Shovels & Rope

Doors at 6:00 pm | Show at 7:00 pm • $30 Advance | $35 DOS | 21+

One night in the middle of the night there were a series of noises coming from above which lead to a series of thoughts. It sounded like something was working. Building something… A nest for its family? A trap for its prey? This led to more thoughts about unseen things at work. A God? A voice in your head? It all feels kind of made up until someone responds to it.  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.) So with this one we just started there and worked backwards. The result encapsulates, more than anything we’ve done before, the sound of our live performance. Resulting in what one might consider by definition, a definitive album.  The summer and fall leading up to recording we spent writing songs, hanging out with family in Colorado, and playing shows opening for The Wood Brothers and Gregory Alan Isakov, both of whom have large audiences. So each night we were playing in front of a lot of people, many of whom had never heard of us.  We decided to take those opportunities to rattle our comfort zone cage and try out a bunch of brand new, just written songs and basically learn how to play them in front a few thousand people. The songs would grow and change show to show, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Maybe we go down in flames? Maybe something beautiful happens while it’s burning? We happily embraced the chaos. That’s kind of always how it’s been with us.  We had a new song that initially neither of us thought that much of called ‘Love Song From A Dog.” During one of the first nights of the Isakov run, we decided on stage, mid set, to try it out because the show was going well and the audience was warm. And it kind of killed. People honestly wouldn’t shut up about it. Not a brag more like a phenomenon or a weird dream. It became a fan favorite moment of our set each night and honestly in all the years of doing this we’ve never had so many people send us messages or reach out about any one specific song as they did this one. It just goes to show us that we don’t know anything. When it came time to record it we thought it’d be fitting and a nice touch to have Greg sing on it since it was his audience who basically fostered it into being by giving us the confidence and encouragement we needed to see it the way they did.  He generously obliged and the song was instantly elevated by the sincerity and richness of mood that colors his voice.  The two of us can’t help but be obsessed with duality. The song ‘Two Wolves’ is a meditation about two conflicting energies competing for power. The first time we ever played it was on New Years Eve in an arena opening for Tyler Childers in front of 15k or so country music fans who surely were like “what the hell is this,” but to us it seemed 100 percent appropriate because it just feels like an arena type song. A fuzzy, thick riffed stomper with a meditative head bob refrain. So we opened with it because, well.. it felt like we had to.  The two of us can’t help but be obsessed with duality. The song ‘Two Wolves’ is a meditation about two conflicting energies competing for power. The first time we ever played it was on New Years Eve in an arena opening for Tyler Childers in front of 15k or so country music fans who surely were like “what the hell is this,” but to us it seemed 100 percent appropriate because it just feels like an arena type song. A fuzzy, thick riffed stomper with a meditative head bob refrain. So we opened with it because, well.. it felt like we had to.