Photo credit Anna Haas
Tell us about your tour vehicle.
Our Tour Vehicle is the majestic Honda Odyssey which has lived up to its namesake. It has over 200K miles on it and has done 3 cross country trips. Why a minivan? Well, we have three kids and Eleese does music classes for little kids with her other business, so we needed a practical family car as well as something that could haul our gear, and Eleese’s stuff for kids’ classes. On any given day, you might find a guitar cable, an animal puppet and some half eaten snack pack on the floor. It’s a Sisyphusian task keeping it clean.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
In the South, we’ve been hitting Buc’ees quite a bit. Not sure that counts as healthy or cheap. This is our first record, so we haven’t done extensive touring. We’ve been really strategic about going out and playing shows near friends and family. That’s the trick – home cooked meals as we mooch off of the kindness of our loved ones.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I guess we’re not shredding hard enough because I think we’ve only broken one or two strings recently. Reminder to strum harder! But always have back up because you never know!
Where do you rehearse?
In Oakland, CA where we lived before Nashville, we had a studio behind our house and we would sometimes hire a sitter to watch our boys, leave out the front door – “so long, kids!” and then sneak quietly back through the driveway into our backyard to rehearse. We called it the “Parental Escape Pod.” Rehearsing might now sound like that romantic of a date night, but in our case, we tried our best to feel like we were getting our money’s worth paying for a sitter.
Our current rehearsal space is a sweet, built-out basement in our house in Madison TN, on the edge of East Nashville. The centerpiece of the room is a very large black and white oil painting of a drum set. It was one of the first pieces of art we bought together as a couple back in Oakland. We often practice just the two of us, so it’s nice to have an imaginary drummer in the room. We have a vintage Japanese standing lamp that helps set the mood. We have a number of posters on the wall from shows we saw when we were first dating, like Ted Leo, Mates of State, First Aid Kit, and a cool collage with Gram Parsons and Emmylou – it’s a nice way to remind us that music is a part of what connected us from the beginning.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Our first song we wrote together was called, “Let You In.” The chorus was “I don’t want to let you in, but I don’t want to let you go. I don’t want you to see all the things I don’t know. I’m damned if I do, and I am damned if I don’t. Don’t want to wake up in a bed without you.” Maybe a little on-the-nose, but felt appropriate for where we were at early in our relationship.
Describe your first gig.
First gig was at a club called Leo’s in Oakland, which, coincidentally, is the name of our first born son. It had formerly been Leo’s Professional Audio, a well-known music gear and audio shop from the 1960s in the Bay Area. Anyone who played music in the East Bay from back-in-the day would know it. For a brief period it was a venue that hosted local independent bands.
The gig was a birthday party for Eleese and we invited old and new friends to play and hang out. It was a blast! After that, we decided to keep the band going and try and do more gigs, and write and record more.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Eleese – My last non-music day job was working as a bartender and server at a legendary tapas bar in Berkeley, CA – Bar Cesar. It was like the Cheer’s of Berkeley. Wavy Gravy would come in all of the time and didn’t have to pay for some reason – maybe because he was Wavy Gravy and it’s Berkeley – but he had his own button on the system – WAVY GRAVY.
My favorite non-music day job was working in a play therapy program with shy kids in San Francisco.
Matthew – I still have a non-music day job working in design research which is creative in many ways, so I feel pretty lucky for that. My favorite non-music job was working in Public Television with a non-profit that helped to get documentary films and television produced.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
Matthew – I have been in bands since the late 90’s. I was signed to Atlantic with a band called OPM where I recorded and toured full-time for 3 years. I still makes some money from performance royalties which is great, but not enough to pay the bills. Over the last few years we both made a decision to focus on having a relationship and a family, and putting that before a career in music, so yeah, our music-related income is a small part of the pie chart, but we tend to put that back into our music which helps for tax purposes.
Not having a ton of music income is one of the reasons it’s taken so long for us to finish the record. I guess this stuff all costs money – who knew? It’s also one of the reasons why we moved to Nashville. Nashville, especially East Nashville, is filled with so many talented musicians who are all working to balance music with life, families, other day jobs. It’s amazing to be in a community of creative people who are all supporting each other because they’re all in similar situations.
Eleese also does music classes for kids which brings in income. It’s been a great way to make some extra money and still do something creative and fulfilling. We joke that the kids shows pay more than the grown-up shows, which they often do.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Don’t think you can do it all by yourself, especially today with all of the different ways to promote, market and distribute your art. It feels a bit like the early days of punk rock where you needed to band together as independent artists, labels, visual artists, writers to try and make something happen. Given that, you got to work with people that you really like and respect.
The second thing is that you have to love the process, or find a way to learn to love the process, including the tedious business parts because it takes time and that’s ok! Otherwise, you’ll just be writing songs in your living room and playing to your handful of friends, which is still cool, but if you’re even a little more ambitious than that, you have to learn to love the parts that aren’t directly related to writing and performing music, and be patient with all of what that involves.