Lil Nas X‘s “Old Town Road” was so ubiquitous for so long that you might’ve been happy to imagine you’d heard the last of it. But a cover version has just been released that’s pretty much guaranteed to make you pleased that road has turned out to be a roundabout. Steve Martin and Alison Brown have turned it into a vintage-sounding bluegrass tune and recorded it with an all-star cast of singers and players from that genre, including two of the great living bluegrass vocalists, Del McCoury and Dan Tyminski.
Chances are you won’t mind the song becoming an earworm again, now that it’s a multiple-banjo earworm, combining a high, lonesome sound from deep in the holler with (surprise) some of Martin’s contemporary comic flourishes. On the eve of the song’s Thursday release, Variety talked via Zoom with Martin, who was taking a break from looping, and Brown, who was taking a break from banjo camp. Before recording this one-off, the duo was last heard from with last year’s collaborative album, “Safe, Sensible and Sane,” which included guests such as Jackson Browne.
With “Old Town Road,” they really went all-in on an all-star roots ensemble, recruiting not just McCoury and Tyminski but Ronnie McCoury (Del’s son) on mandolin and harmonies, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Garry West (Brown’s husband) on bass. At the end of last year, Variety had a song the two of you did with Jackson Browne, “Dear Time,” on our list of 2025’s best songs last year. And now this is a very different kind of all-star track than “Dear Time,” to be sure.
You came up with the “Old Town Road” arrangement, is that right, Alison? Brown: I arranged it and co-produced it along with Garry West, who’s co-founder of Compass Records. But Steve deserves the credit for hearing the bluegrass potential in the song.
I think that, if not everybody on the planet, most people know Lil Nas X’s version of “Old Town Road,” and the version with Billy Ray Cyrus, of course, too. But the idea of how could you bring it into the bluegrass space, that was a lot of the fun of the challenge. And obviously, that “can’t nobody tell me nothing” line, you had to have Del McCoury sing that.
Del McCoury was born to sing “Old Town Road” — everyone will agree. Martin: We were excited just imagining Del singing it. And I think for non-bluegrass people, it’s gonna be like, “What the hell is that?” I mean, it’s such a sound that we know in our bluegrass world, and not so much out of bluegrass world, you know?
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