Magoo decends the Rockies to rock out.
Music & Screen Editor
Magoo decends the Rockies to rock out.
A while back I was attending an iconic bluegrass artist’s concert with a friend. As the night neared its end, my buddy was getting a bit tired after a long run of slower tunes and declared, “OK, let’s wait for one more banger, and then we’ll head out.”
Three gorgeous but slowly meandering ballads later, it was clear that energetic kick wasn’t coming, and he called it a night on a sleepy note.
That can sometimes be a problem with bluegrass at times. The genre is so rooted in tradition that it can come off languid to folks who aren’t bluegrass devotees.
But that’s not a problem for Colorado progressive bluegrass band Magoo.
Magoo’s got bangers.
There’s an immediate energy that’s palpable when listening to Magoo rip through a song. The band’s style of uptempo progressive bluegrass combines the traditional hallmarks of the genre like instrumentation and vocal harmonies with jam band elements that dip into form-breaking jazz-like improvisation.
“What makes us a little different is we don’t necessarily stay in the box of the bluegrass song. Traditional bluegrass bands will play the melody in the song, verse, chorus, couple solos, and then tag it — end the song, and that’s it,” says guitarist and vocalist Erik Hill. “And what we might do is we might play a traditional bluegrass song, but then open up the song to a jam section where we stray away from the structure of the song that we originally started playing, and now we’re in a new territory where we’re kind of coming up with stuff on the spot and vamping on a groove. We try not to have it be like a noodle fest, we try to play with intentionality to do the song justice. And then maybe that leads to segue right into another song.”
While Magoo has only been around for a few years and hasn’t put out too much music yet (two four-song EPs plus a handful of singles), the band already sounds like it’s carved out its own winning niche that leans heavily on the tremendous instrumentation. Considering how cover-heavy of a genre bluegrass can be — with lots of bands playing tunes so old it’s not clear who even originally wrote them — even just playing original tunes helps Magoo stand out from the pack (Hill’s even noticed some fans starting to sing along with some tunes Magoo penned). There are speedy toe-tapping prison blues tunes like “Colorado Rocks,” swing-your-partner dance numbers (“Pickin’ Flowers”), appropriately Coloradan odes to waking and baking (“Coffee and Weed”), 8-plus-minute mildly psychedelic technical jams like “Too Many Cats, Man” and more.
That’s not to say Magoo is immune from playing a straight traditional bluegrass cover, but the band pops much more when covering familiar songs outside the genre. My first exposure to the group was actually via a YouTube video of an absolutely shredding cover of “Everlong” by Foo Fighters. The band’s also been known to play renditions of songs like Nirvana’s “All Apologies” or “Turn the Page” by Metallica (via Bob Seger), which can only bring in more rock fans who might dismiss bluegrass for its tranquil stereotypes.
Magoo originally started as a trio consisting of Hill, Dylan Flynn on dobro (resonator guitars played primarily in a lap picking position) and vocals, and Dylan’s uncle Paul Flynn on bass.
And like every good bluegrass band throughout the genre’s rich American history, the guys met the same way — via Reddit. One of Hill’s buddies encountered the Flynns in a bluegrass subreddit and wanted to meet up despite Hill’s misgivings.
“I was like, ‘No way. I don’t want to do it. Meeting people on the internet is never a good idea,’” Hill recalls. “But eventually they were persistent, and we all got together and started hanging out picking and became real good friends with a good musical bond right off the bat.”
Magoo eventually added Courtlyn Bills on mandolin and vocals after meeting at Telluride Bluegrass Festival (Bills even moved from Texas to Denver to join the group). Then last October, Uncle Paul, significantly older than his early-30s bandmates, decided he wanted to fully retire and travel overseas, so he departed the band on a positive note and was replaced by upright bass player A. Denton Turner, solidifying the current Magoo lineup. So far it’s been a mix of musical personalities that’s really clicked.
“We all share pretty similar influences with slightly different musical upbringings and backgrounds,” Hill says. “Dylan, for example, he grew up going to bluegrass festivals in the Northeast, so he’s been kind of surrounded by bluegrass and going to picking circles for a long time. Me, on the other hand, I just got into bluegrass during COVID in 2020. I had been playing guitar since I was like 10 years old, but wasn’t really too hip to bluegrass — the only slight exposure I had to bluegrass was via Phish or the Grateful Dead when they covered some bluegrass songs — so I was late to the game. Courtlyn, our mandolin player, also late to the game — he’s been in all kinds of bands since he was a kid, ranging from metal and butt rock to jam bands.”
“And so, we all kind of come from different backgrounds, but similar musical influences, as far as jam bands and the greats of bluegrass: Tony Rice, Doc Watson, Billy Strings (of course), Greensky [Bluegrass], Yonder [Mountain String Band], Leftover Salmon, all those guys,” Hill continues.
For being a relative newcomer to the genre, Hill has taken to the Appalachia-born style with ease. All it took was a solid introduction to the genre to realize that it’s actually the convergence point of what he loves about playing music.
“Before everything shut down [for COVID], I was playing guitar in a band that wasn’t bluegrass by any means, but we played a lot of that Leftover Salmon train beat style of drums. So that’s where I started to get my introduction. And then one of the guys in that band actually brought me to a Jeff Austin Band show, he was the mandolin player of Yonder before his tragic death. And that show was kind of my first introduction to bluegrass, seeing it live firsthand. And it was a kick ass band… and it just blew me away,” Hill says.
“Because up until that point,” he continues, “I was primarily into rock and blues and jam bands and the electric side of things — didn’t really play a whole lot of acoustic — and then seeing that show, I was like, ‘Wow, this has got everything I love about music. It’s beautiful. It can be powerful. It can be super energetic high highs and beautiful low soft lows.’ So that was kind of my awakening moment to be like, ‘Oh man, yeah, I gotta start playing bluegrass and studying these guys to learn how to do this.’”
It helps Magoo that they’re part of a white-hot bluegrass scene in Colorado that’s thriving at the moment. Having a ton of talented peers pushes all the bands to get that much better.
“On any given night here, you could go see several different bluegrass or jamgrass shows. There’s a lot of good music here and a lot of great venues to play between Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, and the ski towns like Telluride, there’s endless places to play within Colorado,” Hill says. “So that definitely breeds some creativity, and makes you want to find your sound and have a unique band amidst a lot of bands in the same genre.”
While Magoo’s current tour — which brings the band to The District Bar on Nov. 9 — will be the first time the group plays Inland Northwest spots like Spokane, Boise and Montana, even bigger things are on the horizon for 2026. Magoo has already recorded, mixed, mastered and picked out album art for the band’s first full-length album, which is set to be released sometime in the first few months of the new year. From there it’s just a matter of touring to even more new places and finding spots on fresh festivals to further expand Magoo’s reach.
While the band might share its name with a famously nearsighted cartoon character, it’s pretty easy to see the future is bright for Magoo.
Magoo, Jake Rozier • Sun, Nov. 9 at 8 pm • $21 • 21+ • The District Bar • 916 W. First Ave. • sp.knittingfactory.com
Music & Screen Editor
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