Nashville’s Judah & the Lion brings banjo and hip-hop together and the result is a hit

If you have yet to hear Nashville outfit Judah & the Lion’s single “Take It All Back,” it won’t be long until you do. The recent Alternative Rock No. 1 will undoubtedly be piped into shopping malls and restaurants and placed in TV shows and movie trailers.

The song – which mixes plunky banjo, a chanted rock chorus, spoken-sung verses, and a driving hip-hop beat – has been burning up alternative radio.

“The chorus, it’s so repetitive that when we’d play it live (the crowd) would be singing along by the end of the song. It was easy to latch on to,” says banjo player Nate Zuercher.

Fans will definitely be singing along Saturday when Judah & the Lion kicks off its Go to Mars headlining tour at the Fillmore.

The song was written in an hour’s time after frontman Judah Akers heard Zuercher playing the main riff during the jammy outro of another song, and asked to hear it again.

“We’ve been playing it at every show since and it wasn’t released until a year and a half later,” Zuercher says. “Two and half years later it’s become our song. Funny how that works. You’ll spend a month on one song and then an hour on another.”

The surprise hit fits with the trajectory the band’s taken since forming in 2011.

“The day I met Judah it was super obvious that this was a bigger deal than what we’d normally do,” says Zuercher, who’d jam with other musicians regularly as a student at Belmont University.

Zuercher had been playing guitar since he was 10, but switched his major to banjo when he realized there were 100 guitar majors, but no banjo majors.

Zuercher may play an instrument traditionally found in oldtime and bluegrass music, but while he’s studied those styles, he incorporates his classical music background (his parents play in the symphony back in Colorado), his roots in guitar, studying jazz in high school, and playing metal and punk with friends.

The result is something the band calls “Folk Hop n’ Roll” – the title of its second album, which was re-released last week with five additional tracks.

Zuercher was always drawn to inventive and unusual players like Bela Fleck, who he discovered in fifth grade, Nickel Creek’s Chris Thile and his orchestral folk side projects, and Australia’s the John Butler Trio. A high school mentor gave him an old banjo he wasn’t using and Zuercher began taking lessons for fun at Belmont.

He’d Google “amazing banjo players” online and get discouraged.

“A lot of them have been playing since they were 3 years old. I felt super-behind,” he says. But he realized “those banjo players haven’t been playing guitar all their lives.”

Mandolin player Brian Mcdonald had a similar experience.

“We were both unorthodox about our instruments,” Zuercher says. Unorthodox is a good description of Judah & the Lion, whose mixture of hip-hop beats, pop hooks and folk instruments often has more in common with epic arena acts like Imagine Dragons or Coldplay than banjo-inclusive folk-rock contemporaries like the Avett Brothers.

That sound – which could’ve once been considered a detriment to genre purists – allows them to fit on decidedly unfolk-rock bills. This summer, it hits large amphitheaters with Incubus and Jimmy Eat World. The tour hits PNC Music Pavilion in July.

For now, Zuercher is excited about headlining again and stretching out its set.

“After doing the Twenty-One Pilots tour it was so refreshing to feel like we didn’t have to earn the audience’s respect,” he says. “It was good to be back with our people.

This story was originally published March 16, 2017 at 2:32 PM with the headline "Nashville’s Judah & the Lion brings banjo and hip-hop together and the result is a hit."