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 The SteelDrivers (from the album Bad for You available on Rounder Records)
The music percolating within The SteelDrivers is an audio version of the little engine that could as the Grammy award winning outfit return with a new vocalist. Kelvin Damrell takes The SteelDrivers back to sonic origins when the lead vocal driving the group came from co-founder, Chris Stapleton. The sound of Soul dominates the stories of Bad for You over a bed of Bluegrass picking and strumming. A confession comes with pride for a life lived as a brother and husband in “Innocent Man”, the Soul Bluegrass of The SteelDrivers surrounding the words with dark clouds of sound that swirl and twist over the storyline. Bad for You takes a deep breath of fiddle before launching into “Glad I’m Gone” as The SteelDrivers listen to “The Bartender” tell his story, fire off a flurry of notes that percolate under the sad of “When a Heart Breaks”, and toast midnight in “12 O’Clock Blues”. Twenty-five-year-old Kelvin Damrell grew up in Berea, Kentucky a rocker, foregoing the Bluegrass that ran like mountain streams through the hills, preferring Cinderella to the front-parlor picking he heard on his grandparents couch. He was the new kid in the core band of Tammy Rogers (fiddle), Richard Bailey (banjo), Mike Fleming (bass) and Brent Truitt (mandolin), and for Kelvin Damrell, it was the playing of The SteelDrivers that hooked him, he immediately heard that ‘everybody in the band were virtuosos, and I’d never seen that side of Bluegrass. I thought it was just that old foot-stomping traditional stuff, so I was surprised to hear this. And I knew I had a lot of work to do to keep up’. Bad for You opens with its title track slowly peeling the melody from a persistent march of strings supporting promises of love trouble. The SteelDrivers play a Country waltz with “Lonely and Being Alone” and put a rumble on the vow to “Forgive” as Bad for You lets the music do the talking in instrumental “Mama Says No”. Listen and buy the music of The SteelDrivers from AMAZON Visit The SteelDrivers website for more information
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