In an interview with KGNU’s Indra Raj, Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley discuss their music and upcoming shows in Colorado. They share their excitement about performing in Colorado, and talk about their musical journey, including Rob’s introduction to the dobro. They also touch on the evolving nature of bluegrass, noting influences from other genres like jazz and the Grateful Dead, and emphasize the importance of improvisation in their performances (Interview date: 6/13/2024)
Indra Raj: We are very excited to have very special guests in the studio, Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley. Welcome to both of you.
Rob Ickes: Great to be here. How are you doing?
Indra Raj: Oh, I’m good. I was just saying before this, I’ll say to everyone, I feel like I’m in the presence of greatness. You guys are such legends in the bluegrass community and we’re so thrilled to have you on the air.
Rob Ickes: Great to be here. We love Colorado. We love coming out here.
Indra Raj: And we love bluegrass here at KGNU. Old Grass, Gnu Grass is our Saturday morning show and we love it here, and so do our listeners. So they’re in for quite a treat this morning. We’re going to be talking about your shows tonight at eTown, up in Laramie tomorrow night, and then at the Palisade Bluegrass Festival this weekend. But before we get into all that, maybe let’s just start out with some music.
Rob Ickes: All right. Sounds good. You bet. Here’s one from the latest record. It’s a Doc Watson song, “Way Down Town”.
Indra Raj: That is live in the studio. Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley. Really amazing. What energy. It’s so exciting to have you guys so close to me in the studio. Usually when I hear bluegrass at this level, it’s out on a stage way far away from me. So very exciting. Speaking of festival season, this is it. It’s the summer, this is bluegrass’s time, really. How does it feel getting into it? Is it exciting? Is it like, oh my gosh, I’m going to be so tired? What does it feel like?
Rob Ickes: We just do this so we can go to the rental car counter and have a crummy experience. It’s all about getting to the rental car counter as often as possible. No, we played in Lakewood last night and, really nice concert series, beautiful night. That felt like, yeah, summer is here and people are getting out and just a great crowd and we just had a lot of fun. So we love playing out here. It’s great to have these four shows and Colorado is one of the few places you can drive around and hear bluegrass on the radio, and it’s always been a hotbed for bluegrass, newgrass, acoustic music, and it just seems like people really get it. Yeah, we love coming out here.
Indra Raj: Yeah, absolutely. And bluegrass music is really about collaboration. I guess you can do it on your own. Can you do it on your own? And you two have obviously found each other. How did this collaboration come together? What’s the history here?
Rob Ickes: I met Trey when he was just a kid, really. I was playing with Earl Scruggs, and Earl was a big fan of Trey’s, and so whenever we played in East Tennessee, Trey would sit in with the band, and I still remember that first show in Knoxville and Trey got up and just slayed it. He was really good, probably just 12 or something at the time. And then we didn’t cross paths that much. He moved to Nashville, I guess about 10 years ago and that’s when we started working together. And I thought he was good when he was a kid, but wow man, you can really do it. Great singing, great playing. So that’s when we started, really working together. I guess it was about 2014, 2015.
Indra Raj: Alright. And Trey, tell us about that. Being this young phenom, what did that feel like from then to now to make this trajectory to be playing with these people who are sometimes a lot older than you or they’re so huge in the scene? What was that like for you?
Trey Hensley: Yeah, I grew up loving this music and always had this as my main goal: to just play, for a living. I started playing when I was 10 and then started playing with other people like Earl Scruggs very shortly after I started playing guitar. That was a pretty interesting experience being a kid and playing with your heroes. To fast forward to now and do this full time. And we’ve been doing this for a long time, it’s all I’ve ever known. It’s all I’ve ever really wanted to know. It’s been a great experience for sure.
Indra Raj: Yeah, absolutely.
Rob Ickes: It’s funny, when we first started playing, Trey had just moved to Nashville. I was really impressed with his musicality, playing and singing and songwriting. It was fun. I called everybody I knew and told them about this guy, just moved to town and introduced him around town as much as I could. And then we started working together just as a team. A side project. And then all these doors kept opening, and so after a while it was like, let’s just do this. And it’s been a great trip. We’ve played all over the world and we still really enjoy working together. It’s just been a really fun project that kind of started out as a little thing and then it’s become our full time gig. So it feels great.
Indra Raj: Oh, that’s awesome. And I like that you mentioned musicality. I feel like that’s what takes someone who’s really good at something to the next level of creating something special. Love to hear your story. Let’s hear some more music. Maybe a couple songs in a row.
Trey Hensley: Yeah, this next one is one that I wrote with a friend of mine out in East Tennessee about some sort of natural experiences, not of my own, but of the outside looking in at some other folks. But this is one on our new record called “Backstreet’s Off Broadway”.
Indra Raj: We got Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley live in the KGNU studio. Let’s hear another tune.
Rob Ickes: Trey and I wrote with a friend of his and I was thinking, you have gummies out here, but back east they have moonshine. Here’s one called “Moonshine Run”.
Indra Raj: That was an exciting one and they’ve all been exciting. This is really such a treat for me and hopefully our listeners as well. You’re listening to Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley live in the KGNU studio here in Boulder. Looking forward to a few shows that you have going on here tonight at eTown, tomorrow, up in Laramie. Do you know the name of the venue up there?
Trey Hensley: It’s the Gryphon Theater.
Indra Raj: Okay, nice. And then at Palisade this weekend, which is very exciting. I think I saw you guys were on Saturday. Alright, switching gears a little bit, the dobro is an interesting instrument to me because a lot of people don’t even know what it is.
Rob Ickes: Yeah, it’s still a little obscure.
Indra Raj: Yeah, and so I always wonder, how does someone get into playing the dobro? It’s not the guitar people know, it’s oh, I want to learn to play guitar, but no one’s like, Hey, I want to learn to play the dobro.
Rob Ickes: I wouldn’t say no one. I’m just kidding. I feel like I’ve been learning more about the history of it in the last few years and getting into Hawaiian music. That’s really where it started because in the 1880s there was a guy, Joseph Kekuku, and the story goes, he was sitting in class. He was just a teenager, played guitar, and he had his guitar lying in his lap, and he was combing his hair, and he dropped his comb, and it slid across the strings, and he went, hey, that’s cool. And so he just put his guitar flat in his lap, and then in 1927, the Dobro was invented. This guitar is that style, where it has a metal resonator inside. But as far as how I got into it, I grew up in California, so I get that question a lot, now that I’ve been in Tennessee for a long time, but it’s like, you’re doing a great radio show. And I went to some bluegrass festivals when I was a kid and I just heard it and it hit me, and I heard Mike Aldridge’s first album. He’s one of the greats on the instrument. And so when I heard that sound and I found that people had a lot of the same experience with Mike and the Dobro, you first, you hear it and you’re like, what is that? Then sometimes it hits you so hard that you have to figure out how to do what you’re hearing.
Indra Raj: Yeah.
Rob Ickes: And you just get really excited about it. I still remember when I first started playing, just that excitement, of putting the picks on and I still have that. But when you first start, it’s just mind-blowing. I just heard it and started playing that day.
Indra Raj: Was it hard to find teachers or people to bring you up on the instrument?
Rob Ickes: It is. People still ask me and I always say, you’re pretty much on your own with the dobro because you can’t go down to the music store and find somebody who teaches it. But I was really lucky. I spent all my summers way up in Northern California, up in Humboldt County. My grandparents had a campground there and my grandma just went into town and asked at the local music store. It was called the Singin’ Salmon up in the Northwest. There was a great dobro player in town, and he came out to the campground once a week and really got me off to a good start. So I was fortunate. This was back in, I started playing in the ’80s, so there was no internet, obviously, or anything back then.
Indra Raj: YouTube couldn’t teach you how to do it.
Rob Ickes: No. So it’s a little easier to find instruction now, but yeah, I always think that’s weird that this great player was right there in the middle of nowhere where I was. He got me off to a great start, tablature and listening to records really. We’re all self-taught in this music for the most part, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and so if you’re really excited about it, you’ll just listen to records over and over again until you can do what you’re hearing on the record.
Indra Raj: Yeah, that’s good inspiration for people out there who are getting into music themselves. So it’s such an important message that you don’t need to have this very technical education. You can do it yourself and get all those technical skills on your own. Which I think is really empowering for a lot of people.
Rob Ickes: Yeah, definitely.
Indra Raj: That’s so interesting about the Hawaii thing. I had no idea.
Rob Ickes: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s even, I always think it’s a very global instrument because the guys who invented the resonator type guitar, the Dobro company, they were from Slovakia, but they were living in Huntington Beach, California. And that’s when all these Hawaiian musicians were really rocking the world, but especially in Los Angeles, they were in movies, they were recording with Bing Crosby. The Dopyera brothers were living in Los Angeles and they’re the ones who invented this type of guitar. So it’s a very interesting history.
Indra Raj: Yeah. You think you know something about something and then you realize you don’t.
Rob Ickes: Yep.
Indra Raj: One other thing for both of you is, you’re such stalwarts in the bluegrass scene and it’s always changing, old grass, new grass. What are some things that you’re noticing that are different from before? Or maybe they’ve always been the same. What are you noticing in the scene these days? I know that’s a very broad question.
Trey Hensley: I don’t know, bluegrass goes in cycles, but it’s always kept that same sort of bedrock that it’s had since the beginning. There’s definitely a lot of jam band influence more these days. When bluegrass was first beginning, it was drawing influences from other music and from the blues and from country music. It became this acoustic, even jazz and stuff. They were just putting everything into this big melting pot and making it. And there’s been more bands, obviously bluegrass is going to draw from the Grateful Dead and more jazz influence. Tony Rice in the ’80s brought all this jazz stuff into it and taught a lot of bluegrass musicians, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. It just continually grows as music evolves. It slowly evolves with it.
Indra Raj: Yeah, I feel like the bluegrass and jazz thing just makes sense with improvisation. Just that aspect of it alone.
Trey Hensley: It’s definitely closely tied. That’s a big part, especially of what we do. But of all bluegrass, if you’re not going out there and improvising, you’re doing something wrong.
Indra Raj: Gotta have that skill.
Rob Ickes: Yeah, I think that’s where a lot of that energy comes from that you’re hearing is because there’s a lot of improvisation, so you’re walking the plank and not playing the same thing every time. Definitely a jazz approach, and I think that’s part of what gives the music that good energy, you know?
Indra Raj: Yeah. Reacting to what you’re feeling and hearing and the energy, in this room or at a big festival. You can do that on the fly, which is really great. Alright, let’s hear one more piece of music and then we will sadly say goodbye, but I can’t wait to hear one more song.
Rob Ickes: Well, Trey mentioned the Grateful Dead and we’ll do you one. This is one that we just like playing. We put it on our third album and I just love the lyrics. When Trey and I were just listening to some Dead on the road a few years ago, and I just love the melody and the lyrics we’ll do one here called “Brown-Eyed Women.”
Indra Raj: Alright, Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley, thank you so much for coming into the studio today.
Rob Ickes: Thank you for having us. That was a lot of fun.
Indra Raj: Let’s just do one final push for these shows happening this weekend. Tonight’s at eTown. Is anyone else joining you tonight? Just you guys?
Rob Ickes: I think it’s just us.
Indra Raj: And tomorrow up in Laramie and then at the Palisade Bluegrass and Roots Festival this weekend. Are there any other things people can look forward to from y’all? Obviously you’re going to be performing all summer, I’m assuming.
Rob Ickes: Yeah, we are doing the Ryman Bluegrass series in Nashville this summer, which I’m really excited about. I don’t know that they’ve ever had a duo before, so that’s going to be great. We’re opening some shows for Little Feat up in the Northeast in August. We’ve done a little bit with them last year and it was just a blast. And yeah, just playing all over the place. Go to robandtrey.com and you can see our schedule there and I’m sure we’ll be back out here at some point. But yeah, got a busy year ahead of us, so appreciate everybody out there.
Indra Raj: Yeah. Thank you all for being here. We can’t wait to have you back the next time you’re in town. Everyone, if you want to find out more about those shows, robandtrey.com for eTown tonight, up in Laramie tomorrow, and then Palisades this weekend. And stay tuned, everybody, Rebecca Frazier’s coming in about half an hour, so we’re gonna chat with her too and have her play some music. Alright, thank you guys so much.
Trey Hensley: Yeah, thank you very much.
