Old Town Road  is obviously one of the biggest recorded hits of all time, but also probably counts as a guilty pleasure for a lot of people who are in country music - or bluegrass - who go,  I'm not supposed to like this song, but it actually does sound kinda country. Whoever wrote or created it, there's something in there that kind of feels weirdly authentic,  even though there is also the question,  Oh, is it country cosplay,  or what is it?

Martin: It's hard to define exactly what their version of the song is. I kinda researched it; I even drew a little map. Because Lil Nas was living in Atlanta, and he was online… Evidently, this is the way things are done: There's sites where you can buy a track, or a rhythm, and he paid $30 for the beat, I guess. So it went from Holland to Atlanta, and then it ended up in Nashville. Anyway, the artist, Lil Nas, was very generous to us because he allowed us to dabble with the lyrics and sort of rewrite them for bluegrass world…

Brown: But to your point about it sounding kind of country, even though Lil Nas obviously didn't really come from a country space, or as an artist, one doesn't think of him that way… To me, it's the tonality of the melody with the flat seven. And the notes and the scale of the melody, they're very Appalachian. They're very much like a song that we did a version of called  Cluck Old Hen  on  Safe, Sensible, and Sane.  That tonality of that modal scale is a very Appalachian kind of sound, so it's really natural for the banjo to riff off the vibe and the scale of the melody.

Martin: And also what I always thought was gonna be exciting, and it worked out that way, is that when you hear the first 16 bars - that Alison wrote, by the way, very beautifully and very mysteriously - you don't know what the song is. You can't even conceive. And then when  Old Town Road  comes in, it's this weird surprise that it actually works. By the way, this song has a great tempo, and I think we pretty much stuck to that tempo.

So you were looking to sort of set the song up in a more sort of serious or almost misleading way…

Martin: Right. With 
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