CASEY DRIESSEN

CASEY DRIESSEN “KICK IT OFF, A FIDDLER’S BACKSTORY” 2/25/09 On a blustery cold morning in December of 1978, in the small southern Minnesota town of Owatonna, a fiddler was born. His father played banjo and pedal steel guitar in a band called Everybody & His Brother while his mother gardened and painted with watercolors. The first fiddle he ever held was a cardboard box with paint stirrer taped on for a neck and a wooden dowel used for a bow. As soon as he learned to respect his "instrument", the child was given his first real fiddle. The boy grew up healthy and strong on two different diets ... tater tot hot dish and popsicles for physical nourishment, and bluegrass, western swing, and jazz for his ears. His parents used to say the song Roly Poly was written about him. There had also been passing mention that he had been found under a rock -- a theory that has yet to be disproved. This young boy learned the value of hard work and practice by being bribed with baseball cards. He grew and grew and practiced and practiced...and then grew some more...stopping just a hair short of 5'7". It's been said that summers full of bluegrass festival campfire jam sessions and fiddle camps, years of public school orchestra, and a couple of seasons on the diving team may have prevented him from reaching 6'0". However he did reach his goal of growing a goatee by the end of high school . . . if you could call it a goatee. Goatee was accepted to Berklee College of Music, along with many other goatees, and swiftly left his then home of Chicago. The following three years taught him about life on his own, parking in Boston, and all the other wonderful "lessons" you learn in those "college years." With diploma in hand, this young man -- really a big kid at heart -- moved to Music City USA, home of the Grand Old Opry, the Station Inn, George Jones, the Wooten brothers, and hot chicken, Nashville TN. Goatee already owned a pickup truck but felt life could be more fully realized if he changed his name to Mustache. Harnessing the power of red shoes, Mustache and his trusty sidekick, 5-String Fiddle, have spent the last decade in studios, on stages, and crammed into various forms of transportation, traveling across the North American continent and over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans - not only as a sideman for Béla Fleck, The Sparrow Quartet, Tim O'Brien, Darrell Scott, Steve Earle, and Frank Vignola, but also as a solo artist with his band, a drums/bass/fiddle power trio called The Colorfools - fighting evil music, toppling language barriers, and sharing his view of the world through a camera lens. In 2006, Mustache and 5-String Fiddle made their debut record entitled 3D (Sugar Hill Records). On the morning of his birthday, what at first seemed like prank phone call turned out to be the honest truth -- 3D was nominated for a Grammy. Two years, thousands of frequent flyer miles, and even more thousands of notes later, the time had come to return to the studio. Genre lines were smeared; sounds and colors from beautiful to ugly and everywhere in between were explored; drums & loops (Matt Chamberlain), bass (Viktor Krauss), electric guitar & pedal steel (Darrell Scott), fiddle & voice (midwest boy) grooved through twists and turns; new melodies were born while old ones were de'rranged. Life's most recent adventures of sight and sound have been sonically summed up in less than an hour. That midwest boy is Casey Driessen, and thus begins the story of his second solo record, Oog (Red Shoe Records). Enjoy music.