Everyone knows the parable of the five blind men who stumbled across a large beast. The first blind man grabbed a fiddle bow and declared it a tail. The second pulled on a trombone and mistook it for a trunk. The third ran his hand across a washboard and thought it was a ribcage. A fourth got ahold of a banjo neck and uttered the word “tusk.” The last man patted a round djembe drumhead and confused it for a large ear. Together they announced, “It is an elephant!” Silly men: They were actually groping Elephant Revival.
Turns out, the Colorado-based band in this story is heading to St. Louis on October 5. And we thought they had gone extinct! The acclaimed indie-folkgrass group was at the top of the acoustic music world in 2018 when, after a rapturous sold-out Red Rocks concert near Denver, Elephant Revival went on an indefinite hiatus at the height of their popularity as one of the decade’s biggest roots acts.
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Well, pack a bowl, pachyderms! It’s an Elephant Revival revival! The Nederland sextet are back playing select shows and will bring the banjos, trumpets, fiddles, tom-toms, cellos, stompboxes, musical saws, and much more to the Big Top to create their distinctive genre-fluid musical tapestry. We caught up with founding member, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Bonnie Paine ahead of this weekend’s show.
“We’ve been playing to such sweet, enthusiastic people,” Paine says on a phone call from Wisconsin, the second stop of the band’s fall tour. “They’ve been really fun to play for. So far it’s been beautiful.” It’s a brief, fast-paced tour, and Paine says the band chose their dates carefully. “We’re being pretty selective right now. There are a lot of gorgeous places to see, so we picked beautiful places or where there’s family.” St. Louis made the cut.
We’re not far from her original home. Paine grew up in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, at the end of the Trail of Tears. In those days, she started off as a drummer and was given her first drum set when she was just 5 years old. “My dad would have these parties and put my drums on a flatbed truck,” she remembers. “And I’d play these ‘In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida’ drums solo for like 10 minutes.”
Eventually, Paine picked up the guitar and, with her sisters, joined the backup band for red-dirt rock fiddler Randy Crouch (the “Jimi Hendrix of fiddle,” Paine calls him) and, later, played hand percussion in acoustic band the Mighty Kind, where she learned to play the washboard and the musical saw. Around the same time, she found her singing voice, inspired by her mother. “My mom sang around the house all the time,” she says. “She was a huge influence, listening to old Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and singing Irish folk songs and lullabies.”
Bonnie cofounded Elephant Revival in 2006 with a group of Colorado musicians, including fiddler Bridget Law, bassist Dango Rose, and multi-instrumentalist Sage Cook. The band’s 2008 self-titled debut revealed a singular acoustic-based band that made elegant music brushed with sophisticated textures at once fantastical and organic, refined and spontaneous.
Based in the hippie enclave of Nederland, Colorado, Elephant Revival was never a bluegrass band exactly, yet they were incorporated into the Colorado newgrass scene that reaches its annual summit at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. “We ended up playing a lot of bluegrass festivals with our friends,” she says. “We’re definitely not a bluegrass band, but we could play acoustic instruments around the fire. So we mingled and partied with all these acoustic musicians, being social and making music.”
The Telluride circle of influence helped elevate Elephant Revival, but they also forged a sonic template that sounded like no one else. The Revival might have an acoustic guitar driving a folk ballad over a chiming banjo, while the dreamy lines of Bridget Law’s octave fiddle parachute in. Or it might be Paine’s washboard capering with tom-toms and pedal steel on a gypsy hoedown. Or perhaps it’s Rose’s bowed electric double bass anchoring a Celtic reel, as mandolin tremolos dance atop Paine’s djembe cadence. Or maybe Paine sits alone, her wood-fairie vocals entwined with her sonorous cello.
During our chat, Paine also addresses the Elephant in the room: the departure of founding member and singer/guitarist Daniel Rodriguez, which led to the Revival’s four-year hiatus. “It’s been a wild journey,” she says. “Sometimes there are changes within groups, and you’re not really sure how to move forward. We needed to transform, and not playing anymore was always an option, but the five of us really enjoyed playing together still.”
For a time, Paine moved on as a solo artist, playing with guitarist Daniel Sproul while continuing to collaborate with members of Elephant Revival, which led to the band’s recent resumption with Sproul added as an official member. “We decided to step back in and see if it’s something that feels positive and is something that we feel like sharing with the world,” she says. “Everyone seems really happy with this new chapter.”
Paine is particularly excited that the addition of Sproul has added some electric textures to the band, a sonic evolution in the group’s sound. “It’s been fun to lean into those electric dynamics with Daniel,” she says. “I really like the quiet part of our sound, so I never want to stray from that. Daniel has a lot of sensitivity toward our soft side, so he helps keep space in the arrangements even though we can take it to an electric place. So it feels like we’re always growing something.”
Some of those new aural explorations have led to some adventurous covers, like the band’s version of Tool’s “Schism,” which Paine had the group learn as a surprise for her Tool-loving nephew’s 18th birthday. The cover has since become a viral hit, racking up millions of views online. The Revival has also taken to covering Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar,” another curveball for a folkgrass band, one inspired by Paine’s father. “My first concert he took me to was Pink Floyd,” she says.
It’s been eight years since Elephant Revival’s last album, 2016’s Petals, and Paine says that the band is workshopping new material on the road. “We have some new things that we’re playing and some that we have yet to play,” she says. “Right now, we’re just having fun watching the songs unfold as opposed to recording them and getting them out that way.”
As for choosing St. Louis as a stop on this tour, Paine says, “I love that place. My really incredible cousins are out there. I used to go visit my aunt in Missouri. She was one of my heroes. So I love that area. It just has a cool vibe. It feels like it’s got a story.”
How lucky for us that Elephant Revival is set to add to that story at the Big Top on Saturday.
