DeadPettyKellerGrass! Say it three times, fast! Not only is it fun to chant, it’s easy to sing along with. 

Veteran solo acoustic guitar whiz and singer-songwriter Keller Williams won’t sit still. Even though he just released his heavily electronic, psychedelic-tinged album, Deer, his 35th since 1994, he’s giving his first-ever concert in Fort Wayne with a totally different project.

DeadPettyKellerGrass is an old-time acoustic bluegrass band, with a twist.

“We’ll do a Grateful Dead song and try to string it into a Tom Petty song and string that into one of my songs, and then string that back into the Dead and repeat,” Williams said. “People seem to respond very well to this project.”

As for this show at The Clyde Theatre on Sunday, Feb. 16, with local opening band Debutants, “It’s very special because it doesn’t happen all the time.”

Structured jam

DeadPettyKellerGrass is Williams with three members of the veteran neo-bluegrass band The Hillbenders. 

“I have Jimmy Rea on guitar, and Gary Rea on (acoustic upright) bass, and Chad Graves on dobro,” Williams said. “And I will be playing a customized instrument that sounds like a mandolin: I call it the ‘poser mando.’ ” It’s got four pairs of strings in the range of the mandolin, but tuned like a guitar.

Despite the pedigree, DeadPettyKellerGrass are not open-ended jam-band improvs. Williams gives them structure. 

“Oh, no, there’s definitely a setlist,” he said. “I love taking the songs and morphing them into one another. You put a little thought behind it, and it can happen pretty easily. 

“We know, I guess, probably 25 songs from Grateful Dead, 25 songs from Tom Petty, and then a whole bunch of my own songs. You can do about maybe 20 songs a night. So, there’s all kinds of combinations that we can put them into. It’s super fun and exciting, and we have a really good time with it. The crowd seems to dig it, because it’s songs that they recognize.”

Help along the way

I spoke with Williams on the phone from his home in Fredericksburg, Virginia (which is for lovers, as he croons on the opening track of Deer). Next week will be his 27th anniversary with his wife, Emily.

When Williams performs solo, which he isn’t doing on this gig, he plays a variety of guitars in unusual tunings, layering up licks with a digital looper, incorporating electronic textures and synthesizers, and singing over the top. But in case you lack a sense of history, he was doing this long before artists like, say, Ed Sheeran.

Back in 1988, a young Williams first heard the solo acoustic “savage myth guitar” of Michael Hedges (already a star), and that caused Williams to get serious about his technique.

Then in the mid ’90s, the steady-gigging Williams had the good fortune to open for the equally mind-blowing electric bass guitar virtuoso Victor Wooten, who had perfected a technique of playing solo and layering up phrases with a new kind of technology: the digital looper. 

Wooten gave Williams a demonstration of his Lexicon JamMan. Williams bought one and forged his own style of composition and performance. He calls it “ADM” for “acoustic dance music.”

In 1995, Williams made his home base in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, playing nights while snowboarding every afternoon. He met the jam band The String Cheese Incident, and they hitched their wagons together.

“I would say String Cheese definitely had a huge hand in me getting out of the restaurants and the coffee shops and getting on stages with more people,” Williams said. “It’s because of String Cheese as to why I’m talking to you right now, probably.”

A high point was Williams’ 1999 album Breathe, with String Cheese as his house band, which still sells well today on vinyl.

Staying fresh

I asked Williams how, after more than 35 years, he manages to be so prolific.

“It’s the fear of stagnating, really,” he replied. “I can’t just play the same stuff all the time. I get bored. I’m just so grateful and lucky that I’m able to play with different people and play different types of music, without having to just go, and every show’s going to be the same, and I can’t! That’s where the energy comes from. 

“Sometimes I come back from a weekend and I realize that I have a whole different project for the coming-up weekend. And that’s great! Monday I start thinking about that, start playing those instruments and connecting with those people. And then that weekend it’s over, and then I got a whole other thing going on the next weekend.

“And it’s very unrealistic! It’s not lost on me. I’m very happy that there’s people that support it. Because without the people that are supporting it, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

“And I definitely feel like I’m getting away with something!”

Something for everyone

Bringing us back to DeadPettyKellerGrass, Williams said, “It’s always fun to play songs which everyone knows, that people can sing along to. 

“You don’t really realize how many Tom Petty songs you know until they start playing, and then all of a sudden you’re singing along and you’re, ‘I don’t even know the name of this song, but I know all the words.’ Whereas the Grateful Dead is a little more of a niche type of thing. And my songs, you got to know me. But the Tom Petty aspect of it makes it so that you could be oblivious to any of this kind of music and still know the songs.

“The whole bluegrass world is a beautiful thing. It’s been really kind to me over the past 25 years or so, being that I’m more of a bluegrass lover, a lover of the music and of the acoustic-ness and the kind of surroundings that bluegrass provides, and less of a like bluegrass picker. But I think my love of the music shines through.”