Adam Aijala
Adam Aijala is the guitarist in Yonder Mountain String Band, which he formed in Nederland, Colorado, in 1998 with Jeff Austin, Dave Johnston and Ben Kaufmann. He also sings and writes for the band, and he has played on its records from the first album, Elevation (1999), to Good as True (2026).
He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1973 and grew up from 1977 in nearby Sterling, in a house where the record player was always going, with 1950s music, classic rock and reggae, and the Beatles as his first love. His parents bought him an electric guitar in February 1986, the year he turned thirteen, on condition that he take lessons, and he studied for about four years with a local blues and jazz musician. A sister two years older introduced him to punk and hardcore, and later he moved on to the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and Neil Young. He got his first acoustic guitar for Christmas in his senior year of high school.
He went on to the University of Massachusetts, graduating with a degree in forestry in 1995, and in 1996 took a forestry job in central Idaho with a company working for the U.S. Forest Service. That summer he went to the RockyGrass festival in Lyons, Colorado, where Scott Nygaard’s flatpicking with Tim O’Brien and the O’Boys set him on learning to play that way. After a winter in Lake Tahoe and a season with the Forest Service south of it, a college friend living in Nederland persuaded him to move to Colorado’s Front Range for its acoustic music scene. Until then his bluegrass listening had gone little further than Old & In the Way, the Seldom Scene, the David Grisman Quintet and some Norman Blake and Doc Watson.
In Nederland in 1998 he met Austin and Johnston, who had played together in Illinois, and Kaufmann at a club called the Verve, and in December the four formed Yonder Mountain String Band to open a show at the Fox Theatre in Boulder. On Elevation (Frog Pad, 1999) he played guitar and wrote “Left Me in a Hole,” “Mossy Cow” and “Waijal Breakdown,” and shared the credit with Austin and Johnston for “High on a Hilltop.” Town by Town (2001) carried three more of his songs, “Wildewood Drive,” “A Father’s Arms” and “Idaho,” the last written with Shane Carter. The four also made Old Hands (2003) with the guitarist Benny Galloway, and the live set Mountain Tracks, Volume 5 (2008) included his “Long Time” and “Near Me” and “Night Out,” written with Johnston.
When Austin left in 2014, Aijala, Johnston and Kaufmann kept the band going, and with the fiddler Allie Kral and the mandolinist Jacob Jolliff they recorded Black Sheep (2015) at Coupe Studios in Boulder. On Love, Ain’t Love (2017) he played banjo as well as guitar. With Nick Piccininni, who joined in 2020, the band made Get Yourself Outside (2022), nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, and Nowhere Next (2024). Good as True, released by Frog Pad in March 2026, was made by Aijala, Johnston, Kaufmann, Piccininni and the fiddler Coleman Smith.
