Billy Strings walked into Blackbird Studios' Studio D in January 2019 with a band that had spent the better part of a year playing two hundred shows and sleeping in a van, and the first thing producer Glenn Brown did was make sure you could hear all of that. The approach was deliberate. Traditional recording techniques were set aside in favor of what the sessions described as a rock 'n' roll approach, built around old compressors and vintage microphones. The band counted off and played. The tape caught what happened next. That decision, more than any single song or guest appearance, is what makes Home sound the way it does.
The record was cut in two weeks across two Nashville rooms. Six days at Blackbird Studios' Studio D, then an additional week at Zac Brown's Southern Ground Nashville. Brown, who had produced Strings' 2017 debut Turmoil & Tinfoil, handled additional recording, mixing, and mastering back at his GBP Studios in East Lansing, Michigan, with Strings himself credited as co-producer. The core band was the same four people who had been locked in together on the road: Billy Failing on banjo and vocals, Jarrod Walker on mandolin and vocals, Royal Masat on bass and vocals, and Strings on guitar. They tracked together in the room, which meant the interplay you hear on the record is the interplay they had already built through months of live performance. The studio didn't manufacture it. It just caught it.
What Brown brought to those sessions was a producer's ear for texture. He ran Strings' vocals through a 1950 Bell PA head designed for electric guitar, which gave the voice a particular grain that sits differently against acoustic instruments than a clean signal would. On "Guitar Peace," Strings picked up a 1940s Martin 000-28 that was sitting at Blackbird, set up a drone on Brown's harmonium, and recorded the piece in a spontaneous solo pass. Brown also brought a Buchla CM100 synthesizer into the sessions, used on "Taking Water," "Highway Hypnosis," and "Guitar Peace," alongside vibraphone on "Away From the Mire" and sitar and string arrangements on the title track. These were not ornamental additions. They were the producer and artist testing the outer edge of what the music could hold before it stopped being bluegrass.
The guests were chosen with the same care. Molly Tuttle contributed background vocals on "Must Be Seven," arriving at the session to take photos and ending up singing on the track after Strings asked her on the spot. Fiddler John Mailander and tabla player John Churchville also appear on the record. The tabla, particularly, is worth noting: it sits underneath the acoustic strings without displacing them, and the fact that it works is a measure of how much room Brown had created in the production. A tighter, more conventional bluegrass mix would have made that instrument sound like an intrusion. Here it sounds like something that was always there.
Home was released September 27, 2019, on Rounder Records, and charted on the Billboard Bluegrass Albums chart for 77 weeks, reaching number one. It also hit number one on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart and debuted at number eleven on the Emerging Artists chart. In March 2021, it won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards. Those numbers matter less than what the record actually accomplished, which was to demonstrate that the acoustic tradition and studio experimentation are not in opposition. The flatpicking on this album is as precise and technically serious as anything in the lineage that runs from Doc Watson through Tony Rice. Strings' right hand is not compromised by the Buchla or the Bell PA head or the string arrangements. If anything, the production frames the guitar playing more clearly, because the surrounding sounds give the ear something to measure it against.
Strings has said he thinks about how the Beatles made records, about the freedom the studio gives you to try anything. What is interesting about Home is that the thinking behind it is not so different from what Bill Monroe understood when he first put a band in front of a microphone: that the live energy of people playing together in a room is the thing you are trying to preserve, and that everything else is in service of that. Brown and Strings found a way to honor that instinct while refusing to be limited by it. The record sounds like a band at full velocity, caught in a room, with a producer listening closely enough to know when to add something and when to get out of the way.
