Mustered Courage

The nu-bluegrass quartet has been sailing strength to strength since 2011’s debut LP, and the energetic abandon of the live shows has only increased as the years have gone by. With new single ‘Honesty’ out now and a third album on the way, the band has every reason to rejoice. Yet a chuckling Keeling is constantly apologising for his pessimistic answers.

“I’m really trying to come up with something positive every time you ask me a question,” he laughs. “I promise I’m usually more optimistic!”

We are talking of the hurricane touring schedule Mustered Courage have enjoyed over the last year, with a dizzying array of US performances compared to the reception they get here in Australia. While their fans at home are no less fervent, it must feel odd coming back to much more intimate local audiences.

“It’s not an interesting story, but it doesn’t feel great. The population is smaller here than Texas alone, and we just breezed through there. Three shows and we were gone. In the US, every two hours you’ve got another million people. There’s a readymade market for our style of alt-bluegrass, prog-bluegrass, whatever you want to call it. Seeing these 15,000-strong crowds absolutely raging – not quite moshing, but they’re going nuts for a band that has no drums. “It’s like, five people playing acoustic instruments and you can get crowds that big who just go crazy for it. Here it’s a bit… less.”

Keeling is a banjo man – an instrument that saw a huge renaissance on the heels of acts like Mumford & Sons, but whose presence, he suggests, has started to wane. It’s generally quite an exciting sound – indeed, Steve Martin has an entire sketch built around the impossibility of feeling sad when someone plays the banjo – yet one of the album’s highlights achieves just that. ‘The Flames Of You And I’ is a beautiful, heartbreaking song that, like the majority of the Mustered Courage catalogue, has roots deep in real life.

“Steve Martin plays a three-finger style, which is the kind that I play,” says Keeling. “It’s a lot happier. But that song has clawhammer banjo, and I didn’t play the banjo part for that one. That song has been a point of major contention for me in the past weeks. It was inspired by an ex-girlfriend. I was back in my hometown the other week and I was thinking to myself, ‘Don’t show her the song, don’t show her the song.’ And of course then I showed her the song. I mean, we’re both married to different people now, but we’ve acknowledged that we still have these feelings towards each other that will probably never go away. So it’s kind of heavy. Plus her husband got wind of it and was a bit jealous. But this is another story that probably isn’t that interesting, but it’s a true one.”

I try to reassure Keeling that it is indeed interesting; the true stories almost always are, allowing some glimpse into the life behind a song, a taste of the spark that set each story into motion.

“It’s a dramatisation, and not every line there is strictly true, but it’s real. It’s about real people and feelings. It’s not hard for me to get myself back in that frame of mind when performing it. And it doesn’t make me feel weird, but if you’re a songwriter it helps if you’re a passionate person. It helps to be emotional.”