Ep. 133 - Bryan Sutton

Music Makers and Soul Shakers with Steve Dawson

Bryan Sutton, one of my absolute favorite bluegrass guitar players is on the show this week. I first heard of Bryan years ago when I was on a serious bluegrass binge (It occasionally continues to this day!). Around that time, Ricky Skaggs made a return to bluegrass and released his “Bluegrass Rules!” album. His band was called Kentucky Thunder and it was mostly youngsters with just unbelievable chops and feel. The guitar player in that band was Bryan Sutton, and I’ve been following his career ever since. He continued to crop up on credits for albums that I’d hear and I got a chance to see him at various festivals over the years. He always blew me away with his tone, feel and the way he was taking flatpicking in some exciting new directions. Bryan has now clearly become the top acoustic player in the Nashville session scene and gets most of the calls to fill that role in this town on all the big records made here. I wanted to talk to him about how he approaches sessions, the specialty of just being an acoustic player in the studio, and how his path led to being where he is now - the top call in Nashville, as well as being out on the road with Bela Fleck for his My Bluegrass Heart project. Bryan’s credits include records for Carrie Underwood, Eric Church, Lyle Lovett, Dierks Bentley, Tim McGraw, Blake Shelton - you get the picture. But at the heart oif it, he’s a monster flatpicker who has been the IBMA guitarist of the year 9 times. He teaches through an online course as well, and he put out a really cool solo album called “The More I Learn” a few years back. You can get info on all this stuff and check out his tour dates at bryansutton.com

Listen to the accompanying playlist for this episode here, which features the artist’s own music, plus many of the songs that were discussed during the show.

This episode is brought to you by Izotope - check out their amazing recording software at: www.izotope.com

Thanks for your support, and your fearless host, Steve Dawson can be found at:
www.stevedawson.ca

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