Billy Strings walked into Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville in 2021 with a Grammy on the shelf and a band that had spent two years burning through livestreams instead of real stages. The record that came out of those sessions, Renewal, released September 24 on Rounder Records, sounds like a band that had been coiled too long finally let loose inside a room that knew how to hold them. The reason it sounds that way has almost everything to do with who was sitting behind the board, and what that person did not bring with him.
Jonathan Wilson is not a bluegrass producer. His credits run through Roger Waters, Father John Misty, and Conor Oberst. He makes records that breathe, that find space inside dense arrangements, that treat the studio as a compositional tool rather than a neutral capture device. Bringing him into a Billy Strings session was a deliberate act of productive friction. What Wilson gave Strings was a collaborator who didn't know the genre's unspoken rules well enough to enforce them. The production credit on Renewal reads Billy Strings and Jonathan Wilson, which matters: this was a collaboration, not a handoff.
The result is an album that is, at its core, still an acoustic record. Strings plays guitar, mandolin, guitjo, piano, and synth. His road band, Billy Failing on banjo and piano, Royal Masat on bass, and Jarrod Walker on mandolin and guitar, forms the rhythmic and harmonic spine, the same configuration that had been playing together through the pandemic's long stretch of livestreams. Grant Milliken, who engineered the additional sessions at Fivestarstudios in Los Angeles, also contributed synth. Spencer Cullum plays pedal steel and John Mailander plays violin as guests. Those additions don't push the music away from its roots. They give the acoustic instruments something to lean against, a slightly different gravity. The pedal steel on "In the Morning Light" doesn't feel imported from a different genre. It feels like the room got larger.
The engineering credits tell part of the story too. Gary Paczosa handled engineering and mixing at Sound Emporium, and Paul Blakemore mastered the finished record. Paczosa is a Nashville veteran whose work tends toward clarity and warmth. The record sounds open, the way a good room sounds when you're standing in it. "Secrets" and "The Fire on My Tongue" push into psychedelic territory, through arrangement and tempo, through the way the instruments circle each other. "Hide and Seek," the album's longest track, carries a chorus built around the last text messages a friend of Strings' sent before his death. The production doesn't dramatize that weight. It just holds it, which is the harder thing to do.
Renewal is a sixteen-track double album, and the scale of it is part of the argument. Strings' previous studio album, Home, was produced by Glenn Brown and recorded at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. It won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, and it made the case for Strings as a virtuoso within the form. Renewal, which earned its own Grammy nominations for Best Bluegrass Album and Best American Roots Performance, makes a different case: that the form itself could expand to hold what Strings actually was. The album peaked at number one on the Billboard Bluegrass Albums chart, making it the second consecutive studio album by Strings to do so.
Strings would go on to make Highway Prayers in 2024 with Jon Brion, a record with twenty original songs and a sound that reached even further outward, eventually becoming the first bluegrass album in over twenty years to top Billboard's all-genre Top Album Sales chart. But Renewal is where the permission was first granted, in a Nashville studio, with a co-producer who didn't arrive carrying the genre's expectations. Wilson heard a band that could do more than play fast and clean, and together with Strings he built a room around that instinct. The record is the proof.
