Wings of a Jetliner

Master mandolin player Nate Lee of the Becky Buller Band (B^3) is flying sky high with the debut of his full-length album, Wings of a Jetliner. But before we board the plane to find out more about his new release, let’s soar back in Lee’s history.

Pre-Flight Check List

Growing up in Texas, Lee was age eight or nine when his older brother played him a home-copied cassette tape of various musical styles, including bluegrass. “I remember running over to my dad, and I said, ‘Hey, there’s this great new thing, and it’s called bluegrass; you’ve got to hear it!’” an enthusiastic Lee recalls.  Two years later his dad bought the VHS tape, Tony Rice: The Video Collection that featuresSam Bush, Ricky Skaggs, David Grisman, Jerry Douglas, Mark O’Connor, Wyatt Rice, Rickie Simpkins, and Jimmy Gaudreau, to name a few. 

“It has been the biggest influence on my music of anything,” he said. “I wore that thing out.” 

“The Tony Rice Unit performance came on, and they did “Shadows” and “Crazy Creek,” and that was when I first saw Wyatt Rice play. That was such a huge influence on me. I still can see and hear everything they said between songs. You can probably hear how excited I am just talking about it.”

His enthusiasm for the music blossomed into passion for a career when the 11-year-old boy enlisted at Camp Bluegrass—at South Plains College in Levelland, Texas—for the first time.

“Steve Smith, who has been a huge mandolin influence and teacher to me—all the way up to bouncing things off him during the process of this album—was my mandolin teacher there, and I saw all these great players. Initially, I just wanted to be one of the teachers at camp. To me, they were Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda and all that. So I, pretty immediately, wanted to do what they did. I wanted to tour and record and teach people. Certainly by the time I was 14 or 15, I was already 100 percent set on that goal that music was what I was going to go do.” 

His music education broadened in 2005 when he attended the Bluegrass and Country Music program at South Plains College in Levelland, TX. During his second semester there Lee landed his first professional gig with the Alan Munde Gazette, replacing Glen Mitchell on mandolin, until his mandolin mentor Steve Smith joined the band. 

“By default, I became the fiddle player, which I think led to many more years of me being known as a fiddle player rather than a mandolin player,” said Lee, the 2015 IBMA Instrumentalist of the Year (fiddle) Momentum award winner. “I really cut my teeth on fiddle mostly with that band and we made an album in 2008 called Made To Last that I’m really proud of. It was a great learning experience and so much fun playing with all them. I have these great memories.

“This is one of my favorite things about Alan. We were headed to my first IBMA. It was 2006 actually. He was going to pick me up at 6 a.m. He knocks on my door, and I answered the door, groggy, and I said, ‘Oh, Alan, I’m so sorry. My alarm didn’t go off.’ You’ll never see Alan visibly mad. I imagined he was probably pretty annoyed with me for this. But he was like, ‘Oh, that’s fine. I’ll wait in the car.’ So I get my stuff together, and I get in the car and he said, ‘Nate, did you bring it with you?’ And I said, ‘Bring what?’ And he said, ‘Your alarm?’ And I said, ‘No. Why would I bring my alarm?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re headed up to Nashville. Why don’t we just swing by the Smithsonian? They’re gonna want to see the only alarm that never went off.’  Alan could get in a jab in a way that just leaves you laughing about it forever.”

Nate’s six years with Alan’s band was a strong learning experience that helped hone his talents.

“I remember rehearsing some vocals and one of them pointing out ‘Do you hear how the other harmony singer is not singing the pick-up notes?  He’s coming in on the downbeat.  You should do that, too’.  I learned so many things from all of them, but especially just watching Alan and the way he acts as a musician. The only thing he brings with him onstage is his banjo. He doesn’t bring baggage along. He’s not worried about what’s going to happen when he plays. You don’t see him overthinking anything. He just goes up [on stage], and he plays music. And that’s the first really great example I saw of that.”
 After moving to Nashville in 2012, Nate toured some with Irene Kelly and Town Mountain, but overall he felt like his career had stalled and turned to banjoist Ned Luberecki for advice.

“I had local gigs around Nashville and that was about it. I felt like I’ve done all this practicing, and I had nowhere to go play. Nobody’s calling me. In Nashville … you walk into a jam session, and there’s 10 people there that can play circles around you. Of course, they’re getting the calls. So I took Ned to lunch, and I said I really want to do what you’re doing.”

That’s when Ned told Nate that Becky Buller was starting a band. “I first heard about Becky Buller in a Bluegrass Unlimited story. I was just moving through the magazine and there she is, and it’s a whole article about her. I had never met her or run into her.”

About a year after his conversation with Luberecki, he met Buller in the Expo Hall at the IBMA Convention. 

“She said, ‘I’ve started this band, and I want to have several people who can take on each role. Do you want to be one of the people who knows the songs on mandolin?’

Nate subbed for several gigs with B^3, but not long after joined the Jim Hurst Trio.  

“We made an album called JHT-1, and I’m really proud of what we did there. My music kind of fits in the new acoustic side of bluegrass, and that album was firmly planted in that. There’s one song that comes to mind, “Funky Flatfoot,” and it’s something I imagined that had I not been in the band Jim would have called Sam Bush to do it. The music we made there just felt so natural and organic. Wings of a Jetliner felt like that when I recorded it.”

In 2017, Buller offered Lee a fulltime position on mandolin and twin fiddle with her band.

“You can tell when you’re working with someone who has worked for other people a lot because they already get your frame of reference really, really well. Becky’s a really good example of that. She knows what it’s like to be a side person, and she’ll talk to you [beforehand] about something she wants to do or try. That’s pretty rare. And I’ve learned so much from playing with all of them.”

Boarding and Take Off

B^3 came on board with their talents for Lee’s album, Wings of a Jetliner. Daniel “The Hulk” Hardin laid a steady groove down on bass for a few cuts while 2018 IBMA “Banjo Player of the Year” Ned Luberecki appeared on eight of the tracks. Band leader Becky Buller contributed her fiddle talent and vocal chops. Beside his bandmates, Lee recruited Thomas Cassell, the 2016 winner of the Rockygrass mandolin competition, as mandolin duet partner on “Serenity.” Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, founding member of Mile Twelve, fiddled on eight tracks.

The title of the independently-released project derived from Nate’s appreciation for airplanes. 

“I really love to look out the window as I travel,” Lee says. “In the past few years I started learning more about how to make travel comfortable. I got into travel rewards and airport lounges and all that kind of stuff, and it’s just kind of a hobby of mine. Additionally, I see airplanes when I think of this music because I was on one, or in an airport, most of the time I was making mix notes and listening to the songs over and over.”

The IBMA award-winning instrumentalist first started planning the project after soaking in a Dan Tyminski performance at the 2019 IBMA conference. 

“It was the first time I’d ever seen him live,” Nate tells Bluegrass Unlimited from his Nashville home. “It was fantastic! [Afterwards] I went back to my hotel room, started planning the album, and I texted my friend, Ashleigh Caudill, who is a great songwriter, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m making this album, send me songs.’ I was on a non-jamming floor, so I tried to play real quietly going over songs.”

Days later, Nate asked B^3 bandmate Dan Boner, who is the Director of the East Tennessee State University Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies program, to engineer and produce the album. 

“I like to say that Dan is very professorial. He brings a laid-back energy that is also in complete control because if Dan is there running any kind of project you know it’s going to be fine. In addition to his musical sensibilities he also just made an environment where everybody felt completely laid back and ready to play music and have fun, and I think it really shows in the way that everybody played.  Then add to that Dan’s skill as an engineer. There’s nothing like having Dan record you and then go back and listen and hear your instruments sounding exactly like the way it does when it’s in your lap.”

Boner asked Lee what he wanted the album to sound like over a conversation at Hattie B’s Hot Chicken in Nashville. 

“I wanted this album to have more of a new acoustic, ‘Ricey’ rhythm. As the Becky Buller band, we play a lot of different types of grooves. We do a lot of mashgrass grooves. We do a lot of more country things, and some laid back things. I said, “I want this to have a feel of something that the Tony Rice Unit might have played. That’s when he said, ‘Well, I can call Wyatt Rice.’ That got it started. I feel like as eclectic as the album is, the thing that really ties it together is the rhythm section we have between me and Todd Phillips and Wyatt Rice. And the [studio] band was built around that core.”

An in-demand studio musician, Lee’s job is to fulfill another musician’s vision.

“Almost always when I’m in the studio, it’s about creating products for someone, and I hope I do what they’re after. With my own music, I already have a pretty clear picture in my head of at least what I want my parts to sound like. I just go in and play. It was one of the coolest experiences. I got to stretch on my creativity. Every now and then Dan would say, ‘Hey, couldn’t you try this a different way?’ I didn’t go completely without guidance. But it was very free to just let things flow and play the way I play without any idea of what the song was supposed to be. I think everyone approached it that way actually since we weren’t after a certain product. We’re here to just make music and have fun.”

Lee’s album features five instrumentals he composed using a couple of creative approaches.

“When I do the doodling around method, I try not to make it be a song very quickly. I really procrastinate as long as possible putting it into a song because once you say alright, this is my part, it’s hard to change it. So, I do a lot of doodling and recording little pieces, and often I’ll combine pieces from different sittings. I record anything that I even remotely like. I have a second method I use when melody is missing, and I’m not coming up with something. I did that with ‘Serenity,’ the C part of the song. I knew what I wanted the chord changes to be, but I didn’t know what the melody would be. I like to approach music in a way where at least sometimes you could hum my melody, and I write songs that way. So, the third part of ‘Serenity,’ I played the chords, turned on my recorder and sang some stuff until the right thing came out.”

Not only did Nate demonstrate his instrumental talents on the album, he also showed his singing side.

“For most of my career I’ve been either the harmony singer or in some bands I didn’t sing at all. When I first started with the Alan Munde Gazette, I sang harmony with them. I did a little bit of lead when I was in the band Hard Road, which is now known as the Hard Road Trio. Every now and then, I do a gig where I put things together, and I’d be the lead singer for that. The Becky Buller Band, my role was exclusively mandolin for a year, and then I started doing the baritone harmony quite a bit with them, and then at some point, there was an opening in the set list, and I started singing some lead as well. In a lot of ways, this is rare for me to be featured as the lead vocalist. It’s usually just been when I play somebody’s wedding or something I’ll be the lead vocalist.

“As a harmony singer, you need to know what the lead singer is gonna do and do it almost before they do or else you’re already late. So, it’s something where you’re still on your toes.  As a lead singer, I really enjoy getting to decide where the timing is going to be, but then there’s also this huge pressure of, I’d better sing the chorus the way that the harmony singers are expecting me to or else it makes it look like they don’t know what they’re doing. But it’s not so hard with harmony singers like Dan and Becky and Daniel Salyer, who sang on the album. Besides being able to sing tenor to a dog whistle, he is just an incredible harmony singer in general. So that takes some of the pressure off knowing who was going to sing harmony with me. They, can hang even if I don’t do it exactly right.”

The album’s lead-off track, “Wonderbat,” is named after Lee’s Pava #194 mandolin. 

“There’s a Simpsons episode where it’s a spoof on the movie The Natural, and in it Homer has this bat that he made called the ‘Wonderbat’ to play baseball, and he can hit homeruns with it. You think it’s going to be one of those things where the bat breaks, and he finds out it was him the whole time but, but it wasn’t. It turns out Homer’s terrible at baseball. His bat breaks and he can’t play. So, I named it ‘Wonderbat’ because with this mandolin I just feel like I can do things with it that don’t come out when I play other instruments.”

Nate named the track, “Rook Roller” after one of his “serious” hobbies, Chess.  

“I don’t like to just randomly attach a name, so I do one of two things. Either the song pops into my head while I’m doing something, or I’m playing the song and something pops into my head. I was playing this song, and I got to thinking about chess. And there’s this move, the rook roller, where you use two rooks to crowd their king into a corner, and once you start this thing, there’s nothing that can stop it. This song has kind of a revolving sound to it. It kind of rolls along. In fact, I think of a strong banjo right hand when I play it. And ‘Rook Roller’ popped into my head.” 

Whether it’s an instrumental like “Rook Roller” or his fanboy cover of the Country Gazette’s “Sweet Allis Chalmers,” Lee’s sonic exploration takes listeners on a journey to Cloud nine. 

“I feel happy every time I think of Wings of a Jetliner. The guest musicians made the music everything I hoped for, and working with them was an amazing experience.” 

Final Approach

Nate Lee has surpassed his original teenage dreams to tour, record, and teach. A former student at Camp Bluegrass, he is now an instructor there as well as a top-notch mandolin teacher weekly to 30 students of varying abilities. Lee remembers always gravitating to teaching from a young age.

“I’d be sitting in the sandbox in the backyard making a sandcastle, and for some strange reason, the whole time, I’d be narrating in my head how to do it as if I were teaching somebody. I don’t know where I got this idea that teaching was even interesting to me as a small child, but I just always imagined with everything I did, how I would show somebody else how to do it, right down to what steps you would need to do.”

“It’s always been really interesting to me to say, ‘Okay, what are all the steps between not knowing how to do this and either [playing] the thing I’m doing or this thing that someone else is doing?” It’s the most fun figuring out what someone else is doing, because I have a pretty good idea what I’m doing.”

Although he worked on his dad’s plumbing crew, it didn’t take Nate long to realize that he could make bigger bucks teaching. He landed a job at Guitar Focus music store in DeSoto, Texas. 

“At the time, I was not a very good teacher. I look back on that and I think, ‘My poor students. How did they learn anything from me?’”

He became better in time by comparing teaching to his enjoyment of video games.

“What makes it fun is I need to get past this level. What do I need to do to make that happen? It’s like a game to figure out … what way is going to click with this person because it doesn’t click the same way with each person. It’s on the teacher to come up with the right way to say it, play it, or explain it.”

The 33-year-old Lee has been instructing students for 18 years.

“I’ve been teaching since I was 15, and I still come up with new ways [to teach] almost on a weekly basis when somebody does not understand something. It’s so fun to see them when they finally get it or even when they start to get it. It’s just as fun as playing a video game or playing chess.”

By helping others to advance on their instrument, Lee has become more proficient on his. 

“I’m a way better player because I’ve spent many hours explaining to people exactly how things work. Because you can do something on your instrument and it can come out good, but if you don’t understand it 100 percent, it’s hard to replicate that on another song if you don’t know why you got that result. It’s really changed the way I play and the way I think about music. It’s like practicing all day long.  It just can’t be beat.”

The multi-instrumentalist’s career continues to fly at a high altitude with no plans to touch down anytime soon. If anything, Nate wants to stay above the clouds, honing his vocal and instrumental chops, coaching bands, recording and performing.

“I look forward to taking my new music out into the world once COVID is under control. I can’t wait to share it with audiences and students at shows and music camps. A few of my students are already learning the tunes in their private lessons! Until then, I’m enjoying playing and singing for my four-month-old son, Charlie. He really enjoys music, and I love playing for him!”