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"Every good character in a movie or play is either running toward something or running from something," Schultz said. "I think it was pretty apparent I was running from New York. I was pretty upset with my experience." Unable to focus on music because of the number of odd jobs it took to survive in the city, they fled to Denver where they found cellist Neyla Pekarek on Craigslist. Yes, Craigslist. And it couldn't have worked out better. The scene there was thriving and diverse, full of contacts who helped them find gigs and hit the road where they honed their songs and their sound. They did not aim for pop music stardom in their songwriting, preferring a raw sound they never figured would lead them down a red carpet and into the Staples Center. It's more of a lifestyle choice for many of the acoustic-leaning acts on this year's list. "I see it more on a social level," Old Crow fiddler Ketch Secor said. "I see it as a reaction to Walmart parking lots and Applebee's, O'Charley's and country music. It's very much a reactionary kind of sound. That's something we arm ourselves with in this line of work. When you strap a banjo on you're making a choice." "Country" Winston Marshall of Mumford & Sons joked in an interview last year that he turned to the banjo for more practical reasons: "Not many play it in London so it's much easier to get a gig. And once you've got the gig there's not much competition, so you stick around." Folk music was a novel sound the band turned to after hearing the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack produced by T Bone Burnett. The soundtrack "really sort of pierced through our teenage films, and especially for Winston and I, I think that became kind of an obsessive record for us and also opened avenues for us to explore artists like Emmylou Harris and also like Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss, and then through those guys really the OCMS guys ... so they were like our gateway into sort of Americana really." They've echoed those sounds back at a new generation, one that seems open to sad songs that resonate deeply
-- like "Ho Hey." The song has surpassed 70 million global listens on Spotify and incongruously, Schultz said, it's been showing up as a first-dance song in weddings. "And that's not where it came from," he said. "The feelings that made it come out were not necessarily about finding love, but losing love or missing love. I think that's what's interesting about songs. You can come from a dark place, but people see light in there and they can identify different parts of it." ___ Online:
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