09 November 2025

Hot Buttered Rum Brings Something Beautiful to The Chapel | San Francisco | 11.08.25

ARTICLE CONTRIBUTED BY GABRIEL DAVID BARKIN | PUBLISHED ON November 9, 2025

Hot Buttered Rum (HBR) dropped their new record Uphill Highway this week, and the Bay Area newgrass jammers celebrated with an appropriately rowdy record-release performance. The Chapel in San Francisco was hoppin’ on Saturday night for nearly two hours of HBR music.

The self-described “West Coast Americana / high-altitude bluegrass / indie folk” sextet played most of the cuts from the new album, as well as fan favorites including “Busted in Utah” and “Something Beautiful.” For kicks and giggles, HBR tossed in spirited covers of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” Paul Simon’s “That Was Your Mother,” and an audience singalong version of Lorde’s “Royals.”

Things got jammy early in the set with the new album’s closing track, “Rearview Mirror,” a funky psychedelic bluegrass barnstormer. Later, HBR brought show openers T Sisters on stage to sing harmonies on the band’s autobiographical “Lucky Doing This at All.” Elliott Peck (Midnight North), who appears on many of the new album’s tracks, sang harmonies throughout the night, and Audio Angel contributed some wicked soul arias at the end of the show during the anthemic “Not Falling For It.”

Midway through the evening, Peck and HBR’s Erik Yates harmonized on their delightful duet “Let’s Fall Apart Together,” one of the highlights on Uphill Highway. It’s a frisky song with a hint of one-night-stand romance, but it’s actually about Yates’ Burning Man experience during the 2023 muddy deluge that trapped people on-site. “Here we are, stuck in an RV,” Yates told me, recounting the origins of “Let’s Fall Apart Together.” “We have every molecule under the sun at our disposal. Let’s see what happens.” (Readers are encouraged to interpret “every molecule” in an appropriate Burning Man’ish vein.)

HBR is at heart a bluegrass band. No, wait, they’re a jam band. Okay, they’re really a “Reese’s Peanut Butter” band – they put warm chocolate and wintertime ski lodge rum together to create something uniquely tasty. The recipe includes five talented soloists, including Yates (banjo and Dobro), guitarist Nat Keefe, bass player Bryan Horne, Jeff Coleman on keys, and Ben Andrews on fiddle.

Andrews is currently in the “secret sauce” role. His solos soar to higher heights each time I see HBR. As the newest member of the group, Andrews has grown into his role and increasingly plays with confidence. It’s often during his turn in the spotlight that the music reaches a zenith of jamtasticness.

Keefe recently acknowledged that HBR, “hasn’t achieved beyond-our-wildest-dreams success” – but more importantly, he added, “We are at a spot where it actually doesn’t really matter that much what we do. We get to just kind of follow our bliss at this point, which is really the best way to make music.” That bliss easily leaps off the stage and into the crowd at an HBR show.

The opening set by T Sisters was short one sister. Rachel Tietjen is currently at home with a newborn babe, leaving the reins in the capable hands of her siblings Chloe (percussion and vocals) and Erika (guitar and vocals). Accompanied by bass and electric guitar, the Ts had fun with covers of “Like a Virgin” and an audience-participation closing segue of “I Will Survive” into Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.”

They also played some of their originals, including “Far Cry” from 2022’s Big Girl Pants. Speaking of that album, they also played a song by the same name – although “BGP” (as it was written on their set list) does not appear on the record. Here’s hoping this playful and poignant tune is going to be released soon.