Susto

Over the last few years, Osborne, the central figure in the band Susto, has navigated a series of relational changes—including moving away from his Charleston home—as well as the musicians that surround him. While Susto is very much alive and well as a musical outlet, Osborne has also ingratiated himself with Holler Choir, and together they've even altered his relationships with his own catalog.

Susto Stringband is Osborne's newest endeavor, a partnership with Holler Choir that features reworked favorites from Susto's back catalog as well as some newer songs. It's a chance for fans to hear Osborne in a different light, and for the artist himself, it's a chance to enliven older songs in fresh ways (with some new compositions as well).

We caught up with Osborne recently to hear more about Susto's recent live release, Live from Codfish Hollow (2024, New West), his love for bluegrass, and how the world around him is changing quite a bit these days.

Analogue: You’re on the road now and just released the live album last year. Did that feel like a celebration of the chemistry and growth from so much time on the road with the band?

Justin Osborne: Yeah, for sure. It was sort of marking the 10-year point for us in terms of touring as a band. We’d recorded shows and had different things like that, but we'd never really intentionally made a full band live record.

We wanted to do that to sort of capture what we’ve cultivated on the road—what we sound like on the road—because a live show is always going to be different than a studio recording. We wanted to capture that energy and have something to show for it after all these years of honing in the live sound.

Analogue: You always hear artists asked about their growth from album to album, but the craft of performances is often overlooked. That’s great you got to document that.

Justin: Yeah, I'll add, too, that per record, you have 10 to 12 songs where you’re sort of creating a storyline in that way. However, with the live record, we were able to lean into the whole catalog and paint a broader story arc with all the pieces from our ten years as a band. Being able to tell a bigger story with the energy of the crowd and us doing it in the moment felt really special—a nod to the entire catalog.

Analogue: Is there a song in the catalog that’s changed the most in terms of your relationship to it over the years?

Justin: I think all the songs take on a new life once they transition from being something that's being created in the studio versus something that's performed live. They all sort of take on these new meanings and approaches in that way. Then in terms of meaning, you can write a song and then sort of get further and further away from what the song was written about. Yet you always go there when you're performing it.

That's part of performance for me is being in those moments. But since we've been a band for so long and I've been living my life in that time, some of the songs have come full circle for me in different ways. Like, there's songs that were on our first record that were about heartache and I sort of thought I was away from all of that. Then I found myself in a similar position again.

You know, I’ll be singing this song and it'll be a song that I've been singing for ten years. But then I'm at a place in my life again where it has renewed poignance, and I think that that's something that's been striking to me most recently.

But I don't know. it’s hard to really pinpoint one song that stands out more than others, if I'm being completely honest with you. Because they all evolve. They’re born whenever they're released and they grow every time they're played. And they change with line-up to line-up because we do have sort of a versatile line-up. So, you know, the interpretation can depend on who's playing, if that makes sense.

Analogue: By the way, is there a song in the catalog that you're like, ‘Yeah, fans are never ever hearing that one live ever again’?

Justin: I don't know, honestly. I don't shy away from any of the songs completely. There are certain songs that I feel like require a certain amount of sensitivity from the audience, and not every audience is the same. Not every audience is a seated, quiet one. Sometimes it's a rowdy college one or a bar crowd or a crazy rock show.

So nothing's off the table. There's nothing that I don't stand behind. There are some songs that I'd like to provide more context for, a storytelling-type scenario. And then there are some songs that are just really hard to sort of pull off, just off the cuff. So we have to sort of really work it up.

But I wouldn't say there's anything like, ‘Oh, I can't believe we released that song’ and then we never do that song. I don't feel that way about any of them.

Analogue: Obviously want to talk about Holler Choir and the new outlet there, Susto Stringband. What's the relationship there? How far does that go back?

Justin: So I met those folks a few years ago.I went through some big shifts in my life, sort of post-COVID. I left Charleston where I had lived for a long time, where I started the band, and I moved to Asheville, North Carolina. I had grown up playing shows in Asheville and going to Asheville a lot. You know, it's not very far from where I grew up and where I lived for a long time, but I was never really a part of the music scene there.

So once I moved there, I was like, ‘I really would like to get sort of involved in the scene.’ So I started just looking around, going to shows, and then going to open mic nights. It doesn't exist in the same form anymore, but there was this sort of elevated open mic called Open Folk. And it was always super well-attended. And by that, I mean a hundred people—a very respectful audience. Some really pro people who live around Asheville would come in and do two or three songs and there were five or six spots per night.

So I messaged them to see if I could get on one of the bills and they put me on. It was great because there were members of MJ Lenderman's band and Indigo D’Souza’s—not those people, but members of their bands were there. And then I was there. And then Clint [Roberts] and Helena [Rose] and Joey [Brown] from Holler Choir played right after me.

I was sort of nervous because everybody kind of knew each other. It is a smaller town, Asheville. So I was just sort of the guy. Nobody really knew who I was. I got up and then afterward, Clint and Holler Choir played. My wife and I were there and we were just floored by their tunes and by their vibe.

When I introduced myself, I was like, ‘Yeah, I have a band called Susto.’ It turned out that Clint was a fan and just didn't know who I was because I was only playing new songs. So we sort of struck up a friendship from that and started hanging out. My wife and I became absorbed into their friend group to an extent, and I started being around that music a lot more—going to house parties and people sitting around in a circle jamming.

Old-time bluegrass and gospel music is something that has always been a big part of my musical heritage in terms of a listener. I don't come from a family of musicians, but my family always loved to listen to music. A big part of what I was hearing growing up was that sort of thing, so I had a pretty good knowledge of the bluegrass catalog.

I've always been a fan, but I've never attempted to really make that style of music myself, even though I kind of wanted to. It's sort of honestly been a dream in the back of my head for a while. But when I got to be in that scene, the opportunity was there. Clint and Helena were all about trying to recreate some of the Susto tunes in that style. We started playing a couple of shows locally in Asheville, and then next thing we knew, we started getting festival offers and the label wanted us to make a record. So we did it, and now we have the record coming out. It’s very exciting.

Analogue: That’s gotta be fun to see the songs in a new light.

Justin: It was a really fun experience to give some of these older songs a new interpretation. It was also fun to make a record with a completely new crew of people in a new place. Also, I had some newer songs that I'd been writing that were really sort of geared towards that. So it was nice to have a good place for them to live as well, you know?

Analogue: The new album has Volume One attached. The supposition there is that this is going to be an ongoing thing. True?

Justin: Yeah. That's my hope. We were able to make this record fairly easily and quickly with a crew of really dynamite players, and it only took us a few days. We did two days of pre-production, and I think it was like four days tracking in the studio and then mixing and all that stuff afterward.

I'm hoping that in the next couple of years, we can carve out time to do another volume that will probably be something similar, where we sort of take from the Susto back catalog and then also put in some new songs. I'd also like to do some standards. Like I said, I am a big fan of the old-time and bluegrass and gospel tunes. So I would love to do some of my interpretations of those as well.

We’re leaving it open-ended. That's why that was sort of the point of calling it Volume One to give ourselves not just the option but the mandate to make another one.

VISIT: Susto