Bluegrass Pickings - Chicken Wire Empire and The Big Wu’s Chris Castino Team Up for Collaborative Album

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Sometimes life hands you lemons and you make lemonade. Or if you’re not into lemons, fresh pickles. On their new collaborative album Fresh Pickles, out Feb. 4, Milwaukee’s Chicken Wire Empire and Chris Castino, frontman of Minnesota-based rock jam band The Big Wu, did just that, creating a sonically delectable sound.

As the pandemic eased last year, Castino decided to make music. He picked some of his favorite Big Wu songs—some dating back to the band’s first album 25 years ago—and recruited Chicken Wire Empire to reimagine them in their unmistakably energetic, progressive bluegrass style.

“I said, ‘Here’s a crazy idea … what if we took a bunch of songs that I’ve written that you guys probably know and rearranged them and put the Chicken Wire Empire stamp up on them,’” recalls Castino. “They were super into that idea, and I was surprised but encouraged … They rearranged the tunes in a cool way, and it started to come together.”

The members of Chicken Wire Empire have long been fans of The Big Wu and Castino’s songwriting. Founders Jordan Kroeger and Ryan Ogburn have known him since their early 2000s band Stealin’ Strings, which got to open for The Big Wu. They bonded through admiration for each other’s talents and playing shows together. After playing recent tribute shows to Jeff Austin’s album Songs From the Tin Shed, they decided to collaborate.

“Part of the reason I love working with him is because we do things differently but in a complimentary way where we can work together,” says Kroeger. “It gelled fairly quickly because we come from slightly different backgrounds with our two bands. He came more folk country and rock and roll. We came from the Earl Scruggs bluegrass world and beyond.”

New Arrangements, New Life

Castino says he found new appreciation for his songs through the collaboration. The new arrangements helped breathed new life into the songs. “It made me excited, it gave me energy, the energy they put in,” he says. “It also changed the way that I thought about the songs and the way that I sang the songs. It’s easy to sing the song the same way you always sang it, because you're playing it with the same band, it's like muscle memory.

“So having bluegrass instruments, having different tempos, having different arrangements, the different vocal harmonies, different solo sections, all of that contributed to forcing a new way of approaching all of the songs, which was lovely.”

The song that changed most drastically for him was the Wisconsin-inspired “Jackson County.” He wrote the song about a friend who ran into some trouble with the law (“They like to clamp down on our hippie fans and whatever they might be carrying in their cars”).

“We turned it into an uptempo waltz in the tradition of Flatt and Scruggs,” he says. “It went from a song that I thought would be played just every once in a while, to one of my favorites.”

Bluegrass All-Stars

The collaborators recorded the album mostly live at Minnesota-based studio NeonBrown with the help of producer (and Horseshoes and Hand Grenades member) Adam Greuel and engineer (and Trampled by Turtles member) Ryan Young. Castino also brought in an all-star who’s who of the bluegrass world: Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Peter Rowan, Tim O’Brien, Nick Forster, Keller Williams, Vince Herman and Andy Hall of the Infamous Stringdusters.

“The timing of the recording of this record and how it coincided with COVID, was really actually a huge benefit,” says Castino. “They had the time since they weren’t touring.”

He was especially honored to have Rowan—who once played with Jerry Garcia in the bluegrass group Old & In the Way—playing on “The Ballad of Dan Toe,” a song he had written in tribute. He revised the lyrics to the song from being about a “larger-than-life folk hero guy, kind of like a Paul Bunyan type guy” to a storyteller to make the character more like Rowan.

They got the chance to perform with Rowan during their first performance together at last year’s Boats & Bluegrass festival in Winona, MN. Says Kroeger, “it was very serendipitous.”

He continues, “We were making lemonade out of lemons over there and it worked out really, really well.”