Chatham County Line and Mandolin Orange Play Bush Hall

Entering their second decade as an ensemble, Chatham County Line elegantly reconcile the past and future, tradition and innovation, on the fittingly titled Tightrope. The sixth studio album from the Raleigh-based four-piece follows 2010′s winsome, soulful Wildwood and the career-spanning concert album and film undertaking Sight & Sound, which was released in 2012. Stirring, provocative, and disarmingly poignant, Tightrope was born out of a year’s worth of intense focus, during which the band examined their own legacy while carefully honing new material. All the while, the band’s four members – Wilson (guitar), John Teer (mandolin, fiddle), Chandler Hold (banjo), and Greg Readling (bass, pedal steel, piano) – welcomed spontaneity and the sometimes palpable will of the songs themselves into the process.

On Mandolin Orange’s third release, This Side Of Jordan, there’s a Lightnin’ Hopkins lyric, “If fate’s an old woodpecker then I’m an old chunk of wood.” “I love the imagery that creates,” Andrew Marlin, the duo’s lyricist says, “You just picture death as this woodpecker that lands on your shoulder and starts chipping away at you until there’s finally nothing left.” In 2011 around the release of Mandolin Orange’s acclaimed Haste Make/ Hard Hearted Stranger, Marlin had a near fatal accident. “It was scary,” Emily Frantz, the other half of the North Carolinian duo says, “But ultimately it brought us together during a time when we needed a nudge in that direction.” This Side Of Jordan is a record that’s drenched deep in the traditional music of Southern Appalachia. Since meeting at a local jam in Chapel Hill in 2009, Marlin and Franz have intertwined gospel, folk, and bluegrass but never so seamlessly as now.