Ready to headline: Judah & the Lion excited to top ticket at Alaska State Fair

Every year in the alt-rock world, where winners aren’t quite as pre-auditioned as they are in top 40, there’s always one or two bands that come out of nowhere to get on everyone’s radio.

In 2016 and into 2017, that band was unquestionably Judah & the Lion, a Nasvhille-based quartet of dudes, touching all the bases on their home run trot from Christian to bluegrass, to rock and hip-hop. Their unabashedly meta single ‘Take it All Back’ soared to No. 1 on the alternative charts and to No. 10 on the Billboard 100.

“It’s one of those things where it seems like every week there’s a phone call or an e-mail of some new thing we get to do,” said band member Nate Zuercher during a sound check in a show in St. Louis where the band was set to open for Jimmy Eat World and Incubus. “It’s hard to believe this is all happening. We’ve definitely put in all the time and effort to get here, but it’s all still very surreal.”

When Judah & the Lion takes the stage at the Borealis Theater at the Alaska State Fairgrounds in Palmer on Aug. 30 it will be the first time the band has performed in Alaska, and, to the best of Zuercher’s knowledge, the trip marks the first time any of the members have been to The Last Frontier. Not only that, the Aug. 30 show will mark the band’s first performance at a fair.

Zuercher said the band was as surprised as anyone by the way ‘Take it All Back’ blew up.

“The song was written in about the least amount of time — about 30 minutes,” Zuercher said. “We first played it on our ‘Kids These Days’ album tour before and it really, obviously had a special vibe to it. We loved playing and we play it live at every show since then, a year-and-a-half before it got recorded.”

The hit is nothing so complex, but with a chorus backed by what sounds like untrained school children, an Eminem-esque grunting rap, a catchy hook and lyrics that tell of maybe pining for an ex-girlfriend even as imminent success beckons, a superfluity of self-consciousness that gives itself away in the lines:

'Cause the people they dancing along, they dancing along to the mando' and some sort of hip-hop beat…

and later:

And it feels so nice when the people sing along, they're singing along with the banjo

That banjo is the handiwork of Zuercher, who follows the path laid by Mumford and Sons to deliver the driving rhythm in a world bored with guitar heroes.

“For me, in particular, Mumford and Sons was huge. They were the first band with the banjo that made it seem obtainable. I’d listened to other bluegrass music and I thought, they were just too good. I think ‘The Cave’ was the first Mumford and Sons song I heard and I thought, ‘man, that doesn’t seem so complex or impossible,” Zuercher said. “I’d got a banjo about a month before that and started really playing because of that. A year-and-a-half later I met Judah, but Mumford influenced a lot of how we got started and the way I played. We get compared to them a lot and I definitely look up to what they’re doing.”

The band owes its roots to the music department of Belmont University in Tennessee where Zuercher and Brian MacDonald, who plays said ‘mando’’ first met Judah, who’d grown up in a musical world mostly hip-hop, and who, when rapping as a young child was told by his mother that when he started a band it should be called ‘Judah and the Lion’.

Judah Akers’ influence got Zuercher and MacDonald to move a bit out of their academic musical sphere and experiment with more genres.

“Judah wanted to try some of his songs he’d written with folky instruments to see what it’d be like,” Zuercher said. “We had a mutual friend, brought Brian along to see if it would fit, had lunch, played together at the Bell Tower on campus. That was five and a half years ago and we recorded our first EP ‘Hit the Ground’.”

The show in Palmer affords the band to headline for a night after a summer spent touring with Jimmy Eat World and Incubus and before that 21 Pilots.

Zuercher said touring with veteran rock stars has been educational.

“It’s not necessarily them giving advice so much as watching how they handle themselves; they’ve been doing it so long… No one has a big head, they treat everyone with respect and it’s cool to be able to watch and learn how they handle themselves. They don’t get too worked up about anything — it’s kind of refreshing,” Zuercher said. “When we were out with 21 Pilots, they were closer to our age and they seemed a little more tense and stressed out (pun intended, maybe).”

Zuercher said the band is ready to play for fans coming out expressly to hear them.

“When we’re playing clubs, headlining our own show , ourown party, everyone is more familiar with who we are,” Zuercher said. “It’s fun to get to win over new fans in a new environment playing on stages we only ever dreamed about playing on.”

Before they end the touring season and head back into the studio, now suddenly with heavy expectations to produce more hits, Judah & the Lion hopes to take a little perspective in playing Alaska.

“The banjo and the mandolin is relatively new for Brian and I,” Zuercher said. “We play folk instruments really influenced by everything — EDM, rap, classical, jazz… It’s cool to try to figure out new ways to mix the banjo, guitar and mandolin. We really have no limits.”