[Editor’s Note: 2024 is a year full of milestones for Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN based string-based band Pert Near Sandstone (or as they often stylizes themselves, Pert Near). Most significantly, they’re celebrating 20 years as a band. In that time, the group- which straddles the line between bluegrass, Americana and roots music – has recorded 8 full-length albums, 2 live albums, and several singles. In addition, Eau Claire, Wisconsin based music festival Blue Ox, which they’ve helped create, curate and host, is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary June 27-29.
In April, they released a cover of The Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait,” their first music released since releasing their latest album Waiting Days last October. They picked the song not only because of their shared Minnesota origins but to also challenge themselves to see how they could experiment and translate the iconic band’s sound to their acoustic-based sound. With the help of special guests Max Felsheim on saxophone and Bobby Jay on trumpet, the band expertly blended the two worlds together.
The band says, “The arrangement was prompted by our hometown performance at Minneapolis’ First Ave‘s mainroom for our Waiting Days album release show (Dec 2023). It was so enjoyable to play that we decided to record our live version in the studio. May it represent our gratitude and be an homage to the incredible Twin Cities music scene.”
Here are the song credits:
“Can’t Hardly Wait” (Live cover of The Replacements)
Arrangement by Pert Near Sandstone
Recorded and mixed by Ryan Young at NeonBrown Recording Studio
Cover Artwork by Nate Sipe
Video recorded and edited by Matt Hussey
Lead vocals, Bass: Justin Bruhn
Banjo: Kevin Kniebel
Guitar: J Lenz
Mandolin: Nate Sipe
Fiddle: Chris Forsberg
Below Sipe penned an essay about how covering the song corelates to the band’s adventurous DIY journey to this point.]
Allow me to speak in the spirit of cheap hotel room mumblings after two weeks on tour, stuck in transit, almost back home. Aftershow parties are followed by mornings of g–damn. Some of those towns I never want to see again. Others, I would give anything to return. I’m bleary eyed with a head swimming in the turbulence of navigating homeward. I hate airports and planes, but for me they bookend every long drive down the interstate. Beating it on the road is not aging with grace, but we love it anyway. I think it might keep us young to a degree, or in touch with the spirit of our younger selves.
This is not what I imagined when in my teens, holed up in my parent’s basement, brandishing my first electric guitar, relishing the decay of distortion with every power chord. I would rewind the cassette player tape back to the bridge I was attempting to decipher. I could get the song intros too, if I had hit the record button soon enough as the song began to play. Before the internet, alternative music radio was a broadcast tribune of our imagined counter culture. It was fuel for our dreams. I can almost still feel that bliss of ambition, the newly found permission to be creative while discovering others who were likewise driven. I cringe to think of the shredder I could have been if we had Youtube back then. The few discs I owned were based on cover art and listening sessions I had at a friend’s basement. When his mom was on the hospital night shift we would crank our amps and rattle the neighborhood, often as friends assembled. The several house party concerts cut our teeth and left us eager.
I was led down the garden path toward acoustic music by community radio and ultimately a welcoming embrace of the local bluegrass and folk music scene. We were grunge rockers and metalheads becoming lost in the weeds of traditional music, discovering and relating to the homemade and DIY approach, but also the topical and direct language of folk that could be punk rock without all the deafening electrified accoutrement and spit. There is still anarchism in old time country music, but also a blood-letting mythology against the unjust. We retained the permission to play what we want, how we want, for our own amusement. This is a legacy of the Minneapolis music scene, in our northern isolation, getting at it before winter makes it all more absurd.
Paul and The Replacements couldn’t give a shit that Pert Near recorded one of their songs and it wasn’t meant to impress. When the song happened to catch my ear prior to our Waiting Days album release show at Minneapolis’ First Avenue, it felt befitting to the occasion. Everyone immediately agreed. After a quick arrangement rehearsal in the greenroom with horns we were sound checking and in a flash the show was over. First Avenue was a season closer for us in 2023. However, playing that song by an iconic Minneapolis band on the mainroom stage felt like a moment of cyclical significance. My aforementioned nostalgia was deeply considered while thinking back to all the shows I had seen on that stage when alternative rock was still a burgeoning genre. It felt only natural to record our arrangement live in the studio as soon as we could assemble. Our version might be a bit more “high and lonesome,” than the original, and that’s how we can muster it from a cozy basement studio in the burbs, much like how it all started. Here’s a fresh bloodletting, more content to upload into the ethernet, another punch into the darkness. “Try and try and try.”
To follow the band and find more, visit their Linktree.
Nate Sipe
Contributor
Nate is a multi-instrumentalist and member of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota based band Pert Near Sandstone
