The Core: The High Hawks
photo: Michael Weintrob
Leftover Salmon’s Vince Herman and Railroad Earth’s Tim Carbone circle back to their “ramshackle country-rock” band for a new studio set, Mother Nature’s Show.
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Origin Stories
Vince Herman: Years ago, I was in a band with [keyboardist] Chad Staehly, Great American Taxi, and our bass player and drummer in The High Hawks, Brian Adams and Will Trask, were also in that band. Chad and I have been good friends for a long time—he was our archivist for Leftover Salmon, and he put together all the live tapes he could find and built an archive for us. We became good friends through that period and then Salmon took a hiatus [in 2004] after the death of Mark Vann— we were just having a hard time keeping it going. I went out on my own and did some solo stuff, and Chad proposed getting together a band of friends from Boulder for a benefit show. With Jeff Hamer, Reed Foehl, Eben Grace, Brian Schey and Jake Coffin, we did what we thought was going to be one show and it was really fun, so we decided to do some more. We did that for a year or two and then, when Salmon got back together, it became more complicated to do the Taxi stuff. I was wearing myself a bit too thin, so I retired from that one, though the band did keep going with Arthur Lee Land taking my spot.
Over the years, we’d see each other at festivals here and there, and it was the same thing with [Railroad Earth fiddler/guitarist] Tim Carbone and [Horseshoes and Hand Grenades guitarist] Adam Greuel. I’ve just always had a really good relationship with those guys and thought it would be fun to play some music together. The first thing we did was create some time in the schedule to do a run of Colorado shows [as The High Hawks]. Before we did that run, we got together for a couple of days and learned a whole bunch of new material so people would get something completely different. And in a couple of days, we worked up an album’s worth of material—maybe a little more with the covers. We had so much fun playing the shows, so we played some more and we were lucky enough to be able to get some funds to make a record. We worked on a lot of songs that we brought in individually. There might have been one or two that we collaborated on, but, in two days, we got a whole bunch of new material together.
Tim Carbone: Chad got in touch with me and said, “Adam Greuel and Vince Herman have been writing some songs together.” Of course, that didn’t really quite happen. [Laughs.] But they were getting together and bouncing ideas off each other. And then he said, “We’re gonna put together a couple of shows, and we’d like to have you come out and be a guest soloist.” And I was like, “Hell with that, man! Put me in the band!” That’s how I got in on it. I persisted.
So we got together at Vince’s house up near Nederland, Colo., where he was living at the time. At that point, I had one original and Vince, Adam and Chad all had a couple of originals to put into the mix. And it became obvious that this was actually a band. This wasn’t just a one[1]or two-off. We said, “This has mojo and something’s going on here.” So we went out and did some gigs, and five or six months later, we wound up in the studio working on those songs that everyone had brought in for our self-titled record. They weren’t collaborations, but we all collaborated on the arrangements. We had already played them a bunch of times— although, we didn’t know them well enough for it to be anything but a cool experience in the studio because they blossomed into something else. By then, I had written a new song. I believe both Chad and Adam also came in with new ones.
Hard Working Americans
VH: Chad and I are great brothers and I love working with him. He’s a hardworking guy. He built a house, raised a family, started a distillery—all while doing his thing and managing Todd Snider. Chad can do more than any one human I’ve ever met. Working with him was always something I enjoyed and The High Hawks thing just kind of made a lot of sense in that perspective.
As usual, there was no plan when we got together, but we did emulate The Band. We just love that vibe. Stylistically, there’s no litmus test for it. But it all kind of ends up having this thread moving through it.
Salmon never played with The Band, but I did get to hang with Levon Helm once at a Little Feat anniversary celebrating Waiting for Columbus. I had a great time with him. He was an amazing cat—a really warm individual and funny. And I played his barn after he was gone.
From the first gig with The High Hawks, it just felt fantastic. We do different kinds of stuff than in our other bands. I play a lot of electric guitar, which is something I never do in Salmon, and it’s really exciting to pull different stuff out of yourself musically with some good friends. This band is kind of about finding some spots to make a different type music than with the other ensembles we are in. We’ve definitely done that with The High Hawks.
TC: We’re big fans of Todd Snider. We’re big fans of old country music, and we are big fans of Wilco. So if you mix that all together into a pot, you might get an idea where we’re coming from here. We also [have some connections to Neal Casal, who took his own life in 2019]. Chad worked with Neal in Hard Working Americans. And I’d known Neal since he was 18 years old, when he joined Blackfoot. Blackfoot was from my neck of the woods, and my old band, the Blue Sparks From Hell, were buddies with those guys. When Rickey Medlocke left the band and they were looking to get another guitar player, all of a sudden, this young kid from Jersey—who is 8-12 years younger than all of them—comes in and its like, “You’re in good hands. This guy’s really good.” He put out a record on the same indie label that my old band Kings in Disguise put out a record on. And then we did shows together, and we just became good friends. I was blown away when he decided to take his own life. I didn’t think that would ever happen to someone like Neal. It just goes to show you.
I play three or four songs on electric guitar with Railroad Earth, but back in the day, I played pretty much electric half the time with the Blue Sparks From Hell and the Kings in Disguise. I’m a self-taught musician all the way around— the only thing I took lessons on was drums, amazingly. So I’m not a music-school guy playing a million notes. I’m not a flat picker. But I can confidently say I can make more happen with 10 notes than most guitar players can with 50 because it’s about the emotion. It’s about the tone. It’s about your phrasing. I hammer this home to bands that I produce. I say, “When you’re taking a solo, it’s not about you showing off. I could care less what you can do. I’m more interested in what you have to say.”
If you’re telling a story and you’re connecting with people emotionally, then you did the job. And so we have all of that going on. Adam’s not an experienced electric-guitar player. Vince is not an experienced electric guitar player. I’ve been playing electric guitar for 30 years, but I’m not a guitar god or anything. We’re sort of a ramshackle country-rock thing, like Flying Burrito Brothers meets The Rolling Stones. And we’re not concerned if we push it right to the edge and, every once in a while, fall off. We’re just having a good time and we’re making sure everybody else has a good time.
Somewhere in the Middle
VH: We recorded the new album, Mother Nature’s Show at Pachyderm in Minneapolis, and it never got above 20 degrees the entire time we were there. We started on New Year’s Day in 2023, and we were there for about a week. There’s a house there that we all stayed in—I really like making records where you get to stay there and just concentrate on the record with no outside distractions. Being that it was hovering around zero degrees for most of the time, it kept us focused. Of course, Greuel had to go fishing every morning, even in that cold. But, he’s a freak like that. It was a really fun process, great studio—Nirvana made a record there back in the day. We had the songs figured out before going in and it was a great process—we have four producers in the band after all.
We worked up a good bit of the material out on the road, but about half the songs were new. We just brought them to the studio, learned them and figured out what to do with them there, which was a great process. It kept everything fresh. It creates a good feel, and there’s a ton of heads up listening.
TC: Before we went into the studio, we sent around demos of songs that we’d been separately working on. I usually write with other people; I have a couple of folks that I write with on a regular basis here on the East Coast.
One of the tunes I brought in I had written in 2001, “Somewhere in the Middle.” I wrote it with a really brilliant songwriter, Tad Wise. He played in this little Tibetan folk-rock band the Dharma Bums, and they had been invited to India to play for the Dalai Lama at the World Festival of Sacred Music. And I just happened to play with the bass player, Mark Dann on a completely random gig that I wasn’t even supposed to be playing. I was doing sound and brought my fiddle to maybe sit in and he was there filling in for a bassist who was sick.
Mark is a great musician and a brilliant engineer. He did all the Fast Folk recordings and all the early Dar Williams and Shawn Colvin stuff. So at the end of the gig, he said, “Hey, man. We really like your playing. You want to come to India?” And I was like, “What the hell?” Three weeks later, I’m on my way to India with these guys I didn’t know. And one of the guys was Tad. He and I hit it off really well, and he just came out to my house a couple months after we got back from India, and we banged out a few songs. Two of them ended up on Tad’s album and then “Somewhere in the Middle” has been sitting around for a long time, waiting for the right moment for me to bring it out. It’s a thinly veiled Buddhist song. After we played for the Dalai Lama in his home in Dharamsala and spent two weeks there, I became totally immersed in Buddhism and I became a Buddhist. It’s almost a Clash song—certainly nothing I would bring to Railroad Earth— so I never had a place for it until High Hawks. It’s almost a palate cleanser.
Happy Coincidences
VH: The album’s travel theme was a happy coincidence, but it makes sense for a bunch of guys who travel around the country constantly to make a travelogue, with the occasional love song and a lot of nature thrown in there. We’re all pretty woodsy folks, so it makes sense to have some of that in there. It’s a mental picture of our states of mind going into the record and a document of the time.
I wrote the song “Somewhere South” with Aaron Raitiere and Ben Chapman, some friends in Nashville. It was a hot summer day but somehow we decided to think about winter. I had just moved from Colorado to Nashville, so I guess I was thinking about the difference between living at 9,000 feet in the mountains and being in Nashville. It was working for me—I’m done with winter. That song just came out of that. I love Aaron and Ben; they’re amazing cats. Another song I wrote with Chris Gelbuda and Shawn Camp was a love song about going to a show with your love and feeling that good music surging through you, “This is What Love Feels Like.” “Shine Your Blues” I wrote with my buddy Paul McDonald and Matt Warren. It’s a blues rant about keeping it positive. It’s just a simple tune about keeping your head right and staying in the light.
TC: My two songs are the ones that don’t fit the mold, fortunately or unfortunately. Most of the songs I write are either about something that’s going on within my life or I’m commenting on something that’s going on in the world. “Temperature Is Rising,” in my opinion, is about the poisonous nature of social media—what it’s caused to happen in our country and what it’s led to, which is Trump and perhaps even Trump again, which will be the destruction of democracy. Unfortunately, our country is broke; it ain’t getting fixed. This is what we’ve got and we’re gonna have to learn to live with the fact that 40% of the people in this country are out of their minds. So I wrote a song about that. But at the end of the song, it basically says, “The only way we’re getting out of this— and the only way we’re gonna be whole as a society and as a community—is if we get back to relying on each other and trusting each other.”
Side-Project Extra Curricular Activities
VH: I’m still living in Nashville and writing every chance I can, but going out and doing about 40 dates in October and November with my solo band, Salmon and The High Hawks, there’s been a bit of a writing dry spell the last couple of months because I’ve been so busy on the road.
I spend some time in North Carolina as well, but whenever I get back to Nashville, I have someone that sets up co-writes for me. It’s a great town for doing that. There’s so many people doing creative things in Nashville all the time, and it’s not necessarily country stuff that’s happening. It’s a really diverse town musically.
I try to keep each band’s repertoire totally different. I’ve got buckets of tunes these days, so I just played the ones that I thought fit The High Hawk’s vibe for the guys and some worked; some didn’t. We just kind of tried them on for size and took the ones that stuck.
TC: Last year, I produced a Christmas song with Lenny Kaye at my studio, which is in this old hotel in the Delaware Water Gap. I first met Lenny in 2006 through his late wife when we were both working the polls here. When I’m home, I’ll volunteer to work the polls for elections. And she did two cycles in a row. The first time, we were so busy that I never got around to knowing exactly who she was. And then the next time, I noticed that her last name was Kaye and I said, “Are you related to Lenny?” I had seen him around because he essentially lives in the neighborhood. And she says, “Oh, yeah, I’m his wife.” Then a friend of mine said, “I’m doing this Christmas benefit. Do you think you can call him and see if he’d come and participate?” So I called him, and he said, “I love Christmas songs. Matter of fact, I just wrote one.” And he sang it a cappella over the phone to me. I said, “Get your ass to my studio right now. We’re gonna record this.” He allowed me free rein to produce it, and it came out for Black Friday Record Store Day on a double-sided 7-inch. And so since then, we’ve been working on other stuff, and I’m gonna be making his first solo album since 1986. He’s a great guy and a fucking international rock star.
