Seth Mulder & Midnight Run
Taking Their Music To The Next Level
Humor is only one part of the package that makes the new bluegrass group, known for the hit “One More Night,” appealing to audiences. Seth Mulder on mandolin from Hillsboro, ND is the leader of the group. He’s joined by Colton Powers (banjo) from Kingsport, TN, Max Etling (bass) from Plymouth, MN, and Watlington from Mocksville, NC. For road shows Max Silverstein from Bangor, ME adds fiddle. Bringing a unique spin of traditional bluegrass to high-energy performances, Seth Mulder & Midnight Run engage audiences with laughter, stellar harmonies and musicianship.
“There’s so many important parts of what creates our stage show,” Seth Mulder explains. “Really it’s all of us being friends and having a great rapport off stage, and we just put that on stage. We’re genuinely having fun hanging out with each other…and we know the importance of directing that to the audience. We know if we go up there and have fun, that the audience is going to have fun.”
Their attentiveness to the audience expands into the material they select to perform. One minute they’ll entertain the crowd with the group’s originals, glide into a bluegrass standard from The Country Gentlemen and then switch gears to songs outside the bluegrass genre like the bluegrass version of the rock classic, “Johnny B. Goode.”
“It’s not so much that we’re trying to cater towards an audience,” Mulder says. “We’re just playing music we like and music that we think the audience will like as well. We still play it in our style, but we play music that would draw people outside the genre to it.”
The Beginning
After graduating in 2011 from the Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Music in Hyden, KY, Mulder moved to Indiana where he met his wife, Sarah. Over the next three years, he would travel in the summers to play music with his friends on the streets of Gatlinburg, TN. Falling in love with the area, he pulled up stakes and moved to The Smoky Mountains. Mulder was working as a bartender at the Ole Smoky Moonshine Distillery when he was asked to put a band together in January of 2015. In March they hit the stage. While the band configuration changed over time, four years ago Watlington became the last piece of the puzzle that created a perfect fit.
“When Ben joined the band, we played for about a year together, and we were like this really works,” Mulder said. “We need to go ahead and try to take it on the road. Before then, we were just playing Ole Smoky. That was a great opportunity for us to get our chops together and really tighten up and get to know each other as a band. When it came to playing on the road, it just meshed and clicked. We all got along well. We all enjoyed playing together.”
When the band isn’t on tour, the quartet performs five hours a day, five to six days a week at the Moonshine Distillery. “The idea when we were first approached to do it felt daunting. I can’t imagine knowing that many songs or playing for that long. But now it’s completely changed our mindset. We’ve got a catalogue of songs. We can play for five hours without having to repeat a song. We can play multiple days without having to repeat a song if we wanted to. It’s made playing on the road so much easier for us. We go somewhere to play a bluegrass festival and we’ve got two forty-five minute sets; that’s a breeze.”
That much togetherness also allowed the band to mesh well in a tight-sounding ensemble. “We wouldn’t be the same without it,” Mulder says. “It’s singlehandedly the reason that we’re able to be as tight as we are. We spend every day together playing music. It kind of goes back to Flatt & Scruggs when they were playing on the road all the time, and they were doing radio shows, or you’ve got the Stanley Brothers that were doing radio shows, or J.D. Crowe who had the house gig up in Kentucky. Their bands got so tight because they played together all the time. We get to live that experience just because we’re getting together all the time.”
The foursome brings a mix of influences—Seth, the Johnson Mountain Boys, Colton, Flatt & Scruggs, Ben, The Country Gentlemen, and Max, J.D. Crowe & The New South. “We were going for a traditional bluegrass sound, but our approach to it. We can play other stuff, but we really connected with traditional bluegrass because that’s what we love. We wanted to bring traditional music to a younger audience to help give it more life. We’ve had people tell us that it’s like the Johnson Mountain Boys meet Flatt & Scruggs. We didn’t go out to sound just like this, but those were our influences.
The Next Steps
In 2018 Seth Mulder & Midnight Run started stretching their name beyond the East Tennessee boundaries, hitting the road and playing events like the SPBGMA national convention in Nashville. A year later the band was featured in a couple of showcases at the IBMA convention in Raleigh, NC.
“There had been some hype about us throughout the week of shows,” Mulder recalls. “It was 11 o’clock at night, and we were getting ready to go on stage. It was standing room only in this huge auditorium at IBMA in Raleigh. We played the set, and it was fantastic. We were hitting on all cylinders. We got a standing ovation. It was really emotional for me because these people had no idea who we were until this moment, and we impacted them enough not only to stay but to get on their feet for us.”
They were making steady progress and then the pandemic hit. But the motivated band made the most out of a gloomy situation. “During the pandemic when a lot of bands were struggling to even get together and do anything, we were blessed to be able to get together because we all live within 45 minutes of each other. We would make sure to try and do live streams, and we’d always make sure we’d get together once a week and practice to work on harmonies and stuff like that.”
“Max is probably our main harmony guy. He has a really good ear for harmony. We’ve always taken time to work on our harmonies just because it’s such an important part of the music.” In 2020 they earned an IBMA “Momentum Band of the Year” nomination, and the next spring Mountain Fever Records signed them to a record deal.
“It’s easy to think we’re not moving fast enough, but then, when you take time to slow down and look, we’ve made leaps and bounds of progress and growth. It’s so cool to see from the smaller festivals that we’ve played to the bigger festivals and the European tours, the overseas tours that we’re doing. I’m just so thankful for it all. I’m truly blessed as a band leader to have the guys around me that I do. None of it would be possible without all of them.”
Going National and International
Seth Mulder & Midnight Run’s first single, “One More Night,” from the debut albumpeaked at#2 on the national Bluegrass Today Weekly Top 20 chart and was the #4 most played song of 2021 according to BT. Mulder penned the song about a good friend who was experiencing a tough time in a relationship. “He would come and talk to me about it. After hearing and seeing it all play out, I thought there’s a good song in this. I turned his bad luck into my good fortune. We got “One More Night” out of it, and folks seem to like it. He still gives me a hard time for wanting some credit for giving me the inspiration.”
The band’s second single, “Carolina Line,” came from the writing pens of Jerry Salley and Glen Duncan. “The first time we heard it I was like this is a cool sounding song,” Mulder said. “I thought this will be good for the record, and I think it would be good for Ben to sing, if it works out, because Ben is from North Carolina so it seemed fitting for him to do it.”
“As we were arranging it, we were trying to think of different ideas because you get sent a demo, and things sound so different on a demo. You’ve always got to try and think how can I make this sound like us. I thought, ‘What would be really cool is if we tuned the banjo to Open D and played it on there. It kind of gives it that Osborne Brothers feel with what Colton’s playing on there. It fits the song so well.”
The quartet returned to the studio in January to put the finishing touches on the CD. They have released three previous independent projects—two live recordings and the full-length studio album Traveling Kind—but working on their first CD with a label was a different situation. “You’re a little more nervous because it’s a new environment, but they made us feel right at home real quick,” Mulder said. “We got settled into that environment real quick, and we were cutting up, having fun, recording like we would anywhere else.”
The band also took their show overseas, playing more than 30 dates in England, parts of Northern Ireland, and Scotland,and they will embark on another venture across the pond later this year. “That’s some of our favorite touring. We absolutely love it. The fan base over there is fantastic. They really love the music. They’re very open and very supportive audiences. We played in England at this little place called The Green Note in London. We didn’t know what the response would be at all. We could be playing to an empty room, or it could be packed, sold out. We went in with an open mind thinking that. Apparently, some hype got built up, and they ended up selling it out. We had people that took the train over and came over from Paris …and parts of Europe to see us. It was such a cool experience seeing all these people gathered together just because of bluegrass music. They were so welcoming.”
The Future
The momentum for Seth Mulder & Midnight Run continues to speed steadily along, and the band members have their sights set on being a force to reckon with in bluegrass music. “Obviously, we would love to play the Opry. That’s a goal for I think anybody in bluegrass or country music. We would like to keep expanding our music, grow our audience. Our mission is to bring our version of bluegrass and traditional music to larger audiences, to expand it to younger audiences to help keep the genre as a whole growing and traditional bluegrass growing. We’d love to go out there and play more festivals, play bigger festivals, and see where it takes us.”
