Athens based folk-Americana band Corduroy Road will play at Canyons Saturday. The show begin at 10 p.m. with no cover charge.

Corduroy Road is based out of Athens.

When The Appalachian caught up with guitarist and vocalist Dylan Solise, he was “hanging out in Kentucky,” getting ready to head north toward Cincinnati.

The Appalachian: As a band, what would you say your purpose is?

Dylan Solise: What we try to do is create honest, American music with a focus on the lyrical content.

A lot of our lyrics are stories or snapshots of people that we know and relationships that are important to us. So that’s kind of what we’re striving for is an honest musical experience.

The music of the folk-Americana band Corduroy Road focuses on creative lyrics to tell stories of people and relationships for an honest musical experience. Photo special to The Appalaachian

TA: Who would you say are your biggest influences?

DS: Personally, I think our influences are probably Neil Young, Uncle Tupelo and, I’m not sure how much this really shines through in our music but, Neutral Milk Hotel is one of my favorites as well, especially when I was just beginning to write songs, that was a big influence on me.

There’s also an influence of old timey and country and bluegrass in our music but sort of in general not really as much specific artists on that.

That’s where we’re coming from is a blend of really different types of traditional American music starting out with folk music and up through American rock and roll and country and blending it all together.

TA: How did you guys get started?

DS: Drew Carmen, he’s the banjo player and other chief songwriter in the band, we grew up together in Kentucky.

We got together, I guess we both had finished college, and he moved back to Kentucky for a summer before he started grad school.

We started hanging out and we would listen to music and go to concerts together, then started playing music together, originally learning traditional songs and covers of other bands and then shortly thereafter started writing our own music.

Drew moved from Kentucky to Athens for grad school at the end of that summer, and we both continued to write.

We traded back and forth over email and through phone calls what we’d been working on.

And whenever we had a chance to actually be in the same place at the same time we would be practice those songs. And so what we’re doing now was born out of that, kind of a long-distance musical collaboration.

Two years ago, I moved to Athens with the idea that we were going to pursue music further and we’ve been doing it ever since then.

TA: What brings you to Western North Carolina? Have you played here in the past?

DS: Actually, it would be the first time in that area. We play through the Carolinas fairly often, but it’ll be our first time up that way.

We’ve played in Chapel Hill a couple of times and Winston-Salem a few times as well, but that’ll be our first time in Western North Carolina.

But, for what we do, North Carolina in general is great because it’s an area where people really understand our type of music which is, like I said, blending the old, traditional kind of music with a more modern sensibility.

With groups like The Avett Brothers coming out of North Carolina, that really has put a spotlight on this type of music for us.

So, at this point we’re just trying to get to as many places in North Carolina as we can and we’re excited to be there and play for some folks we haven’t met before.

TA: Do you think that the region’s history of folk music and its proximity to people like Doc Watson make this a hot spot for country musicians?

DS: Yeah, I definitely think so. I have some friends who play not even bluegrass-based music, but acoustic music that’s similar to what we do where it’s hopefully a more updated take on that sort of thing. But they’ve moved from the bigger cities up north to North Carolina.

Our friend Ian Thomas lives in Asheville now, but he moved from outside of Philadelphia. Our friend Paleface did the same move down from New York to Concord because… there’s such a good support from people of North Carolina for that sort of music.

So you have some transplants but then you have a lot of really great local talent as well.

Whenever you have that much interest from the people and that much creativity from both within and without the state, it really creates a great spot for country or folk-type music.

TA: There are a lot of people who I’ve spoken to recently who feel that country and bluegrass and the like are really deteriorating. Do you feel as though you and your contemporaries are championing a new country movement that’ll hopefully bring it back to the forefront?

DS: Yeah, hopefully so. Any kind of musical trend or genre has its moment, and those sort of things wax and wane.

But, there was a time, probably late 90s going into the early 2000s where  [there] wasn’t really, as in quotation, marks cool to play country music or traditional stuff.

But right now we’re [at] a point where you’re getting a trickle-down from a lot of what happened with the release of “O Brother Where Art Thou?” 10 years ago.

That really put a spotlight on bluegrass and traditional music and influenced a lot of younger people who are now getting to the point that they are creating their own music and were inspired by that to delve into that traditional music.

That’s what we’re seeing now, I think, is the fallout from that.

It’ll hopefully be a boom for this type of music where it will be cool to have the acoustic element of music and not just rock and roll.

We certainly appreciate that too and it has a part of our sound, but this will hopefully lead to increase in listenership.

TA: Finally, if you could play with any musician, alive or dead, who would you pick and why?

DS: One of my favorites is a banjo picker from Virginia named Dock Boggs.

He recorded some stuff in the late nineteen-teens and then the 1920s and it’s just a really odd banjo style.

I think it would be cool to play with him just because, I have no idea. I do not understand how he came up with some of his roll patterns.

It’s an interesting, dark, American music. It’s pretty original.

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