carnes): Well, I just remembered that spot that we chose, we just sort of stumbled upon it once for a hike and found all those ferns, and it was like magic. I thought it'd be so cool to film there. And I thought it was too late, but when we showed up to check it out, we still had all those beautiful green ferns. So anyway, it worked out really nicely.

Dalton Coffey: My favorite songs on there are ones that are just the two of them. "Snowglobe," that's one of my favorite songs that I've ever heard. And "Sunshine in the Rain," that was the only song that we cut live, so he played guitar and sang, did two takes and that was take two. I love that song. It was a great performance, I just love what the two of them did.

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Dylan James: So I started playing music when I was five or six on the piano. My mom gave me piano lessons. I sort of liked it. Then I kind of lost interest. I started playing the guitar when I was 16. I had a buddy in high school — in Lead, where we're living now — who played all these classic rock songs, and I thought he was pretty cool, I was like, "I want to play guitar, too." So I started doing that. And then a couple years later, I got into Doc Watson and some bluegrass, and I mean, the rest is history. Once you're into Doc Watson, you're a bluegrass player for life. I played with a few bands starting with Six Mile Road Band and a lot of local bands. And Jami Lynn, I played with her, that was probably my first really busy, professional project for a couple years. Dalton also plays with her currently as well. Humbletown, we've been at this for a couple years and then I also play now with Alex Massa's Good Eggs. I really love Alex. I'm just so happy to have met. Fun, fun, dude.

Morgan Lee: I actually started piano lessons when I was six with my mom [laughs], so I guess we're kindred spirits that way. I loved music for years and I tried everything. I played violin, I played trumpet. All the random things you pick up. And electric guitar and bass. I traded my electric bass for a banjo when I was 19 and then got offered clawhammer lessons a few days later. So that was meant to be, I guess. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the punk scene, which segued into folk-punk for a few years. When I moved to Vermillion, I played in a band called Letters to Friends, which was really a beautiful, little folk-punk project with horns. So anyway, then played with various South Dakota bands, and that's actually how I met Dylan playing with one of my last bands, Hard Travelin'. You came and played as a guest.

Dalton Coffey: I really grew up around music. My dad was a musician. I was born in Arkansas, and I didn't even really realize there was any other kind of music other than bluegrass for a long time. I was probably 12 or 13 before I was like, "Oh, wow. Okay. There's more." And so, I grew up, I was kind of a festival rat. I went to a lot of bluegrass festivals with my dad when I was really little. My dad played shows in Branson, Missouri, and he toured with a bunch of different groups when I was younger. He was a banjo player, three-finger, Scruggs-style banjo player. I started out playing guitar, so I could accompany him. I played that for a long time, I still play guitar, but I picked up the dobro — it's probably the instrument I know the best and am most comfortable with. I started playing that when I was about 15. I saw Alison Krauss and Union Station, Jerry Douglas was the guest [dobro player], and I remember seeing that and I thought, "Oh my god, that's what I want to do. That thing's cool." And my dad's known Alison for a number of years, so we got to go backstage and meet everybody. I got to meet Jerry, I had met Alison a couple times before that, but I'd never met Douglas. And it really changed me. I went home that night — my dad played a lot of different instruments, he kind of tinkered with a lot of stuff, and he just happened to have a dobro that he had traded a guy a pistol for ten years earlier. So I was very fortunate that I could start literally that night. I played for about a year, and then started touring and playing with various bands when I was about 16. Did a lot of playing with a group called the Faris Family, they're out of Kansas. Eddie Faris, who's actually on Jami Lynn's record [Fall Is a Good Time to Die]. He was in Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder for eight years. He also played bass on a couple of tunes [for The Path I Chose to Walk]. You know, my dad would always joke, "If you're in our family, you had to learn to pick something besides your nose or you couldn't be in our family." So when I was a kid, that was always what I heard. I had to pick an instrument. He wanted me to play banjo, but he was such a good banjo player, I didn't see any point in it. I thought, "Well, I'll never be that good, I'll just try something else."

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Dylan James: Towards the end of 2019. I remember being in Winfield, — there's a bluegrass festival in Kansas [Walnut Valley Festival] — and I remember texting Dalton while at that festival, "Hey, we should jam some time. Would you ever be interested in recording?" and that was, I think, September of 2019. So we got at it a few months after that.

Morgan Lee: So we had a baby at the end of December 2019. And then, you know, Covid hit, so we were pretty set back for a while. And finally started working on [the album] again a little bit when our baby was a baby, and it was really hard. And then finally finished, what month?

Dylan James: We did our last day in the studio maybe in October [2021].

Dalton Coffey: Tenbrooks, the name of the studio, comes from an old Bill Monroe song, "Molly and Tenbrooks." It's just kind of a bluegrass homage. I didn't have a name for it and people started asking me. Jami [Lynn] did her record and then I did the JAS [Quintet] records. It's not technically a commercial studio, but we've got the gear for a commercial studio. I've been interested in recording for a long time. I think I got my first recording setup when I was about 15 or 16 years old, in my bedroom. So it's kind of evolved from there. Now it's something I do as a hobby — it's a very expensive hobby [laughs], but it's a lot of fun. I'm pretty selective with projects that I do just because I am limited on time. It's not my main gig. I'm one of those guys that, like, I'll do a project so that I can buy a microphone. I don't pay my bills with it. Well, much to the chagrin of my wife, she's like, "Really?" I do it for fun. I love the intimacy of the studio. I love when you go in and you can just be just you. It's always quiet in the studio, I mean, unless somebody is mowing, it's in the basement of a house. I don't have floating floors, and hanging walls, and everything isolated, so if somebody's mowing or snowblowing, then that's not good [laughs]. I like that you can just create, just grab a guitar and start doing stuff. So I learned to play a lot of different instruments because I like recording so much — so that if I wanted to, I could record a whole song. I don't do fiddle. I won't do that. I gotta leave that to the professionals. I don't need to lose that many friends [laughs].

Dylan James: Every song that we put on the album was written before we started the album. Would you say that's accurate?

Morgan Lee: Yeah. We rearranged in the studio. We both write and sing our own songs and then harmonize. It was Dalton's suggestion to not have the harmonies be quieter than the lead vocals, and have it be more like a blend. I think that was a really cool choice. Then we help each other sometimes with our songs, we give suggestions on lyrics or arrangements. We sometimes spend exhaustive amounts of time working out harmonies.

Dylan James: Sometimes in studio. Surprised Dalton didn't murder us.

Dalton Coffey: It was all good. It was fun. But that's what makes [The Path I Chose to Walk] unique. I wanted to work with you guys because I liked your sound, and I felt like I wanted to try and reinforce it, but not change it. Which is why [I made] the choice of saying, "This is how you guys sound when you sing together," instead of going "Well, Dylan's the lead, so we're going to really just push him right out front.” That just didn't seem right. It seemed more appropriate to be like, "This is the wall of sound that's coming at you. It's these two people." And then everything else just reinforces that.

Morgan Lee: We're going to re-release [The Path I Chose to Walk] in a bigger capacity sometime after our baby's born. Oh, yes! There's another baby. And it's due March 4. So basically, yeah, we want to get new album art, new shirts, and new everything.

Dylan James: We just haven't decided on anything yet with that [rebrand], so we decided to just print 100 albums do a limited release. Let it be known: I suck at organizing and promoting events. I'm okay writing songs and playing guitar and stuff like that, but I am not so good at creating any sort of hype about anything. In fact, I'm really, really terrible at it. Usually I'm like, "Oh, man, I've been telling everyone to come" then get to the show and there's two people I know. So I was like, "I really don't want that to happen for the album release show." So I called my friend Gaynor [Johnson], he actually started the [Sioux River] Folk Festival along with Bill Peterson 40 years ago. Just a really good, old fashioned show promoter. He doesn't even have the internet as far as I know, he just calls people and he sends people postcards to invite them to the show. So I called him and said, "Hey, would you be, by any chance, interested in helping me organize a CD release show in Canton?" And then we played Matt Fockler's festival [Montrose Music Festival], and he was just really, really thankful. So he was like, "Let me know if there's anything I can do for you." And I was like, "Well, would you want to play with us on our CD release show?"

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Morgan Lee: It's hard to make it as a professional musician in South Dakota, and so most people just aren't really doing it. I mean, there's just really limited places to play. Places don't pay musicians what they're worth. One of my biggest frustrations is that everyone wants to hire you for a three-hour gig, and I don't think three hour gigs should be a thing. No one plays their best for three hours. It’s like, "How much time can we get out of you for as little as possible?" And so I feel like, in terms of gigging, it's really hard to make money. You always have to have some sort of side-hustle, like Dylan does lessons. Other people will be in several bands, or have some side-thing they're working on that’s unrelated, like DoorDash or something. So it's hardly viable, I would say, in South Dakota, unfortunately. Dylan's encouraged me to do it more as my thing. I'm just like, "Oh, I don't know if I want to deal with all of that."

Dylan James: Yeah, I would agree. It's really tough. It's not for the faint of heart. Being a professional musician is not for anyone who doesn't absolutely love music, because when it all gets put in the wash, you definitely could easily get compensated more for your time pretty easily.

Dalton Coffey: Yeah, you know, that's tough. I mean, I would agree that it's not easy. And you can't rely on just South Dakota to support you and your music, which is too bad. You can be here, you can live here, and you can be from here, but you really have to look outside. Like Morgan said earlier, they like to travel a lot. I've traveled a lot and I've played music in a lot of different places. I call South Dakota home now, but I'm not from here originally. I would say the biggest thing is you have to educate people. You have to educate people on not only just what good music is, I mean, that's important, but then how to support it. And there's a lot of different ways of supporting musicians other than just either showing up to a concert, or you know, "I follow them on Facebook, so I support them." There's so much more to it than that. And what that is, how to educate, I don't really know. So it's hard to be upset at people — I want to be sometimes. I want to be like, "Why the hell is this place not packed?" This is a great band, or a great songwriter, or whatever. [People] are busy, and they get caught up in, "Well, unless you're playing some huge venue, then you must not be that great." And that's just simply not true. So it's a lot of factors. But if we can figure out a way to educate people, that would help immensely. I do a lot of work with the South Dakota Arts Council and Arts South Dakota. I've produced a lot of films about artists across the state, everything from painting, hoop dancing, the South Dakota Symphony — even they can struggle with getting people to be like, "No, this is a viable thing," and they're one of the finest symphonies in the country. I do think that the last couple of years has really reminded people how important live music is. Most of my friends are musicians, or artists in some ways, and it's been really tough, obviously.

Morgan Lee: I think that women are vastly underrepresented in music in the state, so I'm working on building an artist network to support women and trans musicians, specifically. I'm hoping that this is going to be a way to educate people and bring more people out into professional music. Right now, we don't have a specific name, we're just "Women and Trans Musicians Network." But I'm applying for grants for that, so we'll see. Hopefully it works, because I think it's really important.