The boy’s life rolled out like a bleak American black and white film set in OxyContin County, Kentucky, where fiddlers play on the back porch and fentanyl is the currency.
His father died when he was two, his mother remarried but the couple fell prey to meth addiction. The boy left home at 13 and went through his own dependencies.
And that could have been where the film reached an abrupt ending. However, the boy – born William Apostol but known professionally as Billy Strings after the nickname his aunty gave him – is now 32, a successful musician, married with a baby son and our call catches him at home in downtime.
Not that he has much of it these days because guitarist Strings – bringing his band to Auckland in July – is a Grammy-winning bluegrass player who has integrated that traditional country music learnt from stepfather Terry Barber (who he calls his dad) with the heavy metal he also grew up with.
Strings’ shows can be like bluegrass-meets-Grateful Dead as he peels off guitar licks like early Eric Clapton raised in an Ozark holler. This is jam-band bluegrass rock that pulls big and diverse audiences.
“Yeah, sometimes I look out and see a guy in a Slayer t-shirt with long hair,” Strings says in a languid drawl, “or an old white-haired lady enjoying the show. Or some 15-year-old kid just getting into bluegrass. It’s a beautiful thing that they could find interest in my show; that’s pretty cool.”
Strings is modest, relaxed and these days is “California sober” (no hard drugs, just marijuana and psychedelics), to quote his 2023 song recorded with Willie Nelson: “I’ve had years I don’t recall, but I’m told I had a ball, at least someone did who looked a lot like me.”
Strings has come out the other side of a life that could have killed him and has always been respectful of the bluegrass tradition he carries. Repeatedly, he namechecks his illustrious predecessors: Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley, Bill Monroe and many others. “There are so many great artists I grew up on, and it’s sentimental to me because the music reminds me of my dad and my childhood, of when I was a young kid before I knew anything bad. It’s a portal back to before I knew anything dirty about the world.”
The bad’n’dirty certainly came but he went back home to Michigan and his parents cleaned up.
Of as much interest is how this unexpected mix of metal and traditional music came about. “I grew up playing bluegrass with my dad and a lot of folks we were playing with were way older than me; I was just a kid.
“When I was a teenager I just wanted to play with people my age and who were interested in the same things. And the only music folk in my school were interested in was heavy metal. I didn’t like it at first but then started digging it. So I didn’t play bluegrass for quite a few years.”
After failed attempts at starting rock bands, he turned back to bluegrass “where my heart and soul was”. When recording his 2017 debut studio album, Turmoil and Tinfoi, he envisaged a bluegrass jam band – “having some more diagonal lines rather than just horizontal, and putting some jagged edges in the music”.
Lyrically, he doesn’t shy away from the messier parts of his life: Turmoil and Tinfoil included the songs Living Like an Animal and Dealing Despair.
On subsequent albums he tapped into the spirit of the US in decline (Heartbeat of America) and put much of himself on the line, too: “Well, I thought I knew it all till I crashed into the wall” (Know It All).
“I try not to filter too much, and when I’m writing I get out of the way so the songs reveal themselves. If I’m doing my job right I’m fishing these things out of the air.
“A lot of them come from what I went through when I was younger. I’m stuck in the past because I’m one of those people who’s always thinking about what happened back then.”
And social comment has always been in the bluegrass tradition? “Oh yeah, there were a lot of songs about some poor kid with no food, and parents out drinking, dad coming home and beating on the dog … It’s like the saddest stuff you could ever think of. That’s what you sing about in bluegrass, the sadder the better,” he says with a laugh.
“People might not know my unique situation but sometimes when I talk about my stuff in a veiled way it can relate to their own situation.”
After that debut album – hailed by rock and country critics equally – he recorded Me/And/Dad (2022), a record of traditional bluegrass tunes with Barber, and followed it with a live album (Live Vol 1) where he and the band spun out lengthy instrumental jams.
It’s been a fast track into a different world – his new friends Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and Les Claypool of Primus played in the band at his wedding – and his career has taken off, so he’s mostly on the tour bus. Does that explain his recent album Highway Prayers?
“I was collecting these songs and they were about travelling or cars so I thought, ‘This is a highway record’. It just presented itself.
“All the songs were pretty much done before I knew what the album was going to be called but it was a whole concept there, so many songs about the same thing. I’m just following those things until the songs realise themselves.”
Despite his grounding in the past, he remains open to opportunity.
He speaks of Bassekou Kouyate from Mali, whose music he was introduced to by Carlos Santana (“I’d love to jam with those guys, that’s some of the best music I’ve heard in a long time”), and of appearing on Ringo Starr’s new country album, Look Up.
“The Ringo record was already done and I just went in and put my guitar and vocals on. But I met him at rehearsals and at shows, and there was a party afterwards.
“It was good to hang with old Ringo, man. He’s a great dude. He just acts naturally,” he adds, again with a laugh.
He speaks respectfully of more recent bluegrass torch-bearers – The Seldom Scene, Leftover Salmon, Greensky Bluegrass …
None, however, have connected with a younger, more rock-oriented audience like he has. But again, with Southern humility, he talks about the “good community” he now finds himself in.
“Some of those people are now my friends, it went from them being God-like figures for me to now knowing them.
“And,” he pauses as he weighs the importance of what he’s about to say, “I’ve been able to introduce them to my father, who showed me their music when I was a kid.
“It’s a full circle thing. I was lucky to be exposed to great music and am now lucky enough to be able to take it out there.” l
Billy Strings and his band play Spark Arena, Auckland, July 22.
