It is, of course, the archetype of the American music dream: You quit your job. Drop out of school. Ditch the family. Move to Nashville. Or L.A. Or Austin. Or New York. Practice morning, noon, and night `til your fingers shred and your ears wilt. Connect with everyone you can find anyway you can. Hook up with bandmates. Take the bum gigs in the bad bars. Write. Play. Dream. Search for a label deal. Hunt for the Big Break. Then it comes. You make a record. It’s on the charts. People take notice. You’ve got fans. What happens next? You break up the band and start all over again.

Okay. So that’s not the story’s traditional ending. (Think 10-night stand at Madison Square Garden instead.) But that was exactly the trajectory for Blue Merle, an upstart cross-genre Nashville export that made an impressive debut splash with their breakout 2005 album Burning in the Sun. Helmed by lead vocalist and songwriter Lucas Reynolds, Blue Merle applied largely acoustic roots instrumentation to its members’ thoroughly modern sensibilities. The result was a sound that found rock flirting with pop even as it danced with jazz in songs that owed as much to the Appalachian hills as they did to smoky clubs. With lush orchestral strings mingling with backwoods mandolin and fiddle, and strong rhythmic pulses nestled comfortably next to melodic reveries, Blue Merle’s was a unique formula. And listeners responded by becoming enthusiastic fans that propelled the band very nearly overnight to high profile venues like Farm Aid and Bonnaroo and opening slots for such luminaries as J.J. Cale and Van Morrison. Then in a heartbeat it was over. A short and altogether surprising note on the band’s website explained that “the time is right for us to pursue individual paths in music and life.” For his part, Reynolds responded to the breakup in the typical pedal-to-the-metal fashion that marked his Nashville tenure and got him to the gates of greatness in the first place. Within months of the last Blue Merle performance on April 21, 2006 at Vanderbilt University, Reynolds had released a six song EP, begun work on a full-length solo effort, scored a major Hollywood film, and formed not one — but two — new bands. In mid-summer, we spoke with Reynolds from his current roost in the tiny Green Mountain town of Bristol, Vermont to find out what happened, what’s happening, and what happens next in the career of one of music’s fastest rising stars.

Let’s start by finding out a little bit about where Lucas Reynolds comes from.

I grew up in Cornwall, Vermont in a geodesic dome with a lot of music in the house. My mom taught in the Green Mountain String program. My dad was a guitar builder and a canoe builder. They started me on piano when I was four or five. And there were always different instruments around our house. Mandolins, ukuleles. So I guess from when I was just about walking, I had instruments in my hands. I started playing guitar when I was around 10 years old. I had a great teacher up in Burlington that I started studying with named Paul Aspel, who played with Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf and a lot of those guys. So from early on I had real cool connections to all the music that I was listening to and a really wonderful support system from my family and my teachers.

So it was pretty natural that you ended up picking up a stringed instrument of some sort?

I didn’t ever really think about it at a young age too much, [whether or not] I wanted to do something with it. I always thought I’d grow up to be a guide in Alaska or something like that. But it was such a huge part of our childhood. It was just such a natural transition. We were always writing. Always playing. Always listening. We were always in backpacks on our parents’ backs going to festivals. So it was just a really natural transition all the way through.

Who were some of your early influences?

There was a lot of blues, a lot of gospel, and a lot of songwriters. There was a lot of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. A lot of songwriters like Paul Simon and Merle Haggard. We listened to jazz, to Duke Ellington. Just great bands that had songs all the way around. I think that’s the common thread. It was just great writers all the way through. It was really broad. I remember there would be these hippie parties on the weekends where my sister and I would get to stay up late, and there was always a lot of Motown and Stax recordings like Otis Redding and the Temptations.

What are some of the earliest festivals you remember going to?

I remember going to see a lot of blues and bluegrass festivals. Being at the Muddy Waters festival. Going to see Robert Cray at the Ben & Jerry’s (One World, One Heart) Festival. And a lot of those. As soon as I was in High School and got a car, the world just opened up for me. I was all over the place.

What was your first concert you went to by yourself?

I got my driver’s license and that week the Allman Brothers were playing. Everybody’s parents were really cool. [They said] take sandwiches, drive safe, wear your seatbelts. My mom said, “Don’t have sex with anybody in the tent you don’t know.”

You mentioned that growing up you thought you’d end up as a wilderness guide. And you actually did that for awhile. How did that path get taken?

It was funny… All that I knew while I was growing up was that the town seemed so small and I wanted to get as far away as I could. No matter how amazing the place you grow up in is, that’s just a natural thing. So for me, like everybody else, it was just like, “Let’s get out and scatter.” Even though I love Vermont. I want to live here forever, but when I was young, that’s what I was thinking. So I started off with pretty close to a full-ride scholarship to this music school in Colorado. And the West was great because it seemed like a good balance between studying music and being able to get in the mountains a lot. What ended up happening was that I just carried the same rhythm I had when I was growing up, which was equal time between music and the woods. So I cranked music during the year and every other second that I could I was in the mountains, whether it was guiding boats up in Montana or guiding in Wyoming. I did music school out west for two years, and I decided it wasn’t going to happen in school. I needed to be in a scene. So I went and checked out New York, and I went and checked out Nashville and Boston. I knew music schools provided you time to develop and mature as a player, which is what everybody needs. But at the same time, the scene that you’re in is the most crucial aspect. So I found this music school down in Nashville, Tennessee, and I just really fell in love with Nashville. There’s such a rich musical history down there. It’s almost like a rite of passage. So many of my heroes spent considerable amounts of time in Nashville. So I went down there and I put my time in. But I actually got burned out after a year or two. I felt like such a fish out of water. I went and got a job guiding elk hunts out in Wyoming. Lived in a tent for six months, and halfway through that experience I felt like everything was happening for a reason. I felt like I was definitely going to get back to Nashville, and I was going to need to really hunker down and commit if I wanted anything real to happen. [I thought that] I might be out of the woods for awhile so I should let that experience of backcountry living on that intensity level really last in me. So I treated Wyoming like it was the last hard core go-around for a little bit. And it was. I went back to Nashville, started up Blue Merle. Then for the last three and a half or four years, we’ve been on tour.

Tell us the tale of Blue Merle. How did the band come to be?

I didn’t know anybody when I first got to Nashville. So I basically got to Nashville, and I took everything that I could. I took internships at record labels so I could understand the business end of things. I was taking every gig that I could. Country gigs, rockabilly, gospel, rock, Christian, hip-hop. I just put myself out there. It took literally three years of cranking that year round. That heavy. Just living like a dog. Three years of that until somehow I ended up on this recording session with this guy that introduced me to our bass player, Jason Oettel, and the rest kind of happened from there although there are so many pieces to the puzzle in between. I guess it just took like three years of being really hard until I could even find myself around a peer group, with all the Nickel Creek kids, and that whole young scene, and then Blue Merle kind of came through that.

What were those early days like?

We were all living in one band house in Nashville and just staying up all day and night working on music together. Literally we’d buy one big meal at the grocery store in the morning. We’d play all day. Some of us would skip our jobs. Some would skip school. And when we were done playing, the guys would just all sleep on the floor. We’d get up, we’d play all night. And we just did that and did that and did that. We had times where we were all on food stamps together, where definitely it was tight times, but everybody did it. There’s something like really romantic about making your life what you love. Really hunkering down and committing to it. And we did it. It made everything great that happened even sweeter.

Were you guys playing around town at that point?

Yeah, we had a bi-weekly residency gig at this club called the Basement, which was this really hot little club in Nashville. And we started packing it out and pretty soon it became a circus where you just count on every record label in Nashville being there. It just became kind of like a circus and then that’s where our deals all initiated out of. Many of the first steps came through that, which was a really wonderful period. It was a really fun period because all we were doing was creating new music and taking it out and trying it out. Going and going and going until it catapulted us out on the road.

Blue Merle put out one record, and then you made the decision to stop. That’s an interesting choice. Could you talk a little bit about what went into that decision? Was it difficult to make?

Oh, god, yeah. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t difficult to make. But all I know is that none of us are quitters, and it has nothing to do with anybody backing down work level-wise. It’s just that it’s really an intense business. The closest thing I can call it is just being married to six people, four or five other bandmates. When you’re poor, you’re sleeping in the same hotel beds. You’re on the road 300 days a year. Different people can hang in there for so long. And I guess what it really comes down to is we just had to have a heart-to-heart to see where everybody was. We’re all really close. We’re all really tight. I don’t really have a good answer. It’s all so confusing. All I can say is that we had a really amazing four years. We made a great record, and all of us wanted to do separate things. I wanted to keep on going full-on with a full band that’s all playing and working really hard together. So we just all sat each other down and talked it over over a long period of time. And I feel like all of us have had so many amazing experiences and opportunities through this launching of Blue Merle that there’s a body of work that they can pursue any way they want to. I’ve chosen to pursue it by keeping right on going full strength with another band and another record deal. Neil Young quit Buffalo Springfield, and that didn’t make any sense at the time, but in hindsight it was one of those things that everyone has to do. Neil still plays with a lot of those guys, and it’s a lot healthier to speak about those things and get them out in the open than to harbor them against your partners and your best friends. So I feel like whether anyone on the outside understands it or not, it’s such a positive thing that happened.

So you’re still in touch with the other guys in the band?

Yep. You know Michelle Branch? Our fiddle player Luke Bulla just joined Michelle’s band. I know Jason, our bass player, has done a record with Ken Coomer from Wilco. Everybody is pushing hard. I’ve been playing with a bunch of the Macy Gray kids. I have two different bands right now that I’ve been playing and working with. One is assembled from a couple of different players on different ATO records projects. The whole Dave Matthews camp. Mike Doty and then friends of friends through the Macy Gray kids out in California. And another one has a different rhythm section that makes me feel like I’m playing in Emmylou Harris’ and Van Morrison’s bands. Those guys are all from Detroit and Nashville. So there’s just a bunch of players all over the country that I’m pulling on right now and working on a bunch of new music with.

You’re playing with a new band at some gigs in August. Is that one of these bands?

Yeah, I think that will be the band out of Nashville and Detroit.

Who’s in that band?

Derico Watson. He plays with Victor Wooten from the Flecktones. There’s this great drummer Chester Thompson, who’s played with Santana and Phil Collins, and when Chester goes out, Derico subs for him. He’s just an amazing soulful drummer out of Detroit. Then there’s also Chester’s son, Akil Thompson. Akil plays every instrument. Then I have a friend Tim Lauer who plays accordion and B3 organ. And just [about] every instrument. It’s kind of like every single person in the band plays every instrument. Everybody’s switching it up.

Do you think this might become an on-going concern?

The biggest thing that I asked for from management right now during this period of writing an album was time to explore playing with different musicians to find what really exists out there because a band is such a chemistry thing between the players. And different guys have the capacity to bring different aspects of your personality out. I feel like Blue Merle brought one part of my personality out musically, but by no means everything. And I feel like I’m really just scratching the surface. So management’s been wonderful in giving me the time to just start playing music with different guys to see what’s hot and what’s not.

You spoke about how Blue Merle really only explored one facet of your musical personality. How do the new directions you’re going in these days differ from Blue Merle? What sort of things are you exploring?

The thing that’s the same is that I’m really excited. We have all sorts of different instruments, and the guys I’m playing with have all sorts of different instruments, too, and it’s really enjoyable and fresh to be able to explore fleshing out songs in a way that’s different from the average guitar-bass-keyboards set-up. It allows you different textures. So that’s the constant. Just tons of different instruments. I think the thing that’s different is that we’re starting from scratch. There’s no expectations about what type of music someone might naturally have an aptitude to play. So it’s nice because everybody’s caught off guard a little bit. The coolest thing I can think of to say is when Van Morrison went and made Astral Weeks, the nicest thing about a record like that is you have classical musicians mixed with members of the Modern Jazz Quartet mixed with R&B players playing that stuff live. The thing that works with that is that you have all these different types of musicians and it creates a tension because guys aren’t used to playing together in that capacity at certain times. And that tension translates in the recording and in the songs. So I guess that’s the thing that’s different. The energy is really, really high. A lot of the stuff is even more dynamic. Blue Merle tried to be really dynamic with different string arrangements. We prided ourselves on putting a lot of time into the arrangement of songs. But this just elaborates on that even more. It’s a lot more dynamic. It’s a lot rawer. A lot more rough around the edges. And it’s a lot more high energy.

Do you find that the music you’re playing these days is taking place across genres or is it more focused on a particular style? What’s your take on that?

I guess stylistically it’s just branching out a lot more. Its still drawing on folk and Americana, but there’s a lot more R&B and a lot more edge. The energy is higher. I just feel like four years on the road taught me so much about myself. I just feel so comfortable in my own skin. I feel bullet-proof and pretty fearless to explore and try anything, so I got a hundred plus new songs, and half of them are crap. And maybe there’s like three or four good ones, but the three or four good ones they just come from fearless writing. It feels really good.

Now you just released a solo EP…

Yeah, I did a solo tour this spring right before writing this new album. I wanted to bring new music out on the road for that so I went and recorded six songs and did all the paintings and artwork myself and sold it.

Tell us about that experience. Now that you’re doing your own thing, how is that different from recording with Blue Merle?

We made that [Blue Merle] record with this producer Steven Harris from the UK. A lot of those songs were already arranged and fleshed out so it was a matter of getting everybody on their best day at the same time on tape. But this EP was like very stripped back versions of new songs. It was a lot rawer than Blue Merle. It was putting things down fast. The guy I was working with was in between making albums with Garth Hudson from The Band up in Woodstock so he was running back and forth between Garth and me. We were proceeding as we did with Blue Merle, which was trying to get the most honest emotional take on tape for where we are in our lives, and that’s what happened. But it also happened a lot faster doing this EP. We recorded the whole thing in two days. Pedal steel and everything. With Blue Merle we were camped out at the Dave Matthews Band house for months.

You mentioned on your blog that you’ll be spending some time writing with [Phish bass player] Mike Gordon this summer. Is that still going to happen?

Yeah, I just went up and saw Mike and Trey [Anastasio] last night. But we have the same manager now, and so me and Mike were hanging a little bit a month ago, and just speaking about it. And he’s got the Trey dates. He gets off the road in August, and he wanted to get together after. He asked if I would be into it and I said, “Dude, of course!”

This summer you’re in Vermont doing an intensive writing thing. Tell us about that.

We’d gotten off the road in November for the most part. And so immediately I woke up six hours later right out of the van and started writing for another record. Which is an ongoing thing, writing intensely. So I wrote all November. This summer was dedicated to staying off the road as much as possible to really create a large body of work. I chose Vermont because I grew up here, and I think it’s a really amazing place. It makes me feel so comfortable. I know that traditionally with me that’s where my best songs come from. They come from when I’m so comfortable, and I’m writing and working, working, working so hard and all of a sudden a great one just slips out. So I’m trying to create an environment for myself where that’s going to happen as much as possible. So I’m living in my tent up on the mountain. I’ve got a pretty sweet tent platform and a pretty sweet spot in the birches and the spruce trees all set up. And then I have a big recording studio in this town, Bristol, which is up in the mountains. It’s at the bottom of this three-story grain mill that was renovated. So I get up, drive down the mountain, get coffee, and I crank to the studio. It’s pretty sweet. It’s such an amazing deal to come back to the studio and just work on stuff. It’s really nice just being a part of this community here. Last year, we came off the road with Van Morrison and I had two days off, so I was playing down in Harlem with him and then I ran back up [here] and I was doing interviews from the top of Sugarbush [Ski Resort] because it was a powder day.

What was opening for Van Morrison like?

It was so amazing. He’s a pretty private guy. He’s got a ten-piece band, and they’re all Irish, and my whole family is Irish so we all got along while Van was in the hotel until the last second.

Any other great memories from the road?

We did this tour with J.J. Cale this last year, and his thing is every day before soundcheck, he’d pull out lawn chairs. Three lawn chairs next to the tour bus, and he’d get his pack of Carleton cigarettes, and he’d put on his slippers and be like, “Come here, boy. Come sit down.” I’d just go sit in the lawn chair with him and he’s just school my ass on everything. I just listened to him teach. That’s the way he’d teach. He’d just talk about how it all blew up after he cut “After Midnight” and “Cocaine.” But [before that] the dude lived in every trailer park in Davidson Country, Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t an overnight thing. He was hunkered down for 13 years down there. Everybody that’s wonderful has to put their time in. Sometimes it happens fast and sometimes it doesn’t. You got to hang in there and do your thing.

Getting back to your current recording project. Are you cutting tracks for the next album or just laying some demos down?

It’s just for demos. Songs come different ways. Some songs need to be written music first. Some need to be words first. Some need to be recorded all in one burst. It happens different ways, so the studio is just strictly to try and document things. It’s really helpful to listen back and see what works and what’s a bunch of crap. And it also helps to be able to send mixed takes and work tapes to different fellows. So that’s what’s going on. Another thing that happened was that I scored the new Robin Williams film that’s getting wound up right now. So I was working on the soundtrack for that. And actually a lot of those tracks from my home studio I could just ship my hard drive off to New York where they were doing the master recording. And they just take my demo tracks off and use them in the master.

Scoring a movie has to be a much different process than normal songwriting.

I’ve just been chomping at the bit [to do this]. And we had maybe three scripts come in, and you know, it’s like you write for them and you write for them and then get knocked out or it doesn’t happen. Well this Robin Williams film, August Rush, the director (Kirsten Sheridan), she’s from Dublin, Ireland, and she was a fan so I just started sending her mixes and working really close with her. I worked for six weeks straight all day every day sending mixes overnight, and it’s just about who can keep up with the director, with what she needs. I really enjoyed that because you’re working within some guidelines and it really pushes you creatively to be able to get to the source of the emotional root and capture that.

Between all that’s going on do you get time to listen to much music for pleasure?

All day, man!

What are you listening to these days?

Well, this morning I was listening to Beth Orton. Her new album is really beautiful. I listen to a lot of classical music. I’m listening to a lot of dance music right now. I like that a lot. A lot of hip-hop and a lot of blues.

Are there any emerging artists that have caught your ear lately?

There’s a guy Andrew Bird from Chicago. He’s really amazing. He was at Bonnaroo this year. He was really wonderful. This guy, Mike Skinner, he’s in this band The Streets from England. He’s an MC. He does a lot of hip-hop. He’s really really wonderful. Then there’s this band DeVotchKa. They do a lot of eastern European music with accordians and tubas and upright basses and dance beats. That’s pretty hot. I think they’re from Colorado. But the new Beth Orton album is amazing.

Let’s switch gears a little bit. How did you get turned on to Elixir® Strings?

Actually it was the fiddle player in Blue Merle, Luke Bulla. I met Luke when he was playing in Ricky Skaggs’ band. We used to go jam with the Nickel Creek kids. Everybody would all get together. And I was playing Luke’s guitar one night, and I was like, “Dude, this just sounds sick. This is awesome.” He said, “Aw, dude. Elixir Strings is where it’s at.” So I went out the next day and bought Elixirs, and that was probably six years ago, and I haven’t stopped. They’re just amazing. They just sound better than other strings. They’re balanced. I love the way they feel. I play the Polywebs, and I just love the way they feel on my fingers. I don’t get hung up sliding. They sound better longer. They just speak to me. They sound really amazing recording. I’ve tried recording with every kind of string. I’ve got all sorts of different Elixirs on all different instruments. On my guitars – my electrics, my acoustics – my banjos, my mandolins. They just track differently with the microphone on them. I like the way they sound.

What’s next for you? What’s happening in the rest of 2006 and looking even further down the road in 2007?

I hope that by the end of September I have a body of work that I’m really proud of and at that time go make a record. Go get on another label. Put a band together, and then by this winter, this January, be back on the road full time hitting strong with a new album. I’m not sure where I’m going to be. I moved to Nashville with the hope that if I really worked hard and I didn’t slack, I could create a body of work down there that would last me my life so that I’d be able to come and go. I’ve been there for seven years, and I never slacked off once, and what it’s done for me is that I can step in and out of the scene. I have work to do there whether it’s writing, recording, playing out. Everybody’s there and it’s not going anywhere so I’ve worked really hard to be able to not have to be there the whole year. I’d like to be able to be out here up in New England. I need the woods.