For the members of newgrass quintet Packway Handle Band, the business of being a band has been a true labor of brotherly love.

Most of the members of Packway Handle Band grew up together. They’ve toured under the Packway moniker for nearly nine years. They’ve been on the road full-time since 2006. They even sing and play on the same microphone. But where other bands might crack under the pressure of too-much-together-time, the quintet is lucky enough to (mostly) get along, even under the most strenuous of circumstances.

“I know bands where people don’t get along and they’re talking about going on the road full time and I just think, ‘Don’t even bother,’” laughs fiddle player Andrew Heaton. “No matter how well you get along, it’s going to turn into this thing like what you see on war movies where everybody’s sitting there and no one says anything to anybody else without it being derogatory. And everybody has a derogatory name for everybody else.”

Today, the band laughs at Heaton’s assessment, but it’s clear that there’s a genuine affection amongst the bandmates. When Blur catches up with Heaton, banjo player Tom Baker, guitarist Josh Erwin and mandolin player Michael Paynter via conference call, it’s hard to tell where one band member ends and another begins. But then, expressing themselves in concert with each other is nothing new for Packway. Along with bassist Zach McCoy, during their live shows, the quintet crowds around two centrally-placed condenser mics, instruments and all. To see them onstage is like watching a five-headed monster: the band seems to move telepathically, each member pulling back or leaning into the mic as one fluid whole. And though the band is fully at home now in the old-time stage set-up, learning to mix themselves on one microphone took years of hard work.

“One year, we practiced around a broomstick,” recalls Erwin, who credits the shared-mic system with inspiring the band’s high-energy sets. “When you only have two condenser mics to crowd around you kind of feel compelled to give it everything you have.”

Though these days the bandmates sound like grizzled pros when talking about their craft, they are quick to point out that they started off playing rock music—far from the pure bluegrass category that they often get lumped in. Growing up together in Kennesaw, Ga., Josh, Tom, Zach and Michael spent their high school years — according to Erwin — jamming and playing crappy rock music in my basement.” It wasn’t until Tom’s older brother brought back a mandolin from Colorado that the band started to experiment with a different style. Though they had little exposure to bluegrass and old-time music, Tom picked up the banjo and Michael learned the mandolin and pretty soon the band was arranging harmonies.

“We weren’t singing any harmonies that were straightforward at all or correct the way that harmonies are technically supposed to be done,” says Erwin. “We were just playing what we thought sounded good. I don’t know if it was very close to real bluegrass.”

Despite their lack of familiarity with bluegrass, in 2002, the newly-named Packway Handle Band entered the Bluegrasss Competition at the Telluride Music Festival. Competition aside, the trek to Colorado became a source of personal legend, as well as the beginning of a long, strange trip for Packway Handle.

“We took a little Chrysler minivan and there were six of us in there with no air conditioning,” recalls Erwin. “The air conditioning went out in New Mexico. Somebody always had to sit on the floor, paperclip-style.”

“I thought you guys had to run the actual heat in it because the car was overheating?” asks Heaton, who seems to know the story by heart even though he didn’t join the band until the next year.

“We were riding through the desert with the heat on,” Baker agrees. “We came back into Athens and that thing would not go above, like, 35 miles an hour. We just destroyed that van.”

The only thing that the band can’t laugh about in recalling the trip is the fact that they walked away with 4th prize at the prestigious competition—a feat that, for a band with little bluegrass experience—is nothing short of remarkable. Unlike their fellow competitors, Packway brought a lot of new material to a genre that is generally heavy on cover songs. So, in a sense, it was their unfamiliarity with bluegrass that brought the fresh energy and perspective to the competition and made the judges sit up and take notice.

“I guess in retrospect it was so funny because they were going to this competition with almost no experience in bluegrass at all,” says Heaton, who joined the band on fiddle in 2003. “I think that what goes on at some of these concerts is they get so tired of hearing the same thing and rehashing the same thing that (Packway) really seemed like something different to people.”

Pretty soon, the band was touring the bluegrass circuit—adding McCoy in 2006 when they started on the road full-time. They’ve since toured all over the country and in Europe, sharing stages with the likes of Ralph Stanley, Larry Keel and Yonder Mountain String Band. They’ve released three full-length records — Chaff Harvest in 2004, (Sinner) You Better Get Ready in 2005 and a self-titled record in 2008 — plus a live EP in 2006, and will release their 3rd full-length studio album, What Are We Gonna Do Now? in February.

But despite their continued success in the bluegrass arena, the band’s rock roots kept them from ever fully committing to a traditional bluegrass sound. They’ve experimented with collaborating with other bands like Venice is Sinking on their stage shows, and have included instruments not common even on the bluegrass circuit, like saxophone and flute, into the mix.

“The more we started arranging songs, they started to get more and more away from bluegrass,” says Paynter. “I realized there’s no reason to adhere to this preconceived notion of bluegrasss music. We could just come up with original songs and play them with bluegrass instruments. That’s kind of what we’ve been doing ever since.”

What has emerged over the band’s nine years is a sound that at times sits fully in the bluegrass tradition, and at other times is completely quirky and self-deprecating about whether or not the band fits into that category at all. The bandmates revel in pushing their rhythms to almost comic speed, singing raucous, spirited choruses that stress their voices to the limits and at times poking complete fun at their own players. (“Our mandolin player plays the fiddle completely upside-down/he makes infernal racket and all other kinds of sound.”) The band even makes fun of their name, which has been the source of hilarious amounts of scrutiny over the years. They tell Blur vaguely that the story involves a friend of the band’s and isn’t that interesting; the band’s new song addressing the origin of their name, “What is A Packway Handle?” isn’t that much more insightful.

“We used to try to tell the whole damn story but it’s just too weird and the circumstances of creation involve Tourette’s syndrome and too much beer.”

Despite their ever-present sense of humor, it’s hard to say whether Packway is a rock band making fun of bluegrass, or bluegrass band that is changing the face of a traditional genre. Like “newgrass” contemporaries the Avett Brothers, Packway is quick to dispel any notions that they think of themselves as a true bluegrass band, insisting instead that they are just a band that uses traditional bluegrass instrumentation in new ways.

“I don’t know if any single or around-the-mic bluegrass band has ever added sax and flute,” Heaton points out. “Eventually our stage show is going to get more and more elaborate, at least with different instrumentation. I just want to do justice to the songs we’re putting out there.”

Still, they recognize that trying to get away from the cliché of being a typical bluegrass band has become sort of a cliché in itself.

“Almost every band that we’ll play with in the bluegrass genre go out of their way to add something that says ‘bands that don’t like bluegrass will like this band,’” says Erwin. “That’s funny that that’s become a real standard thing for bluegrass bands to say.”

In fact, the band got to go head-to-head with their more traditional counterparts this past fall when they opened for Ralph Stanley at the Melting Point –– and the results were sort of a mixed bag:

“Some people were either into it or completely aghast or just didn’t know how to take it,” says Paynter of the experience. “It was definitely a fish-out-of-water scenario.”

Recognizing the conundrum of “to bluegrass or not to bluegrass” is a large part of what informs their new release, What Are We Gonna Do Now? Recorded entirely by the band in Heaton’s home studio, the EP is a mix of humorous jams about being a bluegrass band and straight-forward tunes with rock-style vocals and bluegrass instrumentation. Where previous albums were recorded like the band’s stage show, all around one mic, on the new record Heaton set up the recording and every band member came in and overdubbed their parts separately. Also new to this release is the addition of snare hits and organ, hardly traditional bluegrass instruments.

If the record’s new title is any indication, the band is on the cusp of some pretty major changes—and not just in their formal releases. Though they’ve made a name for themselves through their onstage round-the-mic style, they’re not necessarily planning to stick with that stage set-up forever.

“I guess at different times we all have these visions of ways that, at certain points in the show or at the end of the show, we can sort of step away from the mic and go to a totally different set up,” says Heaton.

“We don’t see any reason to restrict ourselves to one sort of stage structure if we don’t have to. And we don’t think we do.”

As ironic as it may seem, the very thing that got Packway Handle to where they are today—playing so closely as one unit—is what they think will help them move forward into new, more independent, territory.

“There was something that was tempting about knowing that I wasn’t going to be blazingly loud and exposed with my own line in or my own microphone. It would be blended in with what everybody was doing,” says Heaton of playing in the single-mic scenario. “As time goes on, that has been less of a reason to go with this.”

Still, they have too much fun with it to abandon the single-mic set-up entirely:

“Even if we get away from using the single mics, it will still be a part of our show,” says Paynter. “Just because it is something unique and something people enjoy watching.”

No matter the stage set-up, the band’s reverence for the bluegrass and old-time music makes it hard not to see Packway as an indicator of the direction that modern bluegrass is going: with their high energy and great sense of humor, the group is injecting life into a tradition that has seen a major resurgence in the past decade—partly due to bands like Packway trying to think of bluegrass in an entirely different way.

“I think it’s part of a trend. It’s a trend towards us moving more and more away from feeling restricted by the bluegrass form,” says Heaton. “Now I think we’re trying to do other things. “

Whatever they’re doing, Packway seems to be doing it right. In 2003, they beat out 72 bands in the Miller Lite– “Locals Only” Battle of the Bands, they’ve been voted Athens’ best bluegrass band for an astonishing seven consecutive years in the Flagpole Music Awards, they won first prize at the Podunk Festival Band Competition, and have since won both 2nd and 3rd place at the Telluride Bluegrass Band Competition. But they haven’t let the success get to their heads. The same lighthearted attitude that they took to the first Telluride on that harried journey out West is still working for them today.

“We were really just impersonating a real bluegrass band,” laughs Baker of the band’s beginnings. “But we happened to be doing it in a way people liked.”

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