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Q&A: Folk-Punk Meets Hollering Harmonies in The Montvales’ New Album [1]

['Olivia Weeks', 'The Daily Yonder']

Date: 2024-02-09

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

The Montvales are a songwriter duo from Cincinnati who’ve been playing together since they were 13 years old. Their beautiful new folk-country album Born Strangers came out on Friday, February 2nd.

We talked about the record, the gentrification of Knoxville, and the folk-punk venn diagram. Enjoy!

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sally Buice and Molly Rochelson with their respective instruments. (Photo by Suzi Kern)

Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: So how’d you two start playing together?

Sally Buice: We have been friends for a long time, since we were 13. And yeah, we went to concerts together a lot as kids and then eventually we were both taking guitar lessons and eventually I was taking banjo lessons and we started playing together casually and when we were 16 or 17, we started writing songs together and that quickly became the most important part of it to us.

Molly Rochelson: We started out playing music on the street in Knoxville a lot, and then eventually a kind person at the radio station WDVX was like, come inside and play some songs on the radio. And that’s kind of how we kicked things off.

DY: It’s crazy that you guys have been friends for so long and writing together for so long. If it were just one of you, you could look back at songs from when you were teenagers and be like, “I’m just going to tuck these away,” but since it’s both of you, you have a witness.

MR: Right, no forgetting.

SB: We did have a silly high school band name that we buried, so we’ve left some of it behind.

DY: Care to share?

SB: It was “The Caring Committee.”

DY: It all sounds so bold, to be busking as kids and then ready to go into the radio station and play for the city of Knoxville. What was that like?

SB: I think busking seemed normal to me because my older brother did it all the time, so I was just like, “Oh yeah, of course that’s a normal thing to do.” And then with the transition to the radio, we were both super anxious little teenagers, but I think it helps to be surrounded by a really supportive music community.

MR: And I think both of us felt like outsiders to some extent in our pretty conservative East Tennessee upbringings and playing music was a clear role for us and an outlet for expression. So I think that really won out over how shy we were, so I’m grateful for that.

DY: Is making music the main thing you’re both doing or what else do you have going on?

SB: Music is definitely the main focus for both of us, but we also both have a lot of odd jobs that pay the bills, the most interesting of which on my end is that I get to work seasonally as a wrangler at a ranch in Colorado, and then I work on a vegetable farm during a lot of the summer season.

DY: Right, Sally, I read that the song “Lou” on this new album was sort of inspired by both your work in the outdoors and your hopes for your niece. Can you talk a little bit about how that song came about?

SB: Yeah, I wrote that one after I took my baby niece to the ocean for the first time. I was actually living in France and teaching English in elementary schools there, but I was reading American news a good amount and thinking a lot about what was going on at home, and especially about threats to public land in the U.S. That song came out of both the joy of watching a young person fall in love with the land and also the distress of wondering how much of it would be left for her as she grew up. And where I landed with that one was trying to focus on a defiant hope that we could preserve the good things about the planet for young people.

Cover art for the singles “Lou,” and “Through the Night.”

DY: And then Molly, what about you? What are you up to outside of music?

MR: Really I just bartend at a cool little spot in Cincinnati that’s full of other musicians, so that’s really nice. I spend a lot of time with my partner and our two cats. I need a lot of alone time to kind of recuperate from being in front of people all the time, so I love going on long walks across the city by myself and listening to nerdy podcasts and trying to write songs.

DY: How’d you guys find yourselves in Cincinnati?

SB: There’s no super concise answer to that I guess. But we were looking to try something new and looking to live in a place that had affordable rent for us as working musicians, and I really love that Cincinnati is full of woods and huge parks. I can walk in the woods just a couple blocks away from my house and that’s really nice. And our neighborhood north side is lovely.

MR: Yeah, it’s really an interesting spot because it’s a weird confluence of the South and the Midwest and Appalachia all together. People from all over those regions end up there, I think for similar reasons to us – as more people discover the bigger Appalachian cities, people who’ve lived there often are forced to move somewhere cheaper. But I think that makes it pretty culturally interesting, and there’s definitely a great music scene there. There are some really talented songwriters and old-time and bluegrass players, and then also these really cool art punk bands that are doing some of the weirdest, funniest stuff you’ve ever heard. So it’s been cool, and kind of unexpected, but really good to us.

DY: And were you guys there when you were writing this new album? Is there a place influence on Born Strangers?

MR: I was there for writing some of the songs that I started on this album, but they were really written across three different places – Knoxville before we moved, Sally’s time out on the ranch in Colorado and then Cincinnati, and I think the songs on this record are super place-based and really do delve into our experience in each of those spots.

DY: Since you’ve been playing together for so long, I’m really curious about how you developed a sound as a pair and how it’s changed over time. Did you guys go through phases together? I’m just interested in how that would play out in a partnership.

SB: Yeah, it’s been such a long time of playing music together and the first maybe five years of that, we weren’t thinking too hard about curating any particular sound. We were just having a lot of fun being creative together. But yeah, I think it was very shaped by old time jams that I used to go to in Knoxville, and really leaning into Appalachian music traditions. We also both had big folk-punk phases that informed our songwriting and sound. And just generally being in rooms full of people hollering harmonies, that influenced us a lot.

MR: Yeah, the folk-punk influence was definitely big early on in terms of there being a lot of room for being messy and imperfect, and also pretty political and community oriented in songwriting. I think that has stuck with us.

I loved country music when I was a kid but not as much in middle school and high school because I felt pretty alienated in East Tennessee. And then in college I rediscovered a love for it, and I think Sally did too. So I think coming back together when we finally moved back to Knoxville in 2019, there was more of a country influence then.

SB: This album is also really influenced by our producer Mike LoPinto. We traditionally sounded really folky, I think, and I met Mike out at the ranch in Colorado but he’s a Nashville musician and producer. We had dreams of making this record sound more country and he really helped us take it there and assembled a great team of Nashville musicians.

DY: That goal definitely comes through listening to the album. And that’s such a classic story of loving country music when you were little, and then sort of rebelling against it, and then coming back around eventually. So can you talk about the artists that brought you back to country in college?

MR: My first concert I ever went to was the Chicks in Knoxville, and it was right after Natalie Maines said the thing about George Bush and everybody was all up in arms. As a kid I listened to a lot of badass female country artists with my mom. There was this outlaw feminist feel to a lot of country songs from the Chicks, and “Independence Day” by Martina McBride was huge for us. I think I really came back to those artists in college when I was also doing a lot of thinking about where I was from. I majored in sociology and gender studies and I was thinking about those intense, female-driven country songs. And then I’ve always been in whatever punk scene, or at least at that point in my life I listened to a lot of punk music and went to a lot of punk shows, and for whatever reason in the mid aughts in Asheville all the punks were also listening to country music. And so I definitely had some context for listening to it. And it does feel like home.

DY: I think to some people, the term “folk-punk” might sound a little bit oxymoronic, so can you talk about what that even means?

MR: There were a lot of bands we listened to back in the day that I would put under that umbrella that were typically just a really unpolished person with acoustic instruments playing loud and fast and kind of angry political music, but also very, “I love my friends and we can do anything together.” I think maybe the mid aughts were a bit of a heyday for it.

DY: It’s been more than a year since you guys recorded this album – how have your feelings about what you put together changed over that time?

MR: I’m so excited that the whole thing is finally going to be out. It’s been a lot of work and yeah, I think it’s really interesting listening to these songs now after some time has passed. These were very 2020 lockdown influenced songs and it’s just kind of crazy to realize how much the world has changed since we recorded them.

SB: I feel like I hear a lot of people around me processing that time now. So I think looking back at those songs has been helpful for me in that process. They still feel really relevant, but it also feels like they speak to that particular moment in time.

DY: I know you just wrapped up a short tour. Are you planning on playing live shows anytime soon?

MR: Yeah, we’re here in Knoxville on the phone, and we’re headed back to Cincinnati after this. But we have two album release shows coming up, one in Knoxville and one in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati one is on Friday, February 2nd at Woodward Theater, and then the Knoxville one is next Saturday, February 10th at Barley’s in Knoxville. And both of those are going to be our first full band shows ever.

Correction: A previous version of this conversation incorrectly stated that the band was from Nashville.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time.

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