Shovels & Rope talk life on the road with kids, new music and Live Nation

Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent have been performing together as Shovels & Rope since 2008, but becoming a musical tour de force as a couple wasn’t their initial plan. Rather, they were pursuing their own individual music careers before and after marrying in 2009, but in 2012, they decided to fully commit to their musical partnership.

“It was not a planned thing at all. We had both been working on our individual careers for maybe ten years before we got married. And then once we got married, we started picking up these bar gigs in town and we would go down and make a little bit of money, and it was easy and fun. And we had twice as many songs because it was us two,” Trent said.

“It made sense too if we wanted to be a family and be married and not be in different cities all the time, that it would be more traditional in many ways just to be together in a band,” Hearst added. “So there was some ego strangling and we buried those in the backyard. And here we are, with what I think is an incredibly collaborative career and family life, just riding around doing it.”

The joint venture has worked out for them, as they’ve released ten albums, performed on Late Night with David Letterman and toured all over. One thing that makes Shovels & Rope tours a bit different than the typical band, though, is that they have their two children in tow.

Trent and Hearst said they treat their tours like vacations: they spend their days visiting places like the Bronx Zoo and the Smithsonian, and in the evenings, the nanny watches the kids while mom and dad perform. This is pretty routine for the family, and their kids have grown up this way.

“The kids are the most important thing... they both have grown up on the tour bus since they were three months old. They're nine and five now. And you know, we prioritize their happiness and their health and their safety,” Trent said.

Shovels & Rope are currently touring in support of their latest album, Something Is Working Up Above My Head . Hearst credits Trent’s songwriting for some of the darker themes of the record, a vibe often called “Southern gothic,” though much of the record harkens back to the more lively sounds of their early albums, rather than the distress of their COVID record, 2022’s Manticore.

Hearst said some of her favorite songs to play live from the new album are “Colorado River” due to its spooky narrative and “Dass Hymn,” a spiritual that takes Ram Dass teachings and puts them into an “old-timey Kentucky style.”

Trent and Hearst work on their songwriting separately in a process that takes months, sometimes years.

“We'll be writing separately and then it'll be time to start talking about making something new, and we'll show each other our piles. And some of them are more or less completed songs. Some of them are half-written. Some of them, you know, just need a little encouragement from the other person,” Trent said.

Three of the ten Shovels & Rope albums are covers records, in a series they call Busted Jukebox, which features collaborations with artists like Brandi Carlile, Sharon Van Etten, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and many more. Their goal with these collaborative covers is to deliver something completely unexpected, taking singers one could never imagine covering a certain song and recording just that.

When asked which artists they’d like to work with next, Hearst immediately knew her answer.

“I want Rufus Wainwright to sing with us, and I would sing the birthday song with that man [...] I would love for Nick Cave to come and do one, but I would never even ask. And Elvis Costello,” she said.

One collaborative effort the duo has recently stepped away from is the High Water Festival, a music festival in their home base of Charleston that they founded in 2017. They ended their partnership with the event after Live Nation became involved and High Water seemed to lose its homegrown charm.

“Let’s spill the tea!” Hearst encouraged.

“We've stepped down from the High Water Festival. When we started it with our our manager [...] it was a little bit smaller. [...] We had a little bit more say in the culture of the thing. And we've always been proud of the lineups each year because they've been killer lineups,” Trent explained.

“That's what they hired us to do, is to bring cool bands that we liked into the scene, right?” Hearst continued.

“In the past few years, it was bought by Live Nation. We didn't own it, just to clarify. And you know, the way that the festival music business is right now, it’s tough out there for everybody. But, you know, as we know, with Live Nation, there's a lot of VIP packages and stuff,” Trent said.

“[There was] weird ticket pricing that fluctuated the customer experience and it felt incongruous with our brand. It wasn't a mom-and-pop vibe, so it didn't feel like something that we needed to keep on being a part of. It's still gonna go on, and I'm sure it's gonna be awesome, but we just will be somewhere else.” Hearst said.

As a genre-defying band that incorporates rock-and-roll into their Southern gothic, Americana folk sound, Shovels & Rope thinks it’s important for Americana artists to not pigeonhole themselves into a certain genre.

“Some of the purists get fussy about whether something is, you know, folky enough, or if it's too loud, or if it's too one thing or another, but [Americana] is such a great catch-all for cow punks and R&B, blues and folk to all kind of find congress and also a market of people and a pool of people that actively are interested in building that scene,” Hearst said.

“I think it's a really wonderful place to build community and to find artists to collaborate with, but I think it's important to also build those relationships outside of just the Americana world, unless you're like a stone-cold purist, in which case go ahead with your little bad self and your banjos.”