High Fidelity is pushing back against computerized culture with decidedly human tools: voices, strings and a deep knowledge of bluegrass history.
Never Say Goodbye, available now through Rebel Records, collects 13 songs drawn from the Stanley Brothers, Delmore Brothers, Louvin Brothers, Charlie Monroe, the Lewis Family and other sources. Ten selections are secular, while three come from the gospel tradition.
High Fidelity Goes Deeper Into Bluegrass History
The title track began as a Louvin Brothers composition from the 1950s that Ira and Charlie Louvin never released commercially. Corrina Rose Logston Stephens adapted its three original verses into two for High Fidelity’s recording.
Jeremy Stephens moved to mandolin for the song and used a crosspicking approach associated with Jesse McReynolds. The resulting arrangement draws from Jim & Jesse without treating the past as something sealed behind glass.
“When It’s Time for the Whippoorwill to Sing” reconnects Jeremy and Corrina Stephens with former Traditional Grass members Joe Mullins and Mark Rader. Mullins joins High Fidelity banjoist Kurt Stephenson for twin banjos, while the final chorus rises into a high trio.
The album also includes “The Lonesome Road,” whose video became an unexpected bluegrass gathering. Elsewhere, “Home in San Antone” gives mandolinist Daniel Amick his first lead vocal on a High Fidelity recording.
Two instrumentals provide room for the band’s picking to move to the front. “Cattle in the Corn” draws from fiddler Joe Greene, while “Fling Ding” comes from Ralph Stanley.
“In a world where everything is increasingly computerized, AI, and spoon-fed from a machine, this record has been our heart project,” Corrina Rose Logston Stephens said. “We’ve always been a little counter-culture by intention, but for this album we said, ‘Let’s just go full in,’ for what I’d consider our most hardcore bluegrass offering yet.”
Her conclusion supplies the album’s clearest statement of purpose: “We’re still here making music that the robots will never understand.”
Never Say Goodbye Track List
- “Red Ball Rocket Train”
- “Walking With You in My Dreams”
- “Lord, I’m Ready to Go”
- “Home in San Antone”
- “Fling Ding”
- “Never Say Goodbye”
- “When It’s Time for the Whippoorwill to Sing”
- “In the City Where the Lamb Is the Light”
- “The Lonesome Road”
- “We Live in Two Different Worlds”
- “Cattle in the Corn”
- “The Fields Have Turned Brown”
- “Living in the Promised Land”