Parenthood pushes couple to a contemplative space
Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst call from their van, which Hearst says “we’re just driving around a parking lot.”
The partners in life and music, as Shovels & Rope, had a baby last year, but the circling actually isn’t to keep little Louisiana Jean asleep. “Oh no, we pawned the baby off on grandma,” Hearst says. “So we’re on our way to the liquor store ... . ”
“... deciding whether or not to go back home,” jokes Trent.
The couple converses in a manner similar to the way they make music. Each of their voices is distinctive though they turn together like gears. And they often apply some rough-hewn humor to hide an underlying sincerity. And sincerity is all over “Little Seeds,” the duo’s fourth album. Make no mistake about it, “Little Seeds” is a Baby Album, a subgenre in popular music in which well-established songwriters find a contemplative space after the expansion of the family. But Hearst and Trent don’t address parenthood directly on “Little Seeds,” instead using the songs to frame a perspective on the world that changed since their lives changed last year.
Two musicians whose band name references the tools of the undertaker’s trade are looking for hope in dark times. Case in point, just one among
many, is the new song “St. Anne’s Parade”:
“And I’m up too damn early in the morning,” they sing. “I can’t remember ever feeling so alive. And I need more fingers to count the ones I love. This life may be too good to survive.”
“We sort of knew it would happen and then it happened,” Hearst says. “Having a kid does change your perspective. It intensifies feelings and changes how you see the world. You see everybody as somebody’s kid, no matter how honorable or dishonorable they are. Everybody’s doing what we hope we’re doing: raising our kid to be good.”
So even the songs that aren’t about the baby are informed by her. “This Ride” is about a friend who died. “Botched Execution” — “a jarring couple of words,” Trent says — was supposed to be a serious song inspired by a story on the evening news, but ended up with the condemned enjoying a comic reprieve from his demise. “All my little seeds have grown,” he says, a line that can be optimistic or chilling depending on the narrator and the context.
“There’s excitement and fear and all that comes along with just waiting for your life to change,” Trent says. “Some of the songs were done before the baby. Some were started and changed.”
Trent wrote “Mourning Song” about his parents, inspired by him thinking about his mother as his father’s Alzheimer’s worsens. The title lends itself to some depth through homonym. Trent says, “Morning is really when I’m in a meditative place and things seem clear. So yeah, it’s like waking up at the beginning of the day and thinking about the end of life.”
Even “The Last Hawk” — which was written about Garth Hudson, the virtuosic multi-instrumentalist from The Band — plays into the album’s emotional palette about interactions between people. Both Trent and Hearst read an article about Hudson and felt moved to write about him and his quiet reclusive nature in a band with a combative creative dynamic.
“On one hand he was this crazy genius,” Trent says. “But he also held everybody in that band together in a way.”
As a two-person act, Hearst and Trent don’t have the same potential pitfalls. They met in Charleston, S.C., where Hearst had moved from Mississippi and Trent from Colorado. Each had released music on their own before releasing an album together titled “Shovels and Rope” under their own names 10 years ago. They got married, turned that album title into a band name and have been stirring up a rich and live wire play on American roots music since: part garage rock, part string band. Released in 2012, “O’ Be Joyful” was a breakthrough success fueled in part by the duo’s spirited live shows, which made them a festival draw. In 2014 “Swimmin’ Time” debuted inside the Top 40.
They tour, record and live together, and Hearst says they don’t need any break from it.
“We’re still excited by and motivated about the process,” she says. “There’s no decompression here. We live and breathe music. We’re constantly thinking about it.”
And they’re still finding new ways to project their music. The most striking track on “Little Seeds,” “BWYR” is more a recitation than a song. Trent wrote it after the Charleston church shooting from 2015 that left nine people dead.
“There was never any other way to do it,” Hearst says. “You can’t turn that into a song. It can’t have a melody. It can’t be a singer’s song. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s a meditation on communal struggle and unification and shared sorrow. There’s nobody in this political climate who doesn’t understand loss. We don’t have opportunity to play it in live settings very much, though. It’s one of the most powerful things we’ve done, but it’s also one of the simplest.”