Article Contributed by Gabriel David Barkin
Published on October 28, 2025
Hot Buttered Rum (HBR) drops their new studio album Uphill Highway on November 7. After more than twenty years together, the San Francisco Bay Area ensemble continues to explore the expansive domain of their self-described “West Coast Americana / high-altitude bluegrass / indie folk” genre with a collection of ten new, tasty tunes.
CDs and vinyl can be pre-ordered directly from https://hotbutteredrum.net, and the album will be available through all the usual channels too. Bay Area fans will likely get to hear a lot of the new cuts performed at The Chapel in San Francisco (with opening guests T Sisters) on November 8.
The press release for Uphill Highway says it represents “a journey from yearning to empowerment, anger to gratitude, and, finally, letting go.” That’s quite a journey, but the ten-song expedition is worth the ride. Founding member Erik Yates (banjo, flute, Dobro, vocals) says, “We’re not telling a story with the album. We wanted the best songs we could come up with.” Take the trip, you won’t be sorry.
Along the way, listeners will experience nostalgia (“Lucky Doing This at All”), political wrath and social angst (“Not Falling For It” and “Outrage Machine”), and cheesy, quasi-romantic frivolity (the delightfully playful “Let’s Fall Apart Together”). Somehow, it all comes together cohesively. The secret sauce that binds these disparate parts is the music, which combines core elements of bluegrass – guitar, banjo, fiddle, and upright bass – with keyboard and drums.
The lineup on this record includes Yates and his fellow HBR founders Nat Keefe (guitar, vocals) and Bryan Horne (upright bass, vocals), along with Jeff Coleman (keyboards, vocals). Lucas Carlton (drums) has returned to the lineup following a few years away to raise a family.
Most songs also include a fiddle from a rotating cast that includes Allie Kral, Leif Karlstrom, and Ben Andrews, who plays in the current touring lineup of HBR. Elliott Peck (Midnight North) adds vocals on several tracks, and mandolin wunderkind Kyle Ledson (Broken Compass Bluegrass) can be heard on a few cuts as well. There are contributions by Wally Ingram (percussion) and Sam Chase (guitar and vocals), and vocals on “Not Falling For It” by Audio Angel, Mia Byrne, Andreas Santos, and Jimbo Scott.
The addition of keys and drums, instrumental elements not commonly found in bluegrass, lifts HBR out of the limitations of that genre. Keefe says, “It’s absolutely golden to have Jeff and Lucas in the band. Our music has certainly leveraged off of what we’ve learned in bluegrass, but then there’s a lot of other things too.”
Yates concurs: “We’re putting out material that, I hope, shows our real love for bluegrass music, country music, Americana – but it’s woven together with the West Coast psychedelic music we also grew up with. That’s a really important part of our stuff, including the Dead, of course, and other electric-guitar-driven bands like Santana. We love the feeling and the expressiveness of that world, but we’re not trying to be an electric band. We want to keep the bluegrass element really strong.” (A lyric on “Lucky Doing This at All” bluntly recalls HBR once being told, “You sound like Workingman’s Dead.” Fair enough.)
Adding drums a little over a decade ago opened new frontiers for HBR. Yates says that “it took us a long time to figure out how to use drums. We’ve learned how to lean into writing for that instrumentation – for the kinds of grooves that drums bring out.”
One of the new tracks, “Not Falling For It,” exemplifies the influence and value of drums that runs through much of Uphill Highway. Yates recounts the process that led to this song: “It started with just a drumbeat. Lucas sent us a bunch of different rhythms and said, ‘Hey, do you want to use these?’ I wrote a whole song in, like, twenty minutes just from this one drum groove.” The result combines an Appalachian stomp, a bit of a New Orleans shuffle (likely from that rhythm Yates first heard in Carlton’s raw drum track), and lyrics that reforge elements of Woody Guthrie’s protest sensibilities.
The closing track on Uphill Highway is another reflection of the band’s something-more-than-bluegrass sensibility. “Rearview Mirror” has a vibe that veers between Leftover Salmon’s electrified oeuvre and songs from The Talking Heads’ Remain in Light era. Keefe says, “For a while there, we were considering making a whole album of that mode of music sort of in the big sound, sort of in the Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem lane. But we decided to do kind of what we have always done, which is to make a well-rounded record.”
The well-rounded variety in these ten tracks includes the title song, which toes the bluegrass line HBR has walked since their late-90s inception. Next, Keefe’s vocals on “Outside Looking In” glide seamlessly along over a mid-tempo bluegrass melody punctuated by Ledson’s mandolin during the chorus. “Sturgeon Moon” moves into folkie Americana territory with a rolling river rhythm banked by Coleman’s piano on one side and Yates’s banjo on the other.
Bay Area singer Peck contributes vocals to many of the tracks on Uphill Highway, and she gets to share a lead alongside Yates on “Let’s Fall Apart Together.” There’s magic in her rich voice in this country duet, and Yates lauds Peck’s immeasurable talent. “In addition to being easy to work with, there’s her innate understanding of country vocals. She might be the best in the Bay Area.” This cut gives credence to that declaration.
“Let’s Fall Apart Together” mirrors the tone of John Prine’s and Iris DeMent’s “In Spite of Ourselves.” I interpreted it on first listen as a woke, egalitarian alternative to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
It’s a silly song, but one born out of a real-life experience in the wake of the infamous Burning Man deluge of 2023. Keefe recalls seeing the drenching rainfall in his rearview as he left the Burning Man playa that year. “It was sort of like in the Jurassic Park movie when they’re in the helicopter and then the whole world, the whole island is blowing up. We’re all, Oh wow, looks real bad back there. Erik was still there, and that’s when he wrote that song.”
Yates says, though, that it wasn’t written with romance in mind. During that Burning Man rainstorm with several friends, he recalls, “Here we are, stuck in an RV. We have every molecule under the sun at our disposal. Let’s see what happens.” (Readers are encouraged to interpret “every molecule” in an appropriate Burning Man vein.)
“I like writing songs that are like little one-act plays, if possible.” Yates says. Call this one a comedy.
We’ll chart our lives together through the years
And maybe even learn each other’s names
Let’s fall apart together, when the weather is cold outside
We got nothing to do but hide in this RV
Keefe’s vocals on “Any Other Way” also capture a classic country feeling. The bridge of this fiddle-heavy swinger elicits comparison to the coda of another John Prine song, “Illegal Smile.” A band like HBR could do worse than to capture the essence of Prine, whose combination of wit and wisdom is clearly an influence on many of Keefe’s compositions. (He also frequently covers Prine’s “Spanish Daydream” in concert.)
Notably, Keefe took some of the reins in the production of this record. “This was the first time that I was able to be the hands-on engineer for [an HBR] album, and that’s empowering and exciting. I think we have better results than going to a studio and having someone do it.” Keefe, whose credits as a producer include records by Jessica Malone and Kyle Ledson, is in his element here. “You trim out the shrubbery and cut back the thick grass. It’s just really fun – and it’s actually what I’m good at in life, to tell you the truth.”
In the middle of Uphill Highway Yates tells the story of HBR’s early days in “Lucky Doing This at All.”
We graduated into a late model GMC
Crawling up the hills full of strings and skis
They cheered us on every time we left town
Came back home with more heartbreak to sing about
Shot through with a particular kind of peace
Bassist Horne gets a quick turn on a solo in the middle, followed in turn by bars from Keefe on guitar, Coleman on piano, and finally Redner on fiddle. Knowing HBR, it’s easy to imagine these quick takes will get a lot more space on stage. On record, there’s just a hint of the jam capabilities all the songs will have in the hands of these master musicians.
HBR has traveled a lot of highways to get where they are today, and they’ve got a lot more road ahead of them, a lot more ground to cover. Keefe looks at it this way: “We haven’t achieved beyond-our-wildest-dreams success, but we are at a spot where it actually doesn’t really matter that much what we do. We get to just kind of follow our bliss at this point, which is really the best way to make music.”
Yates concurs. “I think our days of trying to make great big statements have come and gone, for better or worse. We want this album to be a lift. We wanted to feel that while recording – and we want people to feel that while listening, and when they come to see us. Things are dark right now, difficult. And it may get darker. We’re all having to deal with it.” But he concludes by noting that as a band, “That’s what we’ve been doing for a quarter century – giving people a lift.”
They’re lucky doing this at all. And we’re lucky to get to hear it.
