Rick Faris
Rick Faris is a bluegrass singer, guitarist and songwriter who spent eleven years in Greg Cahill’s Special Consensus, first on mandolin and then on guitar, before leaving in 2021 to lead his own band. He has made four albums of mostly his own songs for Dark Shadow Recording, and the IBMA named him New Artist of the Year in 2022 and Songwriter of the Year in 2024.
He grew up playing guitar in a touring family band, the Faris Family, based in Kansas, and began performing professionally with it at seven, in 1998; his brother Eddie Faris has sung and played bass on his own records. His break came when Cahill invited him to audition for Special Consensus, the Chicago band Cahill had led for decades, as its mandolin player, and he learned the instrument in five weeks to win the job.
On mandolin he played on Scratch Gravel Road (Compass, 2012), on which he sings lead on “Sea of Heartbreak,” and on Country Boy: A Bluegrass Tribute to John Denver (2014). After about six years he moved back to guitar and became the band’s principal lead singer, on Long I Ride (2016), where he shares the lead with Celia Woodsmith on Larry Cordle’s “Highway 40 Blues,” Rivers and Roads (2018), on which he sings “Big River,” and Chicago Barn Dance (2020), whose title song, by Becky Buller, Missy Raines and Alison Brown, he sings lead on; it was the IBMA’s Song of the Year in 2020. In his eleven years the band toured in nineteen countries, made six records, received two Grammy nominations and won six IBMA awards.
He signed with Mougin’s Dark Shadow Recording as a solo artist in the fall of 2018 and recorded Breaking in Lonesome (2019) in a week with Laura Orshaw on fiddle, Harry Clark on mandolin, Justin Moses on banjo and Eddie Faris on bass; eleven of its twelve songs were his, and its title song reached number one on a weekly bluegrass radio chart. In February 2021 he left Special Consensus, and Greg Blake took his place. The Next Mountain (November 2021), with Orshaw, Clark, Russ Carson on banjo and Zak McLamb on bass and guests including Sam Bush and Ronnie Bowman, included songs written with Rick Lang and Becky Buller and brought him nominations for Song of the Year from both SPBGMA and the IBMA.
Uncommon Sky (June 2023), which he wrote or co-wrote apart from a version of Huey Lewis’s “The Power of Love,” had Del McCoury singing and Jerry Douglas on resonator guitar. His fourth album, Life’s Parade, followed in July 2025, with Ron Block on banjo, Dan Tyminski on mandolin, Orshaw on fiddle and Mark Schatz on bass, and that June he returned as a guest on Special Consensus’s fiftieth-anniversary album, Been All Around This World. He also builds guitars as the Faris Guitar Company.
