The Cedar sat down with Nate Sipe from Twin Cities hometown bluegrass heroes Pert Near Sandstone. Learn about Pert Near’s roots in blues and folk music, their creative process across distance, and why The Cedar and West Bank hold a special place in their hearts.
The Cedar: You grew up playing a lot of grunge music in high school. What drew you out of that into playing bluegrass music?
Nate Sipe: Even while I was in that band, I was taking guitar lessons at Schmitt music from Scott Frasier in Brooklyn Park which turned me onto bluegrass music. I was taking some music lessons with a teacher that said, “Oh, you wanna play rock and roll? You need to learn the blues, you need to learn the roots of rock and roll. It’s all part of the early work, and it’s sourced from the blues and early Americana country approach.”
That's what I learned. Even while I was in this band in high school, I was trying to push blues licks and riffs onto the band and into a couple of songs. We disbanded pretty quickly after high school, but even during high school, we stopped playing. To me, that blues meets rock convergence turned me on to psychedelic music and then rock music that became an amalgamation of folk and blues and rock. It opened me up to different forms of music and led me – as I got into that more and more – to being more aware of music as I heard it played and realized that this music that existed for a long time was tickling my fancy. It really got under my skin and made me want to explore it more.
That led me to meeting J Lenz, our guitar player in Pert Near. He also took lessons from Scott. After Pert Near formed, J said, “Oh shoot, I gotta learn some country runs and some bluegrass licks,” so he got lessons from Scott Frasier, as well.
The Cedar: Were you open to learning new types of music?
Nate Sipe: I had no resentment, only excitement. I just bought a new instrument a week ago, and I'm learning how to play it, and I’ve been obsessed.
The Cedar: Why are you always pushing yourself to explore new things?
Nate Sipe: I like different sounds. I like to experience. I like how music makes me feel. The pure sensation of hearing music is a pleasure and hearing music that inspires emotion or brings about associations, or it just excites me in some way. I thrive for that, but it’s also being able to do it myself and create those sounds that I'm hearing in my head. I think about a song I love that I've listened to 100 times; if I can try to reproduce that in my own way, it's even more exciting. If the reward at the end of all of the hard work of obsessing and losing sleep and spending money on an instrument is just to enjoy myself, then why not? There's responsibilities in life, but in the meantime, you gotta find joy somewhere in there.
It becomes even more compounded once you're doing it with other people. That's the end goal. I can play all my instruments in my studio all day, but when you go to a festival or you're playing around a campfire or you're on stage playing in front of an audience, that's even more of a reward than just being able to do it by yourself.
Ideally, you're expressing something that you can't express otherwise or can't put into words. I think a lot of songwriters are more romantically inclined to think of it in those terms, but coming up in grunge music, you just rock, and then you get together with your friends on stage and play it becomes tangible. I think it's true for a lot of people, that's the reason for creating. I think of it more in egalitarian terms than I do in philosophical terms.
The Cedar: I know you moved out to California for a few years. Were you still living in Minnesota when you started Pert Near with the other members?
Nate Sipe: We've been playing in this band for almost 20 years, and I've lived outside of Minnesota for the last decade. We did about ten years of coming up in the scene and trying to figure out where to play and who to play with and cutting our teeth and trying to get a foothold before we landed at The Cedar. We've been doing that for 12 years now, and First Avenue for ten years. This will be our eighth year doing Blue Ox Music Fest, so we're almost veterans now. For the first ten years it was definitely just putting in a lot of leg work and hard work before we kind of established ourselves as musicians.
Initially, it was a lot of discovery and learning new music, and then learning how to play led to stumbling into a whole scene that we didn't even really know existed. Growing up, my dad listened to a Prairie Home Companion, and I heard other programs through KFAI and other radio – the library was actually a big source for getting into this music – but folk music is really what is at the core of that. What we play is a form of folk music and one of those genres, and we even kind of bounce around through the different genres of folk music in a single night's performance. The thing about folk music is it's the people around it, it's the other bands, the other players - it's not a very cut-throat or competitive world of music like you might find in other genres. It's really all about the jamming, the camaraderie, and collaboration. All of those things are vital and add to a very tight-knit community.
Ultimately, I think that’s why we've done this for almost 20 years, why we keep performing, why I would stick together as a band, why I've lived in Los Angeles, and now North Carolina and still stuck with the band, 'cause it's a family. You can move away, but you can't ever really leave your family. That's part of who you are, you know?
The Cedar: What brought you out to California?
Nate Sipe: I moved out here with my partner. We had wanted to move multiple other places and none of them panned out, and finally she's like, “Well, let's try California.” We thought we'd be there for two years, but we ended up there for eight and a half years. We had a really good time, it's an intense place to live, but I don't think I'd wanna move back. I'm glad for the time we spent there, and the opportunity came to move out to North Carolina and we jumped at it. She's getting her doctorate degree at UNC, so we relocated to a much more quiet, relaxed, forested, colder place. Everything's different here really. It's really a 180 degree change in lifestyle for us.
The Cedar: Does that change you creatively when you're writing?
Nate Sipe: One of the things I enjoyed most about Los Angeles is the creative influence that it has. Because it's such an intensely artistic place historically, I got a lot of that while I was living out there. Here, it's a lot more laid back and I'm digging a lot more introspectively into my music and I am absorbing. I'm doing a lot more internal creative exploring, which I think is good. It's definitely changed how I approach my work. Maybe it's just the change of lifestyle or the certain facets of living, but I've altered my ability to focus differently and take time differently to do this. It was hard to have space to work on music in our tiny studio apartment in Los Angeles. You have to pull out the instruments and set them up every time you want to play versus here, I can just walk into my music room and they're all there ready and waiting.
The Cedar: How does that affect the band creatively when you’re so far apart from each other?
Nate Sipe: Even though now there's four songwriters in the band, we've all done our own bit of song writing. It's always been kind of an independent study within the group, which is why I think we have such an eclectic sound, even from album to album. Our stage performance from night to night jumps around genres a little bit, and we go from old time and fiddle tunes to this kind of modern string band orchestration to a rock and roll cover. We're all over the place, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we just have creative freedom as songwriters, and we bring what we are working on to the table. Generally, people aren't shunning it or turning it down. It's like an all-inclusive hang with this band and they're just like, “Cool, cool, you got a new song. Alright, let's work it up and play it. Let's try to record it. Let's just do it.”
Of course, it doesn't always work out. There are songs that don’t absolutely feel right or fit right, and they get put aside or worked up differently, but generally, we're all pretty open to the ideas that everyone has in the band, and we have succeeded on our limitations - it's a strange thing to say, but I think that's absolutely what we do. I didn’t grow up playing the mandolin or the fiddle, Kevin certainly didn't have a banjo in the house when he was growing up. J played trombone; yes, he played guitar, but not bluegrass guitar. We came about this in our own way and were all self-taught, for the most part.
The Cedar: I feel like when you have to learn in non-traditional spaces, you are more open to different ways of getting the result.
Nate Sipe: Very much so. When we record, I love to hear a song idea that I have, then bring it to the band to hear what they make of it. It's a very organic process. Like I say, we all kind of have our limitations, but we also have our strengths on our instruments, and to hear those things come out and pull out different ideas than what I was imagining is really exciting. We're recording a new album right now at our friend Ryan Young's house, and it’s like a laboratory. It's like we're cooking up a recipe and we're adding ingredients and seeing what rises up when it's baking in the oven.
I think the openness and that creative freedom and eagerness to just accept what we’ve got in our pocket and work with it is absolutely the reason why we've achieved the level of a band that performs at all, but then the other reason we’ve stayed together so long is because we have a sibling bond amongst this group.
With all the painfulness or disagreements or baggage that we’ve all carried for years of being partners in this project, we tend to set it all aside. It's our refuge from when we're actually performing and making music. How we disagree reinforces our friendships and our bonds as people. If we had the drill sergeant in the band for somebody who was constantly stopping the song in the middle to correct what we were doing on the side, I don't wanna be in a band with that person. I've sat in with bands like that, and I was with other people like that, and it's not my bag. That’s not the type of band I wanna play in.
The Cedar: Most of that music you play is rooted in the South, why did you gravitate towards that?
Nate Sipe: I think a lot of it has to do with just a period of time that we were all coming of age and breaking out on our own and exploring independence and exploring different musical expressions. I had been hopping freight trains around and hiking around the country in Canada.
The Cedar: Did you go to college?
Nate Sipe: I did. I went to the MCTC [Minneapolis Community and Technical College] for a while, and I never graduated with the degree, I decided that I was gonna get my degree “on the road.” I was doing it less as an escape and more as an experiential thing. Because I wanted to go hiking and camping and see places I've only seen in photos, towns I’ve never been to. There were also some events and things that I wanted to attend. I always had a destination. I had started riding Greyhound buses even in high school and with friends and road tripping with friends in the summertime. Then I started hitchhiking and started hopping freight trains. It was my Jack Kerouac days where I was free-wheeling on the road. It was great; I loved it.
At the time I started hitting the road with a guitar, I found it was too big and too cumbersome, so I traded it for a mandolin and I was hitching around New Zealand with my partner. It was easy to play, and it was a different approach to folk music and blues. Through the mandolin, I discovered the fiddle. I realized that to really sound the best, you have to play those tunes on a fiddle, so I picked up a fiddle and started playing and discovered old time music. I really fell in love and went deep into old time traditional Americana.
What I discovered was that there's a great scene, there's a great folk music and old time tradition based right here in Minneapolis. It's lived here since the ‘60s during the folk boom, which produced Bob Dylan and such. It happened here and in New York and all these college towns around the country. The West Bank and University of Minnesota were some of those places that nurtured the folk boom, and a lot of those people who were youngsters were learning this music and starting to pass it around and share it are still playing today, Dakota Dave Hull, Spider John Koerner, Peter Ostroushko – who passed away not long ago, unfortunately.
I discovered this wealth of tradition in Minneapolis, which I can tie to The Cedar Cultural Center very directly as one of the last strongholds of the West Bank scene. The spirit of it is there, and I've seen many of those players at The Cedar or at Palmers and The 400 Bar, The Viking when that was still open, or heard them on KFAI. They played through a program, and it all tied back to my childhood. I realized, “Well, shit. This has been here this whole time.” It took me going through this whole cyclical process to acknowledge it and realize it, and then become a part of it.
The Cedar: Do you feel that you are a part of it now? Do you feel like you've earned your stripes and you’re a part of the community now, or do you feel entitled to what you're doing?
Nate Sipe: I don't have a lot of entitlement to it. I struggle with that one because I feel in some ways maybe I should, but I don't. I go back to that skinny, quiet guy from junior high, and that's kind of still who I am. I like to blend into the background when I'm not on stage, I like to get lost in the behind the scenes. In degrees, we're a part of that scene now, and I think I see that because of the influence we've had on a lot of other groups. I don't think it's through us forcing it or doing anything other than just continuing to do what we do, but we've influenced the scene. To a degree that we're on the verge of being veterans or something in the community, and my position in the community has helped me acknowledge that everyone's just kind of faking it, everyone's just kind of faking it till they make it. Of course, there's extremely trained professionals out there doing their career that they ought to be doing, but there's a lot of people who just want to do the thing they love, and sometimes they don't have all the necessary skills to do it, but they do it because they love it.
Some of them become successful at it and become the next wave of influential practitioners, and we're kind of like that in a way. Now we're producing a bluegrass festival in Eau Claire every year, and it's kind of the big happening in the region for this genre. It’s bigger than anything we were a part of when we were coming up as a band. To have the privilege of being able to provide that is a pretty substantial thing, but I still get imposter syndrome. Every once in a while I'm just like, “What am I doing playing at First Avenue?”
The Cedar: Why do you think you have imposter syndrome?
Nate Sipe: I'm not a loud, out-front person, and I'm introverted. For the most part, I will force myself to be out front and to lead the pack when I need to be, but generally speaking, I'm observing from the side, and that's the sensitive artist in me. I think it leads to me questioning or considering taking it in and acknowledging it and being a part of it from a larger context, acknowledging a larger context of things rather than just trying to be the life of the party.
The Cedar: What would current Nate say to 18-year-old Nate?
Nate Sipe: Practice, practice, practice, and then practice more. I don't know, that's a good one to consider. I don't have a lot of regrets. I don't feel like if I could go back, I would do this thing better or differently, but I feel like picking up the fiddle earlier or studying certain aspects of music, and focusing more on aspects of music that I wanted, that I feel like I wish I had more time to approach now. I'd probably tell the 18-year-old me that he's on the right track, and to keep doing it. Do it more. Do it with more intention. Do it the best you can. I feel like I've done that in a lot of ways. I've definitely lived intentionally, but I guess you can always look at it differently. If I could go back and share those winning lottery numbers…
The Cedar: But think about some people who are born rich. They didn't have to earn that character that took them to where they needed to be.
Nate Sipe: That's true. Yeah, it's definitely a hard earned position that I'm in now. Again, I don't regret it, but you wonder about maybe finishing that degree and having something more to fall back on. I always wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to have more focus on writing, and I've not published anything, but maybe someday I'll have a memoir book of poems.
The Cedar: Pert Near Sandstone has done so much over the years. Why do you continue with The Winter String Band Gathering you host at The Cedar?
Nate Sipe: That's been a conversation we've had in this band for quite a while, and more and more recently throughout the years. Thinking back to learning about all the music that influenced me. I saw a lot of those people at The Cedar. You talk about rooms and venues or recording spaces that really have kind of a mojo or that have a spirit about it. They just have a feel and a sound. The Cedar is one of those places for us. It always feels really good, not just the spirit of the history of it in the community that is associated or surrounds it, but it's also a room that sounds really good to us. It feels really good to be on that stage - it's a much more intimate venue than a lot of places we play, and that's very true locally in Minneapolis. It's conducive to string band music and acoustic music more so than almost anywhere else that I can think of. To this day, it's one of my favorite places in the world that we play.
Catch Pert Near Sandstone with Arkansauce on Friday, March 3 and with Hackensaw Boys on Saturday, March 4, 2023 at The Cedar for the 2023 Winter Stringband Gathering.