Phoebe Hunt on Rental Car Headaches and Transforming Screen Time to String Time

Photo credit: Nicola Gell

Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?

Rental cars most of the time… so they are more dependable although honestly, sometimes the rigamarole associated with just getting the car can be a headache. For example, if my flight lands after midnight it can be tricky to rent a car so… last time I had to take a 90 minute Uber from LGA to my hotel and then ended up renting from Newark so then I had to change my return flight to be out of Newark just to accommodate the rental return. But when I am driving my own car it’s a Toyota Prius… I call her my golden nugget and am so grateful for her! We’ve been around together. Right now all the warning lights are flashing so I gotta get that checked out ????.

How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?

Oh this has been a challenge for 15 years. Becoming a vegetarian was one of my solutions. There was a time when I traveled with a band called the Hudsons and those guys liked to eat as cheaply as possible – meaning fast food and deals. On that first tour I gained 30 lbs and felt like hell… so, I made the boundary with myself to eat healthy even if it was more expensive and became a vegetarian so that I wouldn’t let myself accidentally order chicken nuggets which were my Achilles heel at the time. Since then, I learned to integrate my yoga practice into road life as well as jogging and walking. My mental health is much more aligned when I am taking care of my physical health… the two go hand in hand. And when they are balanced, my spiritual/emotional well-being is also much more intact.

How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?

I probably change my strings 2x/year for about $80 bucks each time… often they don’t break… but on a fiddle they unravel…

Where do you rehearse?

Any place that I can be alone is my rehearsal space. It’s more difficult than you may imagine to truly be alone… so I use my hotel rooms, or the basement of a friend’s house.

What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?

I remember writing while on tour with The Hudsons. We were in Deluth, MN and I was on a jog around Lake Superior. That day I wrote “Time To Stand” which eventually made its way onto a Belleville Outfit album as the title track.

Describe your first gig.

What exactly constitutes a gig? My first 10 years or so of playing had many concerts… orchestras, string quartets, etc. but I had a string quartet in High School called “Acoustic Dreams String Quartet” and we played weddings… we must have done 50 weddings throughout high school and they actually paid us pretty well. That was the first place I was paid to play… if that is what constitutes a gig.

What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?

In high school I worked as a waitress at Johnny Rockets… we got to sing to people as they are just before they went to the movie across the way in the mall. Over the pandemic, I started an online coaching program, Ukulele Sprouts Parent Teacher Training, which is my current day job that I run while on the road… It feels like I am running two businesses at the same time while on the road and that is a bit challenging but they both feel meaningful and important. The coaching program teaches parents how to teach their own children beginner level ukulele from the comfort of their own home, transforming screen time into string time ?

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?

It has ebbed and flowed going up and down according to the band I am in and the type of gig I am playing… I expect that it will continue to do that same thing. Sometimes I play a bar gig as a background musician for tips just because I love the people that I might be jamming with… that doesn’t pay as well as an auditorium. But, the bar gig doesn’t require me to promote it or pay for a publicist or run a team either… each type of gig has its own place.

What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?

Oh goodness… maybe it is that each musical moment is fleeting. Gotta make the most of each jam or musical hang while it is alive. You never know when it might change. And it always changes.

Phoebe Hunt’s sparse and vulnerable new album, Nothing Else Matters, feels like an exercise in stripping things away—peeling back all the layers to get to the heart of who and what she really is. After years of writing, recording, and touring as a band member and bandleader, her latest recording finds her as a woman standing alone, just her voice and her fiddle. In that empty space left behind, Nothing Else Matters is an album that asks many questions, the most central being, “Is this enough? Am I enough?”

This question has quietly loomed in the background of Phoebe Hunt’s entire career as she’s searched the world and herself for the purest expression of her art. Though born in Texas, she has been a citizen of the world and the road. From Austin to Brooklyn, India to China to Africa, Los Angeles and Colorado and Nashville, her journeys have all added to and colored who she has become as an artist. She was classically trained as a violinist, but an affinity for fiddle and old time music led her on the path to where she is now. She played for years with genre-bending folk band The Belleville Outfit, and more recently served as bandleader with her own backing band The Gatherers. But through all of the added layers of her illustrious career, the “enough” came when she returned to herself and her fiddle – the two voices singing to one another in harmony.

The songs that comprise Nothing Else Matters were written in 2020 at a time when Phoebe was off the road in Nashville, far from her bandmates in Brooklyn. As she sat in the guest room of her house, flipping through a notebook of around thirty song ideas she’d written over the course of several months, she knew that she was ready to make another record. But it would have to be different than the ones that had come before. Whereas previously it was a challenge to find ways to strip down her songs with the band into arrangements to perform alone for solo gigs, these songs had been born out of total creative isolation—just her voice and fiddle had given life to each of them from the beginning.

Connect with Hunt online and on the road.