Meet Thrift Store Sonata: Seasoned Stillwater Musicians Turn to Bluegrass

It’s a simple concept. A stand-up bass. A fiddle. A guitar. A washboard. And a group of neighbors who like making music.

Meet Thrift Store Sonata.

Thrift Store Sonata—made up of Chris Brown on Guitar, Tuke Weston on bass, Dan Gerber on washboard and Alissa Jacobsen on fiddle—began putting their own bluegrass spin on covers about a year ago, and the project is starting to take a serious turn.

What began as friends jamming in Brown’s car house, has become a musical project that sees Thrift Store Sonata playing private parties, events at Lift Bridge Brewery, gigs at the 331 Club in Minneapolis, and next week, a show on the main stage of Summer Tuesdays.

The members of Thrift Store Sonata bring a diverse background of music together in a new light for the seasoned musicians.

“The idea is to put our unique twist on music people already love,” Jacobsen said.

The hard-driving, up tempo style is one that gets everyone from seniors to children moving—and often times makes people hoist a beverage into the air and sing a long.

• Check out Thrift Store Sonata on Facebook

About a year ago, Brown and Weston—neighbors of Stillwater’s South Hill—got together and started jamming. Soon enough their mutual friend, and fellow musician, Dan Gerber, entered the mix.

One day Gerber got a call from his band mates saying he had to come by the Brown’s garage, where they had been practicing.

“I asked what was wrong,” Gerber said. “They said: ‘We have a fiddle player, you have to come over here.’”

The minute Alissa Jacobsen joined the trio, things got exciting.

Weston—a long time guitar player with Orange Whip—picked up the stand-up bass; Brown plays guitar; Gerber went back to playing the washboards, an instrument he played on the Main Stage of First Avenue with Accident Clearinghouse; and for the first time in her musical career, Jacobsen who plays classical fiddle is diving into contemporary music for the first time.

“We all have these pretty cool musical backgrounds and then Alissa showed up out of nowhere and it just made sense,” Brown said. “That’s when we realized the concept was there to do a bluegrass project—something a little more country.”

A Thrift Store Sonata show is a mix of original and cover songs.

“The covers are all over the board,” Brown said.

It’s a big mixture of music each of us like, Gerber added.

“We all bring different music to the band, put our twist on it, and based on the instrumentation it lends itself to a more bluegrass adaptation of things that aren’t normally that way,” Gerber said.

There’s a hard-driving element to the band, too.

“We’re not going to do a song unless we can kill it,” Brown said. “Really do it our way.”

“We’ve all developed this sound together,” Jacobsen added. “We’ve all helped each other really develop into something unique.“

Thrift Store Sonata looks to include songs people wouldn’t generally expect to hear from a bluegrass band, like Black Sabbath’s War Pigs or Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion.

“Things like that aren’t traditionally bluegrass, old-timey songs, but that adaptation is fun for us,” Gerber said. “We find that the more we play them, the more they evolve. They’re always changing.”

The band’s set list is always changing too.

Thrift Store Sonata has also been writing a lot of original music, and is incorporating that into their shows.

“Our originals are essentially that hard-driving stuff that we like,” Brown said.

The originals start with Brown’s lyrics, and the band fills in the rest.

“When I rewrite my old songs, I picture what it they could sound like with washboard player, a stand-up bass and a fiddle,” Brown said. “It’s been awesome.”

One of the band’s latest songs, Photograph, is co-written by Weston and Brown.

“It came about very organically,” Brown said. “We were just jamming and it hit us. This would be a great song, and we went with it.”

This project has been wonderful,” Weston said. “I like the challenge of playing the bass, and rearranging these songs into our instrumentation. It’s been a huge breath of fresh air.”

“I’ve fallen in love with the unique style,” Jacobsen said. “There’s a lot of room to maneuver within the sound, and the harmonies really open up a nice space for the fiddle.

“This has just been so much fun,” she said. “It’s been really unexpected and great to see this explode.”