Artists > Missy Raines and The New Hip

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Inside Out

Inside Out is truly a dream come true for bassist Missy Raines who has been envisioning it for the past decade. The album, which fuses bluegrass virtuosity with jazz-tinged grooves and a song-driven sensibility, is a true collaboration between Raines and her band, The New Hip featuring M... more

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ABOUT MISSY RAINES AND THE NEW HIP

“If you allow it” says Missy Raines, “music can take people and let them be seen from the inside out. It’s a way of letting people see who you are without having to sit there and talk about yourself. For instance, the title tune contains the sort of changes that life often forces upon you, expressed musically. When I was writing the tune, I was thinking, ‘this all makes really musical sense except this one half-step change here.’ That’s what throws you off. For me that’s what I’ve been through. Just when you think you know what’s going to happen, something comes up and surprises you.”

Inside Out by Missy Raines and The New Hip is the product of the renowned bluegrass bass player’s twenty-year long dream. The album, she stresses, is a true collaboration between her and her carefully constructed band, The New Hip: Ethan Ballinger, (mandolin/mandola), Michael Witcher (resonator guitar/lap steel/vocals), and Dillon Hodges (guitar/vocals). “I’ve wanted this for a very, very long time. This band and this sound has existed, at least in my head, for almost two decades – it was just a matter of finding musicians that could read my mind,” laughs Raines.

Raines’ groundbreaking, adventurous musical career as one of the pre-eminent female bass players began with an unexpected surprise from her father. “My father had been playing a washtub that he’d made himself and then decided impulsively (without consulting my mother) to buy a bass. I was already playing the piano and guitar by then, but when you’re ten or eleven years old and there is a new instrument in the house…well, I couldn’t stay away from it. That’s the bass I still have and play today.”

Growing up in West Virginia, Raines was well placed to join her family in their favorite summer pastime of attending music festivals, which migrated to home picking parties in the winter. Her parents thought nothing of traveling 2-3 hours to go to a jam, and it was at these events that Raines cut her musical teeth.

As Raines’ technique improved she found herself jamming with and then learning from bigger and better players, most notably International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor member Tom Gray (The Country Gentlemen, The Seldom Scene) “I met him through mutual friends when I was 12 and it was one of the biggest deals of my life up to that point,” she remembers. “Tom is an amazing person and he took me under his wing. He says though that I never asked him to show me how to do anything; that I would just talk about how he played. I thought I was picking his brain,” she laughs.

Raines cites her earliest influences as Bill Monroe, The Country Gentleman, The Stanley Brothers, The Bluegrass Alliance, and David Grisman. She then immersed herself in jazz before discovering the music of Joe Jackson in the early 1980s. “I’d never gotten into the rock/pop scene at all - I’d been affected by it peripherally but not directly. And then I got totally caught up in his music and his writing and a whole new world was suddenly opened up for me.”

Professionally, Raines has lent her skills to a variety of projects that have capitalized on her varied interests. She launched her career with experimental bluegrass outfit Cloud Valley and toured with Eddie and Martha Adcock before joining up with The Masters (Adcock, Kenny Baker, Josh Graves and Jesse McReynolds). Raines toured and recorded with Claire Lynch’s Front Porch String Band from 1995-2000 and again from 2005-2008, along the way developing a successful duo with band mate Jim Hurst. A stint with the Brother Boys opened Raines’ eyes to the value of musical spontaneity.

Missy Raines is now fulfilling a long-held vision: the release of Inside Out, her first full-length album that reflects all of her many musical influences while playing alongside her dream band The New Hip. Inside Out will be available on Compass Records February 10, 2009.

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