Hearing Sol Chase talk about how he and his bandmates first discovered they all possess the same sixth sense makes ESP sound plausible.
“The first time we all played together, we felt there was something special there,” the 27-year-old vocalist and mandolinist of bluegrass-obsessed Americana quartet Big Love Car Wash says of the newfound “stage telepathy.”
As a working musician in and around the Austin scene for the past decade, Chase is well-versed in the unspoken symmetry of artistic collaboration. That’s exactly what he, Everett Wren (vocals, fiddle, dobro, lap steel, guitar, percussion), David Rabinowicz (vocals, guitar, piano) and Taylor Turner (upright and electric bass) tapped into after he recruited the trio for a solo show back in 2022.
“We’ve all done pick-up gigs,” he says. “You play hundreds and hundreds of gigs with all different people, and every now and then something just really clicks, and you think the same thoughts.”
“When you find that, you want to hold onto it,” Chase, who also calls Ireland home for half of the year, continues. “It’s really special now that we don’t even live in the same place full-time, but we’re all so interested in playing together and seeing what’s going to happen when we get together, we make time for it.”
In harmony
After a short stint playing out under the Sol Chase Band banner, the found-family foursome evolved into the current incarnation of Big Love Car Wash. Soon after, the kindred spirits were all thinking the same thing: They needed to write a proper record.
Following three weeks at the legendary Arlyn Studios — a hallowed space that’s welcomed everyone from Meat Puppets to Merle Haggard since opening its doors in 1984 — last November, the result is debut album Daydream, released independently earlier this month.
The quartet pulled from a cache of ideas in winnowing down the tracklist to the best 16. Naturally, the Big Love Car Wash found themselves in harmony.
“The writing process was really fluid. We had a lot of song starts, given there are three songwriters in the band,” Chase says. “But one of my favorite things about this group is the trust we had for following an idea of someone else’s, maybe even if it was counter to what we initially thought. By the end of working through the full musical idea we’re often in agreement.”
'A heart-forward experience'
Bouncing between traditional bluegrass and jam, Daydream showcases Big Love Car Wash’s breezy style, particularly on tracks like “Dante,” “Silver Lining” and “21st Century Telegraph.”
Without a pre-conceived throughline, the songs are tied together by the themes of community-building and empathy, according to Chase, who also plays bouzouki. The grief-stricken mandolin jammer “Memorial” is a great example of that, he says.
“It’s a friend of yours who’s mourning the loss of their parents. You’re at the funeral and watching them go through this really difficult time,” Chase explains. “It immediately resonated with us. I hope it translates to folks in the way that it felt to us.”
Big Love Car Wash is now sharing Daydream on tour, their first time on the road under the moniker, featuring more than half a dozen Colorado shows — including a June 25 stop at Gold Hill Inn. It’s also a homecoming for Chase, who spent part of his childhood in Crested Butte and lived in Boulder for four years. He says the Rocky Mountain jamgrass runs deep.
“I’d go to Telluride Bluegrass and RockyGrass every summer. I came up in the Colorado scene,” he says. “That’s definitely my musical roots; the jamgrass and bluegrass scene on the Front Range and going to those festivals.”
“Interlude I: The Colorado Waltz” is a little tip of the hat to that. The name Big Love Car Wash is also an homage to Jeff Austin, the late founder of Nederland’s Yonder Mountain String Band.
“He described the experience of being at a show when the crowd’s just right and you got this energy interchange between performer and audience. They give you their attention and you use that to perform at your best, and then that brings the crowd up to meet you and it’s this positive feedback loop,” Chase says. “He described that, in his words, as ‘a big love car wash.’
“We feel that on stage very often, not only with the audience but also with the band itself, pushing each other to be better and feeling spurred on by the energy on stage,” he continues. “So we wanted to honor him. It just perfectly resonated with the experience we have with playing music, which is very much a heart-forward experience.”
ON THE BILL: Big Love Car Wash. 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 25, Gold Hill Inn, 401 Main St., Boulder. Free