“An Invitation to More than Ever Love Bluegrass”

An interview with Lance Frantzich of The Storytellers

By Russell Klettke

My fascination with The Storytellers began years ago when I first spotted them on social media—a new band appearing in my feed among the many traditional bluegrass groups I follow. Right away, it was clear they weren’t just another bluegrass ensemble. They had the classic lineup—mandolin, banjo, guitar, bass, and fiddle—but with a decidedly modern spin: frontman Lance Frantzich played a Fender Precision Bass instead of the usual upright, and fiddler Tyler Emerson wielded an electric five-string. Their set lists mixed bluegrass standards with Grateful Dead covers, and the whole package had an unmistakably “newgrass” edge.

Over a short span, The Storytellers went from busking on Los Angeles streets to performing at county fairs, trendy clubs, and ultimately the region’s larger bluegrass festivals. Their marketing caught my eye, too—vibrant concert posters, sleek social media promotions, and a cohesive brand that matched even the biggest names in contemporary bluegrass. According to Frantzich, all of it originates “inside the band’s community.”

“The Storytellers is more than just a band,” Frantzich told me one morning in Palm Springs, where we met for cappuccinos, a plant-based blueberry muffin, and a conversation about marketing and promotion. “We’re a cooperative—a commune of creative people who use The Storytellers as a vehicle for expression. Our friends are graphic artists, poets, photographers, videographers…we all collaborate to produce progressive ideas that spread peace and love. Music is one part of that.”

Embracing the label of “hippie outlaws,” The Storytellers have become known for their colorful costumes—think ‘60s-inspired prints, bolo ties, cowboy hats, and boots—yet Frantzich is quick to acknowledge the very intentional approach behind their onstage attire. “We’d never go on stage without dressing up,” he explains, crediting their mentor Bob Stane, a legendary folk music and comedy promoter. It was Stane’s advice that nudged the band from being simply a group of musicians to a fully realized musical act, complete with family-friendly humor, anecdotes, and choreography—an evolution Frantzich calls “the game-changer.”

In 2024, the band enjoyed its most successful year yet, selling out concerts, completing their bluegrass residency at Treasure Island Resort in Las Vegas, headlining both the prestigious Prescott Bluegrass Festival and the Desert Bluegrass Festival, and ultimately performing onstage with bluegrass legend—and Old & In the Way alumnus—Peter Rowan.

Initially, I set out to interview the band about their standout online marketing (it’s my own professional arena), but when I arrived in Palm Springs—where they were taking part in a songwriting retreat in nearby Joshua Tree—the conversation changed direction. Having caught their shows in Las Vegas and at the historic Calico Ghost Town, I’d seen first-hand how charismatic, lively and animated Frantzich could be. On this day, though, he was serious, measured and reserved, intent on discussing not just the band’s marketing prowess and collective ethos, but also their place in the broader bluegrass tradition. And it’s there—in the tension between traditional roots and a modern “newgrass” sensibility—that The Storytellers’ provocative story truly unfolds.

Please begin by introducing yourself and the band.

I’m Lance Frantzich, the founding bassist of The Storytellers, which is a bluegrassy, rootsy, hippie, folky string ensemble based out of Southern California. Scott Diehl is the founding guitarist. David Burns plays banjo. Tyler Emerson plays fiddle. Ethan Van Thillo has been filling in on mandolin. Then we have Steve Stelmach manning the percussion station, which includes the washboard. Everyone but Steve sings and we’ve been together for almost six years now.

Part of your band’s lore is that the founders didn’t play instruments, and the band was started just to see if they could do it? Do I have that right?

Not exactly. It was started by two of us who didn’t play instruments as an experiment to determine if a life consuming culture – being passive, watching and listening – was as rich as a life creating culture, like playing an instrument, recording and performing live. That’s how it happened. I learned bass so I could play in the band. Scott learned guitar. It’s been an important part of the history because we wanted this particular part of our story to be inspirational to people who don’t play.

What did you ultimately learn?

The experiment is ongoing, but I think we’ve learned a few things. As to the question of creating versus consuming, there’s a balance that has to be struck and that balance isn’t always going to be in the middle. It’s not going to be equal. We want to play music. We want to practice. We want to rehearse. We want to learn songs. We want to perform. That’s the priority. At the same time, we do make the time to listen to other artists and even go out and see concerts. For us, the creating is about 90% of it and the consuming is about ten percent. Speaking for me and Scott, we believe it’s better to spend more time creating and I’m certain the rest of the band agrees. Maybe ‘healthier’ is a better word for it.

But the consuming part, even though we spend so much less time doing that, it’s become more important, and there’s a mindfulness about it that was never there before. We listen to other artists, mostly when we’re traveling, because we find it inspires us with ideas for our own creating. We feel a responsibility to go to live concerts so we can practice doing what we hope our audience will do, which is to come and concentrate and listen and be openminded about the art or the music and try to take something from it. That’s what we hope people who come to our concerts will do, so we feel we absolutely should do that ourselves.

Have you seen any good bluegrass shows recently?

We all went and saw Peter Rowan in Los Angeles. We got to meet him after the show. It was a powerful experience! He’s one of the greatest storytellers on the planet! All we could do is be amazed. We were all deeply moved. When we were driving home, nobody was saying, hey, maybe we can be a Peter Rowan someday. Nobody was thinking that. He’s one in a million. But a few of us went to see Nickel Creek in LA together recently and that was a revelation on so many levels. The music, of course, but their act, their playing, their dress, the way they told stories and interacted with each other were all things we could wrap our minds around. The way that they project vocally! We were so blown away by them that we started a new saying in the band. A-B-N-C, a variation on A-B-C, which in sales jargon is “Always Be Closing”, but A-B-N-C to us is “always be Nickel Creeking”, and we say it like Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengary Glenn Ross, and we say it often. Vocally it’s taken us to another level.

Getting back to the lore and legend question …

I didn’t finish answering that. It is part of the lore and legend, but it isn’t the most compelling story anymore. In early interviews we were telling that story all the time. So we learned we could do it, we could learn instruments, we could learn the music and we can perform. So the next questions were, can we do it good? How far can we take it? Scott and I together have played a combined 15 or so years and we’re performing with musicians who have collectively been playing more than a century. Now that’s an interesting story! Not what it says about how great me and Scott are, but what it says about these other guys in the band. They’re incredibly nurturing and supportive. This is a band of brothers and that’s a compelling story! There are lots of interesting stories happening within this band, lots of interesting questions being answered. So just by existing, we’re telling a story. By achieving anything, that’s another story.

Is that why you named the band “The Storytellers”?

No. We call ourselves The Storytellers because we focus on the great collection of old and modern folk and bluegrass songs that tell stories about the human experience. The love, the suffering, the victories, the war, the loss, the courage and cowardice. It’s all been covered by the great songwriters over centuries. There’s the lyrics telling the stories but what we’re trying to do is focus on the energy of the song’s story. The vibe. We’re trying to capture it in the singing, the harmonies, the solos or breaks so that whoever is listening can really experience the story and when the song is over, they’ve felt like they lived it. That’s how we want to feel at the end of the song and when we do, we know we’ve been successful. We’ve survived betrayal or heartbreak. We’ve stood on a doomed freight train in its final moments. We’ve snuck onto a battlefield to rescue a lover. Maybe it’s enough to just sing the story, but we want to represent it in all the ways we can to tell that story and get to the pure essence of it. It hasn’t always been this way. At some point there was this collective shift of awareness in the band about striving to represent the nature of the song in performance. The soloists create drama in the music, in the song. It’s stirring.

I asked you earlier about bluegrass shows and you mentioned Nickel Creek and Peter Rowan, two nontraditional acts. The Storytellers are less traditional than they are. How are you labeling the band these days?

They’re nontraditional compared to Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. We call ourselves “progressive bluegrass”, but we’d rather not label ourselves at all. Except this is a labeling culture that likes categories, so we look at the genres and we choose what’s closest. We’re not reggae. We’re not rock. We’re not punk and we’re not funk. We have the bluegrass instrumentation. We have guitar, bass, mandolin and banjo. We have a washboard. We sing in 3- and 4-part harmony, and we sing a lot of bluegrass songs. Again, we don’t want to categorize our music, but we have to try to describe it. We’re closest to bluegrass. We’re not saying we are what The Dillards and the Stanleys were. We are what we are, doing what it is we do. It’s certainly bluegrassy.

We’ve called ourselves “newgrass,” and “jamgrass,” and “folkgrass”. We’ve been called “jazzgrass” and “deadgrass” because we play Grateful Dead songs, but “Grateful Grass” sounds a bit more flattering. To us, what we do is grass of some kind. Terms like “Americana” and “Roots” are too broad to get people’s attention let alone draw people in.

Have you felt more support or more resistance from the bluegrass scene?

In the beginning, seven years ago, there was a lot of resistance but that’s changed considerably over the years. One thing, we’ve gotten a lot better. We’ve increased our repertoire of bluegrass songs, and the overall tide has turned for non-traditional bluegrass. But there’s always going to be resistance as long as there are the purists.

Yes, we see that with the popularity of Billy Strings who is also nontraditional.

Right! And there’s not even consensus in the bluegrass community that what he plays is bluegrass, but of course it is. We have a lot of compassion for lovers of anything traditional who are having to come to terms with change. We love traditional bluegrass! We know it will always be played. We want it to survive and to thrive. But what doesn’t evolve risks dying. The culture is in a dizzying state of change in ways we could never have expected. Art has to change with it. That’s just the nature of it.

We’ve been performing at a lot of these regional bluegrass festivals in California and Arizona. We spent a year in Las Vegas playing bluegrass. The one thing we’ve noticed is there’s no young audience. Most of those folks are young at heart but they’re well over fifty. But go to a Billy Strings show. Come to our Southern California shows. You’re going to see a lot of younger people there. And I’m not comparing The Storytellers to Billy Strings.

In some very beautiful way, The Storytellers has become this entry-level bluegrass experience for an entire set of people. A lot of these people have gravitated towards the band because of our Grateful Dead repertoire. What we’re finding out is that this contingent of our audience – the people who didn’t know they love the bluegrass songs – find out that they love bluegrass! We have a lot of people tell us our version of “Nobody’s Love” led them to The Stanley Brothers. So while we’re not traditional practitioners of bluegrass, we see ourselves as an important part of keeping that music alive. It wasn’t planned this way, but we see ourselves and our music as an invitation to more than ever love the traditional bluegrass music.

The way you’ve described the genesis of the band, at least as far as the founders go, it doesn’t seem like the band has significant roots in the bluegrass scene, or does it?

Oh, it does. None of us were born and raised at the mouth of Hazard Hollar, but Tyler, our fiddler, grew up with bluegrass and learning to play it. Dave, our banjoist, has deep roots in the Southern California bluegrass scene. The rest of us came to it late. I should say that when we started the band, it was because we were listening to that classic Old & In the Way CD. We wanted to make music like they were making. We initially performed our due diligence listening to and reading up on Vassar Clements and David Grisman and Peter Rowan. Right now, interest in Jerry Garcia as banjo player and in Old & In the Way is exploding. But we were deep in it seven years ago and taking inspiration from them and playing “Wild Horses” and “Pig In a Pen” and “Midnight Moonlight” and those songs. So those are our roots.

Many believe there’s an inherent advantage to having deep roots in a musical style. Is there something to overcome, then, if you weren’t born and raised in Hazard?

It’s good to have deep roots in whatever you do, but it shouldn’t be required because then only the people who are fortunate enough to grow up with generations of bluegrass or whatever it is can have a path to do it at a high level. I don’t like the idea of a door being closed to anyone because they start late. There has to be people of all ages gravitating towards learning to play and they’ll only do the work if they think starting late isn’t going to hold them back. Otherwise, why do it? There’s a big bluegrass jam session scene in Southern California where folks come together to play together, folks of all levels and instruments. It would be great to know that some of those people have a path to perform in working bands and at festivals because those experiences can be exciting and fun.

I remember at some festival in Arizona some fella asked me what I knew about Jimmie Rodgers. I said, “Nothing.” He was saying, “You can’t get anywhere without knowing about him!” I was thinking, hey, I started late. I wasn’t picking when I was ten or 16. But I’m picking now. I don’t have time to practice and perform and have my attention on what people were doing 50 years ago. I’m much more interested in what people are doing now, especially me and my bandmates. I think one advantage to not having been exposed to too many legends is that there’s less temptation to copy or mimic what’s already been done. We don’t want to play music like anyone else. Doing it our own way has served us well. I think history is important, but I also believe that all this focus on the past could cause the scene or community or the movers and the shakers of bluegrass, to be missing what’s happening now. Maybe they’re overlooking us? Maybe Billy Strings should have been discovered five years before he was? There’s only so much time.

The Storytellers performed at Brookdale Bluegrass Festival with bluegrass legend Peter Rowan back in March. How did that happen?

It was surreal! It feels like a dream! The short answer is, Eric Burman, the fella who runs the festival, made it happen for us. I know he loves our music and he and his wife Barbara are these wonderful, warm hippie bluegrassers. He booked Rowan to do a solo headlining set and scheduled us to perform right before him. Like I mentioned earlier, we had met Peter backstage at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in LA a month or two before and we told him we were performing before him at Brookdale. Rowan’s daughter Amanda arranged that meeting and facilitated us to perform a few tunes with him at the festival. We called her, emailed her, texted her, sent her a telegram, sent some homing pigeons, so she became our point of contact.

We met in his hotel room at the festival to jam a bit and go over some arrangements of songs he was going to do. For me and Scott especially, the opportunity to meet with Rowan and perform with him was a tremendous honor. We got into this music because of Old & In the Way. So the long answer is, it was a series of luck, pluck, good intention, synchronicity and a million other things that created that moment. We played and sang “Midnight Moonlight” with him. We did “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and a few other tunes. After we were done, I turned to him and said, “Thank you, Peter, this is the highpoint of my musical life!” He responded, “Don’t stop here. Keep having them.” A month later we were on stage headlining the Prescott Bluegrass Festival in front of about six thousand people.

As you said earlier, bluegrass is enjoying a resurgence of popularity. How do you account for The Storytellers’ quick progress?

It may seem quick if you’re outside our experience but we’re not experiencing it that way. It feels gradual, which seems better because there’s so much to take in and learn. It’s a lot of effort. We do a lot of work to make things happen. We book our own shows. We design our own promotional material; we do our own social media, and we do our own PR.

We’re certainly successful in that we’ve performed at some of these regional bluegrass festivals. We performed with Peter. We headlined Prescott. We’re selling out our local shows. We’re just performed a sold-out show in front of 750 people in Sedona. We performed for a year at Treasure Island Resort in Las Vegas. We have a Facebook following of twenty-eight-thousand people, but we’re still a regional band known primarily in Southern California and the Southwest.

I think we’ve been successful because of how we’ve forged our own path. It isn’t a competition, getting gigs. We don’t subscribe to scarcity theory where there aren’t enough gigs out there or enough money. We believe in abundance. But we’re sort of lone wolves. We don’t pay much attention to what other bands are doing because it’s so easy to get caught up in envy and jealousy, so we forge our own way. In many ways, the purists who book festivals and venues who believe we’re not bluegrass enough, have forced us to be very creative in getting quality gigs; the sort of gigs that are perfect for us, and probably the sort of gigs a traditional bluegrass band couldn’t book.

We might be successful, too, because of how we frame our existence. We’re not in the music business. We’re in the joy business. We’re in the business of creating a joyful experience. The music isn’t the commodity. The larger experience is. So we play bluegrass songs in a colorful, free way that makes people smile and dance, that makes them participate.

Probably all the bands performing today are trying to achieve that joy. What does that look like in The Storytellers experience?

That’s a good question because it’s hard to put into words. It has to be something you see, something palpable. At several of these bluegrass festivals we’ve performed at, we’re told by the organizers, “You’re the first band that got people on their feet.” We love hearing that because we want to be a dance band as well as a sit-down band. At our live shows if we have an opportunity and if it seems appropriate, we’ll get out and dance with our audience. Our wireless setup allows us to do that. Now, at this point, we have a reputation for getting out and dancing, and when we’re working our way out into the audience, people are running to join the dance party. This is joyful, and it brings us closer to the audience energetically. It’s also our way of acknowledging to the audience that they’re vital to this experience. We’re all creating this experience together, equally. We see mothers dancing with their children. That’s what inspires us to keep performing. Music is great, but joy and happiness is what we’re striving for. Music is the means. Not being a traditional bluegrass band allows us to do what we want to do. We’re not held back by tradition.

What’s next with The Storytellers? What are your plans for 2025?

Our first priority is recording an album. Playing live is going to take a backseat to song-writing, arranging and recording. We’ve been threatening to do this for a couple of years, but we’re actually doing it now. By this time we’d have 30 shows booked for next year but we only have like a dozen, so it seems like we’re serious about it. We’ve written a bunch of new songs that we really love! We’re performing a few of them already at our shows and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback. The songs and the arrangements have come together in rehearsals. We thought by taking them out on the road they might change and evolve but that hasn’t been the case. They’re solid. And we’re creating them together as a band. Our tune “Burn Some Sage” is really good. Our gospel song “Wake Up and Sing” is really strong. We have another dozen in process, so we know we can’t finish and polish these songs if we’re playing our regular 50 or 60 shows per year.

Is this going to be a bluegrass album?

Absolutely! It has to be a bluegrass record if we want to win the bluegrass Grammy! But it isn’t going to sound traditional. People will recognize the influence of Nickel Creek and Rising Appalachia and the Traveling McCoury’s and Greensky, but it’s ultimately going to sound like us. Just as it should.

You’re going for the Grammy win?

(Laughing) Oh, you caught that? It’s sort of a joke and it isn’t. We would say, “Who cares about Grammys?” Then we start thinking that other people are going to think that artists who say they don’t care about Grammys really care about Grammys! So we started saying, “Okay, let’s get the Grammy!” That’s one thing that’s become apparent. You have to go into a creative project thinking the world of what you’re doing. You have to think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. And why wouldn’t you think that? We think our songs are going to be great and we think people are going to love them. We think the songs and the music are going to make people want to think good thoughts, move their feet, and go along with us on some fun and interesting musical journeys. The stories. The drama. The adventure. The insight, the joy, the pain and the love. We’re going to get to the bottom of it all and we’re going to do it together.

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The band consists of Scott Diehl (Guitar, Vocals), Lance Frantzich (Bass, Vocals), Tyler Emerson (Fiddle, Vocals), David Burns (Banjo, Vocals), Ethan Van Thillo (Mandolin, Vocals), and Steve Stelmach (Washboard, Percussion).

http://www.StorytellersBand.com

https://www.facebook.com/TheStorytellersBand

Russel Klettke is a business and freelance writer, journalist, sustainability advocate, author, triathlete, gardener, Airbnb host, solar power generator, floor sweeper, and voice actor.