Since forming in northeast Minneapolis in 2006, The High 48s have been making music that combines the soulful sound of classic bluegrass with a modern attitude.

They’re a band with one foot in tradition and the other in the world of music today, and one of the very few who can find an overlooked bluegrass classic in a song by M. Ward or the Clash then throw down hard on a standard by Bill Monroe.

The High 48s are also a band of songwriters. Here, too, they take a modern approach, heeding the well-worn advice to writers: write what you know. Their songs ring true to their lives as northern city-folk rather than an imagined “sweet, sunny south” of coal mines and dark hollers.

The band takes its name from railroad slang for the boxcars originally used to transport troops on the front lines in WWI that could carry 40 soldiers or 8 horses, and were later used in the US on fast-moving “hot shot” freight trains by train-hoppers looking for work during the Great Depression.