As the Long Road Festival kicked off on Friday evening, Gangstagrass, a unique blend of raw, twangy elements of bluegrass and the gritty, hard-hitting beats of hip-hop, had the privilege of opening up the ever popular Interstate Stage for the weekend We opened up Long Road Festival, one of the first bands, right early on Friday, and then we high-tailed it over to Shrewsbury Folk and headlined there. So two festivals in one day, it's the Gangstagrass style. We hustle! This is one of the festivals we talk about the most.
Two shows in a day though is a piece of cake for a band like Gangstagrass who certainly do hustle to please their fans I still feel like this, doing the two festivals in a day yesterday was still not as tough as doing Glastonbury and then, and like a late, late night show at Glastonbury. We did Brooklyn and Bristol and then drove straight to Glastonbury. Yes, straight to Glastonbury, did like a couple shows including one like late night one, then we had to fly to Amsterdam and be in Rotterdam to headline the Rotterdam Bluegrass Festival. A very nice day. We didn't leave Glastonbury until what, like four or five in the morning, something like that, and then we had to, you know, get that flight It's like 72 hours, we did like eight performances. We flew KLM to make sure we get there. It was amazing, but, that was tough!
Opening a three-day festival can be tricky when people have the potential to look to arrive later in the weekend or still be pitching their tents, however the crowd certainly showed up for Gangstagrass’ opening set. It was so early on the first day, and then the tent filled up while we were sound-checking and people just kept coming in! They're into the Gangstagrass over here. Yeah, with people wearing Gangstagrass hats and T-shirts. We had not sold any merch at the festival yet, so they were coming from previous shows. There were a couple of cats that had come from previous shows, and we had reached out to them before, and we were like, we're playing come along, and they were like, all right, we'll be there for that. It was very cool just to get there and have a crowd that early and rock out for them.
Gangstagrass features Rench on vocals and guitar; with Dulio the Sluth and R-Son offering MC vocals; with UK banjo and fiddle players Chris and Laura for this trip. The band was initially formed almost twenty years ago now by Rench, who sought to combine bluegrass with hip-hop to create a unique and genre-defying sound. This trip was their second visit to The Long Road Festival and they’re already looking ahead to returning We've done a lot of second time stuff. We just did our second time at a festival in the Czech Republic. We've done multiple shows at a Scottish manor. When you're doing what we do on the level that we do it, it's almost never that somebody's not impacted by it. And they're like, all right, we need to do this again. Maybe next time we need to do a bigger. What happens sometimes with Gangstagrass is the first time they'll put us, you know, in the middle, then the people that have to go after us are in a really tough spot! The festival's like, oh, man, okay, next year we're going to bring them back and put them at the end of the night. When we come back to the Long Road again, we're on that big stage. That thing is, we're at that stage, it's a wrap. It's over. There's going to be a crater over there when we're done. It's going to be insane.
In recent years, Gangstagrass’ crossover sound is coming more common in the country music scene with multiple artists switching between genres and featuring artists on tracks. It's a lot less lonely. Yeah, yeah. So, we want to say you're welcome, Beyoncé. We've been laying the groundwork for a while. Back, we started off in the days when everybody said, you can't do that and now, everybody's doing it.
Recently Gangstagrass teamed up with UK artist Katy Hurt to rerelease her 2019 track Revved Up in true Gangstagrass style She toured with us and she had the song and was like, yo, can we do a little something on it? And I was like, sure, why not? Let's try something! The first time we did it, I just freestyled a little eight bars and it worked. It was like, okay, you know what? Let's actually do this. So, we finally sat down and recorded the whole thing. For that to finally drop, it was pretty dope. She's just a lot of fun, you know, like we had the good fortune of touring with her in 2019 and then just stayed in touch just because, you know, she's a lot of fun to work with. She does great stuff. She's a great voice. It's really the talent that makes you want to stick around with somebody and keep working.
As well as supporting Katy to rerelease Revved Up, Gangstagrass released their own album just two months ago in the form of The Blackest Thing on the Menu, and confirmed during their Friday afternoon set that a deluxe version of the album is on the way shortly. We worked on this album for a really long time and developed a lot of material that we had to try to whittle down to make it fit on a vinyl. We have some more goodies that didn't fit that we're going to put out digitally now, September 6th with the deluxe edition. There’s a few new tracks, a couple alternate mixes on songs that we tried to get them down to three minutes or whatever. But now we can give you the full rollout of the song. Also, the song Mother, letting it just be the banjo and fiddle because when we were in the studio, they just started jamming on that thing. I always wanted to put that out with just that going on and show people what they were doing behind the vocals there. I don't think we'd even talked about it when the album came out. It was just recently, it was like, you know, let's keep it going and get these tracks out. Sprinkle a little bit more on there.
Having now played The Long Road twice, including their unique double header with Shrewsbury Folk Festival, they also played Cambridge Folk Festival in 2023 so the future is very bright for Gangstagrass. We want to grow exponentially. So next year we're going to do four festivals in one day! We plan to achieve that by riding on flying sharks with laser eye beams that can get us around really quickly to all the festivals!!! The thing we enjoy about coming to this side of the pond is that when we're in the States, everything's like so segregated as far as music is concerned. But when we come over to this side of the pond, it's just accepted as American music, you know? And you get such a variety of the audience because, you know, you have these countries situated together in much of the way that for us it's like going from one state to another and it's like you can go from country to country and you get such a mixture of the people in the audience and then they go back to their home countries and they say, oh man, I was in the UK last weekend at this festival and I saw the coolest thing. We got to get these guys over here! It gives us an opportunity to meet new people, encounter and experience new places at the same time.