Jake Armerding was 6 years old when he pulled a beat-up tape recorder out of the attic of his Massachusetts home, balanced a cheap microphone on top of his clock radio, and began taping the pop hits of the mid-1980s onto cassette. These sessions often ran well into the night, and when he would finally turn off the radio and fall into bed, the soundtrack would switch to his dad, Taylor, practicing bluegrass mandolin up in the living room. Ten years later, when Armerding began crafting his own style of music, it was no surprise that pop and bluegrass were the main influences.

By the time he graduated college in Wheaton, IL, Armerding had his first album in hand. Cagèd Bird reveals his early experiments with a pop-bluegrass blend; it was also informed by 10 years of classical violin lessons and a six-year stint as fiddler in his father’s acclaimed “newgrass” band Northern Lights. Boston’s WUMB Folk Radio began spinning it regularly, eventually naming Armerding their Best New Artist of 2001. On a whim, he packed his stuff into his Honda Civic and took off for Nashville. For the next eight months he wrote and recorded songs for his next album, hung out with other twentysomethings in the local acoustic music scene, and jammed with his childhood bluegrass heroes. He headed back to Boston with most of the record done; ironically, it was then that Nashville-based independent Compass Records bought the unfinished tracks and decided to turn them into a national release.

The result, Jake Armerding, put its author on the map. The CD was picked up by radio stations all over the country, and Armerding logged appearances at the Newport Folk Festival, the main stage at Falcon Ridge (NY), Great Waters Folk Festival (NH) and the Moab (UT) Music Festival, along with clubs from Anchorage to London. As the buzz built, so did critical praise. The Boston Globe proclaimed him “the most gifted and promising songwriter to emerge from the Boston folk scene in years.”

Now finishing his second Compass CD -- slated for a 2006 release -- Armerding is on tour with a full band this year. The new album, Walking on the World, is as difficult to categorize as much of today’s best music – equal parts New England singer-songwriter, acoustic rock, and traditional bluegrass, no genre is exactly safe. But the effect is natural. Listening to Armerding perform, hearing these diverse elements overlap, you find yourself wondering why these genres, strangers until now, haven’t been friends all along.