SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, April 11, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — If you’ve lived in Utah for any length of time and are a music fan, chances are you’ve heard of local favorites Pixie and the Partygrass Boys.
The band is part of a lineup of mostly national and a handful of local acts that are part of the 2024 Summer Nights with the Stars season at Kenley Amphitheater in Layton. The Kenley is right in the heart of Layton Park and can hold 1,800 people at capacity.
The summer season kicks off Saturday, June 15, with An Evening with Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, and concludes on Thursday, Sept. 12, with Petty Theft: San Francisco Tribute to Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. Also appearing during the summer are national names including Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, Martina McBride, Colbie Caillat, Ben Folds, and Phillip Phillips.
Pixie and the Partygrass Boys will be taking the stage at 8 p.m. Saturday, July 13. The group is touring nationally before that, and appearing locally at Ogden Music Festival at 7 p.m. May 31, then at RiverWonderGrass in Jensen, Utah, on June 12.
The band has been touring extensively since the release of their 2018 debut EP “Utah Made,” becoming a five-year fixture at WinterWonderGrass, as well as gracing the stages of High Sierra Music Festival, Gem and Jam, Delfest, Jam Cruise, Hangtown, Sawtooth Valley Gathering, Bourbon and Beyond, and countless venues across the USA, and has supported such prestigious acts as Billy Strings, The Infamous Stringdusters, The Brothers Comatose, and Lake Street Dive.
The band is signed with record label Americana Vibes and released their fourth album, “The Chicken Coop Sessions: Vol. 1,” in May 2023, which harkens back to their origins, paying homage to the covers that brought them together as a group of ski bums playing house parties in the Cottonwood Canyons.
The band incorporates bluegrass, newgrass, pop, punk and rock ‘n’ roll into its unique sound. Along with the skill and expertise that comes from nearly a decade of performing together, the five have captivated audiences with their unique blend of heartfelt songwriting, high velocity instrumental excellence, silly outfits, and sing-along anthems.
Pixie and The Partygrass Boys invite the audience into their world every time they take the stage, hoping to share a piece of the magic they’ve found on the mountain tops and in the desert canyons of their Utah home.
Gephardt Daily chatted with Katia “Pixie” Racine, the lead singer of the group, who also plays the ukulele, over the phone Tuesday. The band had just returned from the WinterWonderGrass Tahoe Festival in Olympic Valley, California. She explained they drove all day Saturday, played all day Sunday and then drove back Monday.
“It was fun, but I feel like we didn’t have a second of downtime,” Racine said. “We filmed some live videos for a website at 11 to 12:30, had a soundcheck in the festival at 1:25 p.m., and Amanda [Grapes Dellinger, the band’s fiddle player] and I jumped on stage with WinterWonder Woman at 2:15, then we had three sets back to back. Then when the last one was done we had to run and soundcheck for our late night. Like literally had to pack up and run, played until 11:15 at night. Yeah, and then hung out a little bit; we opened for the very last late night and Amanda jumped on stage with them. So, we were in go mode from 11 a.m. to about 12:30 a.m.”
All the band members are based here in the Beehive State, though Racine said some of them are splitting their time with other states. She explained how the band began around 2015, and has had the same lineup almost from the beginning; Racine and Dellinger, Andrew Nelson on guitar and vocals, Ben Weiss on mandolin and vocals, and Zach Downes on upright bass.
“So technically it was just me and the boys, but it was only six or eight months before we met Amanda,” Racine explained. “So she was a core member like from the beginning. And yeah, it’s been the five of us, which is kind of unheard of, doing this for pretty much a whole decade. It’s really crazy. We have a completely grown up together. I’m 34 now and obviously I met the boys when I was 25. We are somewhere between, like, quintuplets and a platonic, non-sexual, five-way marriage. I don’t know how to explain it. There are periods of time that we spend more time with each other than our partners.”
Racine told us more about the band’s busy summer.
“It’s looking really great,” she said. “Lots of really cool festivals. We’re starting to get a little older, and we’ve really started to change our focus to trying to be more selective about what we do. You know, it’ll be a little bit of a change for sort of our identity and our approach but we just were really aging out of the club grind and going out for a week or two and playing bar club bar club every night. Because you come home so exhausted and unable to really have a home life.
“But this summer, you know, that’s the approach we’re taking and it’s still completely filling up, and it’s really looking great with so many cool festivals, town events, really great trips and opportunities, but yeah, we have to look so far ahead. And I have to set aside time and look six months in the future to say to booking and management, ‘OK, we’re gonna need a break. Like, this month or these three weeks off.’ It’s pretty exciting.”
She also talked about the group’s plan to release new music.
“I believe yesterday we got the final mixes for our next album; we’re putting them out for mastering today,” she said. “It is the most excited we have ever been for an album by far. It is our self-titled album. You know, we haven’t done that yet, but we’re really proud of it. It’s a bit shorter than some of our previous albums. Well, not shorter, but less songs, because this is gonna be our first one we’ll put on vinyl.
“Yeah, and we have a tendency to write very long songs so we couldn’t fit a ton on each side. And so recording has been very interesting for us because our last original album, we started working on in the winter of 2019 into 2020. So it completely got just halted from the beginning of 2020 until about the end of 2020, so it was a very long process. And it was interesting because when we went into the studio, we were in GO GO GO GO mode and then when we went back eight months later we were in slowdown COVID mode. And to hear the songs we recorded eight months ago we were like, ‘Who are these little babies playing all their songs so fast?’
“So that album just really went on and on and was a multi-year process because of COVID, and then our last album that we did was a cover album which is a little different. It’s, you know, nobody has the same ownership of any songs because nobody’s the writer. So this one is all original songs, it’s all songs we’re really proud of and we really feel very connected to them as songs that we’ve written. And I know at least one or two people in the band have said somewhat jokingly but also truly that this is the first one we’ve finished mixing and we’re not sick of any of the songs.”
Racine explained that all of the five band members write songs.
“Generally our most common way the songs get written is that one person writes the song start to finish; we’re all songwriters; and then brings it to the band,” she said. “And at that point, there’s really one of two ways that it happens; they’re both related. For the most part, everybody in the band fills out their own parts together.
“A lot of the times they they grow organically on stage, which was interesting going back into the studio because I know at least for one of my songs, I got a very specific sound and progression and dynamic in my head when I wrote the song. That was not how it organically developed live. And I did actually sit everybody down in the studio and say I know this is annoying, but I’m going to completely change the way you all play the song because I would like it to be recorded the way that I originally thought of it. So I know we’ve been playing this song for over a year and everybody knows what they do, and I’m going to change up everything that you do right now.
“So another thing about that song, and a couple of different songs, is that we’ve been told quite a few times that our genre more or less is quote-unquote live band. And I think that something we internalized this time around was that so many people, so many fans, love us for our live show. And it is just not possible to translate the energy, and the energy exchange with an audience, and we’re quite theatrical onstage, and you cannot translate that to studio.
“So we really decided that for this one we would consider live and studio to be two different art forms and to record the songs in a very produced way that as a five piece we can only get in the studio. So we have lots of friends joining us. We have pedal steel, we have banjo, and I will admit that most of my songs have pretty much verged into full band production with a drummer, I would say like pop music. On one of my songs, I have a drummer, I have horns. On one of them, I had our producer Mike Savage playing the baritone guitar. I have a small choir on one of them.
“So originally before we added everyone in, we went in as just the five of us and recorded it very similarly to how we do it live. So I do plan to mix those versions and release them as B-sides, especially so that people who are very used to the songs live and maybe a little like well, this super produced version isn’t the version that I’ve come to know and love, but to have those that are more true to the live performance. Yeah, I mean, we’re so excited. It sounds so good. We’ve worked with the same producer, Mike Savage here in Salt Lake at Man vs. Music with every single album we’ve ever done. And it’s just so organic to work with him.”
Racine said there’s not a release date for the album quite yet as it still needs to be mastered.
“I know that the label; we’ve talked with them and we’d all really liked to release the first singles in the spring, and hopefully have it [the album] come out in the summer,” she said. “The exact timeline is just based on when we get these masters back and get everything on the back end with publishing setup and then we can get ready to put it out there in I would say the next six months. And we are so excited we’ve actually gone ahead and booked our next studio time in May to start working on the next album.”
We also asked Racine what her dream collaboration would be.
“Mine are so lofty. It might be insane, but if I can ever have a dream collaboration, mine would either be Paul Simon or Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, believe it or not,” she said. “Nine Inch Nails has been one of my top favorite bands my entire life. And then I also just love the sort of, you know, the Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, big band, world influence, multiple drummers. That’s really my dream, and I would say that the other band members are probably very different. I’m sure for them, you know, especially Ben and Amanda, probably bluegrass, old time musicians, so we’re all over the place. I’m sure Downes’ would be some sort of funk or soul artist.”
Finally, we asked Racine what both she and the band’s goals are musically.
“I know the whole band would really feel like it was a huge accomplishment if we could play Red Rocks Amphitheatre [in Colorado]” she said. “That would be a big one. One of the festivals that’s always been in my mind, I think because I attended when I was younger, would be Bonnaroo. I think those are those are two of the big ones. As we get into, you know, I’m actually the youngest member of the band, a couple of the other members are also 34. And then we’ve got 37 and 39. So really just the last six months we’ve sat down and said, we’re going to talk about shifting what success, and what the next steps are. So actually, as you’re asking me that right now, I do need to really recognize what the new steps are. But those are two for sure.”
Racine added that one of the coolest things she feels the band has got to do is to go on Jam Cruise, that leaves out of Florida and goes to the Bahamas.
“So we got to play on the cruise, and it wasn’t a show but one of the coolest things we ever got to do was a music exchange with a Bachata Academy for kids and teenagers in the Dominican Republic. Yeah, that was really I would say life-changing. The kids performed for us, we performed for them, and then it just organically turned into one by one they they came up on stage and started to understand what we were playing and took over the instruments, and it sounds so cliche, but all of the American musicians that were playing, very few of us speak proficient or fluent Spanish. And pretty much none of the kids spoke any English, and it was really the most quintessential example of music as a universal language because we all just slipped right into being able to play together organically as well. That was incredible. I know we have big aspirations for international; for whatever reason, the five of us really want to play in Japan. That’s really been the bucket list, then in Europe. And I think that’ll be something now that we’re focusing on sort of better offers, higher goals or unique experiences.”
Season ticket renewals for 2024 Summer Nights with the Stars go through Friday, April 12. Tickets go on sale to the general public on at 10 a.m. Tuesday, May 7. At that time, tickets can be purchased online here, over the phone at 801-546-8575, or at the DAC box office at 1530 Layton Hills Parkway, Suite 104, Layton. For more information on Pixie and the Partygrass Boys, click here.
