Tangleweed is a band of five forward-looking musical reactionaries from Chicago, Illinois. While the band’s instrumentation is standard bluegrass, their music is anything but. With a repertoire both broad and deep, one listener described them as sounding like “a band playing on a pirate ship off the coast of New Orleans in the 1920s”. Their three CDs have garned critical praise and worldwide airplay, earning the band invitations to appear at major festivals and high-profile venues around the country.

Tangleweed formed in the summer of 2004, with a nucleus of Ryan Fisher on banjo, Paul Wargaski on bass, and Billy Oh on fiddle. To that core they added mandolinist Kenneth Rainey, whom Fisher had met a year earlier at a bluegrass jam, where they were both admonished for “not being bluegrassy enough.” Rainey in turn brought in his Logan Square neighbor Scott Judd on guitar to complete the quintet.

The band’s first shows were at a coffee house on the far North Side of Chicago, where they played without the benefit of amplification, blasting old time tunes over the din of noisy and largely disinterested patrons. By virtue of knowing a lot of songs and being able to yell louder than the others, Rainey assumed most of the vocal duties. His talents did not go unnoticed, as an early listener advised the group to “get a better singer.”

Undaunted, the band established their folk cred with their first CD, Just a Spoonful (and Other Folksongs of Rural Cook County). Engineer Bob Weston recorded the band live to two track using vintage analog equipment, a setup modeled after the early field recordings that inspired the band. The group recorded thirty songs in a single day, working in a makeshift studio on the second floor of a Logan Square two-flat. The discs’ raw “warts and all” qualities attracted listeners seeking respite from the slick, overproduced records then dominating the bluegrass world. While the band slogged through shows in Chicago bars, copies of the disc were garnering prices of 75 Euros or more overseas.

With Just a Spoonful, the band established a trademark style: CD art modeled after old Folkways record jackets, and tongue-in-cheek liner notes. Though Just a Spoonful is far and away the band’s most traditional record, comprised largely of bluegrass and old-timey standards, there were hints of what was to come, with covers of Duke Ellington tunes, a nod to the Dillards, and raucous ragtime raveup on the title track. The Chicago Reader’s Monica Kendrick wrote, “You know you’ve found a good CD when you can’t decide whether to wax more rhapsodic about its music or its liner notes.”

For their second disc, the band paired with engineer Mike Hagler, best known for his work with Billy Bragg and Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue recordings. The group worked with Hagler to retain the live energy of their first disc while expanding their sonic pallet. They also continued to expand their repertoire: the disc covers a broader swath of American music. The 14-song CD features Tangleweed originals mixed with classic bluegrass, old-time country, and Irish tunes. The songs run the gamut from up-tempo rockers (’Hard Times’, ‘With a Bottle in My Hand’) to delicate ballads (’Leaving of Liverpool’), with hot jazz (’I Found a New Baby’), mountain music (’High on a Mountain’), Irish fiddle tunes (’Sir Lucas De Somerville’), and classic bluegrass banjo (’Black Eyed Susie’) all covered with equal skill and passion. The band’s vocal chores were more widely distributed as well, with banjoist Ryan Fisher and guitarist Scott Judd joining Rainey in turns at the mic.

The disc, “Where You Been So Long,” picked up where the first disc left off, generating praise from critics and airplay all over the world. The band also saw their music on television when their recording of Ola Belle Reed’s “High On a Mountain” appeared on the soundtrack for the PBS series Roadtrip Nation. The band began to travel farther from their Chicago base. Though the band was threatened with firearms on two consecutive trips to Wisconsin, they continued to travel, venturing as far as Hawaii to perform.

Tangleweed has just completed their third full-length CD, “Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals,” which marks the latest stage in the group’s development. While the instrumentation remains 100% acoustic, the instrumentation is more varied, with the addition of instruments such as the erhu, autoharp, tenor guitar, and accordion. Their repertoire continues to expand as well, adding mountain murder ballads, Irish rebel songs, and classic rock to the mix. The result is the band’s most far-reaching effort to date: fourteen songs representing the past and future of string band music. Tangleweed combines high-energy performances with impeccable musicianship and a wide-breadth of influences to create a unique sound that is simultaneously modern and old-timey. The band has been hailed in reviews worldwide as a welcome breath of fresh air for lovers of stomping string band music and high lonesome harmonies.

Check out Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals or the list of upcoming events and hear for yourself.