SHOVELS & ROPE with JOHN FULLBRIGHT at the Phoenix (410 Sherbourne), Tuesday (September 30), 8 pm. $20. RT, SS, TF.
The titles of the tracks kicking off Charleston, South Carolina, bluesy folk duo Shovels & Rope’s sophomore album, Swimmin’ Time (Dualtone), seem ominous – The Devil Is All Around, Bridge On Fire, Evil. The music, too, sounds suitably menacing at times. The pair have augmented their scrappy drum and guitar parts with heavier distortion and organ.
But Cary Ann Hearst, on the horn along with her husband and musical partner, Michael Trent, explains that there’s a contrast between the toughness of the music and the tenderness of the lyrics.
Evil, for example, is a song about sadness, loss and misunderstanding. “The relationship between the little girl and the guy is perceived as being salacious,” she says. “But she’s a little ugly girl no one likes who feels sorry for this man [who] can’t control his bouts of rage. At the core of the song are a couple of Boo Radleys trying to help each other survive in a world in which everyone is suspicious of them.”
Trent, who produced the record at the couple’s home studio, with Hearst as assistant engineer, says the heavier sound reflects their live evolution. “If you go back and listen to O’ Be Joyful [from 2012], we play those songs quite differently live. It wasn’t really a conscious decision, just the way we ended up playing them after playing them hundreds of times,” he says. “When we went into this one, it was more about matching the energy of what we do live.”
Not that the new songs are finished evolving.
“Right now we’re learning how to play these songs from Swimmin’ Time, and by the end of this tour they’ll probably sound completely different,” says Trent. “We like to play around a lot with rearranging songs live.”
They’re consummate road warriors – Hearst reckons they each had at least 10 years of music under their belts before they combined their careers in the late 00s – and still love touring.
“We learned a long time ago to live in our own little bubble that protects us. We don’t like to talk about our marriage, because it’s not the point: the main thing is to come out the end of this thing old, married, with a lot of kids and not a whole lot of scars from the music business,” says Hearst.
“We really ain’t got time for that, and we don’t need those kinds of problems.”
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