Trent McCausland

My path to bluegrass is probably not the norm (that is, if there is a normal way to bluegrass). High school consisted mostly of punk, ska, reggae and some classic rock. One of my favorite bands was always Social Distortion. The singer, Mike Ness, is an advocate of old country. In about 1999, he was doing a solo tour with a different band. It was way more country than punk and I loved it. At the record store one day, I sneaked over to the country section just to see what was there. I stumbled across an album by Steve Earle who I'd previously heard on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack that I owned. I loved his song Ellis Unit One from that album. So I walked up to the counter with the Train a Comin' album and took it home for a listen. Approximately two notes into the first song I realized a whole new world had just opened up to me. When my truck got stolen a few weeks later my first thought was of that CD left in the CD player. About this time about I bought my first guitar. The first song I learned was "Goodbye" from this album.

Steve Earle played that year at UCSD for the Landmine Free Tour with Emmylou Harris. Other artists included Guy Clark, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Gillian Welch with David Rawlings. I was blown away by David's playing. (To this day he's still my favorite guitar player). I hung around after the show to meet Steve Earle, which was great. But I also talked to Gillian and David. They told me about a soundtrack they were working on for a movie called "O, Brother Where Art Thou". Around this same time a friend, with the same interests in music, bought me a ticket to see Alison Krauss. This was the first bluegrass concert I went to (although she's sort of on the fringes of bluegrass). It was amazing, particularly her voice and Jerry Douglas' Dobro. Then, Steve Earle released The Mountain, a hard drivin bluegrass album with Del McCoury, the reigning king of bluegrass. It's pretty much all down hill from there. I took all my old CDs to Lou's Records in San Diego and traded them in for bluegrass and alt-country stuff like Tony Rice, Lucinda Williams and David Grisman. This is the kind of music I wanted to play. I practiced the guitar incessantly.

When I moved back to Utah in 2000 I started taking guitar lessons from Jessica Wilkinson. She was incredibly patient with me and gave me a lot of invaluable experience. She and I still get together weekly to jam. Through her I found out about Mark Geslison's folk music program at BYU. I think I've taken his class four times now. In one of those classes I met Hilary and Karin, in another one I met Cassie. I ran into Cassie at the mall one day and we talked about getting together to play some music. We asked Karin to join us. That was in the beginning of 2003. The three of us played together for a few weeks and then Karin invited us to go play with Hilary and friends. These jams gradually evolved into Miles To Go.