Ketch Secor doesn’t exactly celebrate milestones. He’s not even sure what he’s doing more than three months from now. But somehow Old Crow Medicine Show has made it to year 19 with a Greatest Hits collection, and yes, that’s worth a tip of the hat—even if Secor’s wearing a fiddle instead of one.
“We made it to year 19,” he laughs. “1998 was a long time ago, man.”
Long enough, in fact, that their new compilation only covers the Network Records years. “Just like FPK took a chance on Old Crow, it was hard to find a label to take a chance on us in 2002,” Secor recalls. “We were selling cassettes. We didn’t have a website. Nobody had a cell phone.” Somehow that Canadian label—fresh off a win with The Be Good Tanyas—said yes. And now those first two albums (plus a few from the third) are getting a victory lap.
Secor admits the band didn’t rush into this kind of retrospective. “We’ve kind of shied away from [a Greatest Hits] because we want to write new songs,” he says. “But this is one of those deals where you kind of get to rest on your laurels a little bit.”
The songs, he says, are like racehorses in retirement. “These songs are kind of like Cigar or one of those old thoroughbreds… they bring ‘em out, you get your picture made with ‘em, then they bring ‘em back to the barn.”
He’s not wrong. “Wagon Wheel,” “Take ‘Em Away,” and “Tell It to Me” have long outlived the usual shelf life of most Americana singles. But he also acknowledges the deep Dylan influence in legitimizing the greatest hits model itself. “Everything I learned I learned by listening to Bob Dylan,” he says. “You have to have a greatest hits at some point. Bob did it in the ’60s.”
In fact, he fondly remembers how Dylan used Greatest Hits as an excuse to sneak in a new single—“Positively 4th Street”—that fans couldn’t get anywhere else. Old Crow’s version? “Black-Haired Québécois” and “Heart Up in the Sky,” both previously unreleased and criminally good. “Those songs I wrote in the ’90s,” Secor says. “When we got to Nashville, we didn’t want to play original music. We wanted to be the best damn string band the world had ever seen.”
That old-time religion eventually gave way to songwriting. “In our early 20s, we wanted to play trad,” he says. “That was kind of punk rock to us. Severely old-time string band music, really fast, really crazy.”
They still haven’t run out of material. “We’ve got all sorts of outtakes, live things, radio shows,” he says. “The ephemera of 20 years on the highway produces quite a lot of tape.” Yes, that box set is coming—eventually.
Meanwhile, they’ve got new music to promote. A live double album, 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, captures Old Crow’s take on Dylan’s seminal Nashville record. “We put our own spin on it,” Secor says. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
And they’ll be bringing it to Louisville this summer with a date at the Iroquois Amphitheater, which Secor calls “a great place to get a whole bunch of hillbillies from Indiana in the house.”
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the track below.
