Picking up speed

US bluegrass star Billy Strings is riding his success all the way to NZ.

- BY GRAHAM REID

The boy's life rolled out like a bleak American black and white film set in OxyContin County, Kentucky, where fiddlers play on the back porch and fentanyl is the currency.

His father died when he was two, his mother remarried but the couple fell prey to meth addiction. The boy left home at 13 and went through his own dependencies.

And that could have been where the film reached an abrupt ending. However, the boy - born William Apostol but known professionally as Billy Strings after the nickname his aunty gave him - is now 32, a successful musician, married with a baby son and our call catches him at home in downtime.

Not that he has much of it these days because guitarist Strings - bringing his band to Auckland in July - is a Grammy-winning bluegrass player who has integrated that traditional country music learnt from stepfather Terry Barber (who he calls his dad) with the heavy metal he also grew up with.

Strings' shows can be like bluegrass-meets-Grateful Dead as he peels off guitar licks like early Eric Clapton raised in an Ozark holler. This is jam-band bluegrass rock that pulls big and diverse audiences.

"Yeah, sometimes I look out and see a guy in a Slayer t-shirt with long hair," Strings says in a languid drawl, "or an old white-haired lady enjoying the show. Or some 15-year-old kid just getting into bluegrass. It's a beautiful thing that they could find interest in my show; that's pretty cool."

Strings is modest, relaxed and these days is "California sober" (no hard drugs, just marijuana and psychedelics), to quote his 2023 song recorded with Willie Nelson: "I've had years I don't recall, but I'm told I had a ball, at least someone did who looked a lot like me."