Freeway Prayers, the major-label studio debut from Billy Strings, is a popping out social gathering for the bluegrass wunderkind. Not that Strings essentially wants an introduction. Over years of touring punctuated by a handful of acclaimed information on the legendary Americana imprint Rounder, the Michigan native has developed a quicksilver type that has earned him widespread attraction and trade recognition: Residence, his second file, received the Grammy for Greatest Bluegrass Album in 2021, proper across the time his fleet flat-picking discovered an enthusiastic reception amongst jam band freaks. With out ever abandoning his roots in conventional bluegrass, Strings ventured into different musical kinds, demonstrating his facility with rock, metallic, and blues, sounding equally comfortable with bluegrass legends Béla Fleck and David Grisman as he’s with rapper Put up Malone or jam titans Phish.
Strings didn’t lengthen invites to high-profile company to seem on Freeway Prayers, though he did select to enlist one outstanding collaborator: producer Jon Brion, whose intensive resume consists of classics by Fiona Apple and Kanye West, together with ornate movie scores for Paul Thomas Anderson. Brion’s experience lies in utilizing the studio as a canvas, a talent he imparts in refined methods to Strings, who provides painterly nuance to his bluegrass. The expanded palette, together with the file’s rambling double-album size, displays a musician who’s comfortable to experiment—however the important thing to the success of Freeway Prayers is that he by no means roams too removed from house.
The picturesque detours are essential to the album’s character, although. Brion brings sly studio wizardry to Freeway Prayers, looping bong rips and ignited lighters for the rhythm observe of “MORBUD4ME” for a stoner joke that’s sufficiently subtle to slide beneath the radar of a much less discerning listener. An identical trick is pulled on “Leadfoot,” the place the pair samples a classic Chevy, its growl subsumed right into a charging getaway anthem. Solely a handful of tracks had been recorded in Los Angeles with Brion on the board, but his steerage and occasional instrumental contributions lend the file sweetness and a refined sense of cinematic scope. “Gild the Lily” glides by like a candy summer season breeze, whereas the jailhouse story of “Seven Weeks in County” has its plight undergirded by ghostly strings wailing within the background.
Strings’ time within the studio with Brion impressed the guitarist to go to his house turf to assemble “Stratosphere Blues/I Imagine In You,” a mini-suite the place echoey vocals and keyboards mix right into a pulsating astral lava lamp that then offers strategy to an aching, direct plea for connection. This duality captures the album’s aesthetic in miniature: All of his exterior explorations drove Strings to show inward, to use what he’s realized to bluegrass, the music he loves most.
