Fresh from the Pacific Northwest, Never Come Down has hit the road for their spring tour this past week. You won’t want to miss their powerful, dynamic, original acoustic sound, and good news – they are coming to perform live in Chicago! We got to catch up with mandolinist, Kaden Hurst, to hear more about what’s on the horizon for Never Come Down, as they make their way to Illinois next week.
Catch Never Come Down LIVE, next Saturday, April 26th at Reggie’s in the South Loop, the night also features local bluegrass Wheels North opening the show. Tickets here!
Before you head out to Reggie’s, check out one of our favorite tracks from the Never Come Down and read our Q&A below!
BC: We’re so happy to see Never Come Down playing in Chicago, at Reggie’s on April 26th! This is one of your Midwest stops in a much larger tour, tell us a bit about your spring tour.
KH: We’re so excited to be there! Our show at Reggie’s is part of a larger tour we’ll be on from mid-April to early May, on a great big winding route through Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, and Montana. Sometimes we ease into touring season a little more slowly, but this year we’re diving right into the deep end and putting some miles behind us.
BC: Never Come Down maintains a very busy schedule, touring nationally and internationally, recording music, playing festivals – what are you most excited about on the horizon in 2025?
KH: It sure feels busy! I have two, perhaps contradictory things I’m excited about. There’s some magic in the experience of being on tour, that I think emerges from a lifestyle of constant change. Where we’re sleeping, what we’re eating, who we’re working with, how a city feels, and what the weather’s like is all in constant flux. That change and uncertainty keeps me on my toes, keeps me paying attention, and keeps the music we’re playing feeling fresh and alive and new.
I’m also excited to spend time at music camps this year. We’re lucky enough to get to teach at an amazing camp in British Columbia called Nimble Fingers, where we’ll be camping out for a week teaching and performing with 100 other people from all over the world. Unlike touring, camps like these give us a chance to keep diving into the music while also finding some stability and making a little home for ourselves out in the woods of BC.
BC: What aspect of your most recent album – Greener Pastures, released in 2024 – makes you most proud?
KH: I think this is the record that really taught us how to collaborate with each other. We’ve never been a particularly hierarchical band, but it takes time to learn how to offer up some of your creative work to be touched and molded by the hands of your bandmates. Whether it’s a finished song or just the seed of an idea, there’s inherent vulnerability in letting other people in on what you’re making. On Greener Pastures, we really leaned into that vulnerability, trusting that no one of us in the band could hear everything that a song wanted to be. Countless arrangements got reworked, chords got adjusted, and lyrics got investigated; and all these songs ended up better for it. Especially since there are so many songwriters in the band, that spirit of collaboration feels really central to what we’re up to. When folks listen to the album, I hope they hear the cohesion and trust we had for each other when making it.
BC: Tell us about the Portland (or West coast) scene and what is the experience like sharing that through touring and performing nationwide?
KH: It’s a little funny, playing bluegrass on the West coast. We’re far from the home of the music, and I think folks generally relate to that fact in one of two ways. There’s an incredible scene for traditional bluegrass on the west coast if you know where to look for it. I sometimes get the sense that people here that are into that generation of the music feel they need to work particularly hard to preserve and cherish it because they’re so far from its roots, and I feel really inspired by that pursuit.
There’s also a lot of the West coast scene that is inclined more towards the branches of bluegrass and related genres that have come from this region. The lineage of the Grateful Dead and all related projects (The Pizza Tapes, Garcia/Grisman, David Grisman Quintet, Tony Rice Unit) are all well loved and thought of as the headwaters of another genre out here. Jamgrass is alive and well in the west, and feels at home here.
All that said, I think the folks in Never Come Down stuck together because neither of those camps quite felt like home to us. We all love traditional bluegrass, but wanted to do something new and authentic to who we are as people. We all love the jam band influence on acoustic music, but wanted to stay grounded, focused, and strictly acoustic with the music we’re making. That means we often feel like a bit of an outlier out here, but it also means we’re friends with everybody.
