SATURDAYS 7AM

Salwa Khan
I'm speaking today with Tyson and Anna Carver, and their show is called The Grass Is Bluer, and it's about bluegrass music. How did you come to have an interest in radio?

Tyson Carver
Well, in radio for me, I guess it did kind of start with Coach Smith inviting me to do “Over Easy with Coach” when he started that show seven years ago. So that's kind of where I started doing it regularly. I mean, I've played with a band for years and so we've done radio coming in as a guest for different stations like that all over the place. Then he started having me pick the music on Mondays, and for some reason I started kicking it all off with a bluegrass song every Monday morning. Then from John Brown to Tim Kiesling and a couple other people at the station kept saying, Hey, you know, if you ever wanna do a bluegrass show, <laugh> just let us know. And so about two years ago, we let them know and we came up with The Grass is Bluer. That's kind of how the show got started.

Ana Carver
And I was kind of voluntold <laugh> that I was doing it. But you know what, I'm always up for adventures and I love a good challenge. And this has been a lot of fun. I love music, of course. And so this has been a lot of fun for me.

Salwa Khan
You say that you played in a band, or you both played in a band?

Tyson Carver
Yeah, I do. I started playing fiddle when I was three years old. I've got a twin brother and so we grew up doing the whole twin fiddles thing. We grew up playing bluegrass music. We initially took Suzuki Method violin, which is more classical stuff, and we got fired by our teacher, essentially, because she didn't want to learn fiddle tunes every week to teach us. So the bluegrass thing for me and my brother has always kind of been there. And then I've had a band, the Texas Renegade has been my band for the last 20 something years. Ana's just always, she plays a little guitar.

Ana Carver
I sing in the shower.

Tyson Carver
She sings in the shower quite often. <laugh> and plays guitar, some. She's just a huge music lover. I literally can hear her coming down the street because the music is so loud in her car, whether it's Bluegrass or Lady Gaga, it doesn't matter.

Ana Carver
I love Bluegrass. Of course, I've learned so much about Bluegrass through the show, but I've always been a big Bluegrass fan, It's always been something that I've really loved

Salwa Khan
What's the story behind the show title?

Tyson Carver
It was literally the first name that popped in my head. I was like, how about The Grass is Bluer? And then I'm like, surely that's taken. So I started searching on Facebook and just googling it and there were no radio shows or anything really that I could find called The Grass is Bluer. And so I came to Anna and said, how about that for the name? And she's like, that's perfect.

Salwa Khan
How do you go about producing the show? How do you pick the music and decide who's doing what?

Ana Carver
We are go with the flow. We do both listen to Bluegrass often. And so we are trying to come up with newer songs that recently have come out. We don't even have a plan when we sit down and we go through our list and we say, how about this? How about that? What have you heard this week? What have I heard this week?

Tyson Carver
We have a desktop at home that we record from and for me throughout the week as I listen to Spotify or whatever, if I hear a bluegrass song pop up that I like, I just screenshot it on my phone. Then when we sit down to go through the show, I look at my pictures from the last week or two and see what songs I had screenshotted. I look them up and we play that.

Ana Carver
And I have an Apple Music playlist. I like to go through all the new songs that have come out in the week, and then I add them to my playlist if I like them.

Salwa Khan
when people listen to your show, uh, give us an idea of what they can expect to hear.

Tyson Carver
I think we probably focus a little more on like newgrass kind of stuff. We are big fans of Billy Strings and the Infamous String Dusters. Molly Tuttle, Green Sky Bluegrass, some of those kind of groups. But we also do throw in some Bill Monroe, Peter Rowan, Sam Bush, who's been around since the seventies. We do like to try and spread the gamut of what bluegrass is and just put it all together.
We try and give some backstory on different people if they have a new record coming out, we try and tell what it's about. If it's somebody of note like Bill Monroe, if we're playing some of his stuff, we try to mention that it was originally Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys, and hence the name Bluegrass Music. You know, we try and tie it all together.

Salwa Khan
What are the challenges and the rewards of doing your show?

Ana Carver
The rewards are when we're out in Wimberley and someone comes up to us and tells us how great we are, because you wonder who's out there listening and what we're doing this for. So when we're out there and people say they really enjoy our show, that's a reward for me, for sure.

Tyson Carver
For the challenges, learning the program and kind of getting into the groove of what we want to do with the show was a bit of a challenge as well as far as trying to get everything recorded and getting it sounding the way that we wanted

Tyson Carver
The reason I wanted to do this mostly is because I've always been into bluegrass music. And then, we have Wood and Wire from Wimberley. They're a Grammy nominated bluegrass band. There's a group of people in Wimberley that really like bluegrass music and play bluegrass music. And it was not represented on the station.

Ana Carver
Also showing and teaching the people that don't like bluegrass, how awesome it is, the newgrass stuff especially. Hearing someone say, “I used to not listen to bluegrass, but I hear what you're playing and it's really cool.”

Tyson Carver
People do a lot of covers of pop music and pop songs. So it's kind of a gateway drug to bluegrass. People say, I don't like bluegrass. You're like, well, listen to this song. They're like, I know that song. And that's a cool version of it. We like to throw those in just because it's fun.