A Grassroots Dream Show: Ross Thorn’s Fictitious Musical Gathering

Every year the popular bluegrass band Trampled By Turtles, hailing from Duluth, MN, goes back to their roots and gives out an award called the Palomino Grant to a local musician. The winner also gets to join them in opening up the sold-out Bay Front stage located in Duluth, which can hold up to ten thousand audience members. This year Ross Thorn was chosen by the band. He is a folk musician who has been making music in Duluth since early 2018, but it’s always been in his blood to take this path. He was born for the spotlight as he grew up singing karaoke at his grandma’s bar in northern Wisconsin. With a mix of thought-provoking lyrics relevant to musicians like Jason Isbell and Bon Iver, Thorn’s new album Hugo has catapulted him into the big leagues of music. WNSM had the chance to meet with Thorn before his sold-out show.

Ida Ward York: Are you getting pumped for the show tonight?

Ross Thorn: Yeah, I think all of the excitement’s here and anxieties are mostly gone. 

IWY: how has it been finding a live band to bring the recorded songs to life after writing them solo?

RT: It was really a challenge, but it was a really cool challenge because some of the songs I had written like “South Of Somewhere” I knew I really wanted to have a full band, and then the other ones I didn’t know about a full band on them. Bringing them to life was listening to the musicians who were helping me in the studio,  as well as some of the musicians performing such as the Mahon brothers. We workshopped a lot of those live up here, and then when I went and recorded it was a same sort of thing—just back and forth listening to other ideas from people in the band.

IWY: How do you see the Palomino Grant fitting into your path as a musician?

RT: I’m really really grateful for it and hope that this experience, the grant and the performance, and hopefully some of these connections can be a catalyst to helping me grow and put more effort and time into this. 

IWY: You often reference yourself as being inspired by Jason Isbell, how did that appear on this album specifically?

RT: I love the way Jason Isbell does his wordsmithing, there’s something about it, and there’s always these terms and phrases that are right on the nose, and so powerful and poignant. I think that I try to emulate that too in a lot of my songs, like “Lions Den” which is one that’s really heavy with those types of pointed phrases, that's probably one of the biggest ones. 

IWY: What drew you to record parts of Hugo in Nashville? And what kind of influence did it have on those songs?

RT: My brother is a full-time musician in Nashville, so part of it was that I had never done recording before and had no idea what to do. My brother has recorded and I’ve gone and performed with him and I was trying to bring in a friend of mine who I met through playing Magic: The Gathering and he’s also a musician that’s done a lot of producing and stuff. We were all trying to coordinate, and Nashville just seemed like the best place because I’ve played with some people down there and have some friends down there, as well as my brother's connections to bring it all together. I think it helped us record it in a short amount of time, we did all of that in a week without practicing outside of that week. I think that's what really helped it, there were some people like Clark Singleton on bass and Brandon Barns on drums, Cassandra Sotos on violin. They were so in tune with each other and the whole process of it so that it was able to come off like that. 

IWY: What was the mindset behind tuning down parts of the album a half-step? 

RT: It’s just sort of an artifact of me. When  I perform live I’ll typically tune down a half-step because it’s easier on my voice. I sing some really high songs sometimes, like Prince and Elton John. If I do a half step down it helps my voice feel better the next day and I can sing more of the gig longer. I was like, let's just keep that, as much as it annoys some people that I play with, I’m like “This is in G flat” and they’re like “Oh yup, ok, we can’t do that”. It’s something kinda quirky about it too, it's not totally just all in G. It comes with its benefits and bad parts.

IWY: I saw you used Magic: The Gathering cards being shuffled as a sound on the song Gimme A Coin. Are there any other secret easter eggs like that hidden in the album?

IWY: Yeah, there are some secret ones and a lot in the album artwork. The big inspiration of this record, in general, was the mini-series Over The Garden Wall. Old Black Train is where I heard that and we cover the version from the mini-series on the album. And then in the album artwork there's a ton. There was this antique lamp in the studio that was this ceramic boy feeding a dog something that looked like either bread or ham, and he was holding a knife and had a cut on his toe. So there's a boy on the cover of the album too that is an homage to just weird stuff.

IWY: Do you think playing a game like Magic: The Gathering helps you build the worlds you sing about?

RT: I think so, I’m also really big into Dungeons And Dragons too, and a lot of other tabletop roleplaying games. As a cartographer I build worlds and I’ll make fantasy maps, it fosters this imagination so sometimes when I’m playing these songs I’m envisioning some sort of storyline. They’re all really personal in some way, but sometimes it's autobiographical, and sometimes it’s not. When it’s not, and I’m trying to tell a story, it’s definitely helpful to be imagining what this character would do, what is this world like.  I think there's a huge parallel between fantastical endeavors like Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons And Dragons, and my ability to do imaginative storytelling. 

IWY: What music have you been loving recently?

RT: It’s been some different stuff, this year I’m listening to an album every day on average, some of my latest ones are Willi Carslile’s album Peculiar, Missouri—it’s incredible and I feel so connected with it with my music, and the things that I sing about. Madison Cunningham’s album Revealer is incredible and there are lots of curve balls in the way that the songs in there are structured and the timings, it was such a good album to listen to. And then also I just broke out The Chicks the other day, the album Fly is just a monumental album for shaping me, probably more than I realized it at the time, but now I just listened to it and I was like, wow every song on this album just slaps. 

IWY: You’re playing your dream show. Where is it and who’s on the billing with you?

RT: Probably with Tyler Childers, Willie Nelson, The Mountain Goats, the Avett Brothers, and everybody on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou. We’re playing this fictitious venue that's this grassy hill and amphitheater, and it’s got that sort of vibe.