#peter rowan

Dharma Blues

Song Review: Max Wareham - “Closer to You”

Max Wareham takes the wide-eyed, ethereal route on “Closer to You.”

On the third advance single from If the Cosmos Were Whiskey … , the banjo picker and ostensive bluegrass player is a blissed-out space cadet singing high in his rage alongside the wispy Lily Sexton over a droning soundtrack of double bass, acoustic guitar, banjo and percussion.

Every day that goes by like an eagle in the sky/only brings me closer to you, Wareham and Sexton sings on the chorus which appears after shimmering, waterlogged six- and five-string solos.

The six-minute mediation follows “I’m Just Along for the Ride” and “If I Had My Way” ahead of the June 19 arrival of Whiskey … .Taken together, they suggest an adventurous, stylistically diverse offering from the youthful Peter Rowan collaborator.

Grade card: Max Wareham - “Closer to You” - A-

Song Review: Sam Bush & Friends feat. Peter Rowan - “House of the Rising Sun” (Live, 2025)

Deep in to a spellbinding version of “House of the Rising Sun,” Peter Rowan grabs everyone’s attention with a haunting, improvised vocal refrain that has the audience in silence and his onstage collaborators staring at him in disbelief.

It was late night at MerleFest 2025 and Rowan was fronting Sam Bush and Friends on the old standard, in a performance just released on professional video. This was a slow version that emphasized the blue in the ’grass and found the octogenarian Rowan - who’d bantered with Bush in faux British accents upon taking the stage - illustrating his undiminished skills.

And in case anyone wasn’t convinced, Rowan held the resolving note for an inhuman amount of time, and the audience cheered one of the last surviving members of bluegrass’ foundational generation.

Grade card: Sam Bush & Friends feat. Peter Rowan - “House of the Rising Sun” (Live, 2025) - A

Song Review: Peter Rowan - “Mississippi Moon” (Live, 2025)

Peter Rowan was in Vermont when he gave his fans the opportunity to bask in the glow of “Mississippi Moon.”

Surrounded by a large band at the corner of country and bluegrass music, where electric guitar and clip-clopping drums wrap themselves around acoustic guitar, double bass, mandolin and banjo, Rowan, seated center stage at the 2025 Green Mountain Bluegrass & Roots Festival, defied his octogenarian status with fluid guitar playing and an acrobatic voice still capable of in-key high notes.

The band, musically tight and adept at straddling the genres, was wobblier at the mic. And while country and bluegrass music tend to lean heavily on precise harmonies, the imperfections serve the slow-moving “Mississippi Moon” well, the rough-hewn vocals adding authenticity to the sad-sack lyrics.

Like Rowan himself, imperfection is underrated.

Grade card: Peter Rowan - “Mississippi Moon” (Live, 2025) - B+

Song Review: Peter Rowan - “New Muleskinner Blues” (Live, 2025)

With a tight, hybridized band behind him, octogenarian Peter Rowan showed he is still a loose vocalist when performing “New Muleskinner Blues” at the 2025 Green Mountain Bluegrass & Roots festival.

Captured on professional video and just released, the number finds Rowan seated and playing a few licks on acoustic guitar. But this song is about Rowan the vocalist rather than Rowan the instrumentalist. And he delivers with entirely in-tune yowls and yodels befitting a much-younger performer.

The band, too, is precise and genre-blurring with bluegrass banjo, fiddle, acoustic guitar and mandolin pairing with rock ’n’ roll rhythm section and electric guitar. And while David Grier’s axe is unfortunately buried in the mix, the “New Muleskinner Blues” is nevertheless electrifying. And it probably would’ve been even if Rowan’d delivered it solo.

He is that commanding.

Grade card: Peter Rowan - “New Muleskinner Blues” (Live, 2025) - A-

Max Wareham & the National Bluegrass Team at Natalie’s Grandview, Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 20, 2025

Bluegrass is a team sport for Max Wareham.

The Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band banjo picker is on the road with his own National Bluegrass Team to support his Rowan-produced solo debut, DAGGOMIT! And on Aug. 20 on Charlie’s Stage in front of some 30 hard-listening music lovers inside Natalie’s Grandview, Wareham and company plopped old-timey music squarely in the present day.

With no amplifiers and an old-school mic at center stage to capture lead vocals and instrumental solos, Wareham, mandolinist and baritone singer Jean Baptiste Cardineau and guitarist and tenor Jack Holland made room for one another in moving about the small listening-room stage as bassist Wes Shuck held things down in back. And when the front line engaged in three-part harmonies on such numbers as the gospel-infused “The Wicked Path of Sin” and the hopeful joy of “Never Grow Old,” which ended the 65-minute performance, the show seemed a band performance as much as a solo gig.

The gregarious Cardineau underscored this feeling with his effusive stage presence, his prodigious riffing and featured spotlights on his own “Booze is the Glue that Keeps Us Together” - If we could be wasted all the time, we’d be in love forever, is the kicker in this deceptively sad song - and the standard “Orange Blossom Special,” which burned the tracks as the temporary frontman kept his promise to “put a hurtin’ on this tiny little mandolin.”

With Wareham in charge, as he was for the majority of the set, the focus was on DAGGOMIT! And though the songs differed in concert owing to varied instrumentation from a new group of players, their vitality and spark remained intact as the quartet glided like stones skipping on a pond from the tender lovesickness of “Highway to Your Heart;” to the wordless intensity of “The Black & Gold,” a paean to the Boston Bruins borne of the COVID-19 pandemic; to the front-porch determination of the Wareham-Rowan co-write “Lonesome Blues, I’m Coming Home.”

The bandleader’s generosity and graciousness toward his bandmates notwithstanding - a trait almost certainly picked up from the collaborative-minded Rowan - this stop in Columbus, Ohio, was Wareham’s show. And with his comrades at his back, the one-time sideman stepped from the shadows to preview what should be a long solo career.

His first central Ohio appearance is therefore unlikely to be his last central Ohio appearance.

Guitarist Adam Schlenker, who’s also played with Rowan, and mandolinist Hayes Griffin opened with a duo set featuring harmonious vocals and lightning-fast licks on such covers as “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” “Kentucky Mandolin” and “The Last Thing on My Mind.”

Grade card: Max Wareham & the National Bluegrass Team at Natalie’s Grandview - 8/20/25 - B+

Peter Rowan and Sam Grisman Project at Stuart’s Opera House, Nelsonville, Ohio, July 6, 2025

When Peter Rowan was on stage, the Sam Grisman Project played a little harder, sung a little sweeter - the musicians deeper in concentration and louder in presentation even as they performed into microphones rather than through amplifiers.

“It’s really a treat to get to make acoustic music in a venue like this,” Grisman said early on during SGP and Rowan’s July 6 appearance at Nelsonville, Ohio’s, Stuart’s Opera House, where Jorma Kaukonen was on hand - he did not perform - to help christen the new home of his Fur Peace concert series.

The Project’s respect for Rowan was evident when the latter unexpectedly joined “the Sam Grisman Projectiles” 40 minutes into their 65-minute opening set and the musicians snapped to, like privates when a sergeant appears. Rowan previewed the still-to-come joint headlining set by leading SGP in a joyful singalong of “This Land is Your Land” and dedicating a decidedly more-dour “Dustbowl Children” to the victims of Texas flooding.

Two days after his 83rd birthday, Rowan remained a supple lead and rhythm guitarist and retained a broad range of vocals from low moans to high yodels. And though he sat out about 30 minutes of the 80-minute main event, Rowan gave everything he had during his stage time.

Rowan and bassist Grisman began part two as a foreboding duo, with the former nodding to Kaukonen and admitting to copping his arrangement of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave is Kept Clean” from the Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna guitarist. Rowan described such blues numbers as antecedents to bluegrass songs, which came along presently on the balladic waltz of “The Mississippi Moon,” on which Rowan took a guitar solo before passing it around the six-piece Project, and Old & in the Way’s rambunctious “The Kissimmee Kid,” which found Rowan seated at the back of the stage, watching and listening as fiddler Shad Cobb briefly took the reins, bending backward as he sawed like an amped-up lumberjack.

Under the direction of Grisman, who cued solos with glances and playfully stared down his bandmates while peeking around his double bass, the Project - Cobb, guitarist Max Flansburg, banjoist Victor Furtado, mandolinist Dominick Leslie (Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway and Hawktail) and a Dobro player who came and went nearly as often as Rowan - shone whether alone or with the man Grisman called “Uncle Peter.”

The quintet/sextet opened the gig with music associated with the bassist’s father, David “Dawg” Grisman, and “Uncle Jerry” Garcia with such tracks as “Waiting for a Miracle,” “Jack-a-Roe” and “Anniversary Waltz,” rendering the familiar melodies with unfamiliar instrumentation and two- and three-part harmonies from various combinations of singers. Leslie took over the band for a reverent take on Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons;” Grisman turned to Ry Cooder’s songbook for a sinewy reading of “How Can You Keep on Moving” to mark this period of American “madness;” and Flansburg, who played back-porch leads all evening, interpreted Garcia the way Garcia interpreted others when the Project played “Rosalee McFall” during Rowan’s off-stage break in the second set.

Rowan, dressed in black, in bare feet and with a wide-brimmed hat, returned for the homestretch energized. “Land of the Najavo” expanded toward the horizon as the elder statesman took a solo before calling for one each from his six collaborators; Grisman’s lead bass is jazzy and nuanced. And when Rowan began the song’s trademark vocal incantation on the outro - trance-like, his eyes closed, head back, voice at the top of its register - the audience responded with a standing ovation.

New Riders of the Purple Sage’s Rowan-penned signature song, “Panama Red” - sung as Ed on the initial verse in honor of the soundman - closed the set proper and the elder-Grisman song “Old and in the Way” ended the evening in harmonious fashion with a nod to the band that united the bluegrass world and the Grateful Dead universe in a marriage that remains strong despite Rowan and the mostly retired David Grisman being the lone survivors of the titular supergroup.

Grade card: Peter Rowan and Sam Grisman Project at Stuart’s Opera House - 7/6/25 - B+