Folk duo hits the road

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This article was published 16/11/2017 (3213 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Right before the previous leg of their tour kicked off, Saskatchewan folk duo Kacy & Clayton ran into some bad luck: their truck, with almost all of their gear inside, was stolen.

 

Kacy Anderson and her friend were driving the vehicle from Salt Lake City — where they had just ended a tour leg — to Toronto. They stopped in Chicago for the night and woke up to find the truck, and all its contents, missing.

Neither the truck nor any of the gear inside — including a borrowed vintage drum kit — was recovered, but Anderson took Clayton Linthicum’s guitars into the hotel with her for the night, so at least those remained in their possession. To add salt to the wound, the pair also had several thousand dollars worth of recently acquired merch inside the truck, so that, obviously, was gone as well.

“That kind of set things off in a bit of a… not-the-most convenient way, but we didn’t actually have to cancel any shows and we finished the tour,” says Linthicum, 23.

“I’m glad we were able to do it because that would have been the worst — not having your stuff and then also just not being able to play would have been a pretty sad defeat.”

Linthicum is “pretty confident” the next section of their tour will get off to a less complicated start, as they roll through Regina, and then Winnipeg on Nov. 23, before heading to a handful of Midwestern states.

Anderson, 20, and Linthicum are second cousins and are currently on the road in support of their third full-length release, The Siren’s Song, produced by Wilco singer/guitarist Jeff Tweedy. It may seem an unlikely connection between a folk duo from Wood Mountain in rural Saskatchewan and an indie heavyweight, but Tweedy had been a longtime admirer of Kacy & Clayton, so much so that he asked the young folkies to open one of Wilco’s shows at The Fillmore in San Francisco during the band’s five-night album release celebration for Schmilco in 2016.

“While we were there, Jeff came over to our little area backstage and wanted to hang… We talked a bit about Saskatchewan and he talked about southern Illinois where he grew up. My parents were there, so I was talking about what they do for a living and he told us what his parents do for a living. It was really nice.” Linthicum says with a chuckle. “He’s one of the kindest men going. He certainly didn’t have to come over and hang out with us.”

As a producer, Linthicum says Tweedy is relatively hands-off, saving his input for the details rather than making sweeping structural changes to the songs and vibe Anderson and Linthicum were going for.

“He’s a good listener. He picks out details that just blow my mind… we’ll be listening to a playback and he’ll hear something that nobody else hears and you realize it after, and that could be, like, he might hear a glitch in the tape, he’s just got a keen ear,” Linthicum says. “Aside from that, he was pretty much free of ego. He didn’t impose much of his own ideas on the whole thing, it was kind of just like he would let us do what we had wanted to do and if he thought he needed to step in, he would. But otherwise it was pretty much like we just were making the record we wanted to make.”

On The Siren’s Song, Kacy & Clayton utilize a full electric band setup for the first time and lean in heavily to the retro folk vibes of the ’60s and ’70s they showcased on their previous albums. Anderson’s voice has a classic quality to it, with the confident femininity and roundness of a young Joni Mitchell, while the musical composition adopts influences from many other genres, a trait of that era of folk music Linthicum especially appreciates.

“I think that was a time when the influence, the popular music of that time was influenced by a lot of great things. There was all this kind of crossover stuff like, for example, The Flying Burrito Brothers, like Gram Parsons, being a member of the Byrds, a rock ’n’ roll group, and then branching off and making sort of this country music, but also it has a lot of soul influence,” he explains. “That sort of thing happened a lot in the ’60s, just the mixing of influences really came out well in those years. And I think that’s what is kind of appealing for us. Because we have a lot of influences and it’s satisfying to try and take from more than one at the same time.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @NireRabel