Interview: Sol Chase of Big Love Car Wash

Hi, Sol! What's your story?

I was born outside of a teepee into a field of sunlit dancing musicians making merry in the mountains of Mexico and I lived for about six years with a hippie group throughout Mexico, the US and Europe - around 18 different countries. 

We lived in RVs and camper vans and we had teepees on the top of our trucks that we'd go set up on public land or in someone's forest - just anywhere that we could find away from people. We lived completely off-grid and we would go into town and play music, get a bit of money for groceries and gas and then go to the next place. My parents were doing deep spiritual work and the group they were with was doing a lot of spiritual processing and medicine work at rainbow gatherings and the like. Myself and one other kid just ran around in the woods - mostly naked - just playing and experiencing life to its fullest. 

I started writing songs when I was about four and then my dad got me into guitar so I learned a couple chords. So I've been playing music forever. My parents were both musicians and it just came really naturally to jam. It took me a long time to develop any technique or music theory or formal training, but I just played pretty much since I can remember.

I moved to the States when I was 6; my dad and I came over - he's American - and we lived in little towns in Colorado. The culture there was bluegrass in the Colorado mountains and so I learned to play mandolin when I was six. I started going to festivals, campgrounds, late night jam circles…learning hundreds and hundreds of these standard songs that have been passed down for decades from blue grass’s origins in the American South. I got really into a couple of bands and we'd go see their shows; Punch Brothers became a huge favourite…Yonder Mountain String Band, The Infamous Stringdusters, Crooked Still - these are all quite experimental bluegrass bands. I was really into the kind of new age jam grass, or ‘chamber grass’ or whatever - ‘new grass’, experimental acoustic music.

I started putting together my own bands when I was in my teenage years - I went to a boarding school and had a group there called Three Quarter Moon. We put out a couple of albums when I was around 17 and we were just going for creativity over any kind of technical perfection. I mean, those albums, when I listen to them now; I’m like: “Wow, we were just throwing stuff at the wall!”, but it was nice to be able to busk and play a crappy restaurant gig every week to get money to fund the album! Then we did it all ourselves - put out on iTunes and put out CDs - it's a great experience to learn: what does it take to actually have a band? 
I went to college in Austin, Texas and that is a really musical city; there's live music seven nights a week in any genre you could think of. I was in school for communications but I was playing a lot of music, gigging and getting involved with bands, playing a lot of rotating bluegrass nights - just getting deep into the scene. Through that scene I met the musicians who would eventually become Big Love Car Wash. We actually formed semi-officially as a band in 2023, right before I moved to Europe, and thought ‘Well, what are we gonna do now? We want to keep this project going, [but] Sol lives in a different continent…I guess let's go for it!

We did the work of building the band - writing and rehearsing our songs - pretty much remotely and I came back to record our debut album, Daydream, for a couple months. We spent a couple weeks in the studio, then a couple weeks promoting and preparing to release the album the next year. Since then we've done a couple of tours every year where we meet up somewhere, trying to play every night if we can, and it’s been been this beautiful creative bubble that we go into for a while - then we just take a few months off and work on other projects and play in other bands.

I feel really lucky that I get to live in Ireland; here I’m involved in all kinds of other projects in sustainability. I live in an eco  village and grow food working on eco building and  rewilding and planting trees and then I get to have this other life of creative music making and songwriting. I'm really passionate about storytelling and activism through storytelling, and I talk a lot about environmentalism and social issues like inclusivity, empathy work, feminism and intersectional social issues that I think we need to use art to amplify. I start a lot of conversations at our shows about these things.

So what is Big Love Car Wash all about as a project?

Something that I've wanted to do more of with music is to start conversations and to make it more than just performer and audience. The band name that we have, Big Love Car Wash, actually is a reference to the feeling that can happen at a gig where the band and the audience are having a back- and-forth - a bit of an energy exchange. The audience is encouraging us to do our best so we play better, so they get more excited, and we're all washed in love. It all becomes a big love car wash up on stage (and that was a phrase and a quote coined by the late, great Jeff Austin of Yonder Mountain String Band - he was one of the biggest inspirations in my life). 

I really want to look at more intentional ways of creating. We like to run workshops, whether it's about songwriting or musicianship, and we talk a lot about the traditions in bluegrass, things like murder ballads that are kind of the darker side of this folk tradition - why these came about, what narratives they're putting out into the world, how we can be positive in our songwriting for the kind of culture we want to uplift, how we can take a stand on things that we care about. More and more I've become interested in event facilitation as well as just performing, and actually opening up spaces for more and more people to participate and collaborate. I think folk music of all kinds is uniquely participatory. It doesn't take much to pick up an instrument and get involved, but we do have these gates in place and gatekeepers who maintain them, and it's important to question those rules. So [for example], if a space is predominantly male, female musicians may struggle to get in the door, and we need to be intentional about making that space. 

You know, bluegrass has often been associated with white culture, but the banjo and so much of the improvisation that actually is central to what bluegrass is comes from Black American culture. So [Big Love Car Wash is about] opening up more spaces for the cross-pollination of different traditions, to stop closing our doors to people who we may think of as outside of the norm of what's part of folk music, what's part of bluegrass music, opening up our informal jam spaces, our conversations, our gigs, creating more of a space where everyone can bring their ideas and actually create something together. It's not just a band up there on stage on a pedestal, but it's actually a collective art movement, and that's something I want to be a part of. 

What culture is calling you?

The culture that's calling to me right now is very much DIY, small spaces, events, facilitation, underground folk scene. You know, living in rural Ireland is really giving me appreciation for [the] hyper-local. I am working on a farm here, I'm involved with a couple of arts organisations, and it just feels like such a passionate group of people working on things just within 30 kilometres, going back to the absolute tiny roots. I'm trying to get more and more involved in that. 

At the same time, [I’m] deepening my understanding of Irish culture and cross-sectional folk music in this part of the world. Rhianna Connolly has been a huge inspiration - her bands The Breath and Honey Feet. The Bog Bodies keep coming up for me as just absolute inspiration. I think each of these artists take local culture and bring it into their somewhat more mainstream art. Lau Noah is another absolute genius of a musician who I've been appreciating recently; she's a Catalonian living in New York. 

Jacob Collier has always been a big inspiration of mine, not only for music, but for fashion and ideas and just this sense of radical disobedience, which is a word that Lau Noah used to describe jazz music. I love that kind of punk folk aesthetic of just tearing down the system with the tools we have, which happen to be acoustic music. 

What does London mean to you?

London has always been a part of my life, but  it occupies this weird grey square of my brain that I don't actually know much about. My mom’s from Ruislip in West London, and so I grew up going to my grandparents' house almost every year, but we'd always do family things - you know, see family, maybe go out to eat once or twice. 

I never really got to explore the London scene, and I know it is this brimming, creative, bustling, everything metropolis. St's a bit of a question mark, a mystery box of what is possible in London. I also have the association of big money and finance, and of course the headquarters of all the Britishness that exists in the world. Reconciling what I know is a phenomenal creative culture with this impression I have, which is very kind of sterile and distant (just from my own particular experience there) - it's a nut that I really want to crack. 

I'm really excited to be playing in London and to be starting to make connections in the music scene and to be feeling like there's actually something alive there for me.

Speaking of which...do you have anything to promote?

Right now I'm promoting the Big Love Car Wash tour of Europe that is starting next week. 

We play at Grevengrass Festival in Germany on May 23rd, 24th. 

Then we go to Copenhagen on the 29th to play at the Danish Bluegrass Music Association.

We go to Haga Street Festival in Gothenburg in Sweden on the 30th. 

We'll be playing in London at the Bossanyi Studio in Ruislip on May 31st on Sunday. Message Big Love Car Wash for details about that one; it's a private show but you're all welcome to come if you give us a message. 

Then we'll be over to Ireland for a week playing from West Cork all the way up to County Mayo, Westport Bluegrass Festival, Galway Folk Festival and a few places in between. 

It's our first European tour and I am so excited to bring our sound to all the beautiful people I've met over here and to share our art with good friends.