Shovels & Rope know they have an image problem. On paper, the husband-and-wife duo format carries with it a certain quaint, folkie charm. Onstage, it’s another story. Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent are rockers at heart—and they make that loud and clear on Something Is Working Up Above My Head (Dualtone), a moody beast of an album that leans into the post-punk aesthetic they’ve always felt most comfortable with.
Parenting is also something Hearst and Trent are comfortable with—on and off the road. At home on South Carolina’s Johns Island, interviews happened when the kids are at school. We cornered Hearst and Trent for some questions early one weekday afternoon.
On Something Is Working Up Above My Head, you used only the instrumentation you could replicate live. What was the inspiration for that?
Hearst: Most of the time, since we have children, we write the songs over a period of weeks, make an album, then take it out on the road not really knowing the songs. This time, we were able to workshop the songs on tour, and it just kind of worked out that way. It’s also about getting back to the central core of Shovels & Rope. This record represents all the essential parts of our sound in real time. If you want an answer to what we truly sound like, this would be the record.
Trent: We may have been confusing some people over the years …
Hearst: What’s that thing you say?
Trent: “They’re louder than we thought.” [Laughs]
Hearst: And we’re not feeling very subdued right now. This tour will definitely be rock-forward.
Do you ever end up liking the live version of a song better than its studio counterpart?
Trent: Yeah, and that’s part of the reason we’ve come back this way. We end up falling in love with that third life cycle of the song, where we’ve scraped it together in front of people and figured out how it goes.
Was there a tipping point for Shovels & Rope when it came to studio experimentation?
Trent: On (2019’s) By Blood, we just went for it and slapped a bunch of everything on there in order to make a big, sweeping statement. We wanted it to have a bunch of dimensions and feel cinematic. We thought it was going to be a big record for us, but it didn’t do the things we thought it was going to do.
Hearst: And then we made (2022’s) Manticore, which was supposed to be a stripped down and simplified record. But then COVID happened, and we built that one up with all kinds of fun sounds.
If all the songs on the new LP, “Love Song From A Dog” may have the best backstory. Fill us in.
Trent: It was a new song, and we were opening for Gregory Alan Isakov. We knew he had a listening audience, even though it was thousands of people. We added it to the setlist as a maybe, and we ended up giving it a shot.
Hearst: Michael wasn’t quite sure if it was any good.
Trent: I didn’t think much of it. But we played it in front of Greg’s crowd, and the response was way more than we expected. We ended up getting a lot of love. People would send us these long messages about their dogs. When we recorded it, we thought it would be a nice tip of the hat to have Greg sing on it.
Hearst: It’s not a sad song. It’s about a dog being super happy and at peace with his life. But it’s this sort of bittersweet grief/celebration thing for dog lovers.
Touring is such a vital part of what you guys do. As your kids have gotten older, what have been some of the more recent challenges of balancing a stable home environment with life on the road.
Hearst: In some ways, our kids are the least of our problems out there. They’re good little roadies. Since they don’t know any better, they love it. They go to school when they’re here; they go to school when they’re on the road.
Trent: We’re good at compartmentalizing. Once, we were both dressed to the nines and about to play this festival in front of a lot of people, and I had to pull something from a toilet with my bare hands and toss it somewhere on the way to the stage.
Hearst: Our egos have been dead for years.
—Hobart Rowland
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