On the Trail Featured in The Bluegrass Standard

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"Bluegrass doesn’t have to be a battleground between past and present. Sometimes, it’s a new sprout planted in fertile soil, taking all the earth gives it and growing into itself. That’s where you’ll find On the Trail, a Connecticut bluegrass outfit that knows full well what tradition means but won’t lose sleep over breaking it. Their latest album, Where Do We Go From Here, isn’t asking a question—it’s daring you to come up with an answer.

The group—Austin Scelzo (fiddle, vocals), Charlie Widmer (guitar, vocals), Tom Polizzi (mandolin, vocals), and Matt Curley (bass, vocals)—stands at an intersection of tradition and disruption, nodding to Bill Monroe while giving a sly grin to the Punch Brothers. Discontented but relentlessly positive in their quest, they're blessed with intricate harmonies, weaving soul and faith into songwriting structure like hand in glove; they’ve birthed new bluegrass as a living, breathing language.

They didn’t just form—they collided like four rogue satellites caught in the gravitational pull of Planet Bluegrass. On the Trail label themselves a group of misfits hellbent on hammering their own dent into the genre’s well-worn rails. Scelzo talked about it like some cosmic accident—four guys from wildly different backgrounds crashing into each other with enough creative energy to spark a whole new kind of bluegrass. They didn’t even have a name at first, just a gig labeled Bluegrass and Beyond, which sounds more like a manifesto than a placeholder. Charlie Widmer still laughs about it, like a guy remembering the moment before a bar fight turned into a lifelong friendship. But they found the thread somewhere in the chaos, in the tangled mess of influences, harmonies, and high lonesome instincts. They weren’t just playing bluegrass; they were on the trail—chasing something old, something new, something bigger than the whole thing.

A band name is a promise, a roadmap, and a mission statement all at once. “I think the four of us came together from very different backgrounds and our goal, as is the goal of any new band, is to define their sound and their direction and things like that,” said Scelzo. “We really resonated with the name On the Trail, I think, because we really felt like we were on this path that was in the footsteps of many mentors and bands that we admire, but also this winding road that we were all on together to find – to discover the true north,” Scelzo explained. The image is clear: a trail is both a history and an invitation, something to be followed but reimagined with each step.

The debate over progressive bluegrass is as old as the genre itself—how much change is too much? How far can you push before you leave the realm entirely? “I think we actually have the flexibility to change our set, like this summer we're playing a more traditional festival in Canada called Shady Grove. Now, we can tailor the set because we have so much variety,” said Scelzo. “I think our true North is eclectic.”

“Progressive bluegrass is a good category. I think probably the one that came out of nowhere with a gig that was almost helpful for us to hear was being called a modern acoustic quartet.”

The release of Where Do We Go From Here serves as a mainsail on their voyage of discovery. “The song that feels the most complete, and that I wish the whole record had the same essence, is the title track, which is also the last album track,” said Widmer. “It felt like we were getting our groove and figuring it out. Maybe at that point, we had figured out the standard of what the next record needs to feel like.”

Scelzo echoes this, the sense of something coming into focus. “Once we heard that track, in its completion, we really, I think everybody in the band agreed that it did everything we wanted it to do and more. We're really pleased with the way that it came out.”

“The goal was to try and get our sound onto one record,” Widmer said. “We wanted to try and capture the answer to ‘If you come to an On the Trail show, what does it feel like?’ That was part of the discussion, let's not overproduce so we can't recreate. That’s what we were really trying to do and trying to capture.”

The band brought in G Rockwell on banjo, a strategic and deeply personal move. “Charlie's sometimes pretty picky with what kind of sounds he likes, and I remember Charlie always saying G Rockwell's banjo playing just really struck him. And then everybody agreed that he was the guy for the job,” said Scelzo.

This band has a more complex mission, not looking to wallow in nostalgia, but not looking to rip up the rulebook just to watch it burn. On the Trail is doing something trickier—cutting a path between the two, where history isn’t a ball and chain but a map with room for detours. The album title might throw out a question: Where do we go from here? But these guys already know. They stick to the trail when it suits them; when it doesn’t, they’ll make their own."

By: Stephen Pitalo