Shovels & Rope

Less means more. That’s kind of always how it’s been with us. This time the rules were simple: we can only use what we work with live and whatever we put down on tape must be accomplishable on a stage in a live setting. That’s always seemed to be when we’re at our best. Or most twitchy. Many times we’ve made records that we loved and then, after figuring out how we’d perform it live, we end up falling in love with the live arrangement because being a 2 piece band, it took some real risk and struggle which led to innovation, which gave it a whole new life. (Consider the tortured grape.)

For those who are new here we’ve spent the last decade or so bouncing around in the ‘Americana’ realm quite a bit. Getting branded into that world was admittedly a bit of a head scratcher for us as we’ve always identified as more of a rock band (though we do think of ourselves as folk songwriters and yarn spinners, and we do harmonize well together) but the people were paying attention and we were building a fan base so we kind of felt like “who were we to tell them who we weren’t?” But when you go all the way to Europe and are standing on a stage in front of a few hundred Scandinavians who are dressed in head to toe denim and cowboy hats, we can’t help but feel like we’re about to confuse some people. We will often find ourselves playing an outdoor, ‘free in the park’ type of concert series where a Male and Female with 2 guitars and beautiful harmonies will be booked as the opener, and then we’ll take the stage and proceed to be a little louder and maybe a little more brash than was anticipated. It’s always kind of been this way with us.

Event Sponsored by Mascoma Bank