No Laughing Matter: Steve Martin Makes a Banjo Record

When Steve Martin was 17 years old, he had a girlfriend—and the girlfriend had a father, and the father had a banjo. Martin fell deeply in love, not so much with the girlfriend but with the banjo, an instrument he’s been playing ever since.

“Obsession is a great substitute for talent,” Martin says one Sunday afternoon, recycling an old line while taking a break from promoting the latest Pink Panther movie. “I was so obsessed by the banjo that practice was not hard. It wasn’t like being a kid being forced to learn piano.” Martin learned to play “the old-fashioned way, slowing down Earl Scruggs records to 16 rpm and picking out the songs note by note,” and he eventually got good enough to incorporate the banjo into his comedy routine. But he’s not kidding around with his rootsy new record, The Crow. “That’s why the subtitle is ‘New Songs for the Five-String Banjo,’" Martin says. "I want people to be clear about what they’re buying, so they’re not expecting a big comedy album.”

His playing is also no joke—the dude can seriously frail, to use the technical term. He wrote or co-wrote every track on the album, and he recruited a dream team of collaborators including Dolly Parton, Vince Gill and good old Earl Scruggs, too. Martin, 63, professes himself starstruck by his sidemen, but says he’s confident in his own chops. “There are so many good banjo players, and I listen to them and it’s amazing,” he says. “It’s amazing—there’s technical banjo players, there’s emotional banjo players, there are players I could never compete with. But on the other hand, I think, ‘Well, I know how to play these songs. They’re my own songs, and that’s my genre.’”