Homegrown, the fourth album from the New York City-based Cole Quest and the City Pickers, opens with the voice of Pete Seeger reading the words of Woody Guthrie: “There’s a feeling in music, and it carries you back down the road you have traveled and makes you travel it again. Or it takes you down the road someone else has come, and you can look out across the world from the hill they are standing on.”
It’s a fitting opening for a record that embraces Cole Quest’s musical (and political) heritage as the grandson of Woody Guthrie, while confidently asserting the group’s distinctive identity. While the opening monologue is followed by the group’s energetic take on Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” there’s little sense that the music is a mere retro tribute. The band is full of sharp pickers, including Quest prominently on resonator guitar and Mike Mulhollan on banjo. They have a casual, loosely bluegrass style that sits somewhere between the Union Station and Old Crow Medicine Show in the populist-progressive mold of the genre. The prominent additions of harmonica by multi-instrumentalist Matheus Verardino and the brusque strums from guitarist Christian Apuzzo also bring a hint of outlaw country to their sound.
