Can His and Hers Guitars Start Fires?
Country newcomers Striking Matches raise a compelling question: Why have assertive male-female guitar duos been so rare?
By Barry Mazor
Justin Davis and Sarah Zimmermann, the gifted writing and performing pair who make up the band Striking Matches — both 28 — tend to be determinedly indeterminate about musical and personal definitions. Define what they do? Well, they’d placed eight songs on ABC’s Nashville as songwriters before ever recording themselves, and they’ve been featured on the Grand Ole Opry repeatedly, but, then, they’re at least as likely to cite Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page or Bonnie Raitt as direct influences as the Dixie Chicks, Chet Atkins or Jerry Reed.
Their new T Bone Burnett-produced first album, Nothing But the Silence, is on the recently revived I.R.S. (Nashville) label, an imprint previously known as home to the likes of R.E.M., The Go-Gos, the Fleshtones and The Cramps. The Matches’ record has been taken to Triple A and Americana radio, and they’ve quickly developed a strong following over in the U.K. And yet the release is charting Country — and doing even better on the Heatseekers chart, which seems unusually appropriate. That band name of theirs (they consistently refer to themselves as a “band,”) plays on the duo’s glaring musical compatibility, and also the often-told story of how they were first paired up in a near-random selection by a music professor at Belmont University.
After over five years of writing songs together, jamming together, singing and playing around the non-fiction Nashville in lounges and guitar pulls, and working as openers for rock and country acts, their forceful, energetic act is itself striking now, especially their instrumental dynamic. You can hear it on record: It’s Sara most often taking aggressive, louder slide guitar leads — check out “Make a Liar Out of Me,” for instance — and Justin, who has bluegrass mandolin in his background, the picked, countryside response.
Eventually it occurs to you that you’ve rarely seen a duo like this one before. It’s no secret that for the longest time young women who wanted to rip into guitar this way in any genre were actively discouraged from encroaching on that mighty, shiny implement of male prerogative, and even when that sorry phase began to pass, the women handling axes were either solo, in all-female bands, or occasionally, in mixed multi-member bands. But in a man-and-woman guitar duo? Not much.
In fact, male-female duos where both are accomplished instrumentalists of any sort have been rare, the “girl singer” (or strummer/tambourine shaker) and guy musician pairing having been the common one. Think Ike and Tina, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Lester Young and Billie Holiday — and many country and soul duos where the instruments got put away when paired male-female.
When I sat down with Striking Matches recently to discuss that, they were explicit about the lack of obvious models they had for what they’ve worked to build. As Justin put it, “Yeah, trying to blaze your own trail, you almost handpick inspiration where you need to — or where you can. If you want to have the musicianship aspect or the sound, and like Cream or Jimi Hendrix or something like that, it’s cool, but then for the lyrical content, there’s the classic country we grew up with and loved. But you listen to duets and, ironically enough, you find something like the Robert Plant-Alison Krauss project” — where Plant had never been an instrumentalist and Krauss put her fiddle aside.
Man and woman duos, whether coupled in their personal lives or not, (as say, Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn never were) are taken by audiences, inevitably perhaps, as having a dynamic that’s not just musical, but also personal and sexual. The more pop things get, the more that happens. Musical management has often pressed couple acts (and others) to “get out from behind those guitars,” to “open themselves up” to the audience, to stand there face to face with mics and relate, exposed, so to speak. (Instrument-playing duo exceptions who come to mind include brother-sister acts such as The Carpenters, for example, where de-sexualizing was on the agenda; not an accident.)
This band turns some of these aging assumptions and tactics on their heads, and, as your mother probably warned you, Striking Matches tends to be incendiary. There are the guitars and the shared vocals. And the song lyrics on Nothing But the Silence employ some heated imagery, too. (“Don’t touch the flame if you don’t wanna get burned.”) As a songwriting team, though, Davis and Zimmermann show range, not just a hot “brand.” More notably, they offer a combination of fresh song ideas and simple-but-right lyric specifics that only the best writers from Nashville (and elsewhere) exhibit, and they manage that even in relationship songs such as their break-up ballad “Like Lovers,” which is plain hard to do.
Another contemporary twist: Their songs are mainly written to be sung as from one voice and one sensibility, even though it’s a man and woman singing them. They’re only occasionally “us” songs about “the two of us,” and very rarely “he says” and “she says” dramatic or comic interplay songs of the sort classic country or soul pairs often did, working up maximal sexual tension in the process. (And also favored by music marketers, over the years, like not playing instruments so you can show yourselves off!)
This pair goes about creating onstage, on-camera, on-record identification differently.
As Sara explained it, “I think when you have two people that are singing to each other, that’s a story in itself, and people want to know what that story is. They’re listening to the song going ‘OK, he’s talking to her; she’s talking to him.’ When you sing to them though, as opposed to each other, you include them in it. Instead of saying ‘OK, he cheated on her,’ they get to put themselves in there. ‘This one time, he cheated on me!’ That’s different.” Justin added, “It provides you something that ‘regular’ bands or solo artists don’t get to do. It’s pretty cool that we can present a song as a band, as a unit — or we can sing to each other.”
Audiences tend to project stories onto the two of them in any case. Those songs they’ve placed on the Nashville TV series have been for a variety of the central characters, but it’s the connection to the Gunnar and Scarlett pair, the fictional sometime lovers who introduced their song “When the Right One Comes Along” on the show, that seems to stick in people’s minds, as if they were “the real” Gunnar and Scarlett, characters to whom they bear little resemblance in life.
In keeping with that generational tendency toward ambiguity about relationships and the music biz smarts not to wreck a good thing you have going, Justin and Sara don’t mock that identification, though. They’ve even shared club dates with Claire Bowen and Sam Palladio, who play the fictional couple. (The Striking Matches version of “The Right One” is on the record.)
Wailing guitar conversations, band partners with a shared point of view singing, collaborating songwriters. That’s what can make up a working male-female duo in 2015 — and it’s all quite striking.
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Barry Mazor is the author of Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music and Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, and he is a regular contributor to
Wall Street Journal
