Roots Band Della Mae Brings Harmony, Musicianship To Bluegrass Fest

A self-titled third album, recorded with a highly decorated producer. A black-and-white cover photo showing only half the band smiling. Nine excellent originals, flanked by smart takes on Rolling Stones and Low Anthem songs.

These all signify changes for Della Mae, a bluegrass/roots quintet that returns to the Strawberry Park Bluegrass Festival in Preston, which runs Thursday through Sunday, May 28 to 31. Della Mae performs Friday at 8:30 p.m.

Not that drastic changes were needed: Since forming in Boston in 2009, guitarists Courtney Hartman and Celia Woodsmith, fiddle player Kimber Ludiker and mandolin player Jenni Lyn Gardner have watched their audiences grow steadily. Della Mae snagged a Grammy nomination in the Best Bluegrass Album category for 2013’s “This World Oft Can Be,” their Rounder Records debut. (They lost to bluegrass legend Del McCoury.) They’ve spent the last two years touring the world, including trips to Pakistan, Brazil and Saudi Arabia as cultural ambassadors in the U.S. State Department’s American Music Abroad program.

But with “Della Mae,” and the recent addition of bassist Zoe Guigueno, the band has reached a new artistic peak.

“As much as it feels like a shift, I think that, in a bigger way, it’s more of who we are as a group, musically and dynamically,” Hartman said. “It represents the last few years of our travels and our experiences together.”

Hartman and Woodsmith penned eight of the nine originals on “Della Mae” over the last two years; Hartman collaborated with singer-songwriter Sarah Siskind on “Long Shadow,” a song inspired by Pakistani musician Natasha Ejaz.

When it came time to record the new songs, Della Mae enlisted producer Jacquire King, whose most recent Grammy win came in 2010 for “Use Somebody” by Kings of Leon, which won Record of the Year. “It was a dream come true for us to work with him as a producer,” Hartman said. “He comes from a totally different perspective from us musically. That really came across in the way he produced us.” (Tom Waits’ 1999 album “Mule Variations,” Hartman added, King’s first Grammy win, is “one of the band’s favorite albums of all time.”)

In the studio, King helped cultivate the material, picking out what was strongest about the songs and musicians. Rather than recreating the acoustic sounds of the instruments, he sent signals through amplifiers and pedals, giving the songs a unique sonic stamp. “It was pretty incredible to be working through a song and then to go into the control room and hear what he had put in,” Hartman said. But the production never veered so far left that Della Mae couldn’t recognize itself. “He’s incredible at drawing what is true out of an artist, and that’s what you hear with all of his work. His albums sound like the artists.”

Woodsmith sings lead on most of the songs. “She’s such a powerhouse,” Hartman said. “Such an incredible singer. She is the voice of the band.” Mandolinist Gardner takes the lead on “Good Blood.” Creating harmony parts involved passing around parts to the different singers until everything felt right. “You find out which voice works the best for which part of the song,” Hartman said.

“Long Shadow,” Hartman’s only lead vocal on “Della Mae,” is a slow, minor-key ballad with bowed double bass tones and long fiddle lines. It gallops into double-time at the chorus, then the musicians show off their instrumental chops before a final, quietly intoned verse. Ejaz, the Pakistani musician who inspired the song, “was an incredible musician, just such a powerhouse, and an incredibly strong woman,” Hartman said. “There’s so much we can see from our cultural perspective, being a woman or being a musician, being an entrepreneur. We see our own struggles based on how our culture is. For her, the struggles that she has to face and what she has to stand up for, it’s mind-boggling. It was so inspiring to see that.”

When the they perform, Hartman’s always on the lookout for two things.

“For me, the two things I love to see the most are when little girls and boys are right up front,” Hartman said. “You look at them and you’re like, ‘OK, this is why we do what we do.’ Or if you make someone laugh or cry: that’s why you do what you do.”

DELLA MAE performs at the Strawberry Park Bluegrass Festival in Preston on Friday, May 29, at 8:30 p.m. The festival runs Thursday through Sunday, May 28 to 31. For more information, visit strawberrypark.net.