Interview: Shovels & Rope Look to Make a Racket at The Sinclair
For more than 15 years, Shovels & Rope have been a revelation within the Americana music scene. The Charleston, South Carolina based husband and wife duo of multi-instrumentalists Michael Trent and Cary Anne Hearst have an emphatic approach to their craft that’s infectious. This blend of authentic folk, vintage rock & roll and classic country forges a creative output that’s easy to get hooked on. Their latest album Something Is Working Up Above My Head, which came out on September 6 via Dualtone Records, is another excellent example of this. As part of their tour in support of the full-length release, Shovels & Rope are going to be ripping it up at The Sinclair on 52 Church Street in Cambridge on September 18 with Kingston, New York singer-songwriter Al Olender kicking the night off at 8pm.
I and a talk with both Trent and Hearst about the making of the album, the idea behind the cover art for it, how dogs are better than humans and how they’ve evolved within this particular project.
Where was Something Is Working Up Above My Head recorded and what was the main vision you both had in mind during the entire process?
Michael Trent: It was recorded at our home studio, which is where we make all of our records. I guess the vision for it was mostly to create something that sounded like what we sound live. We used all of our own equipment, we didn’t do any special studio tricks, extra overdubs or anything like that. We made it pretty raw and pretty primal.
I totally get that from listening to the album. With it being done in your home studio, was that where the photo for the album cover was taken as well? It seems like it was taken in a backyard with clotheslines coming down.
Cary Anne Hearst: It’s actually someone else’s house. Our art department envisioned this kind of lone home in the middle of nowhere with a supernatural event taking place.
MT: It looks like our house.
CAH: Yeah, it looks like our old house, for sure. We just wanted to capture the idea that there are forces at work in the universe that affect our lives. Whether it’s God, energy forces or some kind of great clock going, there seems to be something working up above my head. (laughs) Michael is making weird eyebrows at me.
MT: I’m just looking at the body of water around here.
One of the songs that I really gravitated to while listening to the record was “Love Song From A Dog” featuring the singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov. How did the idea for this song come about where it comes from the perspective of a four-legged friend?
MT: I don’t know, really. I did buy a book of dog poems when we had some time to kill in New York, it was this tiny little book. It made me start to think about what dogs are thinking about and I think we probably can all agree that dogs are better than humans. It’s just pure, the love from a dog is really pure and I thought that was kind of a sweet notion to write a song around.
I love the song, I think it’s great. Since you both started Shovels & Rope back in 2008, how much do you think you both have grown as songwriters and collaborators when it comes to this project? How much do you think you’ve both evolved as a duo?
CAH: I think we’re more comfortable working together. Michael is a much more prolific writer than I am while I do a little editing and encouragement, but we have the ability to make it work. Both of us feel confident to bring forth a new idea without being shy, and that’s taken a few years to do. We’ve also been married for a few years, but we still write separately and now it’s a little bit more collaborative. In the studio, Michael does everything.
All of our songs, all of our production and all of the arranging, that’s really his world. In that way, we’re not so much collaborating but we’re giving each other the space we need to thrive.
When someone gives the new album a listen ahead of the upcoming show at The Sinclair, what do you hope they take from it and how have you gone about including it in your live performance?
CAH: Well, we’re going to be playing a great deal of the new record. If someone prepares before the show by listening to the record, what they’re going to find when they arrive is an exploration of rock & roll energy and the songwriting people are accustomed to hearing from us. There’s a kind of rawness, there’s always tender moments and there’s always an emotionality to what we perform, but it’s really fun. This record feels like an essential sound of us, it sounds the most like what we actually sound like live. If you listen to our catalog, we have a very dynamic sound, but I feel like this is our essential work.
We’re very excited to bring it to Cambridge. We’re going to make a bunch of racket in the “yahd”.
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