Listen to Run Boy Run’s third album, Something to Someone, and you can tell there’s certainly something unique about this progressive bluegrass band. Maybe it’s the way the lush and stately strings dramatically crest and fall, or the way the airy vocals of Grace Rolland (cello) and sisters Bekah Sandoval Rolland (fiddle) and Jen Sandoval (mandolin) blend like soft winds around guitarist-fiddler Matt Rolland’s picking and bowing.
Whatever it is, there is definitely an atmosphere to the Tucson, Arizona–based four-piece’s new album. The band will bring this atmosphere, thickened by blood bonds (the band is composed of two sets of siblings), to SOhO on Sunday, April 10. Joining them will be our friends from Ventura, The Ventucky String Band, who have an upcoming appearance at the Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival in April and European shows in December.
Matt Rolland— brother to Grace, husband to Bekah — credits the album’s sound to famed Bear Creek Studios, a barn in Woodinville, Washington, whose walls have encapsulated resonances from performers such as Brandi Carlile and The Lumineers, as well as James Brown and Modest Mouse. Run Boy Run recorded with a newly deep attention to detail, recording hallways to get a cabaret-jazz-lounge sound, or handpicking precise microphones for each sound. “They really worked with us to produce this very warm inviting sound, and we approached the record by trying to give different songs different textures,” Matt Rolland said.