Adam Steffey's face may not look familiar - especially now with its longer, leaner appearance - but he's been a key influence on up-and-coming mandolinists for over a decade. Steffey was a core member of Alison Krauss' band, Union Station, for nearly eight years, leaving in January 1998 to pursue other musical directions. Since then, he's done a stint with Southern gospel group The Isaacs, released his first solo album, Grateful in 2001, and recently released a new album, No Other Way with his latest band, Mountain Heart.

Steffey also has a new limited-edition Gibson signature mandolin, based on the famous F-5 scroll body design. He chose a dark, small sunburst finish for the instrument, reminiscent of the old Gibsons. The new model has Steffey's signature on the tailpiece and truss rod cover. It will be produced in run of 50 instruments, and he couldn't be happier with the results.

"I took it over to the studio and played it, and I ended up recording the rest of No Other Way with it. It stays in tune a whole lot better and it notes out so much truer up and down the neck. And it's a lot more evenly balanced than the other mandolin I was playing," Steffey remarks.

In the past, he has done recording sessions for artists as diverse as Dolly Parton, Bill Frisell, Michelle Shocked and the Cox Family. Lately, he's been out and about with the Dixie Chicks. Steffey's tasteful picking can be heard on their new best-selling album, Home, and he's been playing with the backing band for the Chicks' recent promotional tour. He figures he's been home about three days in the last six weeks.

"I feel like I'm on autopilot right now - it's like, where am I supposed to be, and when?" Steffey laughs during an interview at the Gibson Bluegrass Showcase in Nashville. "It was fun, playing with the Chicks. It's interesting to see how that side of music works - I'm used to real laid-back, small time country kinds of settings, and bluegrass. They have a whole team of people whose focus is to make sure everything is right."

Steffey's whirlwind promotional tour with the Dixie Chicks included appearances on the "Today" show, "The Early Show," "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," the "Late Show With David Letterman," and taping an episode of "CMT Crossroads" with James Taylor, which will debut this month on CMT.

He first met banjo-player Emily Robison and fiddler Martie Maguire, two of the three Chicks, while they were playing the bluegrass festival circuit in the summer. The sisters were doing a combination of traditional country, folk and bluegrass at the time.

"When I was out of school, I'd go and play festivals with the Boys in the Band and several other groups. I hadn't talked to them in probably four years," Steffey explains. "Last August, Martie called me out of the blue and said they were fixin' to go in and cut a real traditional-sounding record, and they wondered if I'd be interested in coming in and playing mandolin on it."

As a teenager, Steffey honed his professional chops with The Boys in the Band while still in high school in Kingsport, Tenn., joining forces with future Union Station bandmate Tim Stafford - who was attending East Tennessee State University - and mandolin maker Audie Ratiff, who gave Adam his first lessons. He got his first mandolin, an inexpensive, Korean-built A-model instrument, from his maternal grandfather, whom he credits for his early interest in bluegrass music.

"My grandfather's name was Fred Carter, and he was like a nephew somehow or other to A.P. and Maybelle Carter [of the Carter Family]. He grew up around Hiltons, Virginia, and every Saturday night, he would go up to the Carter Fold and visit with folks he grew up with, and talk gardens and weather and whatever," Steffey remembers. "I'd go just to be with him, because I loved riding around him. I had never been exposed to traditional music like that. They'd flat-foot dance and have a bunch of different national bands come through there and play.

"Slowly over time, I started paying attention to what was going on onstage. There was a band in particular, the Lost and Found, who are still playing and have the same mandolin player, Dempsey Young. He's one of my favorite players to this day, and he influenced me more to want to get a mandolin."

Steffey's grandfather picked him up the Korean Arrow mandolin at a local flea market, and 14-year-old Adam sat around fooling with it for a couple of months, then decided it was time to take lessons. His first experience was learning how to tune his mandolin to the standard G, D, A, E, and unfortunately the top of his instrument folded. "My heart was just broke, because I was so excited about wanting to learn to play," he says. Ratliff was able to fix the bowed mandolin by inserting a sound post in the body to prop up the flimsy top.

Steffey became consumed by the instrument and bluegrass music, and there was no shortage of jam sessions and picking parties every night of the week in the Kingsport area. He recalls that there were probably 40 local groups playing at the time, and he sat in whenever he could - many times with players who were in their 60s.

On the opposite end of the bluegrass spectrum, at home he listened to David Grisman, Sam Bush, Dave Apollon, and Mike Marshall, who to this day is his overall favorite mandolin player.

"If I heard even one solo that somebody did that I liked, I would go and try to find it on an album, and then I'd listen to it, rip it off and try to figure out how they did things. The mandolin is what I did for several years," he recalls.

His gig with the Boys in the Band led to an invitation to join the Lonesome River Band in 1987, where he played with Tim Austin, who now heads independent label Doobie Shea Records. Steffey later left the LRB to continue his English studies at ETSU, but took another life-altering detour, hooking up again with guitarist Tim Stafford, as well as bassist Barry Bales to form another band, Dusty Miller. The trio was rounded out by banjoist Brian Fesler and Adam's former wife, Tammy, on fiddle. It was this band that came to the attention of Alison Krauss, and Steffey, Stafford and Bales were invited to join Union Station in early 1990.

Steffey's 1998 departure from AKUS came at a time when the band decided to take a hiatus. They had been on tour in support of their album So Long, So Wrong, and to Adam it seemed the right time to move on. Other opportunities to play started to fall into his lap, and over the course of a year on the road, he was able to record his solo album, Grateful.

"I had wanted to do one for years, but because of scheduling there's never a good time. The easiest part is sitting in front of a microphone and playing," Steffey explains. "I finally said, I want to do one and I'm just going to call up folks and see if they will do it and if they're available.

"I was tickled with the way it came out, but it's like anything I do. I'll go back and listen to it the next day and I'll want to redo it, to do something else. I learned years ago, there has to come a point where you just have to say, that's good enough. You can sit and fool with something until you never put a record out."

Life is good for Steffey. He's got one more date with the Dixie Chicks this year, to play the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas on Oct. 19. In the meantime, he's touring with Mountain Heart in support of No Other Way, and he says the youthful band makes him feel like he's 21 years old again.

"We like being an underdog, because we're new and a lot of folks don't know I'm with the group," he enthuses. "We want to make people sit up and say, they're a good group - who are they? It's kinda fun, it makes you try that much harder. It was real eye-opening when I got with them, that you could have that much fun on the road and yet be serious about what you do."