This song is 50 years old today. Gulp!

This is the best bluegrass version out there, but I do have an issue with it: I'm an American with Western and Southern roots -- cowboys/surfers and moonshine runners, if you're hewing to stereotypes. I never met a T that I couldn't soften. Yet, American diction mars this performance, even for me. There's something about the hard Ts in the original that reflects the almost classical formality of the arrangement (a formality that's due to George Martin, no doubt).

These boys, who usually display a keen eye for detail, could have turned a good performance into a great one with that one, small adjustment.

Here are The Punch Brothers with "Paperback Writer".

The Fine Art of Ripping It

This one’s kind of a walk in the park for the players, but for Chris Thile on solo vocal, it’s a high-wire act – a technically-demanding lead line that has to seem nonchalant. As you might expect, he manages it brilliantly.

Here are The Chieftains and The Punch Brothers with, “The Frost Is All Over”.

And, yes, the album looks well worth checking out.

I talked the other day about one band that puts on an entertaining, high-energy show while still playing traditional bluegrass. Here’s another.

The Punch Brothers display astonishing versatility in this mini-set, moving easily from 20th century Irish folk music to hardcore bluegrass to Americana.

The set begins with “The Auld Triangle”, continues with a wonderful vocal from Critter Eldridge on “Don’t Give Your Heart To A Rambler”, moves on to a lightning-quick version of “Wheel Hoss”, and ends with Gillian Welch’s “Wayside”.

Too On-the-Nose, Too Bluegrass, Too Much Fun

An awful lot of bands have tried to play classic rock on bluegrass instruments. They usually fail. Recently, one bluegrass band, in describing their efforts to do justice to classic rock, sneered at the fundamental idea of mimicking a drum track on mandolin. The implication was that only squares would be so literal.

On a musical level, their project failed, too. Even so, they keep trotting it out at festivals, and audiences seem to have absorbed the idea that a song is "bluegrass" -- whether the band changes the arrangement or not -- simply by virtue of being played on bluegrass instruments.

Awhile back, The Punch Brothers stepped into the arena at the behest of The A.V. Club, and their efforts were a smashing success. Why? Because they weren’t worried about being square, "bluegrass", too on-the-nose, or insufficiently-ironic to please all you hipsters out there.

Instead, they served the genre, served the song, and had … fun!

Go ahead and listen. Just make sure no one sees you enjoying The Punch Brothers’ doing The Cars’ “Just What I Needed”.

Oh, and music geeks, check out the tremolo on Pickles. Who does tremolo on the banjo? His control is mind-boggling.

An Irish-Bluegrass Fusion

Aside from a couple of experiments by Bill Monroe, traditional Irish music was not combined with bluegrass until The Chieftains recorded “Down the Old Plank Road”.

Today, the fusion is common, with Irish bands like Sligo Rags and Rackhouse Pilfer leading the way.

Here’s an American band, The Punch Brothers, with a stunning, a capella version of an Irish tune written by Irish playwright/poet/novelist, Brendan Behan. This one’s entitled “The Auld Triangle”, aka “Banks Of the Royal Canal.” And, yes, this is every bit as good as the version they did for the soundtrack of “Inside Llewyn Davis”.