About

Frank Drake has spent decades playing, writing, and performing across a wide stretch of American roots music. His main vehicle is The Drake Equation, a modern bluegrass-adjacent band built around original material and some of the best players he knows. He also fronts The Drake Experience, a new electric band working through originals alongside the music of the Dead, Dylan, and The Band.

Some bands have a lineage. Drake has been playing with Dan Africk since Flatt Rabbit in the early 2010s. Brother from another mother. Voices that blend like they were raised on the same porch. That partnership continued into The Mudsills, a foundational bluegrass band built around their harmonies and a deep love of the Louvin Brothers. The current chapter is The Something Brothers, now a working quartet, carrying all of that forward.

As a member of the Sandy Ridge Boys he keeps one foot in straight-ahead traditional bluegrass, where the tunes are old and the standards are high. For sixteen years he has run the Burren Bluegrass Jam, a weekly open session that has become a fixture of the New England acoustic music community.

Prior to the current era, Frank has worked with an eclectic variety of bands. The Bagboys were a long-running outfit with weekly residencies at The Plough & Stars and The Burren that stretched across 32 years. Concurrent with that, he co-founded Inner Beauty with Joe Mahoney, a band that split the difference between Sonic Youth and Captain Beefheart on a diet of almost entirely original material. And through it all he played in Debris, a Boston avant-garde ensemble whose work drew on Anthony Braxton and the outer edges of jazz improvisation. Those chapters are behind him. Or are they?

He plays mandolin, guitar, and bass. He writes songs, tunes, even the occasional string quartet. Join his email list and he will keep you posted!