Kylie Kay Anderson
An American Mandolinist Living, Performing and Teaching in Europe
Photoby Mark Evenhuis
I found out about Kylie Kay Anderson—a young female mandolin player who originally comes from Utah but now lives in The Netherlands—through a YouTube search. Although I should have known about Kylie (more on that later), I had never heard of her before stumbling onto a YouTube video of her playing “Cold Frosty Morning” on the mandolin. Several weeks ago, the fiddle player in our band started playing “Cold Frosty Morning” at band practice. I was familiar with the song, but had never learned to play it. I was inspired to learn it on the mandolin so the next day I went to YouTube and typed in “Cold Frosty Morning mandolin.” Kylie’s video popped up as the top listing in the search. I watched it and was very impressed. Her notes were clear, clean, and fluid. She used dynamics effectively and she was very relaxed. She also seemed like she was really enjoying playing the tune for the camera. What I heard inspired me to check out all of the tunes she had posted on her YouTube channel.
What I found on Kylie’s YouTube channel was about twenty more standard fiddle tunes played on the mandolin with equal skill and expertise. Additionally, I found that Kylie had done a very deep dive into the playing of legendary Lost and Found mandolin player Dempsey Young and for 31 consecutive days, titled “Dempsey December,” had posted a new Dempsey Young lick each day. OK, now I was even more impressed—which led me to navigate to Kylie’s website and take a look at her biography.
Reading through Kylie’s bio, I discovered that she was from Utah, started playing guitar at 9 and mandolin at 13. She took lessons from Jake Workman for three years while in high school, attended East Tennessee State University (ETSU) to study in their Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies program, graduated from that program, and then moved to Cork, Ireland where she performed and taught guitar and mandolin for three years and now has been doing the same thing in The Netherlands since 2022. Her website also invited visitors to contact her about taking private lessons. Now I’m thinking, “This young woman has a very interesting story. I needed to know more.” I sent Kylie an email through her website asking if I could conduct an interview for Bluegrass Unlimited. After talking with her, I found her story to be even more interesting than I had anticipated.
Kylie’s Story
Kylie Kay Anderson grew up in Salem, Utah—about an hour’s drive south of Salt Lake City. Her father, Dan Anderson, was a fingerstyle guitar player who liked playing folk music in the style of James Taylor. Kylie said, “I remember my dad singing a lot of James Taylor songs when I was young, but he also had a few bluegrass albums that we would listen to. We would do Saturday morning chores listening to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken – Volume 2. He would also watch Song of the Mountains or some other bluegrass program.”
Kylie said that listening to her father play was what inspired her to learn how to play the guitar. She remembers, “He taught me my first chords and I think that the first song that I learned how to play was ‘Grandma’s Feather Bed.’ He taught me the chords and the words and we would sing that song together.” When she first learned how to play, Kylie was only playing rhythm. She used her bare thumb to play the bass notes and strum with her bare fingers.
While Kylie started her musical journey on the guitar, she said, “Guitar was my foundation, but I really put my heart and soul into the mandolin.” When asked what it was that got her interested in playing the mandolin, Kylie said, “My good friend, Abby Bradshaw (now Abby Sudweeks), who I’d known since we were six, came from a family of fiddlers and she played mandolin. When we were thirteen, she took me to a concert by a Utah-based band called Ryan Shupe and the Rubberband. I remember getting back from the concert and saying to her, ‘I want to learn how to play the mandolin.’ We were both thirteen and she took me on as her student. She was my first mandolin teacher. Looking back, I think that is the cutest thing ever.” Early on, Kylie’s favorite mandolin players were Adam Steffey and Sierra Hull. The way she became familiar with Adam and Sierra’s music was not by listening to albums, but by watching YouTube videos of them jamming on fiddle tunes at workshops.
The thing that intrigued Kylie about the mandolin was the way a melody could be expressed on the instrument. Kylie said, “I think that I just fell in love with simple, beautiful melodies on the mandolin.” Since Kylie’s friend came from a family of fiddlers, she began her mandolin journey by learning how to play fiddle tunes. She remembers, “Playing fiddle tunes was very common in the area of Utah where I grew up. Most jams were just tunes. I started by mostly jamming with my friend and anyone that she would get together. By the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I started to branch out and jam with other people.”
About the same time she started branching out and going to jam sessions, Kylie started taking lessons from Jake Workman in Salt Lake City. She said, “My dad would take me out of school early every Friday to go up there and learn from Jake. He was a huge help during those formative years. I feel so lucky that there just happened to be a teacher like Jake Workman just an hour from me. That was such a gift.” When asked about working with Kylie, Jake Workman said, “I enjoyed working with Kylie for a few years while we both lived in Utah. She has a nice touch and pulls beautiful tone on her mandolin and guitar. I was always impressed at her ability to pick things up quickly and retain them. I’m proud to see all that she has accomplished!”
When asked about how she discovered that Jake Workman was teaching lessons, Kylie said that the guitar player in the youth band she joined was also taking lessons from him. When she was sixteen, Kylie joined a youth bluegrass band that was formed by Ryan Shupe’s father, Ted Shupe. Ted Shupe, sometimes referred to as “the father of Utah bluegrass,” had been putting together youth bands since his son Ryan was young. The youth band that Ryan performed with, the Pee Wee Pickers, started when he was seven years old. That band, which by 1980 included a young Matt Flinner on banjo, performed at the Festival of the Bluegrass in Lexington, Kentucky, and the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1982. Ted’s next youth band was called Powder Ridge. That band won the Telluride Band Contest in 1989. The next band, String Fever, included two of Ryan’s younger siblings, Daron and Tara. That band won the Telluride contest in 1993. The next youth band was Salt Licks. They won in Telluride in 1994 and also won the Pizza Hut International Bluegrass Showdown. The band that Ryan formed after Salt Licks—Ryan Shupe and the Rubberband—won at Telluride in 1997.
All that to say when Kylie joined Ted Shupe’s youth band, first called Avalanche and later changing their name to Stringshot, Shupe’s bands had quite a history in Utah and beyond. Kylie said, “I think we were trying to latch on to that legacy of successful youth bands. Ted Shupe has a passion for helping kids find their voice in bluegrass, so he held auditions and put together our youth band. I was so excited when I made it through the audition and got to play mandolin in the group. It was a five-piece bluegrass band and Ted was our coach and our manager. I joined that band about the time I started taking lessons with Jake.” At the age of sixteen, Kylie was the oldest member of the band. The youngest band member was thirteen. The band played a number of festivals in Utah and Wyoming and various other venues in the Salt Lake area. Kylie stayed in that band until she was nineteen. When asked if any of her bandmates are still active today, she said that brothers Skyler and Zach Beck are both still active, performing as The Beck Brothers.
In addition to performing with the youth band, Kylie also entered various contests on guitar and mandolin. In 2012 she won the Utah state mandolin contest and in 2017 she won the Utah state guitar contest. She typically entered at least three contests every year and in 2011 she traveled to Winfield, Kansas to compete in the mandolin contest at the Walnut Valley Festival. She said, “The contests really pushed me when I was young.”
After graduating from high school, Kylie decided to attend college at Utah State University and was accepted into the music therapy program. The instrument she studied there was guitar. She stayed at Utah State for five semesters before transferring to ETSU. Although Kylie was enjoying her studies at Utah State, she was missing bluegrass music. She remembers, “I was playing guitar as my major instrument in the music therapy program, but I’d always be looking for excuses to bring my mandolin to a session and infuse some bluegrass in there. Then someone said to me, ‘If bluegrass makes you so happy, why aren’t you doing everything that you can to fill your life with it?’ I thought, ‘That is a good point.’ It was a tough decision because the music therapy program at Utah State is one of the best in the country. But I left to go play mandolin.”
Once she was set on surrounding herself with bluegrass, Kylie started looking for opportunities that would send her to the cradle of bluegrass in the East. She said, “I was trying to find anything that could get me closer to bluegrass. I think at some point I messaged Jake and asked for advice. My original idea was to move to Nashville. But Jake suggested the program at ETSU. When I realized that Adam Steffey was on staff there, I had to jump on the opportunity to take lessons from my hero.”
While you do not have to audition to be accepted into the program at ETSU, Kylie sent in a video in order to apply for a scholarship that would allow an out-of-state student to pay in-state tuition fees and she won that scholarship. Kylie started at ETSU in 2017 and, since many of her credits from Utah State transferred, she was able to finish with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a minor in the bluegrass program in 2019.
While at the University, Kylie was able to study with Adam Steffey, Wyatt Rice, Tim Stafford, Sally Sandker, and others. When asked about teaching Kylie at ETSU, Adam Steffey said, “Kylie was one of my best students while I was at ETSU and she is one great player! It was a pleasure getting to work with her and she continues to be just an awesome mandolinist – as well as just a terrific person.”
Kylie said, “Musically speaking, it was totally life-changing. It was an opportunity to become totally surrounded by bluegrass music. For me, coming from Utah and playing mostly fiddle tunes, it was totally essential for my experience to get to be around such great players and to learn about the genre. Before moving to Johnson City in 2107 I don’t think I even knew who J.D. Crowe was and I remember somebody saying, ‘You should listen to the Bluegrass Album Band because those are the tunes that people are jamming.’ And I wrote that down… ‘Bluegrass Album Band,’ you know. I really enjoyed playing in bands and taking the bluegrass history courses because for me that was totally new. It was essential, intense bluegrass boot camp—in a good way.”
While at ETSU, Kylie met and formed a relationship with Dutch Dobro player, Owen Schinkel. After Kylie graduated, they got married and moved to Ireland. Kylie said, “We were ready for a change of scenery and it was an opportunity to put ourselves into the deeper roots of our music. We wanted to live in Ireland for the music and culture and we hoped it would make us into more well-rounded musicians. It was a ‘take life by the horns’ kind of decision. We thought, ‘Let’s just do something kind of crazy and live in Ireland and see what happens.’”
While Kylie and Owen were in Ireland they started to perform as a duo, but then COVID hit, so things slowed down. Kylie said, “We would work part-time jobs here and there as needed, but our main thing was the duo and I would teach lessons, mostly on guitar. There were a few students interested in mandolin, but a lot more interest in the guitar. We played festivals around Europe when travel was allowed, and we played a lot of gigs within Ireland. We also went to bluegrass jams at pubs in Cork City. There is a fun bluegrass scene there.” When Kylie and Owen performed as a duo, one of them was always playing the guitar. So, the configuration was either mandolin and guitar or Dobro and guitar.
After spending three years in Ireland, Kylie and Owen decided to move to The Netherlands and be near Owen’s family in his hometown. Because Owen grew up in a rural area of The Netherlands, I asked Kylie how he discovered bluegrass music. She said he was helping a friend of his father’s digitize a bluegrass album, Live in Holland by Joe Val and The New England Bluegrass Boys, and he fell in love with the sound of bluegrass. After taking a dive into bluegrass, Owen heard Jerry Douglas playing “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn” and he fell in love with the Dobro. Kylie said, “It is pretty wild that someone as young as Owen was, out in the heart of the Netherlands, would discover bluegrass.”
Although The Netherlands is a long way from the world of bluegrass, Kylie has found that while the community is small, it is like a very tight-knit family. There are a couple of bluegrass festivals in The Netherlands and some regular jam parties. She said, “I never expected that part of my story would be experiencing bluegrass in so many different parts of the world. It is so inspiring to see these communities that love bluegrass. The way that the genre has caught on for so many people all over is very cool.” Kylie and Owen now play in a bluegrass band with three bandmates from Germany.
After moving to The Netherlands, Kylie went back to school to work on her master’s degree in arts and culture, which she has now completed. She said, “During that time we stepped back from performing as a duo so that I could focus on my studies. But recently, we have been bringing other people in, so instead of Long Way Home Duo, it is Long Way Home Bluegrass Band. It is a five-piece band.” The band includes mandolin, guitar, Dobro, bass, and banjo as its instrumentation.
Kylie and Owen also still occasionally perform in a band that they started while they were at ETSU called King Springs Road. Owen’s roommate at ETSU was bass and guitar player Tyler Griffith. Tyler played with Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper for eight years and has also performed with The Farm Hands and The Tennessee Bluegrass Band, among others. While they were at ETSU, one of Owen’s female friends from The Netherlands, who he knew from the Dutch bluegrass scene, came to visit him in Tennessee. During the trip, she met his roommate, Tyler. The two fell in love and now are married. So, after a few lineup changes, Kings Springs Road consists of two married couples represented by one person from the United States and the other from The Netherlands, and one married couple from Germany. Kylie said that although Tyler and his wife live in the United States, the band will still perform together when they find themselves on the same continent. King Springs Road plans to release more original music in the coming months.
Teaching Mandolin and Guitar
Kylie started teaching mandolin and guitar lessons when she was sixteen years old. She said, “I think I’ve always had maybe one or two students since I was in high school.” Her teaching picked up when she moved to Ireland. She was teaching mostly guitar to kids but also taught some adults how to play the mandolin. Most all her instruction was in person until she moved to The Netherlands. She said, “Living in a new country and not being a native speaker, I turned to teaching more online.” She now teaches private lessons online with students from the United States and The Netherlands.
What Kylie has noticed about many of her online students is that instead of wanting a regularly scheduled weekly lesson, they will want to check in with her periodically, or contact her simply to get a few questions answered. She said, “I like to make myself available for people who have questions. There is a lot of flexibility, which I really love. Someone will send me an email with a question and I love to be that person for somebody who is learning.”
Regarding her YouTube channel, Kylie said that originally it was her goal to post two videos a month for no other reason than to push herself to put something out there. She did that for about a year, however, she then started her master’s degree work so the posting of videos was placed on hold. However, as previously stated, in December 2022 she did embark on the “Dempsey December” posts where she put up a series of daily short videos highlighting Dempsey Young licks. When asked about her motivation behind this video project, she said, “If someone asked me right now who my favorite mandolin player is, I would say Dempsey Young. He really came to my attention in the last four or five years. As I’ve looked for more inspiration over the past few years, I find that there is nobody who inspires me to love the mandolin more than Dempsey. There is always something in one of his breaks that makes you think, ‘What just happened?’ There is a little burst of personality or a moment of something that is just off the wall. But also, the way that he sticks so well to the melody, yet infuses so much personality, I just love it.”
Kylie has been surprised at the reaction from people who have watched her YouTube videos. She didn’t intend on posting them in order to find students, however, students have responded by contacting her as a result of watching the videos. She said that people are contacting her to either ask specific questions or ask about taking lessons. On Kylie’s website (kyliekaymusic.com) her lessons page is very inviting. She simply states, “I teach mandolin and guitar lessons to people of all ages. I love helping people find and follow their passions in music! To enquire about lessons, please contact me! I look forward to talking with you.”
Kylie finds that most of the students who contact her about taking lessons, in terms of skill level, are somewhere in the gap between beginning and intermediate-level players. She said, “Usually they are people who already have a feel for the mandolin and know tunes, but they want to learn how to spice up or embellish their tunes or to learn how to improvise around the melody. That is a conversation that I have had with so many people. They want to learn how to jump off that improvisation cliff. That is quite common.”
Kylie’s approach to teaching a student online starts with having the student play something for her so that she can first evaluate where they are in terms of skill level. She said, “I’m always amazed with how different each person is and how different it looks for each person in terms of the best way to communicate with them. But, generally, by having them play something, I find that we often have conversations in the very beginning about tone and technique. That is also something that I get a lot of questions about and I really enjoy going into those kinds of questions with people. I get a bit nerdy about the right hand and things like the pick angle and learning how to remain loose and relaxed. Tension is something that we all struggle with.”
One of the aspects of learning how to play that Kylie likes to address with all her students is inspiration. She said, “I think it’s super important to stay inspired while learning how to improvise and how to express yourself in the music. In many of the conversations that I have with students about improvising, I’m asking them about who they are listening to and what gets them excited about the mandolin. Sometimes I will say to somebody, ‘This week, just go listen to a ton of music. Go get even more excited about the mandolin.’ I think that is something that is sometimes overlooked. We want to have a formula for doing something, but at the end of the day, we are playing music. It’s important to learn the theory surrounding improvisation, but you don’t want your improvisation to come out sounding like a mathematical equation. Something has to drive the notes.”
Because I was impressed with Kylie’s musical expression on her mandolin in terms of tone, note clarity, and fluidity, I asked about how she teaches students to develop those qualities in their playing. She said, “I usually make a connection between tone and tension. In my experience, if there is something that is happening tonally that is not how we want it to be, it is often because there is some tension somewhere that is not useful. I think a lot of it is addressing right-hand technique. If there is tension somewhere, we try to understand why it is happening and try to get rid of it. We also talk about pick angle and finding that ‘sweet spot,’ depending on what kind of tone they are going for. We also talk a lot about wrist and arm balance. Something that has influenced my playing in the last couple of years is thinking about where my motion is coming from in terms of wrist and arm motion. A lot of the conversation is focused on the right hand because, for me, the right hand is 90% of the battle.”
One of the reasons that Kylie developed a good right hand was due to having expert instruction from Jake Workman when she was young. She remembers, “When I got started with Jake he gave me a page of right-hand exercises. I have used a similar philosophy. Sometimes I suggest muting the strings with the left hand and working on different patterns of down-up strokes between different strings. You will find that even a right-hand focused exercise that feels so mundane actually does a lot for your playing.”
To summarize her approach to teaching students online, Kylie says that although she is not opposed to teaching particular tunes to students, she is more likely to teach a broader approach to helping the student improve their technique, learn about how to create their own solos or jump into the world of improvisation. She said, “My favorite conversations are those about technique. I could talk about right-hand technique all day long.”
As we were wrapping up our interview, I asked Kylie if there was anything else that she wanted people to know about her. She said, “It would be great if you could mention that as part of my master’s in arts and culture, I wrote a thesis about the bluegrass scene in Lisbon, Portugal. They have a really cool festival there that I think more people should know about. Also, as part of my studies, I was an intern at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum this past summer, from June until the end of August.” This was news to me. Until this part of our conversation, after talking with Kylie for about an hour and a half, I had no idea that she had any connection with the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum. This explains why I said at the beginning of this article that I should have known Kylie, but I didn’t. The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum owns this magazine and thus I work for them. However, I do not live in Kentucky. I live in Missouri and about 98% of what I do is done remotely. The only time that I was in Owensboro during the three months Kylie was there was at the ROMP festival and we worked different stages and never met.
But now, thanks to YouTube, I have met Kylie and after talking with her I called my good friends who do work at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum and they all had wonderful things to say about working with her and they all wish that she could have stayed.
Kylie Kay Anderson is someone who you should check out if you are a mandolin player. Even if you are not looking for a teacher, check out her videos. There is a lot to learn there. I spent some time learning her solos to “Cold Frosty Morning,” and “Panhandle Rag” and enjoyed every minute of it. Next, I’m going to jump into learning some of those Dempsey Young licks from her. If you are looking for a mandolin teacher, consider Kylie. I think that the decision to work with her will be a good one.
