Blue Highway's banjo player Jason Burleson acknowledges that their 1995 debut album "It's A Long, Long Road" turned out to be prophetic. It has been quite a journey for the Tennessee-based band that has become one of the "gold standards" of bluegrass, with 8 more "signpost" albums along the way, the latest being their newly-released 15th Anniversary collection on Rounder, "Some Day."

"It's really," says Burleson, "just a big 奏hank you' to the fans from us... it's rare that a band can make a living at this at all, much less for 15 years and have the fans stick with them and support them."

Following a stint with Alison Krauss in the early 1990s, guitarist Tim Stafford met and hooked up with bass player Wayne Taylor to start a band that would keep their hands in the music while allowing more time with their growing families. Before long, mandolinist Shawn Lane (an alumnus of Ricky Skaggs' band) came aboard and the band acquired the Dobro talents of Rob Ickes, recently transplanted to Nashville from his native California.

Burleson had done some fill-in banjo gigs for one of Stafford's earlier bands, and was interested when the Blue Highway opportunity came around. "We got together one time at Wayne's house...and played some, and I didn't hear anything for a while. Then Tim called me back, we got together again and seems like they said we were having band pictures made the next day. I said, well, I must be part of the band then, if we're gonna have the pictures made."

A decade and a half later, Burleson laughs when it's pointed out that, as the only member who's left the band for any length of time, he gets kidded a bit as the "rookie."

"You know how they put the asterisk beside Barry Bonds' name? They put it beside mine."

"I left in July of 1998," he continues. "I'd just gotten married a couple of months earlier, and we were just really busy at that time and...I really just needed to be at home for a while."

After Tom Adams (longtime Johnson Mountain Boys and Lynn Morris Band stalwart) took over for a time, "I came back in September of 2000, so I've been back almost 10 years."

In addition to 10 tracks drawn from their 4 previous Rounder releases (following 3 on Rebel and 1 on the Ceili label) and Ickes' solo Rounder disc "Big Time," the new disc includes 2 new originals Cold and Lowdown Lonesome Blues and Bleeding For a Little Peace of Mind as well as a newly redone version of the title track.

"We wanted stuff to flow together to make an album...where you put it in the CD player, and it flows along well and you don't have to jump around to find your favorite tracks or whatever...a lot of it was (songs) we get a lot of requests for at shows. The title track, Some Day was originally recorded on Rebel Records, and Rounder wanted a new version of that, so we redid that in the studio."

This is entirely consistent, Burleson, with how Blue Highway has done things as they've stayed together and matured.

"These days, when we do a record, we'll get together at somebody's house, and we have three really good songwriters in the band (Stafford, Taylor and Lane), so they'll just pass a guitar around and throw out songs that they think might work for the band. We'll do that, and end up with way, way too much original stuff, but we try to pick songs that will fit together as a complete thing for an album, instead of just picking the five or six 蘇ottest' or fastest songs. We try to consider all the songs as a complete work for one record."

It's quite a change from the early years, though as he points out, it all turned out pretty well. "When we recorded (選t's A Long, Long Road'), we had played one show together and got together and practiced maybe two or three times, so we didn't really know each other musically that well at that time. And we had a real small budget, and just went in there, and I think we did the whole thing in four or five days, you know, mixing and everything...but it turned out that that record won a bunch of IBMA awards, and it really kind of got us off the ground. We won Emerging Artist that year (1996), and it won Album of the Year...that's what really got festival promoters interested in booking us for shows. So that album really jump-started us."

The passing years, Burleson continues, have only drawn them closer to each other musically and spiritually.

"We've been together so long that, and I know it sounds like a cliche, but we really are family...Musically, I think we've all become better musicians over the years, and we've just learned how to get along personally and musically. We have disagreements every now and then, but it's always give-and-take, and it's a total democracy, there's a five-way vote on everything we do, and majority rules. If you get outvoted, that's just the way it goes."

Now 42, Burleson is a native (and still resident) of Newland, N.C. in the Blue Ridge/Smokey Mountain Tennessee borderlands that also produced one of the band's more noted fans, Doc Watson. His father lost his hearing when Jason was a toddler, yet still encouraged his son to enjoy the "really worn-out and scratchy Flatt and Scruggs records" he had collected, and suggested Jason learn the banjo at the age of 11. The real epiphany came, though, in his early teen years with the 1981 release of the first Bluegrass Album Band LP, an "all-star" project that included J. D. Crowe and Tony Rice.

"It was a brand new album...it wasn't worn at all like my older records. So I stuck the needle on, and J. D. kicks off Blue Ridge Cabin Home. That record really inspired me to play, and, of course, that was the first time I ever heard Tony Rice, also. His solo on that song just blew my mind, and I had to learn how to do that too."

(Coincidentally, an authorized biography of Rice co-authored by Stafford is due to be released any day now.)

"You know, I was just a kid then, too, so it was more like 閃y Generation' of the music, rather than the 詮irst Generation'. It was something I could relate to more as far as it being a bunch of young guys playing bluegrass."

Burleson eventually became not only a top-flight banjo picker, but as those who have seen Blue Highway on stage can attest, an excellent guitarist and mandolin player as well. The multi-instrumental talents he and Lane bring to the band give them an added dimension.

"Me and Shawn are kind of the only two guys that switch around. Shawn can play guitar and fiddle just equally well as mandolin. It gives us leeway on songs that don't necessarily 奏alk' to the banjo, and Shawn can switch to fiddle or guitar, and I can switch to mandolin."

In the end, the Blue Highway sound often strikes the listener's ear as being almost 双rganic', and Burleson seems to agree with that.

"People ask us how we arrange our material, and the weird part is, we usually don't...It seems like the song will dictate which instrument takes the next solo...it's something we don't talk about, we just let it happen. If you don't get in the way of the music, it will dictate what it needs, if you just listen to it."

And the good news is, the "Some Day" when Blue Highway calls it quits should still be a long way off. "I don't see us slowing down. We keep the music fresh by doing new stuff all the time, and one thing that keeps it fresh for us is doing original material instead of doing something that's already been done. I don't see any reason that we couldn't go on another 15 or 20 years at all."