Ben Sollee takes the stage of the Kentucky Theater in downtown Lexington, KY to hoops and hollers from a packed house. He raises the cello in his right hand in acknowledgement, a gesture that provokes even greater applause. Ever the gentleman, he bows before taking his seat center stage. Seconds later a military-style drumbeat kicks in, joined by a bass guitar and Sollee’s evocative cello. This interlude then gives way to his remarkable voice, a weathered instrument that sounds much older than his 27 years, filling every nook and cranny of the hall:

Sometimes, I wear feathers to feel close to the sky
When I turn out the lights I am part of the night

By the time he reaches the chorus, a dissonant horn section has joined in, creating an ethereal countermelody that causes many in the audience to lean forward in their red cushioned theater seats. This song, “Close to You,” is new to them, and they want to catch every lyric and horn trill. They are a hometown crowd, gathered to support their native son as he marks the release of his third album, Inclusions.

Most have been following Sollee since he burst onto the national folk music scene in 2008—cello in hand—with his acclaimed debut Learning To Bend, a record that was hailed as “inventive” and “refreshing” and led NPR to laud him as one of the “Top Ten Great Unknown Artists of 2007.”

That accolade was “a shocker,” Sollee recalls over a cup of tea. “I couldn’t figure out why they were talking about it. It felt like there was a big focus on how alternatively I was playing the cello, when I felt I wasn’t doing anything alternative at all.”

His plucking and bowing style nonetheless created a unique sound, one that enchanted critics and listeners alike on original songs such as “A Few Honest Words” and “Bury Me With My Car,” and a rousing cover of Sam Cooke’s classic “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which featured additional lyrics by Sollee.

“Learning To Bend was a great way to crack myself open in a lot of ways,” he says. “It was kind of like all the pieces and parts of me. It swung in all the characters of my music.”

In demand as both a musician and singer, he partnered with banjo chanteuse Abigail Washburn as part of the Sparrow Quartet, which also featured fiddler Casey Driessen and multi-Grammy winner Béla Fleck. Sollee followed this tour with one of his own, which included an eight-day leg completed entirely on bicycle in late spring 2009. Destination: Bonnaroo.

With his cello strapped to the back of his Xtracycle, Sollee and a group of friends began the 330 mile trek by taking to the back roads of Kentucky, playing shows in small towns including Danville, Berea and Somerset along the way, before crossing into Tennessee, where he played a raucous set at the music festival. Dubbed “Pedaling Against Poverty,” proceeds from the tour benefited Oxfam International.

The following year saw the release of his second album, Dear Companion, a collaboration with fellow Kentuckians Daniel Martin Moore and Yim Yames of My Morning Jacket. A moving, nuanced record about environmental stewardship and mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, Dear Companion offered a “far from preachy” portrait of these issues “through an unmistakably human lens,” according to a review in Paste.

“We explicitly wanted to bring in Appalachia and the sound of it, the feel of it, the stories from it, but we didn’t want it to be an homage to some old recording,” he explains. “It didn’t need to be ‘look at these people and how hard the have it.’ It needed to be ‘look how we’re all involved in these people’s lives.’”
The driving instrumentation of the opening track “Something Somewhere Sometime” recalls the dozers and draglines hauling out the coal, and offers an apology to both the land and the people:

    If I’ve wounded you, I’m sorry
    I had good intentions

“People that grew up in the cities are tied to Appalachia,” says Sollee. “[The song] is very much about the Industrial Revolution and all the stuff that set into motion that we expect in our lives but are also powered by the tremendously old—really devastating—technology.”

While recording Dear Companion, Sollee discovered that his own family land had been strip mined with the permission of his grandparents. “I made a record to find that out,” he marvels, shaking his head. “It was like this roll back in time to a decision that economically made it possible for a family to step up to a new level. There’s no way that my mom would have been in the economic position to go to college. She wouldn’t have met my dad, she wouldn’t have had me, they wouldn’t have been in a position to put me in music. That re-humanized things for me even more [in] this coal debate.”

Sollee says that this discovery is but one example of how his art has pushed him to connect to his roots, which were not a typical topic of conversation in his family. “We create this thing and then we learned why we created it,” he explains. “The more people have discovered my music, the more I’ve been pushed into finding out what it is.”

As a classically trained cellist who learned Appalachian fiddle tunes from his grandfather and devoured Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett records as a child, Sollee’s sound seems to defy clear-cut musical genres. Yet he describes it in one world—folk.

“We seem to confuse the tradition of folk music with folk music,” he says, a misconception he hopes to challenge with Inclusions, an album that explores the boundaries—or lack thereof—of contemporary folk music. “We are living in more cities than ever, and those cities are denser than they’ve ever been. So what does that mean to our idea of folk music? What does it mean when people are living next door to each other and one person has their family recordings of their grandmother singing Balkan folk music [and their neighbor] is listening to really hardcore, homemade hip-hop? What does that sound like?”

This musical melting pot provided the record with its title. But Sollee is quick to explain that it also refers to his concept of the arts, communities and personal relationships. “I love this record,” he confesses. “I love it for all of its meanings, explicit and incidental. In these songs, I can hear the city I grew up in and the people that lived down the street.”

Sollee condenses these influences into songs like “Embrace,” where the slight dip of the bow on his cello and in his voice recall a mountain ballad from Appalachia. Or Kazakhstan. Those styles, he points out, are remarkably similar, and express the universality of the record itself: “People hear themselves in it.”
“Bible Belt” is a standout track that further illustrates this point, especially with its pointed lyrics describing how the outside world often invades the intimacy of a couple with its social mores and prejudices, preventing inclusion and acceptance. “We didn’t ask your permission/And I won’t wear your bible belt,” Sollee declares, his voice rife with defiance over the contrasting reverberations of gentle drum brushes and jarring horns.

Onstage in Lexington, Sollee strums his mellow electric guitar, eyes closed, bobbing his head along with the light sift of the brushes across the snare drum. Many in the crowd follow suit. Others remain motionless, allowing the lush tones to sink in. Like the music, the audience is diverse, a blending of ages, ethnicities and backgrounds, defying categorization. Distilled to one word, it too would have to be described as folk.

Sollee glances up and smiles ever so slightly, knowing that Inclusions is not just an album title—it is a community meant to be savored.