Monzie Leo & the Big Sky: strangeness at the Westport Roots Festival

The three members of Monzie Leo & the Big Sky — lead singer and guitarist Monzie Leo Brummett, banjoist Derek Long and fiddler Brett Grady — have their own secret language. When we meet on a Tuesday night in Lawrence, the three are wearing similar denim vests, ornamented with various patches and pins, arranged in what they tell me is a code. Beyond that, there’s a special signal for when the members need to convene in private. There’s a specific gesture for when it’s time for pizza.

There are other meanings embedded in their vests, they say, and other ways in which they communicate nonverbally. They aren’t about to declassify any of it for me. And if these guys are joking, they have remarkable poker faces.

Beers in hand, we take up a corner inside the Bottleneck, and the unspoken dialogue among all three is fairly easy to decode: a certain merry exhaustion. They’ve just gotten back from a weekend jaunt to Nashville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky, to play a handful of shows. Brummett has had less than one full hour of sleep since their return, he tells me with the kind of pride that comes only from fatigue. They head out nearly every weekend for this or that destination, spreading the Big Sky sound bit by bit, county by county.

“Ideally, we want to be on the road as much as possible,” Grady says. “We’re just finding that balance, how to be on the road and how to maintain our daily lives.”

The band — which recently parted with its bassist, Melodie Ayres — is working on a new album, a follow-up to last December’s Sunflowers, Sunsets and Sons of Bitches, released on Little Class Records. Talking to the three about the new project is like being dropped into a foreign country without a map.

“Basically, it’s a concept record about a wizard we’ve conceptualized,” Brummett says. “His name is Forrest Riverwalker. It’s historical fiction about this character, who is the illegitimate son of Hugh Cameron and Carrie Nation.”

Over the next 10 minutes, the bandmates, like blood brothers in a treehouse, relay a feverishly imagined plot. Cameron, the “Kansas hermit,” whom Brummett calls a “total badass wizard dude” who lived in a tree near Lawrence in the 1800s, has immortal offspring with temperance advocate Carrie Nation. Their hero, Forrest Riverwalker, was raised by turtles. He has an evil twin, Ignarus.

Trying to jot notes about this story feels a bit like tracing a black thread down a rabbit hole. Brummett, Long and Grady could be pulling some kind of elaborate prank, but the minutiae is too expansive.

“I can’t decide if you guys are really smart or totally switchblade crazy,” I tell them.

Brummett laughs. “We came up with this while we were super fucking stoned at Golden Corral,” he says. This is the least surprising thing any of them has so far uttered.

But the band members insist that they are utterly serious about executing this story as an album, and they add that the songs on Forrest Riverwalker — the working title for the forthcoming record — won’t be so convoluted. (One theme, Brummett tells me, will be dealing with feelings of emotional loss. Forrest Riverwalker has suffered just so, of course, because of his evil twin.)

Another act would be hard-pressed to pull off such a project, but Monzie Leo & the Big Sky seems unusually poised to get it done. The band has spent four years building its electric bluegrass, and it started with a spoken-word project; the members set out to record poems over natural soundscapes. That gave way to the traditional-leaning, folk-inspired tracks that gave Sunflowers, Sunsets and Sons of Bitches its grand gusto. There’s something dark, even sinister, about the way that Grady and Long work their strings together, and Brummet’s clear, prairiewide voice sounds ready to sing about aliens or taxes with equal conviction.

Those qualities are what attracted Little Class Records to the band in the first place, and the three agree that signing to the local label last November has been nothing but good for Monzie Leo & the Big Sky.

“We considered it really heavily because we were like, ‘This isn’t getting married, but it is moving in together,'” Brummett says. “And getting in on the ground level with an up-and-coming label, it’s been cool. The DIY element there is bar none.

“In the music industry, I feel like there’s a learning curve, and there’s a lot of things that people aren’t going to tell you,” he adds. “But now there’s a family that you didn’t necessarily have when you were by yourself.”

Long nods. “It’s cool that Little Class is growing at the same time that we’re growing,” he says. “I mean, we’re four years in, but I feel like the last two years, we’ve been taking it a lot more seriously, to the point where now we know what we’re doing.”