Acclaimed bluegrass modernists YONDER MOUNTAIN STRING BAND have announced a month-long trek of U.S. tour dates for winter 2018, kicking off January 10 in Pennsylvania.  The 24-show tour runs down the East Coast, through Florida for five nights and then circles up through the Midwest.  The Southern Belles will open 15 of the shows.

The quintet–Adam Aijala, Dave Johnston, Ben Kaufmann, Jacob Joliff and Allie Krall-also recently sat down for a coveted “Daytrotter” performance, where they performed tracks from their 2017 Love. Ain’t Love album. Check that out here.

YMSB has been on tour most of the year, including an in-progress 25-show run of dates. At their Brooklyn, NY performance this past weekend, the band made super-fan and friend Michael Walker an honorary member of the group, as he has now seen the band 300 times. And in a recent live review, Cleveland Scene said, “Those who came out to the Beachland Ballroom last night were treated to a dynamic evening of jammy bluegrass improv from the always delightful Yonder Mountain String Band. The band veered from plaintive plucking to strident shredding, and the crowd engaged them in laid-back hootenanny dancing all night.’

The Colorado-based band formed in 1998 and have released 11 studio and live albums since, including three #1 Bluegrass Albums chart-toppers.  Rolling Stone said Love. Ain’t Love is “an album rooted in modern bluegrass and punctuated by genre-jumping excursions into world music, reggae and all points in between” and premiered the video for the album’s first single, “Bad Taste,” here.  Talking about the song “Take A Chance On Me,” Taste Of Country said, “Funky’ is just about the last word you’d expect to use to describe bluegrass, but Yonder manage to incorporate a funky groove with a sweet pop vocal hook and sunny vocal harmonies that would be right at home on mainstream pop radio for a track that is delightfully unexpected.”

* = with The Southern Belles