The String Cheese Incident

The String Cheese Incident

590 thousand albums sold. Performances in front of half a million fans worldwide in 2004 alone. 150,000+ unique web visitors each month. Prestigious festival gigs, like New Orleans Jazz & Heritage, Telluride Bluegrass, Newport Folk. Sold out headlining shows at Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheatre, New York's Radio City Music Hall and San Francisco's Warfield Theater. A New Year's run that annually sells upwards of 20,000 tickets. A thriving, innovative family of businesses including a record label, in-house ticketing, merchandise and travel agency. What attracts hundreds of thousands of fans to The String Cheese Incident? Mainstream critics have been slow to embrace them. But the fans know that the five guys who make up the group play their asses off. They know that String Cheese has spent more than a decade making innovative, genre-defying music, and that each member has brought their own unique approach to the band's now five studio albums and countless live performances.

Bill Nershi, who works out his passion for bluegrass on acoustic guitar, often follows lyric paths that reveal a fascination with psychological themes. Bassist Keith Moseley brings a love of hooks and concise songwriting evident in the way his playing serves the song. Violinist/mandolinist Michael Kang possesses an uncanny ability to quickly master instruments that befits his interest in intricate rock compositions. Drummer/percussionist Michael Travis balances innate spirituality with a keen ear for all sorts of rhythms, from ancient to electronic. Keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth, the most intensely trained musician of the group, embraces the heavy bottom of funk and jazz.

Five distinctly different voices, all of them with equal say. In most bands, there's a leader, sometimes two, but democracy rules in The String Cheese Incident, both in their music and their business. It's not some happy, hippy collective, either. A band is like a marriage, and it takes enormous compromises to make it work. How many years has it been to this day / We've known each other in so many ways / Sometimes it seems so hard to agree / I don't even know if you're listening to me / It's time for the Big Compromise Maybe too many heads are better than one, Bill Nershi sings on Big Compromise, a song from One Step Closer, the band's fifth studio album, that seems to embody the conflicts and resolutions of this five-way partnership. Everyone has a stake in the music and the organization. It can be difficult. We often struggle to make fast and easy decisions, Nershi says. The Big Compromise that Nershi sings about is an inherent part of the ever-changing sound of The String Cheese Incident, reinventing what they do at every show and on every record. With every album we realign ourselves, not because we didn't like what we did before, but because there are so many faces of the band and we want to show them all, Nershi says.

The Big Compromise that Nershi sings about is an inherent part of the ever-changing sound of The String Cheese Incident, reinventing what they do at every show and on every record. With every album we realign ourselves, not because we didn't like what we did before, but because there are so many faces of the band and we want to show them all, Nershi says.

Because of their egalitarian nature, bringing in outside producers for their studio albums has become critical for SCI. On One Step Closer, they co-opted Malcolm Burn (Bob Dylan, Chris Whitley, Emmylou Harris, Daniel Lanois), a wiry, energetic Mephistopheles who became the unofficial sixth String Cheese member during the recording of the album and coaxed the group into a catharsis. Burn co-wrote, arranged and played on some of the tunes; he also uprooted the band?s artistic conflicts and used them to uncover The String Cheese
Incident?s genuine songwriting voice all five of them.

Percussionist Jason Hann, who started touring with the band in the fall of 2004, was also recruited to join the band in the studio and add his dynamics to some of the songs. We invited Jason on the road with us to help keep the live dynamics fresh, Moseley explains. It was great having him in the studio for a few songs, too. For the first time on a String Cheese studio album, each SCI member sang and contributed at least twosongs, and each sought out co-conspirators to help them developtheir voice: such as Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist who collaborated with Kyle Hollings worth on 45th of November, and renowned Nashville songwriter Jim Lauderdale, who co-wrote Big Compromise and Farther with Nershi and with whom Keith Moseley penned Brand New Start. Our roles in the band are evolving, Moseley says. This time we all got off on the experience of crafting songs, and Malcolm was good at helping us develop our individual voices and still find a forum for them within the band unit. Lyrically, the songs reflect what's happening with each of us personally.