After 37 years together - not quite as long as the Rolling Stones but several decades longer than the Beatles - Trout Fishing in America is still finding new ways to make music.
On “Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers,” the new children’s CD due for release Sept. 3, Ezra Idlet plays banjo - not quite new; he’s been doing it for awhile - and Keith Grimwood plays fiddle, which he just picked up within the last couple of years. The duo is joined by the Leverett Singing Club on two songs, thanks to Bernice Hembree of 3 Penny Acre, who leads the elementary school group.
And the album features a new song by Greg Klima and Amy Kucharik, whom they met at the Kerrville (Texas) Folk Festival.
“The broad palette of musical styles is pretty normal for Trout,” says Idlet, who plays guitar and sings. “But what’s really nice about the way we approached this albumis we tried a lot of different things, from a really full sound to really stripped down - a guitar, a bass and two voices.
“And it’s dynamic,” he explains. “A lot of albums released these days are the loudest possible signal you canget. If everything had the same sound value, that would be a big yawn.
“After 37 years of writingsongs and playing music together, we still enjoy the creative process and find surprising things about it,” Idlet adds. “It’s really exciting for us to still be able to go in to the studio and come up with things we had no idea we’d come up with it.”
“I still love working with this guy,” says Grimwood, a bassist who played with the Houston Symphony before he and Idlet met. “And we’re both playing music in ways we never played before.”
Whats Up, Pages 13 on 07/26/2013