Rick Van Krugel's first music was jug band. To this day, that music and the closely related rural blues are nearest to the heart of who he really is. In an interview with a Victoria music critic, John Hammond Jr. volunteered the opinion that Rick was "...the best white blues mandolin player around". Choosing a settled and domestic life in Lotus Land on the west coast is somewhat antithetical to being a bluesman, so Rick has performed and recorded everything else a mandolinist could, from Celtic to country.

Being self-taught without a point of reference for years gave Rick a completely personal style, and a sometimes mind-boggling ability to sound as if he already knows a piece he is hearing for the first time. Rick is an improviser in the truest sense - a point emphasized by the fact that he played mandolin for nearly five years before learning his first actual tune. He says, "Trying to remember the right notes to something is too hard. There are far more right notes than wrong ones in any musical improvisation, so I remember the relatively few wrong notes in the structure and avoid them. Avoiding wrong is my easiest path to doing right - in music, anyway." (Well, it makes sense to him) Never one to mimic others, Rick is a player with the rare quality of having found his own voice.

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