Shovels & Rope: Americana Darlings (Interview)

Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent are Shovels And Rope, the husband and wife team who, after releasing their third album, Swimmin’ Time, in August of 2014, have decided to make their way down to this part of the world to perform at Auckland’s Tuning Fork on March 11. Although the couple now resides in Charleston, South Carolina, they have roots in Texas, Colorado and Nashville. Both musicians started out playing punk rock but now their sound is classic Americana adding elements of country, bluegrass, folk and soul, but retaining a bit of that punk attitude. The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda got the couple on the line from their home in South Carolina and talked to them about their transition from punk to Americana and what its like being compared to Johnny and June.

Click here to listen to the interview with Shovels And Rope:

Or, read a transcription of the interview here:

MD: It’s been quite a year for you guys, do you feel like there’s a sense of momentum of what’s going on with your career and your music?

CH: Certainly. Especially the last couple of years and its funny cause this little break that we’re having, this much needed break, it’s been so strange because it’s been like a sudden wonderful stillness. Yeah, this last year was just the coolest year you could imagine, travelling around, you know, getting to go on TV, making cool records that people listen to. It’s just the best.

MD: It sounds great and I was reading some of the press that’s been written about you and you know, they’re calling you like Americana darlings and I saw somebody compared you to like Johnny and June, you know. Do you feel much pressure because of all that?

MT: Not really, we, I mean.

CH: We know we’re not  Johnny and June!! No really, Michael go ahead you were saying, we don’t really feel the pressure, we kind of, we don’t really let ourselves get into to all that.

MT: Yeah, I mean, people are going to say whatever they’re going to say and we do feel, you know, we are excited and grateful that people care.

MD: Right.

MT: But you know, we’re also a little bit stubborn the way that we go about creating music and making records. So, you know, I mean, it’s like we never really thought they were gonna like the first one and then when we made the second one then we were like, ‘Oh man they’re really not gonna like this’. But people, you know, I think they respect the fact that we make music that comes from an honest place.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1n7FAsiezo]
MD: I was speaking with your friend Shakey Bones yesterday and he had kind of a similar feeling about how his career’s going, he didn’t really expect anybody to ever hear his first album and now he’s, you know, he’s kind of riding on a little wave of the similar thing to you are, popularity and a little bit of pressure about you know, what’s going on with the second album. Do you feel that you’re part of a community…a  movement?

CH: Yes, very much a community with Shakey and I think that there’s this, you know, several years that we toured in the very kind of, I hate to use the word like gutter in a bad way but it’s, you know, kind of was. We were dirt poor sleeping in our vans and we all kind of came up with this group of musicians out of that time period whether it was, you know, Lumineers or Those Darlins or the band you know, we look up to so much, you know, we only recently got to play with, admire their hard touring efforts which is Blitzen Trapper, all these bands that we just love. So you come up and you come up for air at the end of it and you survive those several years where you kind of got your feet under you and you look around and see the people who are still standing and it’s just amazing. We do absolutely feel a sense of community with people like that.

MD: Right right. I’m kind of curious about the whole Americana scene. It’s kind of growing over here as well. We had Justin Townes Earle here recently and Jonny Fritz and Jason Isbell. Is it a kind of an insular scene or does it kind of leak out into like the mainstream. Does like the average American, is he or she aware of this kind of music being made or it is just kind of closed into whoever happens to be exposed to it?

MT: I think it’s definitely, you know, it kind of became uber popular for a while, you know, I’m that that’s gonna ebb and flow with, you know, just with the tide. But it’s, you know, Americana, it’s so interesting because it’s such a wide category of music, you know, just even the people that you had just mentioned. I personally feel a pretty different…you know, play different types of music and we, you know, we, I guess were caught off guard by the fact that we were accepted into that world and you know. It’s great, it’s awesome to be in the community with a lot of those artists and I think that it, you know, it sort of ended up being a place where a lot of undefined music could have a home. I don’t know, you know, definitely a lot of it’s rooted in folk music or it’s rooted in…

CH: I think that’s a common thread,  it all shares it.

MD: Right.

CH: All no matter how far out on the spectrum it has that blues or rock or country thread that ties to it.

MD: Right, right.

MT: Yeah, I mean, I don’t even know specifically what that is except for…

CH: You were saying that it makes people feel like there’s something, it needed to feel like an emotional connection and you said that like, I like that you said that earlier that it kind of, I don’t know, lit a fire in people. Back when O Brother, Where Art Thou? came out you were saying…

MT: Oh yeah. It’s kind of a type of music that I feel like people, it was sort of missing for a while and then that movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? came out and it showcased a lot of artists who were playing, you know, folk music or a lot of that type of music and I think that America specifically reacted to it in a way that was like, ‘Oh man I forgot that I like this so much’. You know, kind of opened up a little window for a lot of acts and you know, it’s been sticking around for quite a while. The biggest Americana band is not even from America…Mumford & Sons.

MD: Right. Exactly. It is fairly ironic, I guess, yeah.  One thing I was kind of interested in, I know you, I read that you guys both came from kind of a punk background and I’m an old punk rocker myself from way back. I wanted to know how you kind of made the musically move from listening to punk rock to Americana and country music?

CH: For me, like I grew up in Nashville and I was very much steeped in that traditional country stuff, but I never thought that you have to only kind of listen to one or the other and when I found out that Joe Strummer loves Johnny Cash.

MD: Right.

CH: I felt like that understanding made me understand why I liked all of it. Punk rock music, you know, I caught the tail end of it you know.

MD: Yeah.

CH: Kind of, I was going backwards, you know, backwards from Green Day as a kid, you know.

MD: Right.

CH: Discovering, it was The Clash that really I got attached to because of their outspokenness for the poor, for the working class and their kind of social ethos that they had and the aggressiveness of their music and the melody in it, you know, it was kind of everything that I love. When I kind of went back to country music I kind of, started kind of, mixing my song writing, was trying to sound more rock and roll but I could not help myself but to kind of stay rooted in my upbringing and the way that I understood the songs to be structured that it kind of made an interesting thing and then partnering with Michael, who is a natural born rock and roller. He was discovering song writing that inspired a lot of his heroes, like you know, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt inspired Elvis Costello, George Jones inspired Elvis Costello.

MD: Right.

CH: And I’m sure, Gram Parsons influenced the dad-gum,  you know, he’s in the freakin’ Byrds and then you have this amazing convergence. So we kind of recreated that convergence in our own band and kind of reconciled punk and rock and roll and blues and country in this two man little band.

MD: Gotcha, and Michael do you have anything to add as far as how you made the move from what you were doing before to what you’re doing now?

MT: Well I’ve always been taught about country music but mostly bluegrass music since I was a kid, from when I was a kid both Cary and my dad are bluegrass mandolin players and they both taught us how to play music. So my dad kinda taught me, he taught me about that and then he just sort of taught me a little bit about Chuck Berry, and then we parted ways.

MD: Right.

MT: Because I wanted to play rock and roll and my dad was like going down the bluegrass path and then I got, you know, I went straight for like the Violent Femmes, the snottier the better, you know, all into punk rock and then,  I think that where Cary and I, where we met, we were both at a point where we were really, it was kind of like The Cramps was the thing for us because it was like, you know, like rockability and all that comes from country music.

MD: Yeah.

MT: But it was so…

CH: Completely insane.

MT: It was insane and that’s in…

CH: Scary and sexy.

MT: Yeah. It was kind of like a good jumping off point for both of us. Cary was kind of like into the loud world of rock and roll and I was going, you know, backwards into country music and really, mostly the dark side of country music was what was intriguing to me.

MD: Right.

MT: You know, some of the narratives was really enticing to me.

MD: I think The Cramps are hugely underrated. You don’t hardly hear anyone talk about them anymore, they seemed to have kind of slipped through the cracks a little bit I guess. It’s kind of a shame because it made some…

CH: They’re my absolute favourite.

MD: Yeah, they’re fantastic. Now a lot of people in this part of the world will probably not be that familiar with you and they would probably be surprised to find that there’s already been made, a film made about you guys, there’s The Ballad Of Shovels And Rope. How did that happen already in your relatively young career?

MT: That actually happened, it was starting to happen right away, but it was totally by chance and it was never meant to be what it is now, even though we’re glad that it came, it ended up that way. We had just decided to be a band because we were, you know, focused on our separate projects, our separate bands and solo careers and we were, you know, that was the plan. Then we were playing as Shovels And Rope, you know, as a duo, you know, just in bars to try and make some scratch so that we can make our, you know, so that we could… Go ahead.

CH: So the first day we took some pictures to be Shovels And Rope like here’s what Shovels And Rope looks like and we made a little viral video with these guys just so we could have something to put on the internet that said Shovels And Rope look like us and sounds like us. They came to us later and said, ‘Will you be interested in filming in the next couple of months to see how you guys are doing and make it work’. And they filmed us for three years.

MD: Fantastic, and how do you feel…

CH: They captured the writing of the songs and the recording of the record Oh Be Joyful and the touring that we did.

MT: It was really supposed to be only a couple of videos that they were gonna make for us when we decided to be this band.

MD: Right.

MT: And then they came up to us with an idea and then it was like one thing led to another and it was supposed to be a, you know, a three month project and it ended up, you know, just kind of going because interesting things were happening.

MD: Yeah, and what was your reaction the first time you saw it. Did you have much input into what was gonna be in the film by the time it was finished?

CH: We had creative input and I would even say final veto if there was something we didn’t want in there. But we kind of stayed out of it cause it wasn’t our creative project, it belonged to the Moving Picture boys and that was important to us because it was important to them. Like it was what they saw and they loved us, they’re our friends, they would never make anything that would hurt us, or make us feel bad about, you know, what we were doing. So we knew that it wasn’t coming from that place.

MD: Yeah.

CH: That said, when you see your own life and your recent past projected upon the screen, you know, some of your best moments and some of your worst moments and you’d have to know everybody’s gonna see that, it’s like everybody reads your diary. If your diary was redacted in a self-protective way and you were like as vulnerable as you could be like crossing boundaries and being uncomfortable. So it was that kind of initial, not, shock isn’t the right word but there was a little bit of a shyness that we experienced. Our experience with it now with a little time and little experience behind us Is more of like we’re so grateful for that loving portrait of that time in our lives that we were so busy that we almost might have missed it if we haven’t had somebody to get it on tape.

MD: Gotcha, yeah. it’s great.

CH: And it’s a reminder of our humble beginning. So it never has to get any better than it is right now, all of our dreams have already come true.

MD: You’ve got some pretty cool stuff coming up in the New Year. I saw that you’re touring with John Prine, is that right?

MT: Just two shows.

MD: Just two shows?

MT: We are quite excited about it.

MD: Yeah, that’s got to be pretty impressive. So just for folks who don’t know a lot about you and are thinking about coming to see you guys, I’ve read that your live shows are fairly spontaneous events and you guys swap instruments around and stuff. Give people an idea of what they can expect when you finally get down here in March.

CH: Well our show will be energetic. There’s a lot of, as much as two people can physically accomplish on a stage with two heads and four arms and four legs and two voices, we’re doing the maximum. It’s a sweaty affair. Profanity is present, but sparse. So we just you know, kind of get out there and play the songs we want to hear, the songs they hopefully want to hear and just kind of…

MT: We are pulling from, you know, about five different records I guess and we play because it’s you know, the three Shovels And Rope records that are already out there and then we play a couple of songs from our solo records as well.

MD: Right.

MT: So yeah, we like to mix it up night to night.

Click here for more details about Shovels & Rope’s upcoming show at The Tuning Fork.