Roots, Reunion, and a Round of Frankly Vodka: The SteelDrivers Light Up East Nashville

There are sessions that feel like work, and then there are sessions that feel like a gift. The SteelDrivers' appearance at Paste Studio on the Road ?" set up inside Instrumenthead Live in the heart of East Nashville ?" fell unmistakably into the second category. On a December afternoon in 2020, amid a year that had stripped the music world down to its bones, the band arrived with their instruments, their warmth, and a new album called Bad for You ready to share with the world. What followed was one of those rare, unhurried afternoons where great music and genuine human connection managed to make everything feel, at least for a little while, entirely okay.

For Paste Magazine, which had been running a marathon of live sessions ?" the SteelDrivers were the 26th of 28 acts recorded across seven jam-packed days ?" the afternoon carried the easy intimacy of a reunion between old friends. The band and the Paste team had history: a previous session at the New York studio, a legendarily sweaty bourbon hang at Louisville's Forecastle Festival. East Nashville, with its photography-lined walls and its particular brand of creative warmth, felt like the right place to pick up where they'd left off.

A Room Full of Music and Memory

Instrumenthead Live provided a backdrop that was as much a character in the session as anyone holding an instrument. The walls behind the performers were lined with Michael's extensive catalog of live music photography ?" Moon Taxi, Langhorne Slim, Larkin Poe, Molly Tuttle ?" hundreds of images that seemed to watch the proceedings with the approval of witnesses. Vintage cameras and musical knickknacks rounded out a space that felt curated by someone who genuinely loves the culture surrounding the music, not just the music itself.

The SteelDrivers, for their part, vibrated the room in exactly the right way. Their blend of bluegrass architecture and raw, soul-drenched Americana ?" the sound that has defined the band since their self-titled debut in 2008 ?" filled the intimate space with an authority that needed no amplification to convince. The host noted, with audible awe, just how good the band sounded inside those four walls, even before the mix had been shaped for the listening audience tuning in online.

Opening with "The Bartender": Whiskey, Weight, and Moral Ambiguity

The session opened with one of Bad for You's most immediately striking tracks, "The Bartender," a song told from the perspective of the person on the other side of the rail ?" the one who keeps pouring as the night gets longer and the stories get heavier. It's a meditation on complicity and compassion wrapped in the language of a dive bar at last call. The song explores the complicated moral territory of someone who listens without judging, who keeps the glass full as a form of service, and perhaps as a kind of grace. The refrain ?" the bartender's quiet acknowledgment that they don't pull the trigger, they just load the gun ?" landed in the room with the weight of a confession.

It was a perfect opening statement: emotionally loaded, musically assured, and laced with the kind of literary specificity that has always set the SteelDrivers apart from the broader Americana field. The applause that followed was immediate and genuine, the sort that comes from an audience that has just felt something rather than simply heard it.

Medicinal Spirits and the Art of the Mid-Set Toast

In the spirit of their Forecastle bourbon history, Paste had arranged a tasting courtesy of Frankly Vodka ?" a small-batch spirit line that arrived in several flavors, including apple cinnamon, grapefruit, strawberry lemon, and pomegranate. What followed was one of those delightfully unrehearsed interludes that no amount of pre-production can manufacture.

The apple cinnamon, with its organic fruit, ginger, and cayenne, was immediately and enthusiastically declared medicinal by the assembled group. At only 60 proof, it was, as someone helpfully pointed out, eminently drinkable straight from the bottle. The conversation spiraled warmly through vitamin C, antioxidants, metabolism-stimulating capsaicin, and the particular virtues of grapefruit as a vocal health supplement, all delivered with the knowing irony of people who have been on enough tours to understand that sometimes the best thing for a throat before a performance is a little something that has no business being good for a throat at all.

"I feel like I'm singing so much better after drinking that Frankly Vodka. It's medicinal. My medicine."

The exchange was loose, funny, and entirely human ?" a reminder that the best music has always been made by people who know how to enjoy themselves between the notes. A hopeful note was struck by the host that the afternoon's proceedings might still allow for someone to crawl home afterward.

Forty-Two Million Streams and One "Nice Song"

The session's second performance brought one of the band's most significant recent milestones into the room. "I Choose You," the lead single from Bad for You, had, by December 2020, been streamed more than 42 million times ?" a number that prompted genuine delight and a touch of bemused disbelief from the band.

"Shouldn't we get some like little plaque with a penny on it or something for that?"

The song had debuted on the Americana and bluegrass charts and held the number one position for roughly three weeks, becoming the kind of quiet crossover success that speaks to a song's ability to reach beyond genre boundaries. And it earned that reach honestly. Where much of the SteelDrivers' catalog explores heartbreak, longing, and the more shadowed corners of human experience, "I Choose You" is a love song of genuine optimism ?" an active, deliberate declaration that staying is a choice made every day, not merely a default. It acknowledges that love is neither effortless nor inevitable, but argues, warmly and without sentimentality, that it is worth the choosing.

The band described it, with affectionate self-deprecation, as their only nice song. The host thanked them for bringing it. The moment landed with the ease of people who have earned the right to be a little funny about their own tenderness.

Kelvin Dameron: From Kentucky Rock and Roll to Bluegrass Country Roads

Between songs, the conversation turned to the band's current lineup and, specifically, to its most recent addition: multi-instrumentalist Kelvin Dameron, a native of Berea, Kentucky, who joined the SteelDrivers in October 2017. Bad for You marked his first full album with the band from start to finish, and the chemistry he has developed with his bandmates was palpable throughout the session.

Dameron, soft-spoken and genuine, described joining the SteelDrivers as a blessing that expanded his world in ways he hadn't anticipated. Before linking up with the band, he had rarely traveled far from Kentucky and came from a rock-and-roll background that made the deep dive into bluegrass-inflected Americana a genuine learning curve.

"I hadn't traveled far out of Kentucky before I got with these guys, and I had to learn a whole new genre of music. I was a rock and roll dude before I joined this band, and it's been a ride so far. Looking forward."

His presence adds both a grounding continuity and a fresh-eyes energy to a band that has, across several lineup changes, managed to maintain a remarkably consistent sonic identity. The acknowledgment of that continuity was clear and deliberate ?" the SteelDrivers' sound, their bandmates insisted, has not fundamentally shifted, even as the people creating it have evolved.

On Nashville, Old Friends, and the Artists Who Inspire

Framed by Instrumenthead's gallery of Nashville music photography, the conversation meandered into the broader creative community that surrounds and sustains the SteelDrivers. Larkin Poe came up with natural warmth ?" Brent, who has built a parallel career as a producer and engineer, spoke fondly of having worked on the sisters' first two records. Molly Tuttle, whose photograph hung just behind the performers, was praised with the kind of unreserved admiration that musicians reserve for guitarists who are simply operating on a different level.

Tim O'Brien's image on the wall prompted a story about the particular joy of sitting in with Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers ?" O'Brien's beloved western swing comedy band ?" complete with a hat and a pair of glasses and a stage name drawn from the Alma persona. It was, the teller noted, a genuine career highlight.

John Paul White emerged as perhaps the most significant contemporary touchstone mentioned during the session. A long-standing friend of the band, White co-wrote "Innocent Man," one of Bad for You's standout tracks, and came to Nashville's Butcher Shop studio to be part of its creation. His album The Hurting Kind was recommended with the enthusiasm of someone who has listened to it more than once.

"Nashville's chalk full of great music. If you can't find something good to listen to from the area, then you're probably not listening hard enough."

A Song for the Year No One Expected

The third performance of the afternoon arrived with a quiet kind of prescience. "Lonely and Being Alone," a song co-written with Nashville-based songwriter Verlon Thompson and originally inspired by a personal family story, had taken on a resonance in 2020 that no one could have anticipated when it was written. In a year defined by isolation, separation, and the particular silence of houses that had become islands, a song distinguishing between the weight of loneliness and the quiet sufficiency of solitude landed with unusual emotional force.

The song's central argument ?" that being alone is only difficult for those who cannot bear their own company ?" offered something more than comfort. It offered reframing: the possibility that stillness, when accepted rather than endured, holds its own kind of presence. Its closing reflection on waiting patiently, in the company of faith, for whatever comes next brought the room to a silence that felt earned rather than simply sorrowful.

"I think a lot of people, if they get the chance to hear it, will probably relate to it this year in particular."

The host, not attempting to understate the moment, acknowledged that there was not a dry eye in the house.

Back to the Beginning: "Blue Side of the Mountain"

The session closed as the best ones often do ?" by going back to the start. "Blue Side of the Mountain," the lead track from the SteelDrivers' 2008 self-titled debut, was offered as both a closing statement and a kind of proof. The song that announced the band to the world: a piece rooted in the physical and spiritual geography of the mountain South, in the relationship between a child and a father and a piece of land passed between generations, in the particular darkness of a hollow where the sun doesn't reach.

Played in the warm December light of an East Nashville afternoon, surrounded by photographs of a community of artists, with a new album out in the world and a lineup that had found its rhythm, the song still sounded like a beginning. The SteelDrivers insisted that the direction of the band, its identity and its approach, has remained consistent from that first record to this one. "Blue Side of the Mountain" made that case as convincingly as any argument could.

As the final note settled and the applause rose, the afternoon in East Nashville felt complete in the way that only genuinely well-spent time can feel. Three songs from Bad for You, one song from the beginning, and somewhere in between, a conversation about vodka as medicine, Kentucky roads, old photographs on studio walls, and the particular stubbornness of a band that has always known exactly what it sounds like. In 2020, that kind of certainty felt like something close to radical. The SteelDrivers made it feel effortless.