DENVER.COM (4/17) Q&A: Keith Moseley of the String Cheese Incident By Nicholas Hutchinson Bassist Keith Moseley, a founding member of the Boulder-based band The String Cheese Incident, also holds down the low end for a few side projects including The WMD’s (aka Keller Williams with Moseley, Droll and Sipe) and the innovative bluegrass tribute band Grateful Grass, which includes Keller Williams and Jeff Austin of Yonder Mountain String Band. Keith lives north of Denver in Longmont, with his wife and two daughters and enjoys all that the Rocky Mountains have to offer. You were born in Oklahoma. How did you find your way to Colorado? I came to Colorado after graduating from college. I attended San Diego State and finished up there in 1988. Then I moved to Colorado to ski. I thought I was just going to have a little ski adventure but I wound up staying. Can you tell me a bit about the beginning of the String Cheese Incident? The band started in Crested Butte in the winter of 1993. That’s pretty much when we started playing our first gigs. Billy (Nershi) had been living in Telluride for many years and in the winter of ’93 he popped over to Crested Butte to check it out. He was living in an old school bus, which he parked in front of the house owned by our drummer Michael Travis. I think Michael Kang might have lived in that bus for a while too. One thing led to another and we all started jamming together. We did our first New Year’s Eve gig in Telluride that year. When did the group move to Boulder? In 1996. We moved there so that we could be more central for gigging. We played little places like the Mountain Sun Brewery and then worked our way up to bigger venues such as the Fox Theater and the Boulder Theater. We were also touring, playing the ski town circuit throughout Colorado, California and the Rocky Mountains. How’s it going with the new String Cheese Incident album? The release, which is titled Song In My Head, is all finished and is coming out at the end of April. It’s produced by Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads and was recorded in Boulder at Immersive Studios. Jerry is a great guy who knows a lot about his craft. He was very cool to work with and provided all sorts of arrangement and editing ideas. He had us doing things like changing keys to capture the best vocal performances and between tracking we got to hear some great old stories about the Talking Heads. I sing lead on a tune called “Struggling Angel” that I wrote and I sing backup on four or five songs. It was a lot of fun to make. It had been nine years since our last studio effort. The process in the past has been a bit of struggle for some of the guys. This time we went into Immersive to do some rehearsing and we were having so much fun that we decided immediately to start tracking and have Jerry join us. It was super painless and I think that fun element and our new creative spark really come across on the recordings. Can you tell me a little bit about the project Grateful Grass? Grateful Grass is the name Keller Williams uses to play Dead covers. I’ve been in every rendition of the group with him. So far it’s been Keller, Jeff Austin and myself, though he uses different players when we aren’t available. We first started with a show at the Denver Fillmore in 2008 that became a CD (Rex – Live at the Fillmore) where the profits went to the Rex Foundation. Last December we played another Rex benefit at the Fillmore in San Francisco (Nightfall of Diamonds). We also plan to get together at Yarmony grass (in Bond, Colorado) this August. It’s a great project for sure. Are you still doing stuff with Keller Williams and the WMDs? Yeah, that project, Williams, Moseley, (Gibb) Droll and (Jeff) Sipe started back in 2007 and 2008 while SCI was on hiatus. Keller made a live album out of it. We are talking about a reunion if our schedules work out. Do you get to Denver much? Yeah for sure. We go down to see shows and sometimes we’ll catch a Broncos game. Are there any Denver area venues that stand out in your mind? We’ve had quite a few good times at the Denver Fillmore, which I always enjoy. A few years back we did a show at the Ogden Theatre that was a warm up for a tour. It was about 100 degrees in there, but it was a blast. I’ve also done some really fun shows at the Bluebird with some of my side projects. Are there any restaurants, bars or cool places that you like in Denver? Yeah, every time we go to the Bluebird we like to go across the street to the Mexican restaurant Mezcal. We love that place. What are some of your hobbies other than music? Well, I love mountain biking. I do a good bit of that. And I help coach my nine-year-old daughter’s basketball team. I also love skiing and snowboarding. I enjoy getting outdoors and into the mountains as often as I can. .