Yonder Mountain String Band Encourage Listeners to 'Get Yourself Outside' on New Album
If you're a festival regular, especially at jam or roots oriented festivals, you've probably seen Yonder Mountain String Band or at least seen the name on a festival poster. The band's high energy and extended instrumental jams have made them a favorite to fans of multiple genres. So the band's latest album, Get Yourself Outside, is an appropriate one for a band who primarily makes their living playing outdoor stages, including the ultimate outdoor stage, Red Rocks. But Get Yourself Outside is less an ode to al fresco concerts than an observation on subjects both topical and personal.
Because YMSB is so celebrated as a live act, their albums tend to suffer. There just isn't any way to truly capture the energy of their shows in the sterile environment of a recording studio. That makes Yonder's albums primarily a place for fans to learn the words and melodies to songs that will later become live favorites. Get Yourself Outside is full of these.
The companion songs “Out of the Pan” and “Into the Fire” have made their way into performances for a while now and been well-received. “Out of the Pan” is the kind of rambling instrumental song that YMSB stretches live to the delight of their jam fanbase. “Into the Fire” is a vocal album and a great segue from “Out of the Pan” instrumental, still containing instrumental interludes that are much more in the vein of the band's hyperkinetic “newgrass on caffeine” signature sounds.
“Beside Myself” is the band's pandemic song. Obviously for a band that makes so much of its money and reputation live, the cessation of touring that came with COVID-19 hit especially hard. “When the world stopped turning round, friends it felt upside down. Right became wrong and all those new songs went up on the shelf,” the lyrics go, eventually noting that looking outside in to a grounded musician pulling a day job to make ends meet looks strange “beside myself.”
There's plenty more live candy for fans, from the guaranteed rolling dance of “Broken Records” and its ode to “a song with a groove in the middle of it” to the winking satire of “I Just Can't” and fiddler Allie Krall's change of pace vocals on “Change of Heart.”
If you're a fan, pick up Get Yourself Outside. It's time to get the words and melodies in your head before the band hits your town. If you're not familiar, give it a spin to get the basics of what they're all about and then “Get Yourself Outside” to see them in their true natural environment, live.