Vaughn Walters and Jenny Parrot are bringing their brand new folk project to the Bullfrog Brewery, 229 W. Fourth St., at 8 p.m. Monday. The music blends emotional performances with great, old timey stories and classic folk licks.
Parrot was in town a few months ago and the Sun-Gazette interviewed her for an article about her band "Shotgun Party." This time, her Loves It!?bandmate Walters spoke with us. The group's delicious album "Yay!" is available for download at www.lovesit.bandcamp.com.
APRIL LINE: Loves It! is great! Talk to me about the songwriting process.
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VAUGHN WALTERS: Thank you! Recently, we've been writing separately, but about a third of the songs on that album, we wrote together. We'd have something, and then we'd pitch it back and forth. The song "Me Alone" I pitched to Jenny and she almost immediately wrote the second half. A lot of the time during the writing of that album, we were touring with separate bands.
AL: So are you about in the middle of your three-month tour?
VW: We are! We're right in the middle.
AL: Where next?
VW: We're in Boston right now. We're going to Hartford tonight.
AL: When you're done with the tour, are you going to head back to Austin?
VW: We both live in Austin and we're going to get back on March 4th and South by Southwest is a big music festival and we'll be in town until mid-April.
AL: Do you have other jobs?
VW: Jenny had a job in town, but that business closed. I have a job - I work when I'm in town at a print shop. When we get back, it'll take us about a week to recover. I hope to find some kind of employment. It'll be nice to have some structure, which I never really thought was that important until I was on tour for three and a half months.
With my old band, my routine was oatmeal. Any kind of continuity that you can find when you're on the road helps. You never know what you're going to get until you get to the show that night.
AL: Are you traveling in an RV? How's that?
VW: Yeah, totally. I should send you a picture of it. It's really awesome. We loaned it to our friends who are shooting a movie called "Loves Her Gun" and they needed a touring vehicle. So they borrowed the RV and painted the "Rising Sun" logo on the side of it.
AL: It has to be better than a conversion van.
VW: My first band, we traveled in a Volvo, and there was this tiny little nugget of space to sit in. The next band was a conversion van - that was pretty much paradise compared to the Volvo. In the RV, we have a refrigerator and a stove. We can make good food. We have a place to sleep every night. It's good for our sanity. I don't think I could deal with a three-and-a-half month tour in a Honda Civic.
AL: How'd you pick the cities in which you're playing?
VW: We did all the booking ourselves. Jenny did the majority of it. We both toured in other bands for years, so we knew a bunch of places and a bunch of people. It was easier than it would be for a start-up band.
AL: What are your plans for the future?
VW: This is so new; I just want to see where this takes us. We've been talking about this for a long time and it's going better than I expected it to. We just want to get in front of more people. As long as we keep improving musically, I just want to keep doing this as long as possible.
AL: When I interviewed Jenny, when she was in Shotgun Party, she said she reads a ton of books. Do you read a ton of books, too?
VW: No, I don't read a lot of books. The only thing I've been reading lately, seriously, for hours a day, I've been reading about guitar amps. I brought books with me. But I can't peel myself away from reviews of Fender Guitar amps. Jenny reads constantly. I'm always dorking out on gear and she's over there educating herself about something.
AL: Do you think it matters what you read as long as you're reading?
VW: What if I'm reading about Brangelina?
AL: I would read about them. They have to have a ridiculous existence.
VW: Yeah, man. It's funny to think that celebrities are just people. Brad Pitt probably gets up in the morning, makes himself some eggs and somebody's taking a picture of him through the window.
AL: Do you think he makes his own eggs?
VW: Good point. No more amps! For the rest of the day I'm only reading about Brangelina. Next time we talk, five page reports!
AL: I don't know if there's a lot of reliable information out there.
VW: Whatever! People Magazine is the best source!
AL: Well, as long as I can use Wikipedia.
[lauging]
