Steep Canyon Rangers return to Montalvo for a ‘comfortable, yet exotic’ night

Steep Canyon Rangers are fresh off announcing a brand new album, “Next Act,” and will be touring throughout much of 2026. But Barrett Smith, who plays bass and sings, said the band takes a lot of pride in its live shows, specifically the one they’re bringing to Montalvo Arts Center on Wednesday. They will also be performing at The Freight in Berkeley on Thursday.

“When we hit the West Coast, we do what we can to to hit that spot. We’ve been to Montalvo a number of times,” Smith said. “We got some friends and fans out there, and it makes us really excited to bring a really unique live show.”

The Grammy-award winning bluegrass band from Asheville, North Carolina has been together for over 20 years. Their music is all acoustic, and they play a variety of instruments, like the mandolin, banjo and bass. The group sings and harmonizes with the instruments, improvising every now and then. Steep Canyon Rangers comes from the Appalachian mountains of the East Coast, and the natural, earthy quality of bluegrass music relates to the natural world in that way, Smith said.

“We love all kinds of music,” Smith said, “but when it’s brought down to such natural elements of just humans playing acoustic instruments and singing in harmony with each other, the bluegrass music, it relates to the natural world in that way.”

Because the band tours constantly, they change their show every night and tend to not repeat songs. Smith said they’ll spend the day in Saratoga and recall what they played last time and gather information about how they feel, the setting and the crowd to write out a setlist that they’ll “mostly stick to” throughout the show. And if the crowd’s energy changes during the show, then true to their improvisational nature and tightknit collaborative process, they’ll adapt.

“In the case of Montalvo, we know that it’s pretty small and it’s very intimate and that people are really attentive and very high listening, high intention kind of vibe,” Smith said. “Unless something informs us otherwise when we’re there, we’ll play to that in some way that I’m not really sure yet.”

Smith said playing at Montalvo stands out from the large stadiums that the group has played at in recent years. The lush green rolling hills of California hark back to their East Coast roots in a way that is comfortable yet exotic, and he said he’s looking forward to performing for the residents of Silicon Valley.

“We live in a place that’s very beautiful in North Carolina that’s in the Appalachian mountains, so to be in the hills, it’s very comfortable to us, although it’s very different where y’all are. The whole climate is very dry and the trees are all different and it’s pretty exotic to us, but it’s very beautiful,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of big brains and creative people just in the area around there, and we feel that in the audience and that’s exciting to play for and to feed off of.”