There are plenty of bands that begin with the momentum of shared musical goals, but lose steam, or faith, before they’re ever realized. Things That Fly is not an album by one of those bands. It is exactly the kind of album the Infamous Stringdusters got in the business of original music, together, to make: expansive, imaginatively textured and energized by collaboration through and though. Their career is young, yet they are where they want to be.

Five years ago, Andy Hall (dobro), Jeremy Garrett (fiddle), Jesse Cobb (mandolin), Chris Pandolfi (banjo) and Travis Book (upright bass) were skilled young sidemen who had already landed some pretty impressive gigs with the likes of Dolly Parton, Ronnie Bowman, Lee Ann Womack and Drew Emmitt of Leftover Salmon. Book had taken a slightly different route, anchoring a popular jamgrass band in Colorado. But that wasn’t the whole story. They each also had fresh songwriting ideas, wide-ranging musical interests, distinctive playing styles and the drive to do something with all of it. And launching their own progressive acoustic band was the perfect answer.

The ‘Dusters’ first two albums were impressive in their own rights. Fork In the Road proved the band’s chops right out of the gate, earning International Bluegrass Music Association awards for Album, Song, and Emerging Artist of the Year. Following that, The Infamous Stringdusters showcased a solidified lineup and exciting chemistry adding guitarist Andy Falco. But Things That Fly, recorded over ten days at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Haunted Hollow Studios and out April 20, 2010 on Sugar Hill, is a different animal entirely.

What strikes the ear first is the sheer scale of the ‘Dusters’ new sound. Thanks in no small part to their adventurousness and their wise studio partner, co-producer/engineer Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, the Dixie Chicks, Nickel Creek), there are a good many lush, new layers. Explains Book, “I think string bands have a tendency to feel like when they go to record, doing anything that they can’t necessarily replicate 100 percent live is sort of off limits. Instead of saying ‘Well, this is how it sounds when the six of us play it standing
around in a circle, so we’re just going to put mikes up and capture it and that’s going to be it,’ we really got a little deeper in the production aspect.”

Going deeper meant trying new things; Hall added lap steel and Garrett viola and—in the boldest departure from the stringed instrumentation the band is known for—Falco played organ, all of which enhanced the sonic landscape. A case in point: laced with organ, the brooding blue groove of the Falco/Book co-write “All the Same” fairly smolders.

That spirit of experimentation extended to vocals. The band has no shortage of high-quality lead singers in Garrett, Hall and Book, but, for the first time, they brought in a few fine-singing friends: country standout Dierks Bentley, Crooked Still frontwoman Aoife O’Donovan and Americana songwriter-chanteuse Sarah Siskind (who, as it happens, recently tied the knot with Book, and co-wrote two songs with him for the album). “We’ve taken a lot of pride in making up our own music and performing it ourselves—one thing we
can never do is add that feminine element,” jokes Book. “I think the album is better for having that feminine vocal element. And the same thing with Dierks.” Indeed, Bentley’s playful “poor old me” act is spot-on when he trades lines with Garrett during a buoyant cover of Jody Stecher’s “17 Cents.” And though it might in theory seem a minor touch, the reverb splashed across voices and instruments alike—also new territory for the band—changes the listening experience in a big way; With the edges gently blurred, every note feels a little more spacious.

Things That Fly marks the first time the songwriting has been evenly spread around, which, for this band, is the point. “We wanted to make sure everyone had writing input on the record,” Hall relates. “We’d never done that before. I mean, that’s a lot of why we started the band.” That egalitarianism paid off mightily in the quality and variety of the songs. Garrett’s introspective co-write “Masquerade” moves with the sophistication of jazz-pop; Hall’s “You Can’t Stop the Changes” is the bluest of bluegrass; and Cobb and Pandolfi’s “Magic #9” is head-turning with its sprightly unison runs in driving 6/8 time.

“In God’s Country” is the album’s only other cover; Not only did the ‘Dusters transform it into their own propulsive vehicle—they wrote transcendent anthems in a similar spirit: “Taking a Chance On the Truth” (a Falco co-write) and “Love One Another” (co-written by Hall). Muses Hall, “I think bands like U2 and Led Zeppelin influenced us, lyrically particularly. You listen to Zeppelin tunes or U2 tunes; it’s not all just given to you. You get a feeling; you get images; you get emotions.”

There was one more hardly unimportant factor in the ‘Dusters making an album that lends itself to absorbed listening from start to finish, like the great rock albums do. It came about well before they ever set foot in the studio and it went like this: They would rent a house in a scenic locale—Asheville or the Poconos, say—stock the fridge with brain food and beer and hole up for a few days of serious writing and arranging.

“The way we did preproduction was basically the way we recorded, too, just kind of immersing ourselves in it 100 percent, twenty-four seven,” offers Falco. Which, even with the focused effort, wasn’t a chore for them, six dynamic personalities who have an unseemly amount of fun together, on-stage and off. (The album title was suggested by Cobb in a similarly jocular atmosphere, only at Cracker Barrel. “Everybody looked around
and went ‘Ooh,’” he remembers with a laugh. “Flying” referred to the album’s uplifting spirit and the band’s desire to introduce remote-controlled blimps at their shows. Let it be known: Just because they haven’t yet figured out how to pull it off safely doesn’t mean they won’t.)
“A lot of those pre-production sessions were focused on arranging the music, because, for us, with six guys and five soloists and three singers, so much of what makes that music uniquely Stringdusters-sounding is the way that it’s arranged,” explains Pandolfi, who’s also the band’s setlist-maker and de facto tour videographer. “Even though the writing credit might only reflect one or two guys, really pretty much all of those songs were a six-way collaboration.” They spent time working out the parts that would fit and feel the best together. And it shows. Counting solos- per-song may seem an odd way for a band full of virtuosic players to measure their collective musical growth, but hear them out. “Our first record everybody solos on every song,” Garrett laughs. Hall chimes in: “We’ve earned how to meld the sound of the instruments into the song, as opposed to them only standing out during solos.”

The ‘Dusters still tear it up live, displaying considerable dynamic prowess when they use a slow-burning number like “Masquerade” as a launching pad for an electrified exchange of solos all around. But, as a recording unit, they’ve hit their mark on their third album. “I’m proud of the fact that we gave it so much time on the front end that we never had to approach it from a philosophical place as much as pure, creative exploration,” says Pandolfi. “I hope that that can translate in some way and help people avoid having to figure out what this is, and just allow them to listen to it and enjoy it.”

With an album like Things That Fly, collective musical achievement that it is, that won’t be hard at all.