Class Details:
The ARISE Pick is a special moment at ARISE. It’s an opportunity for many of the finest acoustic pickers at the festival to get together and let it rip. This year’s pick will feature musicians from Railroad Earth and Meadow Mountain along with Bridget Law. This will make for a lively session. Come down and git some!
Biography:
The members of Railroad Earth aren’t losing sleep about what “kind” of music they play – they just play it. When they started out in 2001, they were a bunch of guys interested in playing acoustic instruments together. As Railroad Earth violin/vocalist Tim Carbone recalls, “All of us had been playing in various projects for years, and many of us had played together in different projects. But this time, we found ourselves all available at the same time.”
Songwriter/lead vocalist Todd Sheaffer continues, “When we started, we only loosely had the idea of getting together and playing some music. It started that informally; just getting together and doing some picking and playing. Over a couple of month period, we started working on some original songs, as well as playing some covers that we thought would be fun to play.” Shortly thereafter, they took five songs from their budding repertoire into a studio and knocked out a demo in just two days. Their soon-to-be manager sent that demo to a few festivals, and – to the band’s surprise – they were booked at the prestigious Telluride Bluegrass Festival before they’d even played their first gig. This prompted them to quickly go in and record five more songs; the ten combined tracks of which made up their debut album, “The Black Bear Sessions.”
Bridget is a Fiddle player by trade and a founding member of the band Elephant Revival. Elephant Revival has been successfully touring in the U.S., Canada and Europe over the last ten years. Before she embarked as a professional musician she studied the Music Industry at University of Colorado at Denver with an ambition to become an artist manager. Although her talents led her to the stage, her curiosity and enjoyment of the work behind the scenes continues to intrigue her. Recently she has begun managing her dear friend and former bandmate Sage Cook in his new band We Dream Dawn. Her passion for beautiful music and meaningful lyrics has guided her on an exciting journey thus far and continues to shape big dreams for the future!
Meadow Mountain started as a group of friends busking on the corner of the Vail farmers market, and it wasn’t long before they were playing gigs around Vail and Summit counties. They formed initially over a love of traditional and progressive bluegrass music. For the first summer of the band’s existence, they learned as much bluegrass music as they could, digging into bands like The Punch Brothers, Bluegrass Album Band, and Bela Fleck’s Drive band. It was only a year after the band formed that they were hired to be the house band aboard the cruise ship, “The Norwegian Dawn”. There, the band spent a month tightening up their sound and exploring the eastern coast of Canada. Since their return, they have become one of the premier voices in Colorado Bluegrass music. The band has given a TED talk, hosted Denver’s only performance jam, and won the prestigious Rockygrass band competition. Other notable achievements include 1st place at the 2017 Ullrgrass band competition, 3rd place at the 2017 Telluride bluegrass competition, and opening for The Del McCoury Band. They live in Denver, CO.