China and Seth Kent Interview
Doug Burke:
China and Seth Kent are the wife and husband team who leads the band, Alright Alright out of Denver, Colorado. Their marriage has produced unique musical alchemy. China plays keyboards, Seth plays guitar and they are complemented by lush instrumental arrangements created by China. Their vocal harmonies combined Seth's folky warmth and China's lush alto to convey a range of emotions and feelings. Their first album, Nearby generated strong critical buzz and their live performances garnered a loyal following. They share songwriting duties and write songs both individually and collaboratively. On their new album, Crucible, they write very personal songs inspired by autobiographical episodes, and they are here to share the backstory of some of these songs from the new album.
Welcome to Back Story Song, and I'm your host, Doug Burke. Today, we have the husband and wife duo of China and Seth Kent from Denver, Colorado with the band Alright Alright. The mission of Back Story Song is to help songwriters get found, discovered, and listened to, and liked. I really, really hope you find and like Alright Alright.
Okay, Seth and China, Matthew McConaughey made famous the expression, "Alright, alright, alright," but you guys shortened it. Where does the name come from?
China:
Yeah. We put a little apostrophe there, Alright Alright.
Seth:
It's not a direct relationship, but we have taken advantage of the association from time to time.
China:
It's true, it's true.
Doug Burke:
So where does the name come from?
China:
Like many things in our lives, it was kind of an accident.
Seth:
Sometimes we sort of back into these things.
China:
Yeah. We had our first gig scheduled booked back in 2007, in April 2007 and we booked the gig before we had a name for a band.
Seth:
And it was just us so we were debating should we just call ourselves The Kents or/and...
China:
And then we were like, "Oh, shoot. There's this other band." I don't know, at the time-
Seth:
At that time there was a big new wave band in England called Kent.
China:
Called Kent or something like that, yeah.
Seth:
Which makes sense.
China:
So the venue kept pestering Seth about, "What are we going to call you? What are we going to call you?" So Seth, we were in bed one night and so it was like, "China, we've got to come up with a name for our band." And I was like, "Alright, alright." And there we go.
Doug Burke:
A very different one than Matthew McConaughey.
China:
Yeah, yeah. It wasn't the laid-back like, "Alright, alright, alright." It was like, "Alright, alright."
Seth:
People will sort of clearly say it as though Matthew McConaughey were saying and I'll correct them and say, "No, no. You skip the first alright. It's just the second two."
China:
It's just the second two.
Doug Burke:
It's kind of like, "Enough already."
China:
Exactly, exactly.
Doug Burke:
So you guys have been together for a long time, right? But not just as a couple but as a performing duo? Tell me about your history to get here like the albums you have out and how long it's been, and what we're going to talk about today?
Seth:
The first music we released together was actually before that gig-
China:
In 2006.
Seth:
... in 2006 for Christmas. We were pretty broke.
China:
We had just had a baby, our first baby.
Seth:
We just had a baby and so we decided that our present to all of our family would be, we would make a Christmas CD and send it to all of them. So we literally recorded all these, mostly Christmas standards, and then one song that we had written, it's sort of a Christmasy song and we recorded it just with an old Mbox.
China:
I literally had our son who was one month old, laying on my lap when I was playing the piano.
Seth:
We printed the CDs with a CD burner attached to the computer.
China:
Oh, yeah. This is like such a home DIY job.
Seth:
Right. I was cutting cardstock that we've printed to make a CD cover.
China:
And gluing it together.
Seth:
I mean we were broke.
China:
And actually in that first recording, our son, little baby cries in the end of it. It's actually super sweet. We didn't really have the name of our band yet, but we knew that we wanted to make music together. We had been making music with many other people for years before that.
Seth:
When we met, China was making a solo album. I would not say other than some background vocals that I was particularly involved in other than moral support.
China:
He drove me on the back of his motorcycle to my recording sessions. It was very sexy.
Doug Burke:
Very romantic.
China:
It was. It was pretty great.
Seth:
Now, she gets on the back of a motorcycle and goes, "I'm terrified."
Doug Burke:
That's what parenting will do to you.
China:
I know. What the heck, guys. I mean, this is not okay. I used to love being on the back of a motorcycle.
Seth:
But all of that to say, we've been doing music together off and on basically since we've met.
China:
Seth helped me carry my big ass heavy piano from my station wagon to the stage. For me, I had just gotten out of a really bad relationship so I was not looking at all, but apparently, it was a different story for Seth.
Seth:
I was like, "Okay. This is a good thing right here." I just stuck around until she was convinced. The music thing and the relationship progressed alongside each other with us always favoring, making sure we were maintaining a good relationship rather than trying to shoehorn musical collaboration into it.
China:
Yeah. I would say that this is Alright Alright 3.0. I think we've essentially tried being a band, three separate times. And one time, I think it was back in 2010, I remember we were driving home from Wyoming and when you're driving, because you're not looking at each other and there's this active other thing that is driving, that is happening at the same time. So it's like, you can say these profound truths to each other, so much easier than if you were at dinner looking at each other. I don't remember who said it first, but one of us said, "I don't really like being in a band with you." And then the other one was like, "Oh my god, me neither." It was like this huge relief, so we were like, "Okay. Screw the band. Let's just shut that down and just be parents and married lovers. Let's just give that whole thing up for a little while." Actually, at the time I thought we were giving it up forever.
Seth:
And we really didn't do much with music for four or five years. I was working a full-time just office job.
China:
It was so nice.
Seth:
And after what we had come out of, which actually relates to one of the songs.
China:
We'll come to that later.
Seth:
We'll get back to that. After coming out of that, we really needed a solid break and I needed for my own health for about two or three years, I would say. It was really good for me to just go to an office and work and for China to be with the kids and for me to hug the kids every day when I got home and to be a part of that whole process. As they started with school to help with homework and all that kind of thing, and baseball practice, all the normal family stuff.
China:
Yeah. We lived that life for about four years. So that was like after Alright Alright 2.0 died. And then I kind of had like a... It wasn't like a... I mean, I'm always having many existential crises. That one was more like, "Oh my god. I'm going to turn 40. What the hell am I doing with my life?"
Seth:
And we had some health concerns come up.
China:
I was at the dentist and my dentist was like, "Huh, you've got this weird lump in your throat. I want you to go get this checked out." I did and through a series of events that I won't bore you with, essentially the place that I went to get it checked out, he's like, "Oh yeah, that's pre-cancerous. We're going to burn that off and get a biopsy." He was trying to be like helpful but in my conversation with this doctor, he was like, "This is the cancer you don't want."
Seth:
I mean. I don't think there's anyone on the planet who wants to hear we think this is throat cancer. So we definitely had a couple weeks where it was like, "Oh man, this is going to get very real. This is going to get very intense."
China:
And I had this like, okay, going to the darkest timeline, say I have like throat cancer. What am I going to be so disappointed and sad for the rest of my life that I didn't do? So I just had that moment with myself and I realized interestingly at the same time, I did a life coaching session and I realized this is my one thing. I mean, some people have a lot of things they're really good at. It turns out I'm really only good at a couple of things and playing the piano and writing songs and communicating deep emotion through music is the thing that I do best.
Doug Burke:
So when did you start? When was the first time you wrote a song and why did you start writing a song?
China:
Well, I wrote a song when I was like seven years old. I can sing it for you now. I just remembered the chorus. It was, I was very...
Seth:
That's very CCM of you.
China:
I know. I was raised in a very fundamentalist Christian home. Anyway, I remember hiding those lyrics, that song in my underwear drawer for 10 years.
Seth:
Didn't you find them recently?
China:
No, we never found those. It was a poem that I wrote that we found.
Seth:
Oh, okay. I think my first song was probably like 12 or 13, probably about the same time I started learning to play guitar.
China:
I also wrote piano compositions just without lyrics or words or anything. I entered some contests with them and I won one once actually when I was in seventh or eighth grade. But I was very much on this classical piano trajectory. Singing and playing at the same time wasn't really on my list of things I wanted to do or thought I could do until I was in my 20s.
Doug Burke:
Why don't we start with Don't Worry.
China:
I was in bed, it was late at night. Everyone was asleep. Everyone was in bed. There was just this like snippet of a song going through my head. And I've now been working with this gift, this calling, this whatever, this songwriting thing long enough to know that the lie that you're going to remember it in the morning is just that it is a lie. You will not remember it in the morning. If you have it in your head, you go to your instrument and you freaking flush it out right then and there because... And I always take my phone and I do a voice memo. So I practiced that discipline. I got myself out of bed and I went downstairs. It was dark and I had the - I had that right there all in one chunk. It just was right there. And then as I kept singing it, it was interesting. I was channeling something. I was channeling someone else's, or also my own like deep desire to have this person that almost like a parent or a parent with no issues. Like someone to come and just tell me that I'm doing okay, that things are going to be okay. I don't know. I just was channeling that need and that desire, and I kept singing that. And I was having a moment with myself emotionally. It was really, really hard for me to get through that whole concept which was new, it was different. I'd never had an experience quite like that writing a song. But I didn't have any of the verses yet. And it was very different. It had much more of like a pop like a snappy kind of vibe to it rather than the melancholy thing that we've come up with. No. So I got the chorus out. I went to bed. Actually, I remember a week, a day later, originally it was like the snappy like - and it was going to be like this more of like a beat pop song kind of thing. When we took it into the studio with Ben, our producer, Ben Wysocki who is just amazing, we tried that version of it and it just never felt right. It just never took. Like you're trying to make something stick and it just would never stick. So we left it on the shelf for a while. We did all these other songs and finally we came back to Don't Worry, and he's like, "Okay. Why don't you just sit at the piano? I really think we need to put this in a whole different setting. I'm not quite sure what it is. Let's just play around. Let's just really rethink this whole thing." Well, I really love coming up with a pretty piano part. I'm a big time Tori Amos fan. I love the Sufjan piano stuff. So I just dorked around the piano kind of just meddling. And I landed on that. It's not an Alberti bass. Well, my left hand is rotating in a fifth and I'm playing a G minor chord spread between two hands, and Ben was like, "That, what's that?" And I just applied that background, that accompaniment to like the whole song. And then what did we do? Oh, yeah. Then we basically were like, "Okay, this song doesn't need to be traditional."
Seth:
We cut like a verse and a half out of it.
China:
Yep. We decided to not do the verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge, chorus like traditional way that you do a song. We decided to make it a bit more of... I mean it's not really an art piece, but it is a bit of an anomaly, a little bit of an artistic short song.
Seth:
To use the Crucible analogy, we refined it down to the absolute core of the song rather than all the fluff around it.
China:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
That's interesting. There's a lot of space in the song, which I love. I really like this sort of chunky... It sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled that comes in, in the first verse. What is that?
Seth:
That is actually something we came up with really early even in the pre-pro section I think and then we ended up keeping it around. We were messing around with snare sounds and we started getting a chain and dropping the chain onto the snare.
China:
Wait, we did that in Don't Worry?
Seth:
Yeah.
China:
We did? I don't remember that.
Doug Burke:
Go listen to it again, China. It's really cool.
China:
I know. Good Lord.
Seth:
I mean, we spent like a year working on this thing so a lot of that stuff, you're like, "Wait what sound was that in?"
China:
Well, we also sent... So we have a really great friend that we've been working with for years and years, our British friend, Chris Mears. He's now in Lexington, Kentucky. We were like, "I feel we need just a little bit of mirrors like shimmer and shine." So he took this song and he did... Remember, he had like an autoharp thing that he did with this song?
Seth:
Yeah.
China:
He did a weird percussive thing.
Seth:
He had like this broken autoharp that he was doing some percussive stuff on it too.
China:
Yeah. So there's like weird broken autoharp sound on there and then Ben did this thumping like bum, bum, bum. He did a thumping... Was it on a guitar or was it on a drum?
Seth:
I actually remember what it was.
China:
Anyway he like-
Seth:
He was thumping on something.
China:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
I really like this line, "Dust in the light like a whispered prayer”
This whole song about existential fear, which has always been around, but in this COVID era, seems heightened.
China:
Yeah.
Seth:
Yeah, totally. When China wrote it and when we started working on it, it meant something to us for sure. Even after finishing recording it and through this whole release process, a lot of things have happened that have made that song mean a lot more to us personally, much less otherwise.
China:
Yeah. It's so weird how we wrote this when we made this album and we literally finished it on March 13th maybe. Literally right before the world shutdown, we turned it into our mixing engineer, which was just so weird. And then so much of it is zeitgeist like super current. We had our own sort of falling off the cliff existential crisis about 10 years ago when Seth had been working for a big huge, big label band and got fired. It felt like the end of the world to us. I think that that's what's so interesting. It's like the pandemic is the end of all of our world as we know it or knew it, and different people are experiencing that in all sorts of different ways and we're all navigating that. But the end of the world is a very personal thing, isn't it?
Doug Burke:
It's a universal thing and individually it's a personal thing for everyone. Like so much in life, songs are universal and yet everybody has their personal relationship with a song. I always ask my interviewees how do you know when a song is finished? And clearly on this song started off in one place and ended up in another. And I guess every song has its own pathway towards getting to that moment where you as a songwriter say, "Okay, this is finished." In fact, once you start performing, then they can evolve even from there, but at some point you say, "It's finished and we're recording it this way." So how did you decide this was finished?
China:
I think...
Seth:
A deadline?
China:
Yeah, right, a deadline. That's always a really good way to have to finish something. I think the addition of Ben, the three of us together was such a good working situation. Ben is the drummer for The Fray. The Fray have done obviously... They've been in lots of really fancy studios and worked with really fancy producers and stuff. And Ben really paid attention. I mean, he spent his whole like the end of his teens and all of his 20s in that world, and I think Ben's intuition and his magic music smarts are what have helped us know when things are right, wrong and finished. I don't think that Seth and I, and our own, just us together in a studio would have been able to... And that's really hard to cut off when it's your song.
Seth:
Yeah, it is hard. I also think just the way that we were recording this, we were sitting down with sort of a body of work at the start and trying to make a cohesive, almost a narrative part of helping when the song is ready is when it fits in that narrative. I don't think that was a conscious decision with most of the songs. It was with a few, but there was this acknowledgment that we were going for an arc when the song sat in that arc, we knew we were at least close.
China:
So you alluded to the next one we wanted to talk about, Some Dreams which Seth you wrote and this was a very autobiographical song, correct?
Seth:
It is completely autobiographical with the borrowing of introducing my wife's part of the story from my perspective. Actually, this gets back to Ben as the producer as well. China was talking about 10 years ago in our world kind of ending and that's the moment that the song sort of addresses is when I had been working with The Fray, managing their studio, second engineering and then I was doing some backline tech on the road with them.
China:
He was gone basically the whole first year of our daughter's life. He was on the road with them.
Seth:
She was seven weeks old when I left to go on the road.
China:
She was 11 days old when you left.
Seth:
11 days.
China:
She was 11 days old.
Seth:
That's even worse. Now, I feel even worse.
China:
You're fine. We have moved beyond this.
Seth:
Yes. We have moved beyond this.
Doug Burke:
Who's counting?
China:
No one's counting but she was 11 days old.
Doug Burke:
11 days, seven weeks, whatever.
China:
Whatever.
Seth:
In hindsight, it was a really difficult time for me personally in my life and for China. I was on the road. I was basically not available. I would wake up and when you're a backline tech with a big tour like that, there's not a lot of downtime.
China:
It's kind of ridiculous what you guys do.
Seth:
It's very physically demanding work. It's time-consuming, physically demanding, you're not sleeping well because you're on a bus. I was probably drinking too much. I was missing my family because, again, in hindsight, I'm a family guy. I'm not made to go on the road. That's not part of my... Not on the road like that anyway. So it was a really difficult time in my life, but we had this notion that this was my dream.
China:
Yeah. Seth had said to me like when we were dating, I'd be like, "Well, what's your dream job?" And he'd be like, "Oh my gosh, to be a guitar tech for a major label band." Since you're like 15, that's what you've always wanted to do.
Seth:
That's what I always... I'll get into a little bit of the self-narrative of it in that like now that I'm doing this, now that we have our own band and I'm writing songs for me and when I load in and load out, it's for me, it's different. And I think I was afraid at the time of admitting that I wanted this and admitting that if I was going to do all this work, I should do it for me. And I alluded to that in the song in that first pre-chorus where I say, "I was full of shame." I was really embarrassed about my own aspirations and my own dreams and that I left when we had this baby at home and then China broke her foot.
China:
I broke my foot on July 2nd.
Doug Burke:
I was wondering what that was a reference to, broken bone and baby -
China:
Oh, Doug. I fell down the stairs. So it was literally like the first day that Seth had been gone and it was like the-
Doug Burke:
Day 12.
Seth:
No. We were in Indianapolis.
China:
No. Wait, listen. Let me finish my thought.
Seth:
Okay.
China:
it was the first day since he had been gone that I felt like I had my shit together. I was like, "And I made dinner by 6:30. Oh my god." I felt like I had my shit together and the kids were down in the basement. Fender was two and a half and I left the baby with a two-and-a-half-year-old.
Seth:
She clearly had her stay together.
China:
But they were watching TV. She couldn't roll over yet. So she was laying on the couch and I was like going up and down between the kitchen and watching them, trying to figure it out, whatever. And as I was going down the stairs to call them up for dinner, I fell and I broke my foot.
Seth:
And when we say broke foot, it's not like she broke her toe and had to hobble around.
China:
No, it was, I think a surgery.
Seth:
I think a week and a half later, we had a week off and I came home, and my whole job, while I was home, was to get her through the surgery process.
China:
It's ridiculous.
Seth:
I mean, really that should have been a sign. That should have been like, "Okay, this isn't working."
China:
But we were both so committed to this idea of a dream of like, "Oh, this is going to be the gateway to your career kind of thing."
Seth:
And as I'm sort of intimating, it kind of was a gateway to that career if I wanted it to be except as it turns out, that's not the career I wanted.
China:
But it took like going for that.
Seth:
But I didn't have the courage at the time to get myself out of that situation. I didn't have the courage to say to these guys, who are my friends, "Listen, this isn't working. I think it's probably not working for you guys and I know it's not working for me. So I love you guys. Let's still be friends and you can find someone who's going to be better at this job than me." So I got pushed off a cliff by getting fired from that life.
China:
I feel like people really relate to this. I feel like this is not just you.
Seth:
No. I mean, we all got pushed off a cliff this year. When I say we all, I mean everybody on the planet. Reality came in really, really quick. And that happened for us too in that instance and I think I was really hurt and really upset and also really, really, really exhausted. The only difference in the narrative of the song versus the narrative of how it actually happened was the third verse happened before the second verse. We left town for six weeks
China:
That's not true. I broke my foot before... No.
Seth:
No.
China:
It's all correct.
Seth:
No.
China:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Broken bone and babies in verse two.
Seth:
Yes, broken bone. Yeah, that's true. So the broken bone and baby anyway. But as far as the verse like we left town before I got the job that I could hate.
China:
Oh, right. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, okay. Right.
Seth:
We just like-
China:
He got fired.
Seth:
... and we left.
China:
He got fired while we were going to sell our house. We were going to move the heck out of Denver. Seth said, "Denver is a hornet's nest. I gotta get the F out of here." The same friend that actually renovated our basement, we borrowed his 1952 camper.
Seth:
Aljo.
China:
It was called the Aljo. It was so awesome. I loved it.
Seth:
One of those like canned ham looking things.
China:
Yeah. And we pulled it behind our van and we went on a 10-week road trip with a one-year-old and a three-year-old. Can I just say? It was just so great. We went to a wedding in Connecticut and then we just headed down the East Coast, eastern seaboard. We spent a week in the outer banks. We circled back and it was the first time that we as a foursome had been together like that, ever.
Seth:
Really ever. Especially for any length of time.
China:
Yeah, it was pretty awesome. I still miss that.
Seth:
That changed everything for both of us, I think whereby the end of that trip, I don't think we were ready at that point to say, "Oh, this was a good thing," because it was still very painful but we certainly recognized that we had been barking up the wrong tree. And that's why I needed that break where I was working just a job for years because I needed to break away from an expectation I had built for myself of supporting some other thing, some other dream, some other goal that wasn't within myself. And I really did get that separation and was able to find myself and find ourselves. I think we found ourselves as a family.
Doug Burke:
That's a wonderful story arc. I really like how you had this idea that you wanted to be this thing, this job and a lot of us we start out in life and think, "Oh, I'm going to be a fireman or a doctor or lawyer," or whatever. Then you have three different ways of killing that lie as you call it. The writing on the wall was a lie, the wild beasts will speak and killed the lie and it's walking on the coals that kills the lie. So there are three different ways that the lie got killed in this song.
Seth:
Yeah. And I think that's how life works too. I think we keep getting hit until we get it. If you don't learn to duck the punch, it's going to get you again.
Doug Burke:
The thing I like about this storyline that I find so humorous is you meet your wife by moving her Steinway piano or whatever it was, at a gig and your pickup line when she says what do you want to be when you grow up is, "I want to be a roadie."
Seth:
That's funny.
China:
That's so funny. I've never put that together.
Seth:
That's a good one.
China:
Oh, that's hilarious.
Seth:
And she was like, "I need one of those." I have this frigging Roland RD 600.
China:
Oh, that's hilarious.
Doug Burke:
We got rid of that keyboard because it was too heavy. And China is like, "Oh, you're the man for me."
China:
"You're the man for me. This is my dream come true."
Seth:
Now, we have all sorts of heavy pianos.
China:
Oh, god.
Seth:
I've moved so many pianos in my life. Oh my gosh.
Doug Burke:
Let's talk about over the edge.
Seth:
Okay.
China:
Oh, man. I love that song so much. That song started as a little baby as a soundcheck in Cincinnati. And I'll never forget it because we were playing this really beautiful old sort of broken down... I don't know. It was an old church that our friend set us up with this gig there and the sound guy was understandably trying to dial in the sound and it was taking him longer than normal. He was turning knobs and buttons and everything and he was like, "Just keep playing, just keep playing." And Seth just started playing this riff. It wasn't like gibberish because I definitely... I think I've first started singing about Sheila. I just started randomly singing about this woman, Sheila. It all just started coming out almost in like a gibberishy way. And I was just la la la'ing. One of us at that time was like, "Oh, this is good. Let's just turn on our voice memo again." Thank god, the iPhone has that app. That's like the best thing for musicians.
Seth:
Otherwise, we'd just be carrying around little like Dictaphone things.
China:
I used to. I used to carry around a little tape recorder.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. Or you'd just be singing la la la la la songs.
China:
Exactly. So then I think it just sat there in our voice memos for like a year and a half.
Seth:
And then I think we started listening to it and we're like, "Oh, this is good. We could do something with it."
China:
I think we sent it to Ben and he was like, "This is really good. Let's work on this. Why don't you write this."
Seth:
Yeah. When we were getting ready to make the album, he basically just said...
China:
We sent him all our voice memos.
Seth:
He said, "Send me everything you've got." We were like, "Okay. Well, some of it is not great and funny in some of those things." He's like, "No, no, no. Keep going with this one." We're like, "It's not that good." He's like, "It's going to be awesome." So we sent everything to Ben and this was one of the things that he was like, "Yeah, this is really good. Let's keep going with this."
China:
I feel like it was the first one we worked on with him.
Seth:
It might have been. We've been playing it live for a while too.
China:
Yeah, yeah. We had been playing it live. So we did almost a whole year of pre-production with Ben. He would come over once or twice a week for a couple hours. It was so nice. It just felt so unhurried and unrushed. We worked on honing the body of we're like, "Okay, what are the songs that are going to be included in this? Let's now flesh out those songs and let's finish writing those songs." We did a lot of that together and the three of us in the studio with this song is one of my favorite memories. It was so fun.
Seth:
We did end up moving the story around a little bit just developing it.
China:
Yeah. I think you know we brought him what we had and then we really got so nitpicky about the story and about our characters because at first, it was Sheila worked at the grocery store and Ronnie Jones worked in the sugar mill.
Seth:
Well, no. At first, it was just all a sheila story, wasn't it?
China:
Oh, you're right. First, it was all about, Sheila and then Ben was like, "I feel like we need a second character." We have these three lockers that are adjoined in our studio, 13, 14, and 15 and we got them from like a... It wasn't a junk sale, it was just kind of like a...
Seth:
Somebody on Craigslist had them.
China:
Yeah. And the name under 13 is Ron. The name under 14 is Ted and the name under 15 is Dan. I'm literally looking at them right now. We've always said that we wanted to write a song for each of those men. Who were Ron, Ted, and Dan? Where did they work where they had to have lockers with their names on it? So we put Ron in this song.
Seth:
Yeah. I was like, "Well, this can be Ron's song. So Ron came wandering in." At first, Ron was the sugar mill worker and Sheila worked at the groceries.
China:
Sheila worked at the groceries. And I was like, "Damn it. I'm really sick of these like oh, poor me women. My man left me songs. That's so passe." It makes so much more sense in the modern world to make Ron, the grocery store worker whose woman left him with a child because that happens all the freaking time and no one talks about that. It's like somehow the woman is the sad left person. And then Sheila has been working on this sugar mill for all these years and she keeps getting passed over for a promotion, which that just felt so much more honest and real.
Seth:
Interesting.
China:
I mean, they're fictional characters but they're very real to me. I know exactly what these people look like.
Doug Burke:
The place that's real to me in the song is "I'm going to take these wheels. Take me over the edge of that rocky mountain range."
Doug Burke:
This is the continental divide. We've all been through the Eisenhower tunnel. Not everybody on this podcast listeners, but if you ever have, you don't really go over the edge because you're going to go through it. But there's plenty of places where you go up and over the rocky mountain range and it's always like this spectacular thing because there's something different on the other side of that.
China:
Oh my god, totally.
Seth:
In the view and the like...
China:
In that experience.
Seth:
I mean, that's exactly what we were thinking of. We made a conscious decision as we wrote the song to place it, to give it a place which we did with a few of the songs, which gives the album a place.
China:
Exactly, which was kind of cool. This was the first one that we really honed and whittled down. It made the setting for the album like the rocky mountain range. Okay. We are making an album about where we live, kind of. At least that's the setting.
Seth:
I think that helped make even a song like Over the Edge, which is an imagined story arc, but it did help it feel authentic and real to us, for us to place it where we are.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. And it's clearly two phases of life, this midlife crisis of 37 and change. And then I think as we start to live older, the midlife crisis extends to 50 cents.
China:
Yes, it does.
Doug Burke:
Which is kind of my age bracket. That's why I'm doing a podcast. The line I really love in this, it's such a setting thing, pack up your knock-off American Girl. That just says it all. We couldn't afford the American Girl, we got the knockoff, pack it up and we're out of here.
Seth:
I think at first, it was just an American Girl and we needed another couple syllables and I was like, "China, what if it's a knockoff American Girl doll?"
China:
I mean, if you're a parent in this day and age, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's the Walmart version of American Girl doll. We totally have one of those or we did. I think maybe she got put in the giveaway pile recently, but exactly.
Doug Burke:
Good for you. Another phase of parenting life. But we've all been there as a parent with our kid staring at the American Girl window where there's this $250 rip-off.
China:
I know.
Doug Burke:
I didn't mean to say that. American Girl, I'd be happy to be your sponsor.
China:
Cut that out, okay? Kevin or...
Seth:
Kevin.
Doug Burke:
It is a lifetime of memories if you do buy one of those $250 American Girl dolls. But those same memories could be perhaps bought at a lower price point at a Walmart.
Seth:
And clearly they can.
China:
What is it called? What is the Walmart version called. I forget.
Seth:
I don't know.
China:
I'll look it up.
Seth:
We'll get to the bottom of this.
Doug Burke:
I know what it's called. It's called the knockoff American Girl doll.
China:
American Girl, exactly.
Seth:
But I think that's part of the whole realism that we're going for in this whole thing of like we all live this. Like you just said, every parent knows this. We're parents and we know it. And even though we didn't go through a sugar mill process or a grocery store process, we're really familiar with these feelings and needing to leave a job or being told to leave a job.
China:
Or being undervalued.
Seth:
And just being done with it.
China:
Exactly, and coming to the place where instead of allowing it to happen again and again to be like, "Dang it. We're putting an end to this." And in some ways, I just love the metaphor. I mean I am an English major junkie. The metaphor of travel, the metaphor of the car, being the literal vehicle and also the metaphorical vehicle to help you move into a new place in your life and your soul or whatever. Honestly, right now I'm thinking of Huck Finn on the river and the raft, and the river being this metaphor for America. When we wrote it, we weren't necessarily thinking about all of those metaphorical drugs.
Seth:
We didn't metabolize all of our themes until the album was almost done. When we were putting together the album sequence, that's when we were like, "Oh, look at all these things that are in this album." That reality of parenthood and making decisions as an individual, but also as a parent and also as a tired middle-aged person.
Doug Burke:
Parenting takes energy.
Seth:
Yes.
Doug Burke:
For sure.
Hey, so let's talk about cars. Cars is such a theme in music. I was watching Hail Hail Rock and Roll the documentary about Chuck Perry and he talks about Maybellene and he said, "I wanted to write songs about cars and girls."
Seth:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
There's the Beach Boys with Little Deuce Coupe and Fun Fun Fun 'til your daddy takes the T-bird away. Springsteen's Cadillac Ranch come to mind or Little Red Corvette. So you guys have tackled an American classic in the song, Trans Am. So I had to look up to see if there were other songs written about Trans Ams and yours is very thematically different, but there is a Sammy Hagar, Trans Am song, Highway Wonderland. There's a Thompson Square, Trans Am song and there's a Kesha Gold Trans Am song.
Seth:
Oh, I didn't hear the Kesha one.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. So they're all out there in the Trans Am genre, but I think yours is the one that Camaro should license for their advertising.
Seth:
I agree with you.
Doug Burke:
This song, I can totally relate to because I grew up on Long Island with a bunch of guys who were car junkies, Jimmy Schroeder and Richard Sapanski, and Bruce Northam. They would work on their cars and we used to take them out to Jones Beach at night. We'd run the drag to see if there were any cops there and then they would open up the Trans Ams.
China:
Nice.
Doug Burke:
Armin Galassy had the I rock Trans Am with the big eagle on the top of it. Everyone was jealous of Armin's car in the parking lot. So this story is so personal to me. And I've never really shared a story like this in Back Story Song before in this way.
China:
I love it.
Doug Burke:
I love this song, if you don't know.
Seth:
Thank you.
Doug Burke:
So I had to do all this research about the Trans Am songs. So tell me about this song for you, Seth. You wrote this.
Seth:
Okay. Just real quick, have you seen pictures of the album cover yet?
China:
Of our album.
Seth:
Of our album cover.
Doug Burke:
No, I haven't. I've just received the SoundCloud to listen to. So I haven't seen your album.
Seth:
So there's a car. It's not a Trans Am. We shot the album cover in a junkyard and they had not one, but two Trans Ams there and I was losing my mind.
Doug Burke:
Okay. Is that the picture that's on the video that's on YouTube of the song, the Trans Am song.
Seth:
Oh geeze?
China:
What is the thing?
Doug Burke:
It has you standing next to a Trans Am, a junk... No? It's not? Okay. I can't wait to see it.
China:
No, it's not a Trans Am. That's the car that we bought.
Seth:
That's actually the album cover car and that's a Dodge Shadow Turbo, which we can talk about that too if you want. But the Trans Am song, there was a car in this town called Georgetown which is out i-70 west of Denver.
China:
Speaking of going over the Rocky Mountain Range.
Seth:
Yeah. I mean, it's on your way up to the Eisenhower tunnel and there's this little town called Georgetown and it's an old mining town, old silver mining town.
China:
You can see all the mines like the old broken down mines as you drive up.
Seth:
The saying is that the streets of Georgetown are paved with silver because the miners, when they first started mining, they were immigrants and they didn't know what silver looked like and that it would look gray and dirty. So they were hauling silver out and using it to pave the streets because they didn't realize. So this little town of Georgetown, it's now like a little tourist attraction, but there's this little tiny trailer park on the north side of the highway across the street from Georgetown.
China:
For years and years
Seth:
For years. I mean, every time we play this song live somebody says, "I know that car." It was actually a Camaro, not a Trans Am. But Camaro doesn't sing right. This Camaro that someone had put onto a blazer train and drive train just sat there and it just sat there and it drove me nuts. I loved this car and it drove me nuts.
China:
It's so dumb.
Seth:
It's the hilarious thing. It had probably 38 inch tires. I was like, "That is such a Colorado car." I mentioned it online a while back and people were sending me pictures they had taken from the highway of this car. It links to a YouTube video of this car. So I saw that and I just like sort of... The idea of me going up and offering to buy the car made me laugh so much that I thought, "You know what, I'm going to write a song about this thing." It started out, I'd written some dreams in another song. They were pretty heavy and pretty serious subject matter and I was like, "I think I need a little break. I think I need to just like enjoy songwriting." So I wrote Trans Am first just to like... This is just a song that's going to make me laugh and it's going to be a throwaway and that's fine. I didn't know where to go with it and then I sort of rewrote it and got too serious, and then presented them to Ben both of them and he said, "Yeah. You got two different songs here. These are two different subject matters and I think you should write the funny one." So then we worked it out and I would work on it and then run lyrics by Ben, and we'd be like, "Well, I think we need a funnier part here. Should I rhyme this word or should I make it sort of an anti-rhyme?" At first, I don't think we were on bikes in junior high. I was like running around. We spent way too much time thinking about a song about a Trans Am. We really fine-tooth combed the thing. I kept being bewildered. At the end of it, even though I'm like, "I don't need to think about these words this much. It's about a Trans Am. But now that it's done, I'm like, "I'm so glad, we thought about all those words so much."
China:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
It has a bittersweet sadness in Bruce Springsteen's documentary on Darkness on the Edge of Town. He talks about Racing in the Street as being the saddest song he ever wrote. He almost breaks down in tears and you're like, "I didn't really think of that as a sad song." And this song has those bittersweet sad elements to it in the sense that the guy is going to skip the braces for my kids like a jerk in order to buy a Trans Am because he thinks it's going to transform his life.
Seth:
Yes, exactly. I think that's such a fine line to dance too of it's kind of a funny song, it's kind of sad. You're not sure if this guy is serious or not. Is he going to sell the minivan for a Trans Am? Is that going to happen? But then you're also kind of rooting for the guy. You're like he's paying an HOA he doesn't want to pay. He's living a life he didn't envision in high school or in middle school and you feel for him, but then you're also like, "Don't, don't skip the braces. That's a bad idea."
Doug Burke:
Right, right. His judgment is a little bit off.
China:
Well, it's a little delusional.
Seth:
Yeah, a little delusional.
China:
I think that's the thing about it.
Seth:
It does make me wonder, I wrote the song but I didn't think about his wife much. But now I'm like, "His wife should step in here."
China:
That's hilarious.
Doug Burke:
That's cause China steps into your life too much, Seth. It doesn't mean you-
Seth:
I'm the one trying to talk her into getting a muscle car.
China:
No. You never talk me into it. I want a muscle car. Well, our neighbor is selling a corvette, a really sweet corvette and I tell you what, I feel like a different person when I get to drive that car.
Doug Burke:
That is the midlife crisis right there. Get on the back of Seth's motorcycles. Seth, you're getting a Corvette next.
China:
Yes, we are.
Doug Burke:
Forget the Trans Am. When this record blows up, you're getting a Corvette.
Seth:
Your mouth to God's ears.
Doug Burke:
All right. Well, the next song we wanted to talk about was Champagne.
China:
Oh, wow.
Doug Burke:
Kind of shifting gears, huh? Well, this is the order you gave me.
China:
That is the order I gave them to you. I didn't really think about that when I did that. Well, it's interesting. I think Seth got his super autobiographical song in the album, which was Some Dreams and for me Champagne, when I wrote it, it came out seamless. It came out just like a whole thing altogether. I don't remember exactly, but I think it was one sitting and I might have tweaked a few words later, but it was one of those things. So I often compare songwriting to reaching behind a veil and pulling something into this realm from a different realm. Sometimes that veil is like gossamer and it's really gauzy and not hard to push aside. You can kind of see the light of this thing that you're pulling into your own realm behind that gossamer. Sometimes it's like velvet and you have to like... You know it's there. It's a little scary, it's a little dark. We have to put your hand back there and you have to pull. Sometimes like fucking plywood. You have to, ouch, bang it down. Look at me. I'm banging my hand. I was like...
Doug Burke:
Don't break a bone please.
Seth:
Not again. At least I'm home this time.
China:
But this one was definitely like cheesecloth. It was so right there. It just took the discipline of sitting down the piano and being late for whatever I was about to go to in order to write this song, which is not an excuse for me being late all the time, I just want to say.
Seth:
Just that one time.
China:
Okay. I'm just going to be real. I think I alluded to my super uber duper fundamental Christian upbringing. God is so totally masculine in that realm and that world. And I am so tired of that and so is my daughter, our daughter. I just really wanted to dig into this idea of a higher power being female and not in this like anthropomorphization way, but yes, also. Obviously, I say later in the song, Mama, You've Been Standing Tall, you take it and you take it. But really this is like in some ways this song is very autobiographical. It's very female-forward. I started right off just talking about my miscarriages. I mean not really. I mean, if you don't know me or if you're not really clued into all of that, you probably don't hear that, but I've been taken out to coffee and asked about it because it's right there. I mean, two of them are buried underneath that tree. That line just happened. I wasn't thinking. I was just writing. So I was thinking, but I wasn't in my prefrontal cortex. I was in my subconscious doing this whole thing. In some ways, people are like, "Oh, I'm so sorry about your miscarriages," and whatever. And actually, the first verse is not the hard verse for me to sing. The second verse is the hard verse for me to sing because I did have such a traumatic adolescence that I don't need to get into here, but it was just so hard. I feel like I miraculously made it through all of that. I cannot believe that I made it through adolescence and some very major trauma with... I'm definitely not unscathed and I definitely have been in therapy ever since I was 22. So I mean it continues. I somehow didn't train wreck my life early on and that to me is a miracle. I feel like someone was watching over me. I think this song is the embodiment of my gratitude to God. But I didn't want God to be masculine. So in this song, God is feminine. It rings so true to me because I am a mother and I am so connected to that deep mother love and that feeling of having all your children in your nest and having your kids under your wings and that whole metaphor. So I get all the way to the end of the song about Mama, You've Been Standing Tall. You take and you take and you take it on. I have thought about how like, "Gosh, God gets a lot of blame for a lot of crap that is not hers to take." We sure do blame God for a lot of things. You got all your children in your nest and you never, never, never rest. I mean, I still feel emotional like thinking about that. There's this vigilant being that like depending on your perspective, and sometimes our perspective is not this, but this being watches over us and there have been so many close calls for me, and I have miraculously made it through. I just felt celebratory and I don't know, it just came out like I'm going to find a way to drink champagne. All of these things that have tried to take me down, you've not succeeded. So I'm going to pop a bottle.
Doug Burke:
Nice. I think when God hears this record release, she's going to really smile.
China:
That one actually, I wanted to say is... So I'm a finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival, New Folk Songwriting Competition and that song and Missouri Calling are the two songs that are the ones that I entered into the contest and the contest actually, the finals are next this coming weekend.
Doug Burke:
Oh, wow. What's the contest again?
China:
So the Kerrville Folk Festival has been... It was founded by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. Actually, I don't know if he founded the festival, but he was the one who founded the songwriting competition that is part of that festival and it is called the New Folk Songwriting Competition. I think it's like the Grassy Hill New Folk Songwriting Competition. Lots of words there.
Seth:
We're both squinting trying to remember.
China:
I mean, I did not realize this at the time that I entered these songs, but it is one of the most prestigious songwriting competitions in the world actually. At least for like folks you know. And I'm a finalist which I was just shocked.
Doug Burke:
This is great news.
Seth:
And the notification came and we were like-
China:
Not paying attention.
Seth:
... not paying attention. So a friend of ours who also is a finalist, she texted.
China:
She's like, "China..."
Seth:
We were in the middle of a movie. She's like, "Oh my gosh, Kerrville." And we were like, "Are we just saying the names of towns? What's going on here?"
China:
What are we talking about? And then I checked my email and I was just gobsmacked, utterly flabbergasted. I just was like, "Oh my god. I forgot that I entered the competition."
Seth:
Yes.
China:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Wow. So this is, I think, the only song I've ever listened to about miscarriages. But it's more than just that, it's really about a woman trying to make it through life, through adolescence and young adulthood and motherhood.
China:
Absolutely, absolutely. I balked at the idea that the woman who wrote our, what do you call it, our bio for this album, she originally called it a song about miscarriage and I was like, "I'm not really comfortable with pigeonholing it there." Because for me, you're right. It's about this whole experience of... It's just so autobiographical but it's not just about that. It's about all of it.
Seth:
And as like sort of the observer of this song and the whole experience, we've dealt with miscarriage together and that is a group thing, but it's also a really, really personal thing for China or for any mother going through a miscarriage. I think that, that part... Well, in all of it, the whole story arc, the whole miscarriage and motherhood and adolescence and all of that with women, these are things that should be talked about and should be sung about and should be mourned and celebrated and comforted, and encouraged. I think to the degree that it's about miscarriage and adolescence, and all of these things, a lot of women go through similar experiences to what China has not the same, but it's important to talk about this stuff and acknowledge it.
China:
I think it's getting a lot more sort of publicity now talking about this issue and sort of like women's bodies issues in general just in the last like 10 years. But when I was going through it, I didn't realize that I was like part of this... I mean, in some ways it's like a sisterhood. It's like you don't realize how many people have gone through this until you've gone through it yourself. Well, at the time I was covertly talking about it. And then all these people, these hands raised like, "Oh, me too. I've been through that too." Yeah, I just love the idea of smashing the taboo about talking about it and singing about these things.
Doug Burke:
You smashed the taboo about talking about miscarriages, but you also, I think talk about this universal thing of surviving adolescence from a female perspective. The interesting thing about adulthood is everybody survived adolescence. I don't think anyone's adolescence... Everybody does not look back on their adolescence as a fun time all the time. Everybody has stuff that they cringe about their adolescence. I don't care who you are. No one's adolescence was easy and so you write about it here in a nice way. I like it a lot.
China:
Thanks.
Doug Burke:
So Missouri Calling, this was also entered in the competition.
China:
It was.
Seth:
It was.
China:
It was.
Seth:
This might be my favorite one for us to play together. We really enjoy singing this one together.
China:
And we've done it so many different ways. We could do it just with a guitar and Seth hates it when I play the tambourine, but I like it. A guitar and a tambourine or a guitar and a piano. Or I suppose it can just be a piano song. I like it, but I mean the weird thing about being a pianist in this genre of music is that... I'm like a lone wolf. No one else really plays piano. Everybody plays a guitar. But I've been writing songs with guitar in mind ever since the very beginning. So I think what happened was we were sitting in the living room and you started just playing... Yeah, that's how it happened. You were playing a really pretty riff on the guitar, the one that we capped.
Seth:
We had just gotten back from a vacation with some friends from Missouri. So I think that's why Missouri was on our mind.
China:
Was it last year?
Seth:
Yeah.
China:
Yeah. We have these really awesome Missouri friends. Two separate families that we go on vacations with. We went to the beach last year with them and they have kids the same age and they raise their kids similarly, so we all have like this... It just works.
Doug Burke:
The Missouri beach of the Ozarks?
Seth:
No.
China:
No. They drove out to the outer banks.
Seth:
We all went to the East Coast.
Doug Burke:
Oh, the real beach, okay.
China:
Lake of the Ozarks.
Seth:
We were in Corolla, North Carolina.
China:
Corolla, North Carolina. And Seth was playing and I just started singing. I think what happened... Well, obviously. The voice memo gets turned on early on in this process and I started - I don't really remember writing this song. I just remember you were like, "You need to just keep going there." And I sat on the piano.
Seth:
The main sort of, I guess, skeleton, our songwriting methodology usually one person sort of takes the helm for a while and then the other one comes in and helps edit and we sort of trade it back and forth. And I think this one came out pretty quick though.
China:
Yeah. And I think what happened was... This is what happened. We had the bare bones of it. We had an understanding of where we wanted to go and then we took it into the studio because we did not have that pre-chorus or the post-chorus until we came into the studio. I think I was just randomly humming and Ben was like, "China, China stop. What is that? Okay. I want you to sing that here. Let's let's record that." It was like putting little pieces together like, "Okay, let's arrange that. Ooh, that would be really nice after the chorus." The song came out of our experience with this homeless shelter that we have done a lot of work with over the years. It's a women's homeless shelter and both of us have made meals for the women at the shelter and then we've spent the night with them individually. Sometimes Seth spends the night, sometimes I do of course. This shelter is totally shut down right now because of the pandemic. I've heard a lot of stories of homelessness. I've heard every story is so unique to that individual. There's no one reason why people are homeless. And the other thing that I've realized in all of that is that... I mean, gosh. We are all one really bad accident. There's just a large population that is, one, getting fired from their job, a really bad accident or really bad health issue away from not being able to pay rent. So I just really channeled... Well, I copied and pasted a couple of different stories that I've heard over the years into this song and I was imagining like a woman coming from Missouri to Colorado to escape this bad situation to Missouri. Also, she loves smoking weed and Colorado is like the weed place to be. You can make some money if you're in the weed industry. So let's just go to Denver. I'm just imagining like a 17-year-old doing that.
Seth:
And Denver did go through like a green-gold rush when everything was legalized. People were doing that. They were coming here and thought they were going to make a bunch of money.
Doug Burke:
Right. Start a cannabis farm.
China:
Exactly. And you end up on the streets, but here you are, you're here. That is this story.
Doug Burke:
I love your harmonies on this. I love your harmonies throughout the album. Talk to me about how you guys do that?
Seth:
Yeah. I was actually just... As we're talking about this, I was like, "Oh, this song is a real duet." We sing together on all the songs, but for some reason this one feels like a duet.
China:
This one feels like a duet, yeah.
Seth:
But most of the harmony credit goes to China. When we're building harmonies, I'll be like, "I'm lost."
China:
We have little sessions and I just like-
Seth:
She's teaching me about it.
China:
I'm like I turned into choir director China. I just know music. So I know like, okay, if I'm singing the third, then he'd sound really good on the one or the five. So I can build stacks pretty easily because I know exactly where I am. Well, I also have perfect pitch, so it's easy for me to know exactly where we're at and who needs to do what. And Seth is so good. I mean, I know sometimes I can be real pain in the ass to work with. So Seth is so good at dealing with me. I'm classically trained. I could be pretty perfectionistic, but he's so good at like once you learn it, you got it. You don't forget it. You had your harmony part.
Seth:
It makes it really hard though when we're like, "Oh, let's take this whole song down a full step." And then I'm like, "Well, I have to learn a harmony again?"
China:
And I'm like, "Well, it's the same thing. Just transpose it." But different people have different ways of interacting with that kind of...
Doug Burke:
Sound.
China:
Sound, exactly. I mean, usually Seth will find a harmony and then I'll help him carry it through the whole phrase.
Seth:
Or modify it because China is really great at hearing what's going to be there. So when we were doing vocals, China was already thinking about strings in some of the songs. So then she's saying, "Okay, don't sing that note because the viola is going to be pushing against that note."
Doug Burke:
I wanted to talk about that, Seth because I marveled at the string arrangements throughout this album and not every song has them, if I'm correct.
China:
No.
Seth:
No. Seven of the songs.
China:
Seven of the eleven.
Doug Burke:
Okay. And I was like who arranged that? At first, I was... Because I knew you played keys and I knew you Seth were guitarists and I was like, "Well, is this a synthesizer that she wrote is playing?" And I was like, "No, no. Those are strings."
China:
They're real, yes.
Doug Burke:
Where did they come from and who brought them to this album?
China:
Oh, Doug, this is my favorite.
Seth:
I want to say right now how proud I am of China's string work on this and then I'll let her take over. But I'm just super duper proud of what she accomplished with the strings. Go ahead.
China:
Well, I wrote the arrangements except for Champagne. Our good friend, Britney who is the first violinist in the quartet. She wrote Champagne, which is funny. I think Champagne was so... It was almost too close to me. I wanted to hand it off to someone else because I felt almost too precious about it. So I gave that to her and she did a beautiful job arranging that string arrangement. But all the others, I arranged them. I wrote them in Sibelius. I mean, I also have studied composition so I know my way around Sibelius workstation, and that was so freaking fun. It was one of my favorite things I've ever done. At the end of the day, if I were to just make albums and then also write string arrangements for other people, I would be a happy, happy woman.
Doug Burke:
Well, that leads to one of my standard questions is if you pick any song that you've written and pick the "voice" or the band to play that song, what song would you ask them to play and what voice or band would you want to record and sing that song?
Seth:
That's such a challenging question in a way.
China:
Okay, I have an answer. I think I would love Joni Mitchell to sing my song, Scent of Honeysuckle from our first EP or second EP. Joni Mitchell, man, I have many, many vinyl record on a rainy day have I spun of Joni's.
Seth:
Yeah. That's a good rainy day, rainy day vinyl. I mean, I have two answers that it would be so amazing and gratifying. When our last album came out, this guy who has a radio show, when he introduced one of our songs he said that he could envision Tom Waits covering.
China:
The great Tom Waits.
Seth:
Yeah, he's Scottish.
China:
He's Scottish.
Seth:
And the great Tom Waits. I was like, "That would blow my mind." There's an aspect of that but also I think... And this is going to be kind of weird, but I feel like the voices right now that are most potent to me are coming out of hip-hop. If someone in hip-hop sampled one of our songs, I would be like, "Oh, apparently, we're now saying something really important." That would feel like I'm speaking into something broader than me.
China:
Run the Jewels sample the ooze from Missouri Calling.
Seth:
If Run the Jewels were like-
China:
There we go.
Seth:
... okay, this song is part of our story arc, that would feel like I'm singing in the moment. And that's a thing like a challenge that I'm setting out for myself, for my next songwriting endeavor is to try to make something... And I'm not saying I'm going to try to make hip-hop, but I want something to have that urgent voice like the urgency that you get with a genre that is allowed... I use the term allowed, but a genre that talks about the very moment, and I think I can learn from that and talk about the very moment. So if someone is talking about something that is right now and takes my song and uses it, or borrows from it, I would feel like I was accomplishing my next songwriting goal.
Doug Burke:
Well, China and Seth, this has truly been a pleasure. I have to thank you. This has been an honor and a thrill for me to share your story about Alright Alright and your new album Crucible, which is coming out this October. I thank you. I have to thank DJ Wyatt Schmidt and you can listen to his music out there on the internet. Without him in the sound booth here, we would be lost. And I also have to thank, Mary Caroline, MC Owens, my new social media director for lifting our social media presence.
Doug Burke:
Remember, songwriters get paid when you listen to their songs. And one way to do that is if you like this episode, share this episode. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and share this episode. If you like this episode or like these musicians, listen to our Spotify playlists and they will get paid, not a lot, but they'll get something and we're trying to keep them fed through this terrible, terrible COVID pandemic that we're all enduring so we can get them back out performing in our clubs and go see them on tour in a town near you.
China:
Yes.
Seth:
We cannot wait.
China:
We cannot wait.
Seth:
We're really, really grateful and honored too, so thank you so much for having us.
China:
Thank you so much, Doug.
