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Crooked Still


A Conversation with Aoife O'Donovan (continued)

PM: I was recently interviewing Happy Traum of Homespun Tapes. And he said he was going to do a video with this amazing cellist named--

AO: Rushad, yeah.

PM: --yeah, Rushad Eggleston of Crooked Still. And I didn't know anything about them. But I jumped on that, and quickly got up to speed on Crooked Still--I mean, you have to be some of the greatest interpreters of old-time music ever, anywhere. I mean, that's an unbelievable outfit.

AO: Thank you so much. It's really going well, the ball is rolling fast. [laughs] It's cool.

PM: Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable to me.

Rushad Eggleston

So tell me a little, please, about Rushad. What kind of a cat is he--

AO: [laughs] That's always the first--every time I do an interview for Crooked Still, the first question is, "Tell me what Rushad is like." That's funny.

[laughter]

PM: Well, it's an outrageous presence.

         guiding our nation's young people

AO: He is. He really is. He's so brilliant.

PM: And then he makes those crazy mugs when he takes photos, too.

AO: Yes, he does. This is why you have to watch the YouTube thing right when you hang up the phone with me.

PM: Okay.

AO: Talk about crazy mugs.

PM: [laughs]

AO: Rushad was unbelievable. He's such a dedicated instrumentalist, first and foremost. The first and foremost, I think. When I first met him five, six years ago, he was just so into the cello, and into taking it to a new level, and reinventing cello. And it's really cool that he has come this far, even in the last six years. He's totally a pioneer, and he's just fucking insane. The amount of stuff that he can do on the cello that nobody else can do. People can do the chops, people can improvise on the cello. But Rushad is his instrument. You know?

PM: Oh, yeah. He owns that thing.

AO: It's such an extension of himself. He owns it. And it's amazing. And then his whole sort of creative input as a person, his whole kind of Wild Band of Snee, his whole kind of extraneous personality, that is totally like Dr. Seuss meets Roald Dahl, meets Frank Zappa--

PM: [laughs]

AO: --really come across in his music also. So it's really a treat to be his presence all the time.

PM: He's got to be a hugely brainy dude as well.

AO: He is. He's extremely smart, and he's extremely thoughtful. And it's funny, when he was in college, he was at Berklee, and I was at NEC, he would practice all day. He really did. And this was before we were really touring a lot. And he would just practice the cello. He'd work. He'd play the cello, he'd write songs for like fifteen hours a day in his bedroom.

PM: Wow. That's what the great people do.

AO: I know. It really is. So he was definitely in that vibe for a long time.

PM: Oh, so he was writing songs all the while, too, that's part of his thing.

AO: Have you heard the Wild Band of Snee?

PM: No.

AO: The Wild Band of Snee is Rushad's other band of all his original music, that I'm in also.

PM: Wow. The Wild Band of Snee.

AO: Now, go to myspace.com/snee. That's how you'll find us.

PM: I'm going to get on that for sure.

AO: Okay.

Dr. Gregory Liszt

PM: And Greg Liszt on the banjo, fabulous.

AO: Greg's awesome on the banjo, yeah. And we've been touring a lot this fall with Noam Pikelny on the banjo.

PM: Oh, right. I saw that on the website, yeah.

AO: But Greg is the member of the band, and Noam is just filling in. But we haven't seen Greg except for two shows in the past like couple months.

PM: Oh, really, because he's been out with Springsteen?

AO: Been out with Springsteen. And he's a pretty unbelievable guy, and an amazing banjo player, and really, again, a total pioneer of his instrument, and really does something different than anybody else does.

PM: So his stand-in, Pikelny, must be really amazing, too. Those are big shoes to fill.

                         Noam Pikelny

AO: Yeah, Noam is unbelievable. It's really cool, since we're sort of on the road so much this fall, to sort of be able to have a change every couple of weeks. That was really cool to sort of get to have a new face, a new ingredient to the soup. It really changes it. So it was really cool.

Corey DiMario

PM: And what's Corey DiMario like, the bass player?

AO: Well, Corey is one of my dearest friends, also. Corey is my guy friend who's practically a girlfriend. [laughs] Corey and I were friends before I was friends with any of those guys, because we were in college together at New England Conservatory. We met in the klezmer band. And he and I were just like immediate best friends. We're both from Massachusetts, and we always got along so well. Corey and I were friends from NEC and Greg and Rushad were friends from another scene. And we kind of all came together, and that's when our band started, with two and two, in a way.

PM: Wow.

                     a captured still

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