Photo credit Emily Danielle Jones
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
Sally Buice: We still don’t have our own tour vehicle. We used to tour in our own vehicles, but lately we’ve been using Turo to rent. The miles add up so quickly and repairs tended to be our biggest money stressor on almost every tour. On our first ever tour, the tailpipe got knocked into the back bumper of my Toyota Camry, melting it and nearly catching it on fire. Every mechanic in Laramie, Wyoming was booked up except for one guy who wordlessly stuck a metal rod up into the tailpipe and wrenched it right back into place. He didn’t charge us anything. Our touring vehicles have always been that way – barely controlled chaos and a little bit of luck.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Buice: It remains a struggle! We both rabidly jump at the chance to eat a vegetable anytime we can. Venues that provide dinner are a godsend. Otherwise, meals tend to be healthy or cheap but not both. In desperate times Taco Bell’s $1 cheesy bean and rice burritos see me through.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
Molly Rochelson: A lot!! I pretty much just buy a new pack of strings any time I pass a music store, knowing I’ll need them soon. I blame our folk punk busking band roots.
Where do you rehearse?
Buice: We typically rehearse in either of our apartments. Molly has two cats and I have a puppy, so interlopers are common.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Rochelson: I started writing songs (just for myself) so young, I’d love to know that but honestly have no idea! I did recently remember a really dramatic high school song called “Handful of Ghosts” that was one of the first I ever shared with anyone. The chorus was something like “the stars are all lined up again/in patterns I don’t understand/but people smarter than me do”. A kind of funny early foreshadowing of my love of astrology.
Describe your first gig.
Buice: We’ve been playing music together since we were middle schoolers, but our first gig as The Montvales was at Kauai Folk Festival. I saw that my childhood banjo teacher was putting the festival on, so I texted him to ask if we could join the bill. I think we were both pretty surprised that he agreed. We played 45 minutes at the Old Shed Stage – mostly songs that we had written together over the years. This gig was right after I had spent a year teaching English in France, so somewhere the wires got crossed and we were billed as a French-Appalachian folk duo. We’re both from East Tennessee but we did learn a French pop song because of that.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Buice: I bartend at a neighborhood dive bar and music venue. I work residency nights, when local musicians put together bills of their friends, and bluegrass nights, featuring a band who has been playing there every Sunday since 1996. I also spent a few seasons working as a wrangler on a ranch in Colorado. Wranglers took turns getting up early to ride out to the herd of horses and push them to the corrals for the day. Most of the neighbors were cattle, bison, sandhill cranes, and elk. It was absolute magic, and I find myself still writing songs about it years later.
Rochelson: I also bartend at a neighborhood spot full of regulars and a community that I feel very held by. I’ve really come to respect the power of the “third space” through that job and feel lucky to be there. Additionally, I used to be a medical assistant and a sex educator in the reproductive rights world, and that remains some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever done.
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?
Buice: In my experience, being a touring musician requires a lot of survival mechanisms. One of mine is not thinking too far ahead about how music income is going to be. We’ve had to take a lot of leaps of faith (or, make some questionable decisions) to get our music career to this point.
We went 3 maxed out credit cards deep into debt to make “Born Strangers” and usher it out into the world. We paid those off pretty quickly and kept on trucking. Our income is definitely better than it used to be, and I hope that upward trajectory continues.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Rochelson: Your relationship to your own creativity is actually so much like a human relationship-you gotta invest time and love and patience into it in order to get anywhere good. You’re not a machine and extractive thinking will doom you.