Introducing The Lonely Heartstring Band

The Facebook page for The Lonely Heartstring Band states the facts succinctly: “We like the bluegrass music. We like The Beatles.” A couple of months back, we caught up with the LHB in the hallways of the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival. The Fab Five were practicing for their debut set at the fest. As you can hear, they were in fine form:

What we have here is a convergence of late and early: late Beatles; early Lonely Heartstring. The LHB consists of George Clements (guitar), Matt Witler (mandolin), Gabe Hirshfeld (banjo), Patrick M’Gonigle (fiddle) and Louis Fram (bass). These guys met at Berklee College of Music in Boston. They had all played in various combinations in and outside of school settings, but last year, they decided to explore their mutual fascination with bluegrass and the Beatles. What started out as a whim quickly evolved into a going concern.

Bluegrassers have been playing Beatles tunes practically since Lennon and McCartney first hit the charts. We’ll review this longstanding symbiosis in greater detail in coming weeks. A distinguishing aspect of the LRB approach to Beatles material is that the band hews as closely as possible to the original arrangements. That’s what makes listening to them so much fun: we all know those harmonies and solos by rote, but when they are transposed so precisely into other voices and instruments we get to hear them anew.

A Lonely Heartstring show isn’t just Beatlemania Unplugged. These guys know their way around bluegrass and always feature at least a couple of tunes from the traditional canon in each set. If you are in the Greater Boston area this week, you can sample the full LHB menu, since the band will be playing at the Boston Bluegrass Union’s Springfest event on Saturday at The Second Church in West Newton. Doors open at 5:30. Verily, it will be a hard day’s night.

Yer Pal— Curly

P.S.— At Second Cousin Curly’s World Headquarters, we’ve been tinkering lately with our recipe for streaming video. We want to give you not just the best quality videos, but also the best possible delivery of those videos. If you find that the video clip above doesn’t play smoothly, try the Vimeo version. We appreciate reports from anyone having problems with playback.

P.P.S.— Hats off to Adam Lawrence for the fine editing job on the video, and thanks to our fine camera team at Joe Val: Phoebe Waldron, Christian Trapp and Bill Politis.