A Musical Animal That Puzzles and Delights: The Faux Paws
Dance grooves that stretch out are at the heart of this avante-roots trio’s music
Welcome to the newsletter and written version of the Southern Songs and Stories podcast series. A lot has happened in the two weeks since I last wrote you!
First, we are back on Spotify after they granted my appeal. We are once again available on every podcast platform you could think of (and if you know of one where we are absent, feel free to give us a shout!). We are still talking pro bono territory overall here, but with more of you listening and reading, somewhere north of $0 is entirely possible.
Kidding aside, I am happy that we are back on Spotify, like I am that we are scheduling new interviews. Next week I speak with The HercuLeons. Who is that, you say? It is the new project by John Cowan (New Grass Revival, The Doobie Brothers) and Andrea Zonn (James Taylor, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett). The last time I spoke with John Cowan was near the beginning of this podcast’s history, when he was playing a show with Darin and Brooke Aldridge in Kings Mountain, NC, where we spoke about his extensive history with Green Acres Music Hall. The late Steve Metcalf, the larger than life personality behind most of that extremely unlikely venue’s outsized success, was part of that interview, which was included in our three part series documenting the history of the place locals often referred to simply as “the Acres”.
In early April, I travel to Elkin, NC for the 100th episode of The Martha Bassett Show, a live show (which is also a radio show series) at the Reeves Theater. WNCW added the show to its late night lineup recently, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to talk with Martha Bassett and her show guests, who that night include Wayne Henderson, Hank Pattie & the Current, and Liz Longley. More details on both of these future episodes are soon to come.
Onwards to our current episode, on a band that should be on a lot of folks’ top ten lists come the end of the year. The Faux Paws are a joy to listen to, both live and on record, and are great fun in conversation. Find out more about them in the transcript of the podcast below, and I encourage you to listen to the podcast itself to hear them and their music to get the full effect.
The Faux Paws performing at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival, 08/31/24.
Photo: Jess Maples
[“Bubwa - No Bad Ideas” by The Faux Paws, from No Bad Ideas, continuing as bed]
00:00:01 Joe Kendrick
Faux Paws. Not your typical roots music band. Tell us, for somebody that's not familiar. How would you describe the Faux Paws?
00:00:12 Andrew VanNorstrand
I mean it's it's tough to. It's best if you just listen to, like the, the more we say, the worse it gets, but.
00:00:14 Chris Miller
We really just prefer you listen to it. It's not a lot of things, but it's, it must be something. Must. But we're always just trying to describe around what it is. We've never actually found the words to describe what it in fact is.
Sometimes the natural world and the world of music run parallel in uncanny ways. That was Chris Miller, following Andrew VanNorstrand of the group The Faux Paws, from our conversation at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival in late summer 2024. The name of their group is the first clue to this analogy -- a name that starts like the French expression “faux pas”, but instead of “pas”, “paws”, like animal paws.
If The Faux Paws were an animal, they would surely fall into the grey areas of biological classification. The platypus comes to mind: it is a mammal, but it lays eggs. With The Faux Paws, they are an acoustic roots music band playing guitar, fiddle, mandolin, and banjo, but they add saxophone (a lot), like you can hear on their new song playing now “Bubwa - No Bad Ideas”. Roots music purists could be forgiven for reflexively thinking that the group was laying an egg.
Similar to how common it is to mistake coral for a plant when it is really an animal related to jellyfish, it is easy to glance at The Faux Paws and mistake them for an old time stringband or maybe a Celtic band, at least when they are playing banjo. But then, out comes the sax, and we are not in Kansas anymore.
So, what are they, exactly? We answer that question with the help of more musical specimens from their second collection titled No Bad Ideas, and conversation ranging from their experience playing contra dances, how being unmarketable is part of their DNA, to their relationship with the music of Earl Scruggs. I am Joe Kendrick, inviting you on a musical expedition to capture the ever elusive Faux Paws on Southern Songs and Stories.
[SSaS theme song with VO by Joe K]
The Faux Paws are a trio that is often a quartet, with brothers Andrew and Noah VanNorstrand joined by Chris Miller, and very often now, especially on tour, Zoe Guigueno on upright bass. Having grown up in Ithaca, New York, Andrew and Noah have ties with Jeff Claus and Judy Hyman of The Horse Flies, and all three are deeply influenced by fellow Empire State band Donna the Buffalo. Banjo pioneer Jeff Mosier, of Blueground Undergrass and The Mosier Brothers Band fame, gets credit here as well, especially with Chris Miller, who added clawhammer banjo to his tool box as a young adult, after playing saxophone beginning in grade school in Florida.
The Faux Paws’ gregarious approach to music, evidenced with their multihued melodies, danceable rhythms and variety of styles they weave in and out of, comes as no surprise in light of the aforementioned connections alone. Add to that a small but celebrated club of saxophone players in acoustic, grassy settings like Jeff Coffin from his time with Bela Fleck, Jeremy Saunders from his years with Acoustic Syndicate, and we start to draw a bead on the Faux Paws’ native habitat.
Here is Chris Miller:
00:00:42 Chris Miller
I grew up listening to WNCW and I think your listeners would understand that, you know, genres aren't really a thing, that that we hold in our brains when we when we feel music and when we're influenced by music. I think the music that comes out for us is doesn't hold those lines either.
00:01:04 Joe Kendrick
I love your website. First of all on your website, how it talks about how unmarketable you are and I think I love how you got the, you've got the funny bio and the more like the standard bio.
00:01:11 Andrew VanNorstrand
We're. We're committed to that.
00:01:16 Joe Kendrick
And you can choose between the two.
00:01:17 Chris Miller
Eventually, I would love to make a choose your own adventure bio, like those old books. You know the you know, grade school books and you can be like, if you want this band to be a bluegrass band, turn to page 27.
00:01:26 Andrew VanNorstrand
That's right.
00:01:29 Chris Miller
Don't -- nobody steal that idea.
00:01:33 Andrew VanNorstrand
Yeah.
00:01:34 Joe Kendrick
But you list some press quotes which I think do a fair job of trying to capture the Faux Pas aesthetic so amongst those quotes that I have written down, you're described as unclassifiable.
00:01:49 Andrew VanNorstrand
Hmm.
00:01:50 Joe Kendrick
Imaginative. Nickel Creek vibes. That's a good one. Gotta name check somebody, right?
00:01:56 Chris Miller
Yeah.
00:01:58 Joe Kendrick
An extravaganza of sound. And I -- all of these are not wrong.
00:02:01 Chris Miller
Yeah, they get weirder from there. I mean, yeah, Nickel Creek. The first time I heard Nickel Creek, I think I was 10 years old at MerleFest and definitely haven't looked back. You know I love them as much as I did back then. Think so?
00:02:18 Andrew VanNorstrand
Yeah, I was probably about 10 or 11 at Gray Fox when I first heard Nicole.
00:02:21 Chris Miller
Yeah, same.
00:02:22 Chris Miller
I think we.
00:02:23 Chris Miller
We saw them on the same tour. Maybe or or they're same.
00:02:24 Andrew VanNorstrand
Their tour. Well, we were not on tour, yeah.
00:02:26 Chris Miller
We were not on tour together at age 10, but.
00:02:30 Chris Miller
But the problem is that we're not Nickel Creek and we're not trying to be. It's just something that we collectively share a love for and a lot of other types of music. I am so flattered to hear someone use that and I think that was rather forward thinking to drop the word vibe when that review was written a few years ago because now you can't. You can't go a day and the word vibes.
00:02:53 Joe Kendrick
Right. Well, much more melodic band, Faux Paws, than Nickel Creek. I'll, I'll say that you know you've got. That is, is one of your calling cards really is you’ve got strong melodies and identifiable choruses. You know it's it's, it's there in different forms. Like you say it's going from. A jazz sensibility over to Celtic and into Old Time, bluegrass, but it's never really a one place -- it doesn’t settle in one place.
00:03:26 Andrew VanNorstrand
Well, so there's a like a sort of a under the hood mechanics of our band is that we all have played for a lot of dance music.
Contra dancing square dancing, swing dancing, Cajun dancing, and. So the just the the idea of music that gets people moving that's really like that mechanic of like music that affects people in a physical way is like, that's something that we do take very seriously.
So the, like the genre labels we don't take. We don't spend a lot of time about it, but we we are quite committed to that. Like you know when when we're arranging it. Tune. We're looking for the. We're looking for the thing that makes people want to move and and that's a that is a. That's like an aesthetic or like a function that we're very committed to. And you can kind of find that in most of our most of our arrangements.
00:04:23 Chris Miller
Yeah, and I I appreciate you pointing out melodies because I definitely consider myself a melody guy. I'm in team Melody. So you have to choose.
And yeah, I, you know, saxophone was my first instrument. And I think when melodies have some kind of universal thing to them that can reach people, you know, affect, affect people on a spiritual level. I think there's something to it on like level of how melodies are constructed and what makes a melody that magical thing. You know that we all we all feel that.
00:04:58 Andrew VanNorstrand
Yeah, all of the recognition like when someone recognizes it as a melody, that's what makes it a melody. And. There's something to that.
[“Rockingham” by The Faux Paws, from No Bad Ideas, excerpt]
That’s a bit of “Rockingham” by The Faux Paws, from their album No Bad Ideas.
Contra Dance is an essential element in the band’s storyline, and as you will hear, all three core members have extensive experience playing for these folk dances which date back to English, Scottish and French dance styles originating in the 1600s. They continue in many, especially English speaking countries today, but they continue to flourish especially in places like western North Carolina. I asked about their experience with Contra Dance; here is Chris Miller, followed by Andrew VanNorstrand:
00:05:14 Chris Miller
I certainly didn't before I met these guys.
00:05:19 Andrew VanNorstrand
Well, and you've got you've got such a vibrant scene for folk dancing in in western North Carolina. It's an incredible. Incredible area for that. But yeah, it's a it's a thing that my brother Noah and I have done for a long time.
We we played for many years in a band called Great Bear and we one of one of our favorite gigs that we played very regularly was at Warren Wilson. They would have a a Thursday night dance called the Old Farmers Ball. And we. We started playing that in the probably the like, late aughts or something like that, and it's just a wild scene. Really, really fun.
And yeah, Noah and Chris continue to play dances. I don't play them anymore, but it's a. It's a great thing. It's a really powerful thing as a musician because when you're playing for a room full of dancers, you get, like immediate visual feedback on your own playing like you get to. You don't have to, like, wait to talk to someone afterwards for them to describe how their music affected them like, like you can see how your music in real time and that's, that's an incredible. That's just an incredible thing, and it's, it's hard to get that in a lot of other situations.
00:06:35 Chris Miller
Yeah, the thing that's kind of unique about Contra dancing, I think compared to some other forms of social dance music is that everybody's doing the same thing all together. And when you're up on stage looking out at that, whether it's 100 people or 300, we’ve done dances for 600 people sometimes, and that's a powerful thing. And it feels powerful to the dancers as well to be a part of this collective.
Yeah, I I know that our music is is deeply influenced by that. The other thing about that that I would say is I came into, when I met these guys about 15 years ago starting to play contradance and I had never heard of it but what I appreciated about it is that the dancers don't really care what you call your music or what the what style it is.
00:07:21 Andrew VanNorstrand
It's true, yeah.
00:07:23 Chris Miller
It definitely came from. A variety of influences of folk dance music from English country dance and old time. You know square dance.
But as long as you're kind of checking the boxes of what makes the dance work, they're happy to have an electric guitar solo or saxophone solo, or drums or or whatever. It can be just a fiddle and you know. Or it can be a, you know a 10 piece band so that.
00:07:51 Andrew VanNorstrand
It was a very natural fit for the way we approach making music.
00:07:55 Chris Miller
Yeah. And you guys kind of grew up in that environment where you weren't, you weren't being asked this question all the time. What do you call your music? Because nobody.
00:08:03 Andrew VanNorstrand
It’s dance music And if it makes you want to dance, that's the end. A very short conversation.
00:08:07 Chris Miller
But I would, I would add that your band Great Bear kind of moved the needle a little bit on what was accepted in that world. You know, certainly there were bands that came before, like Wild Asparagus, that sort of moved beyond the traditional, you know. Acoustic music world but, but your family band sort of really kind of blew that wide open and a lot of people have been influenced by that too, so.
Chris went on to note that in this time where short form content dominates the media landscape, the band’s new album has several songs that run well over six minutes long, up to almost ten minutes for the album version of “Rockingham”. I asked how it came to be that they wound up with these songs being that long. Here is Andrew VanNorstrand:
[jump to]
00:14:47 Andrew VanNorstrand
Well, we just weren't done playing yet. Oh.
00:14:52 Chris Miller
I mean it's it's nice to let something sort of develop and unfold in the way that it wants to and some of that is improvised solos that you know, take their time to, to be played and some of it is we we really like to take songs with words, but then kind of merge them with tunes like fiddle tunes. And sometimes that's sort of, you know, there's a verse and then there's a tune, another verse, and then the tune again. And then a solo. I wouldn't call it a jam band record. Wouldn't call us a jam band. I wouldn't call us anything.
But hopefully the people that like jam band music because it sort of shares some of those characteristics would also like this.
00:15:38 Joe Kendrick
I hate to break it to you, but to be marketable. You're gonna have to call yourself something.
00:15:42 Chris Miller
No. Well, that's what we were hoping you would call us. Something. That's why we're here.
00:15:47 Joe Kendrick
OK, that's my assignment.
00:15:48 Chris Miller
That is the media's assignment.
00:15:51 Andrew VanNorstrand
There's one other thing I would say about that, which is just to tie back into what we were talking about earlier about dance music. Contra dances are very often 8 to 10 minutes long. Like, that's a that is a. That's common. Not to say that you can't do them shorter or longer, but that's, that's like your target range. And so all those years of playing for dances, we sort of developed an appreciation for that energy arc, like how you, you know, what your tools are and how you pace an arrangement to sort of.
You know, build in a certain way and and sort of like live in this 8 minute space where you've got enough time with a song to. Like, not like you can let yourself go and sort of live in the song a little bit. Don't have to catch every single note because it'll come by again. Don't worry about it, if you're thinking about something else for a minute, there's another chorus.
00:16:47 Chris Miller
Yeah, the traditional format for that music is like a 32 bar tune, which is, goes by in what, like 45 seconds or something.
00:16:54 Andrew VanNorstrand
So fast.
00:16:55 Chris Miller
You're playing the tune a lot of times, but what these guys would do is. Like take that apart and expand upon it and just sort of be like, what if we just left more space or what if we just didn't play the tune and did this instead?
00:17:10 Andrew VanNorstrand
And then, I think we tried to tap into some of that aesthetic with this record. We just let things let things take their time and lived. Lived in the music a little more.
00:17:21 Chris Miller
Organic.
00:17:22 Andrew VanNorstrand
Yeah, organically, comfortably.
[“Night” by The Faux Paws, from No Bad Ideas, excerpt]
The fiddle is key to every Contra Dance, and I can picture sets of couples in long lines moving in rhythm to the fiddle lines from Andrew VanNorstrand in that song, “Night” by The Faux Paws, which leads off their 2025 album No Bad Ideas.
Being at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival, where the band played multiple sets, I had to ask about their relationship with Earl’s music. Here is Andrew VanNorstrand, followed by Chris Miller:
00:08:44 Andrew VanNorstrand
Absolutely. I so the very first music I ever played was kind of this. It was like a an odd little mishmash of of country western and bluegrass.
It was never like strictly bluegrass and a lot of times actually, I didn't know if a song was a country song or a bluegrass song or just like. A pop song that people were. Covering.
Pardon me in a jam session, but there was a Flatt and Scruggs record that was one of his the IS the Golden one, I forget. The name of it? Golden. It's got a yellow cover.
It was a. My like first exposure to traditional bluegrass was Flatt and Scruggs .
Pardon me. And yeah, just his incredible sense of timing. I think that's the most specific thing about Earl Scruggs playing that has stuck with me is just impeccable, is just impeccable timing. Just a an A mind for rhythm and syncopation and moving forward, always forward. Beautiful playing.
00:09:57 Chris Miller
Yeah, I think I kind of work backwards a little bit from. I mean, I grew up with with bluegrass music around the house and, and family in western North Carolina going to Merle Fest and seeing Doc Watson and everybody there. But I, I kind of got into Béla Fleck and the Flecktones through my love of jazz and then sort. Went back from there and heard. I know I the first time I heard Earl on a recording was that. Bluegrass Planet, tales from the acoustic planet volume 2.
00:10:27 Andrew VanNorstrand
Right, right, right.
00:10:30 Chris Miller
Yeah, yeah. And he's he's on there. And I was one of the last. He did, I think with Bela and I got to see Bela at Merle Fest kind of, you know, play his banjo and do tributes to him but.
You know, I mean. There are few giants of an instrument like like Earl Scruggs. Totally transformed the you know, cultural. Thing that we think of when we think of an instrument like it's completely different from before Earl to after Earl. So we've all been influenced by by that.
00:11:04 Andrew VanNorstrand
One other thing I'd say about that is like so, so we're here at a bluegrass festival and our band plays a bit of bluegrass, but it's, it would be tough to call us a bluegrass band really, but it is something is interesting. Specifically Earl Scruggs.
I mean, Earl Scruggs really created this, played such a huge role in creating this thing, I mean. So, like Earl Scruggs was not like growing up listening to bluegrass because he made it, you know, and and then. So I guess, like, in that in that spirit, it feels like it feels. It feels good to be here, in that spirit of like you are what you make and you make what you are in the same way that he did, you know, in the same way that like he showed up and made a whole new thing. And and we've been playing in that, you know, playing in that pool now for, for decades.
But I'd like to think that he would also appreciate. The aesthetic of justice making. Something new and moving forward.
00:12:17 Chris Miller
Yeah. And this festival is doing a great job at kind of holding that thought. And it's a young festival, but the way they're programming it is so interesting.
It's so much music that I'm excited to hear and just. There's no. Yeah, there's none of this sort of traditional versus non traditional like that.
00:12:36 Andrew VanNorstrand
We felt very welcomed and, and appreciated here and it's been really fun.
[“15 Below” by The Faux Paws, from No Bad Ideas, continuing as bed]
It was indeed great fun to see The Faux Paws play, and to get to talk with them at the Earl Scruggs Festival. No Bad Ideas lands in stores in early May 2025, when they are touring east Tennessee, western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina.
As we hear their song “15 Below”, we close our episode on The Faux Paws, which you can follow on podcast platforms everywhere. You can also check out the written script and transcript of this episode on Substack, where I also post updates and news about the podcast.
Please help us keep going and growing by telling a friend and following this podcast. Also incredibly helpful is for you to take a moment and give it a top rating, and where it is an option, a review! It makes an incredible difference because the more top reviews and ratings we get, the more visible we become to everyone on apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and TuneIn, which means that more people just like you connect with artists like The Faux Paws as well as hundreds more we have featured on the podcast.
This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available at osirispod.com. You can also hear new episodes on Bluegrass Planet Radio at bluegrassplanetradio.com. Thanks to everyone at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival for helping to make this interview possible, and to Jaclyn Anthony for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng who wrote and performed our theme songs. I am your host and producer Joe Kendrick, and this is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it.