Dave Johnston

He came to the banjo by chance: a college friend left one lying around his house, and he picked it up and started to play. In Urbana, Illinois, he led a band called the Bluegrassholes and asked his friend Jeff Austin, who owned a mandolin, to join it and sing, with instructions to play anything as long as it was fast and loud. After college Johnston moved to Seattle, but Austin, who had moved to Colorado, persuaded him that it was the better place to play bluegrass. Johnston joined him in the mountain town of Nederland and worked in the kitchen at a club called the Verve, where the local picking sessions drew players such as Vince Herman. There he and Austin met Kaufmann on bass and Aijala on guitar, and in December 1998 the four formed the Yonder Mountain String Band to open a show at the Fox Theatre in Boulder.

Elevation came out on 15 September 1999 on Frog Pad, the label the band set up to release its own music. Johnston wrote “Mental Breakdown” and “Eight Cylinders” for it and co-wrote “High on a Hilltop” with Austin and Aijala. The band built an audience among both bluegrass and jam-band listeners, began the Mountain Tracks series with Volume 1 in 2001, and made one album for a larger label, Yonder Mountain String Band (Vanguard, 2006), before returning to Frog Pad. Its covers have included songs by the Minutemen, Talking Heads and Buzzcocks, choices that grew out of the hours Johnston spent watching MTV’s 120 Minutes as a child. Asked in 2016 about the band’s “progressive bluegrass” label, he argued that bluegrass, Bill Monroe’s included, had always been a fusion of the music around it.

Austin left in 2014. On Black Sheep (2015) Johnston’s banjo was joined by Allie Kral on fiddle and Jacob Jolliff on mandolin, and the band went on to Love. Ain’t Love (2017), Get Yourself Outside (2022) and Nowhere Next (2024). Good as True, released on 27 March 2026, has Johnston, Aijala and Kaufmann with Nick Piccininni on mandolin and Coleman Smith on fiddle.