AJ Lee & Blue Summit w. Chicken Wire Empire

AJ Lee's musical foundation runs deep, she explains as de facto leader of the group. We met when we were young kids, she says. We definitely chose each other as our chosen family band later on in life, but in many ways it was naturally just that from the start. It was like one of those late at night moments, she continues. We were sitting on a trailer at Grass Valley during the annual Fathers Day Bluegrass Festival held in the Sierra Nevada foothills when someone said all of us right here were a band now. We kind of didnt take it seriously but we were like okay well be a band! And thank goodness they became one. Their first performances were local, small venues, cafes, restaurants, coffee shops where they played for multiple hours honing their set list and learning shared musical vocabularies. Now as they criss-cross the country performing hundreds of shows each year to larger audiences you can sense the intention they had back then to make music together not just for aspirational reasons but because its fun and its all they want to do as young musicians. Currently made up of Lee on mandolin, fiddler Jan Purat, and guitarists Scott Gates and Sullivan Tuttle the band carries that youthful festival-parking-lot energy with them still today but at the same time theres a genuine ease and confidence to their music making. This is not the bluegrass of ambitious musicians intent on industry success this is music made first for the joy of making it and primarily made for each other. Its part of why as they ready their third studio album City of Glass their first label release out July 19th via Signature Sounds their product feels mature and fully realized while deep in the Blue Summit pocket. City of Glass is a slow burn album remarkable when considered alongside records released by their peers in recent years. Lee is most interested in discovering themselves their own music and sonics and textures truly their own. So when they went into the studio to track City of Glass and its gorgeous twelve tracks they once again forsook the roads most traveled by looking to their local California community for collaborators that also feel right at home in their chosen family band. They brought in Lech Wierzynski of the California Honeydrops to produce; they tapped Bay Area steel guitarist Mikiya Matsuda for a couple of tracks; plus they had Californian banjo player instructor and Fathers Day Fest veteran Luke Abbott lend five-string to a number.