Photo credit Luke Rogers
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
For the last seven years or so, we’ve been driving a 2017 Ford Transit 350XLT. The Bluth Model Van. It has about 240,000 miles on it and it has seen many repair shops on the road, but also never caused us to actually miss a show.
The most memorable breakdown experience was in the fall of 2025, we were driving into Asheville, NC, with a trailer that was potentially too heavy, and we were screaming up the incline on the interstate at a max speed of about 18mph. Pedal to the floor. We ended up having to take it in for some fixing up once we made it into town.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Most of the time you are sort of picking one or the other, very rarely are you able to pull off both cheap and healthy. I really love to have a smoothie in the morning, so I have started to bring a blender on the road and we have the things I like to put in them on our rider. That has been a huge improvement for me. We also love a grocery store hot bar.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I probably break anywhere from 10-20 strings in a given year, but that doesn’t mean I have to change my strings twenty times. I would guess I spend a few hundred bucks on strings every year, or I just steal them from Alec (mostly stealing from Alec).
Where do you rehearse?
We rehearse in the back bedroom at Alec’s house in Madison, TN. It’s really cozy and we can hone in the small stuff in a really special way there. We’ve got a lot of sound treatment up so we can get sort of loud and a lot of our favorite records are in there and framed. I think my favorite experience in there was walking into band practice while in the process of making the new album and hearing the demo of what would become “Get By.” We put together basically the whole song that afternoon
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
I don’t remember the title, but one of the lyrics was “I was all alone, washed away at sea/now it’s the waves that I must lie beneath”
Describe your first gig.
Our first gig was at 1716 in Auburn, AL our senior year of college. At the time, Alec and I were an acoustic duo, and they told us that we had a $500 bar tab and to tell our friends so that we could bring people out to the bar. It was incredible, I don’t think either one of us had an actual drink from that tab. It was gone so fast.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
My last non-music day job was working as an administrative assistant for the teleconferencing department of the University of Alabama System. Riveting stuff. I think my favorite non-music job was working at a garden center when I first moved to Nashville. I watered plants and hauled mulch for nine hours a day, it was actually really peaceful.
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?
My music related income five years ago was still just a piece of what made up the whole pie, and today I am incredibly grateful that I live as a full-time musician. I’d love to say that In 5-10 years I expect for it to have become a bigger pie, but expectations are a tricky thing in music. All I can hope is that I can still say it supports me full-time. Either way I’ll still be making it!!!!
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
I wish that I had known all of the things that go into making an album, and that recording itself was such an art form. When we made our first songs, I didn’t know what mixing was, or that you even had to do that. Working with Micah Tawlks for so long has been one of the greatest joys and the most continual learning experience of my life, and I wish when we started I had known anything, like what a compressor was or that the mics you use can make a song sound wildly different. Hell, my recording talent still only extends about as far as the iPhone voice memo.