Big Richard

BIG RICHARD

Bluegrass band Big Richard makes music for the 21st century’s twisted cultural unease. Their latest album Pet, is a fierce, provocative, rejoinder to what troubles them and the world right now, which was recorded live to tape in order to capture the fervor of their live shows.

Big Richard is so much about our energetic delivery, and so I think it’s been really important for us as a group to figure out how to do that for a record,” says mandolin and guitar player Bonnie Sims.

“We made the album all on tape and did it all in these single-shot performances,” cellist Joy Adams adds. “The collection of songs, we wanted to take our most hard driving, heavy hitting songs, we wanted to craft a banger set list. Like, if we had a 30-minute set, what would we put on there that says the most, and makes people feel the broadest bunch of feelings? And it was all these songs.”

Adams and Sims both studied music and toured and played extensively before (and outside of) joining Big Richard, as did the other members of the band: Adams has three degrees in cello, toured with Darol Anger and Nathaniel Rateliff, and has recorded for television and film (including the Queen’s Gambit); Sims, who grew up playing music with her family, has a degree in commercial music, with a vocal specialization in yodeling, toured and recorded extensively with her husband, Taylor Sims (including a platinum-certified record); fiddler Eve Panning, who also grew up playing with her family, studied violin performance and music education, taught orchestra, and played in bluegrass bands, including touring widely with classical group Barrage; and bassist Hazel Royer started out playing music with her dad Eric Royer in the Boston, MA folk and rock music scene, and studied at the Berklee College of Music.
Pet, the band’s sophomore studio album, was engineered by Mark Anderson and produced by the Big Richard members, will be released February 5, 2026 on Signature Sounds. Anchored by staples from the band’s live sets, the album includes their urgent, vociferous version of Dave Olney’s anti-capitalist anthem, “Millionaire,” and an equally-vehement rendition of the anti-gun violence treatise, “Red Fox Run,” written by Cecelia and Andy Thorn (of Leftover Salmon). Both songs are emotionally potent at shows, and the audience’s anger often palpable; feeling it together as they play is cathartic, Sims says.

Big Richard opens Pet full force, with a blistering medley of Sims’ song, “It’s Gonna Fall” and the Bill Monroe fiddle tune, “Old Daingerfield”: “Our air has turned to poison and our water catches flame / You know we’re blowing out the ground under our beds in which we lay / And we’re digging holes we’ll never fill, the ground shakes to protest / But we just close our minds and eyes and ears, there ain’t no stopping progress,” Sims sings about her despair at the destruction of the natural world through fire and flood, and the fracking wells she sees springing up in Colorado. (At shows, the band also jibs at Monroe’s infamous habit of claiming credit for all songs written by his band members, by joking that Sims wrote both tunes.)

“A lot of the time in our sets, we like to follow a heavy-hitting song with an instrumental that meets that energy,” Panning says of tacking “Old Daingerfield” onto the end of “It’s Gonna Fall.” “It feels good to reflect on something for a moment, or keep going with it, and keep that energy somewhere.”

The band applied the same pressure release system on Pet, which features two entirely instrumental tracks written by Panning. Comparatively gentle, “K’s March,” inspired by a musical phrase Panning’s roommate used to sing around the house, follows “Millionaire” with a wholesome old-time jam track that lets audiences blow off steam after being wound tight; and later in the album, “Circus Jerk” (double entendre intended), hints at the band’s raunchy stage banter and bluegrass music’s reputation for showoff solos (by giving each band member her
moment to rip).

“We’re in the most musically locked spot we’ve been in thus far, since I’ve been in the band, and this album feels like a really good reflection of that,” says Royer, who joined in 2023.

Unapologetically outrageous and provocative, the band’s name is a wink to the ‘big dick’ energy Big Richard is reclaiming from male bluegrass bands. They’re intent on making audiences laugh and feel a little uncomfortable, for the sake of making them think, as well. To that end, the album’s cover portrays the band dressed in deranged clown outfits and crouching on railroad tracks in front of an oil refinery. And its title track “Pet,” delivered like a slightly demented circus sound track and written by Adams, is a rich paean for the people society too often lets fall through the cracks.

“I wrote it thinking about people who are stuck in circumstances outside of their control, whether they were born into it or not. That might be childhood trauma or poverty or a chronic health problem, or something that they didn’t choose, and they’re just hauling it around with them,” Adams says. “I think in a deeper sense, the song is reflective of how many people get lost in the big turning of the world right now.” It’s a sentiment and a sound she doubles down on later on the album with the spooky music box track, “Holy Holy,” about religious/childhood trauma and growing up with an addict in the house.

Big Richard’s power to deliver emotionally evocative music derives in part from their rare make up. Though the album also employs toy piano, banjo, and octave mandolin, the band primarily performs on bass, mandolin and guitar, fiddle, and with Adams on cello, which adds an extra sonic dimension for bluegrass (though Adams, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the history of cello in fiddle music, says the cello actually predates the bass in string bands).

Still, among the strife and intensity, Pet leaves room for a little sweetness. First with “Alaska,” a yearning love-song Royer wrote about a crush when she was 16, and then with a cover of Hank Cochran’s “Make the World Go Away,” which concludes the album, and often their live show, too. At concerts, the band’s four members descend from the stage, and play the song clustered together in a clearing in the crowd, a final act of gathering after an intense show.

“Our live performances are so raw and so gritty, and I think that our sound never really flourished in that digital landscape.” Adams says. “[Recording live to tape] we were all in the same room together, very close together, with a lot of mic bleed, etc. And the energy was insane. It felt so good to record this way. Even on the first day, we were like ‘wow, this sounds like our band.’ And to do something that’s very real and gritty and has little mistakes in it just feels alive and human.”