With less than a week to go before the CD release party for his solo “Highway Shoes,” longtime Mill City Rambler Matt Shipman stopped by Crooked Cove in Rollinsford to pick up his CDs and is ready to go. Not a jangled nerve in sight.

“I thought I’d be a wreck, but I’m psyched,” he said in a phone conversation on Monday afternoon.
It helps, he says, that his former partners from the Ramblers—Mary Dellea and Dave Talmage and Steve Roy—will be there, as well as some of the other folks who also helped out with the CD. Recognizable local names playing on the record include Bruce Derr, Jon Nolan, Joyce Anderson, John Ross, Robbie Kneeland, Todd Jones and Joe Walsh.

“I’ve played with these people so many times. I trust everybody.”

This is how it tends to work on the close-knit country-bluegrass branch of roots music, a world to which Shipman feels he came late in life, though maybe, he says, that’s because a lot of the people he meets in that world were raised in it.

“I actually used to dislike bluegrass and country. Early on I was into REM, U2,” he says. Even when his older brother, who taught him his first three chords and introduced him to Bob Dylan, The Greatful Dead, and Old and in the Way in his teenage years, it didn’t stick.

Then he moved to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

“I started playing with two friends—a fiddler friend of mine, Kester Erickson, and Ellen Sharp, who played guitar and drums—and we all wrote songs. Kester played a lot of Irish and Celtic fiddle tunes, and that was my first real experience with roots music,” Shipman says. “Irish eventually started turning into bluegrass and that opened the door to country music. There was no turning back after that.”

Shipman considers himself lucky to have found friends in the Seacoast who love the same sound he does. “Highway Shoes” is influenced by a classic country sensibility, with drums, pedal steel and bass as the framework of the band. “We seem to have a country/swing/honky-tonk sound so far, which has been a lot of fun,” he says. “I realized some of the songs I had been writing the last few years needed that sound to make them complete. I then started writing some specifically with that sound in mind such as ‘Honky-Tonk Angel.’ Some others (are) a little more chordy than classic country, but I still wanted to apply that sound to those songs.”

Among the 15 original tracks, his Americana band, Slant 6, also covers territory on fiddle, mandolin, banjo, upright bass and guitar. The album was recently selected as a semi-finalist in the Great Waters 2005 Songwriting Contest.

The Exeter native and now Portland resident hopes to tour New England with the elastic Slant 6, then continue with local shows once a month or so with the band as he also continues playing bluegrass and gigs with Splittin’ Hairs, a Portland-based fiddle duo with Melissa Bragdon.

“I plan to take the record as far as I can, and we’ll see who I can round up. I feel like New England is really opening up to roots music again and I’m hoping it will be received well here.”