Photo credit: Claire Allison Photography
Sometimes the worst thing you can do with a band is try to force it to be something it wasn’t meant to be. Mark Harrig started Paladino a few years ago with a very specific vision: a bluegrass duo featuring him on mandolin and a friend, no longer in the band, on concertina. “We both kind of decided, ‘Hey, we both play unusual, small instruments; let’s get together and do something interesting,” Harrig recalls.
The two soon realized, though, that as interesting as their setup was, it wasn’t enough. From there the band continued expanding. They added another guitarist (Matt Webber), a bass player (Weston Grit), and perhaps most transformatively, a drummer, Chad Burgess. “We weren’t even looking for a drummer, but I think Chad found our ad on Craigslist looking for a bassist and took a listen to us and said, ‘Listen, you guys really need a drummer,’” Harrig says. “He came in to practice with us, and once we heard our music with percussion it opened up a new door for us.”
The addition of pianist Chris Haise solidified the band’s current lineup, which released an EP last year, Bellows, a wide-ranging set of bluegrass. In the spirit of genre conventions, it even included an original murder ballad, “Iowa.”
But the more Paladino played, the more they realized they weren’t meant to be a bluegrass outfit. “We were still trying to find our voice and which direction we were trying to take the band,” Harrig recalls, “because we were always trying to force ourselves into the bluegrass genre, even though naturally a lot of us were more into rock and alt-county, and we all had that background.”
So they became an alt-country band. “I don’t think we ever sat down and said, ‘OK, people aren’t getting into our music, or we’re not happy with this,’ because we were always happy with the music we made, but every time we debuted a new song and it had an alt-country type of feel, people reacted to it a lot better,” Harris says. “We kept seeing that over and over, every time we had a new song. Then all of the sudden one day we just realized we were an alt-country/Americana band. We didn’t necessarily set out to change our style. We just started creating a lot more upbeat music, because that’s what we got the best reaction to and what we enjoyed playing the most.”
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The group’s lush new album, Friend a Dinosaur, puts that reinvention on full display. Produced by Lodi Broekhuizen of Twin Brother, who contributes some striking violin arrangements, it’s a brisk roots rock record that lands somewhere between the uplifting strumming of The Avett Brothers and the Heartland-leaning modern rock of ’90s acts like Toad the Wet Sprocket and Gin Blossoms, depending on which of the band’s three singers and songwriters takes the reigns of any particular song.
“We were trying to be more dynamic with this record, making the loud parts louder and the quiet parts quieter to make the songs more interesting and keep people on the edge of their seats,” Harrig says. “That’s kind of how we tried to keep the flow of the album.”
Paladino play an album release show on Friday, Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn, with Cullah and Derek Pritzl opening. They’ll perform on Radio Milwaukee’s 414 Live the day before, on Thursday, Nov. 30, at 5:30 p.m.
