Sierra Hull is living her dreams — and yours and mine

Bluegrass musician Sierra Hull has one of the best biographies I’ve ever read of a musician. She was a child prodigy on the mandolin who played at the Grand Ole Opry with her hero, Alison Krauss, when she was ten years old. She told me she was eight when she picked up a mandolin for the first time. Since then, she’s honed her craft and become one of the most gifted musicians in her field.

Her last album, Weighted Mind, came out in 2016. It’s a beautiful, bluegrass album that shows her talents as a musician and singer/songwriter. I was drawn in by the beauty of her harmonies and the interplay with her vocals and instrumentation.

Sierra Hull is on tour now, including a stop on Saturday night at the Triple Door, plus playing with the Portland and Walla Walla symphonies shortly after that. I spoke with Ms. Hull by phone last week.

How’s your tour going?

It’s been going really well. It’s been one of the most fun tours I’ve done in quite a while.

Glad to hear that! I saw that you’re playing with a full band. What’s the setup for that?

So it’s bass, electric guitar, and saxophone. It’s the lineup we’ll have in Seattle.

I’ve read a lot about your story and it’s so fascinating and inspiring. Especially how young you were when you had you started to make a name for yourself. Can you talk about how you got interested in the music?

Sure, yeah well I picked up a mandolin when I was eight. My dad was always interested in music in general but really fell in love with bluegrass music around that time. He always loved it as a kid, and kind of got back into it when I was a little kid.

I grew up singing in church and hearing music that way. So I was kind of sang and my mom has a beautiful voice. But it was really when my dad started getting into bluegrass that I decided I wanted to be a musician, and that was what I decided I wanted to do for a living. So I got a fiddle for Christmas. It was too big for me to really play, it was a full size, and that’s when my family members went in together and bought it for me. And so the mandolin and the fiddle are tuned alike so my dad, who was learning mandolin at the time, said “Well I’ll just show a tune on the mandolin and we’ll eventually get you a smaller fiddle.”

And so he went ahead and showed me my first tune on the mandolin and then I just absolutely took to it and fell in love with it right away.

So this all kind of happened sort of quickly then, you picking up the instrument at 8 and then at 10 playing at the Grand Ole Opry?

Yeah it was kind of amazing how quickly everything happened, for sure.

So can you talk about what you’re working on now? Do you have another album coming out, or coming up soon?

Yeah so I have another album that’ll be coming out later this year. It’s almost done actually I’m going to spend the next couple few days finishing it. So it’s definitely almost there, and we’ll be playing a lot of music, we have been playing a lot of the new music on this tour. Which is part of what’s been fun about the tour is just having new music with a fresh lineup. It’s just an exciting time.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Like how it’s going to be different from the last album or who you’re working with or whatever you want to say?

Yeah sure. Well so I decided this time I wanted to co-produce with a lady here in Nashville that I’ve worked with a little bit. A engineer here in town named Shani Gandhi and we’ve just had the best time. So we’re co-producing the record together and I wanted this album to really feel like an extension of the last album because in many way it is. But it’s quite different in that there’s more instrumentation, there’s more strings, there’s a little electric guitar. I played multiple instruments. I wanted this album to really be more of a studio album. So all of the albums that I’ve recorded in the past have been, not that they were live, but more live-based albums. So everything that was there could be replicated live. With this, I went back in and I laid a lot of my own harmonies and played multiple instruments. Things that I can’t necessarily do 100 percent live but I just wanted to treat the songs the way I felt like they should be treated in a studio setting, and working with Shani has proving to be a great partner for that kind of a record.

How do you think your song writing has evolved over the years? From starting out really, really young and then as you’ve gotten older?

Well, I think that naturally as you get older you start to learn more and more about yourself and what about it means to try and make music. Early on, as musicians, rightfully so we spend a lot of time trying to learn from our heroes and kind of mimic the things that they do so to speak.

So I can’t tell you how many albums I’ve poured over by my favorite mandolin players and singers and songwriters and tried to almost copy what they do. Not because you want sound exactly like them, but as a launching pad for discovering who you are you have to start somewhere and learn from the greats. And so as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to take all the things that I learned from years and years of studying other people. And of course that’s never ending, I’m still learning from heroes and other musicians all the time.

But I think you start to discover more about yourself and what it means to sound like yourself and what it means to be honest as a musicians and a singer and a songwriter, and feel like you’re trying to tell your version of the truth, whatever that may be musically. For lack of better way to explain it. So I think the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve learned what that means to try to be honest and be okay with that. Be okay with the vulnerability that comes with that.

I noticed that you’ve got two really special shows coming up that are in the Northwest, although not in Seattle. Although I’m sure that the Triple Door show will be special also, but when you’re playing with symphonies…In Portland, I think? Can you talk about how those came to be, and how you’re working on those and what’s different versus your other shows?

Yeah so the show at the Triple Door is a regular performance. Regular in that it’ll be all of my original music, of course we’ll play some covers and stuff too, but it’ll just be a show with me and some great musicians putting on a performance as usual.

The shows in Portland and Walla Walla will just be me playing solo with the orchestras, and it kind of came to be because a few years ago I was contacted by this guy, a composer named Ofer Ben-Amots and he’s the chair of the music department at Colorado College. And he had written a piece for mandolin and clarinet, so it’s a concert piano for mandolin and clarinet, and he was looking for somebody that might be down to play this piece for a couple performances. So reached out to me, and I heard the piece and thought “Wow, this would be a great challenge.”

I mean I grew up playing mostly bluegrass music, so my background was that I grew up learning to play by ear, and it’s a very improvisational form of music. And you know, as far as playing with a sympathy, or being able to learn. I read music very poorly, so it’s a good challenge for me to have 25 minutes of music that I have to read and go through and lean note for note, that I didn’t write, somebody else composed. It was something that I had always kind of dreamed of doing at some point, and it just seemed like the perfect opportunity to get my feet wet with doing something like this.

And it’s going to be really exciting. I think it’s a beautiful piece of music, the concert keynote, it’s a three part movement. So kind of a main focus of the evening, but then we’re also going to do a song off of my upcoming record. There’s a song that will be on the new project called Sunday and we have that scored for the sympathy to perform with me. And then we’re also going to do a bluegrass medially. So Ofer has quite a background in Klezmer music. So he basically composed an intro, a written intro for a bluegrass medley.

So we’ll play a couple of the fiddle tunes that I grew up playing. So that’ll be fun too, to hear some bluegrass fiddle tunes with the symphony. So it should be quite a diverse evening of music.

How did it come up with these two places in the Northwest with you being from Nashville?

You know, I was asked to do this, Ofer the composer, has a relationship with the longtime friendship with this guy Yaacov Bergman, who’s the conductor for both of these symphonies. So it’s the same conductor for both symphonies. So they just kind of worked to get this piece on the program there for this season and asked me if I’d be willing to come play it.

I know I’ve taking up a bit of your morning, a probably a little bit too much, but I wanted to ask what else do you want people to know about before I have to go?

Well, I always loved coming to Seattle, it’s one of the coolest cities I think we get the chance to travel to, and I’m excited. I think this will be the first time I’ve been at the Triple Door, so I’m excited about that. And yeah, this is just going to be such a fun evening of music.

My friend Sam Reider is opening the show, he’s a great piano player, and accordionist. So he’s going to be opening and also sitting in some with me. So it’s going to be just a super fun band, super fun evening of music. So yeah hopefully we’ll see some friends out for the show.

Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me! I have fallen in love with your music, and I find your story really inspiring. I love that you’re living all your dreams. You’re living the dreams of other musicians too.

I’ve been very blessed, that’s for sure.

{Sierra Hulls plays at the Triple Door on Saturday, March 23 at 8pm, with Sam Reider. Tickets and more information can be found here.}