First Bluegrass Album in Over 20 Years!

2022 Grammy Award-Winner for Best Bluegrass Album!

"They nearly always come back," says Béla Fleck. "All the people that leave bluegrass. I had a strong feeling that I'd be coming back as well." My Bluegrass Heart is that return the 15-time Grammy winner is talking about – the third chapter in a decades-spanning trilogy that began with 1988's Drive and continued in 1999 with The Bluegrass Sessions. Produced and composed by Fleck, My Bluegrass Heart marks Béla's first bluegrass album in over 20 years. At the core of My Bluegrass Heart is the tradition of sharing music between generations.

More than anything, it was this group of musicians that drew Fleck home to bluegrass. His core group of bluegrass comrades, including mandolinist and fellow New Grass Revivalist Sam Bush, guitarist Tony Rice, fiddle player Stuart Duncan, bassist Mark Schatz and dobro player Jerry Douglas, appear on Drive, Bluegrass Sessions, and all except for the late Tony Rice are featured on My Bluegrass Heart. The album is dedicated to Tony and Chick Corea, whose classic My Spanish Heart inspired the title. Other guests include Chris Thile, Molly Tuttle, David Grisman, Brian Sutton, Edgar Meyer, Sierra Hull (whose Grammy-nominated 2016 album Weighted Mind Fleck had produced), Billy Strings, Tony Trischka, and fiddle avant-gardist Billy Contreras.

My Bluegrass Heart is vividly collaborative, and part of Fleck's talent as a leader is encouraging his bandmates. "This is not a straight bluegrass album, but it's written for a bluegrass band," Fleck explained. "I like taking that instrumentation, and seeing what I can do with it – how I can stretch it, what I can take from what I've learned from other kinds of music, and what can apply for this combination of musicians, the very particularly ‘bluegrass' idea of how music works, and what can be accomplished that might be unexpected, but still has deep connections to the origins."