Editor's Note: Big Richard, whose new LP Pet is out February 6 via Signature Sounds, is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for February 2026. Stay tuned for more from Big Richard all month long.
Just weeks after federal agents murdered multiple people in Minneapolis under the Trump administration’s wildly distorted and unabashedly evil guise of making streets “safer,” the bluegrass band Big Richard touched down in nearby St. Paul to begin touring their second album, Pet, out February 6 via Signature Sounds.
In a conversation a few days before the show and just one day before ICE murdered Alex Pretti, the four women who make up Big Richard — Joy Adams, Bonnie Sims, Hazel Royer, and Eve Panning — had expressed a kind of weary excitement at hitting the road in a time of unrest in the country.
“We're all excited to tour, but then there's also this strange feeling of getting in a van and going out to places we don't know with people we haven't met. And the world feels strange right now,” says mandolinist and guitarist Sims. “It's not a fear that I have, I'm just sensing something different.”
Fear is definitely not a word that comes to mind when describing Big Richard, a band whose name is a winking innuendo for “big dick energy.” In fact, if anyone can bring some catharsis to an angry, grieving city, it’s the same women who donned what they called “founding daddies” drag for their viral Kennedy Center performance last summer amidst Trump’s gutting of the iconic arts institution. Sure, fighting fascism with absurdist humor isn’t a new concept, yet there’s something about the way Big Richard does it that feels not only entirely original, but exceptionally punk rock, especially for a bluegrass band.
