Critical Grass is a collection of San Francisco East Bay musicians who accidentally discovered each other at a Berkeley restaurant. The name arose when two of the band members were coincidentally wearing merch from the Critical Role Dungeons & Dragons podcast. (Nerds.)
They dig both traditional and modern bluegrass and great songwriters. They perform Bill Monroe and Stanley Brothers tunes but also play Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Norman Blake, and John Hartford–because they’re awesome. However, they truly love female songwriters. They perform songs by Kathy Kallick, Martha Scanlon, Kate Wolf, and Hazel Dickens. They have Joni Mitchell in their sights, but songwriting like that does not yield easily.
They also enjoy exploring the edges of the genre, including hippie-grass (often closing sets with “Midnight Moonlight”), old-time (Jeremy plays a mean clawhammer), and Irish (Leah was a County Clare fiddler in a previous 19th-century life). If they like a song, and it seems to sit comfortably into their instrumentation and voices, they embrace it.
Critical Grass celebrates their obligation to share and perpetuate music. Leah is a full-time fiddle teacher at Manning Music in Berkeley, and one of her students has played a tune with them at a gig. They’re always eager to have a young’un come up and play a song.
Finally, they give back to the community—even neighbors on the other coast. In October of 2024, they organized and played a “Bluegrass Benefits Asheville” show at Armistice Brewing in Richmond, California, to raise money for Asheville, North Carolina, and the surrounding region after the devastation of Hurricane Helene. They were proud to raise over $700, which went to BeLoved Asheville and United Way of Asheville.