CALICO
the band - Singing About Runway Cowgirls and Breaking Your Hearts
CALICO
the band - Singing About Runway Cowgirls and Breaking Your Hearts
CALICO the band, comprised of three
singers-songwriters-musicians from Southern California has been steadily
increasing their fanbase, radio airplay of their original songs and have
performed more than 200 gigs during the past twelve months and as we go to
press, they are once again touring, this time in the Pacific Northwest. They are
defined by beautiful, pristine harmonies and they strike a good balance between
writing and performing thoughtful songs and other tunes that are just outright
fun. Manda Mosher, Kirsten Proffit and Aubrey Richmond are the three ladies of
CALICO the band and before they joined forces all three of them were already
highly regarded artists. The group is riding high in the saddle these days as
their debut album Rancho California
receives rave reviews from music journalists throughout America.
Manda Mosher says the seeds for the album
Rancho California were first sown
when she and Kirsten Proffit got together to write some songs.
“It really had to do with the inception of the band and
that was before we knew it was going to be a band. It really just started with
songwriting. Kirsten had an idea to write some songs together, so we started as
a songwriting team and it was the inspiration from the quality of the songs that
we were producing together and singing together, as well as the harmony that
sparked an interest in continuing to do that.
We thought wow this is special and different than anything that we had
been doing on our own. We were
creating a new sound.
We started out by making some demos of the songs.
Kirsten is a production partner with Steve Berns. They have a long
history of working on projects together, as a production team, so Kirsten
brought us into Steve’s studio, which is The Fitting Room Studios. We as the
band had input all along the way.
This record ended up being done that way except for one track, “Dead Reckoning,”
which was produced by Rami Jaffee a member of the Foo Fighters and The
Wallflowers,” says Mosher.
“It’s
going to burn like the devil / It’s going to sting real good / You won’t be able
to wash it off / It’s like a bad tattoo / I guess I should have warned you /
Before I let you jump in / But we’re already peaking / And it’s all down hill
from here,”
the first few lines from the song
“Break Your Heart,” from the album
Rancho California, are hardly words
that inspire confidence in a man, especially when sung by three beautiful women.
Kirsten Proffit says, “When we do it live Manda puts the
castanets over her head like some sort of Latin dancer (Mosher adds, “In
Flamenco style.”), and it is so cute. It is a fun live song.”
Mosher picks it up from there, “When people start
hearing the lyrics, both men and women start to laugh.”
As
for the song “Runaway Cowgirl,” Manda Mosher says, “We felt like writing a real
love song, because we didn’t really have one like that on the record. Then we
thought of this story and sometimes we call this song, “The Ballad of Ginger and
Danny.” (It is about) a girl who is working in a bar at a dead end job in a
small town. She had big dreams and hopes and she had a whole future ahead of
her, but she just couldn’t see it.
Sitting there in that bar she was losing her faith and the excitement of life,
when in comes this trucker character and interestingly enough Kirsten has
experience working with truckers in the past. Kirsten has all of these
connections with these truckers that she has helped get from point A to point B
in routing them all around the country and she knows who they are and their
character. We were curious about the truckers and we started asking all of these
questions about them and what their lives were like. We decided to make the male
character a trucker who comes through town. They meet each other in the bar,
they fall in love and they decide to run off together (Kirsten
laughs lightly) (We ask if they run
off together in his big wheeler and there is more laughter from all of them).
They might have ditched the big wheeler for a sports car. I don’t know. We
didn’t get that far. We really
wanted a sweet love song on the record and it just has a real touching feel to
it. That line, “love is just one stop away,” is funny, because you never know
when it is going to show up. It feels like a big surprise when it does. You are
just going through your life and you can feel very bleak about it or maybe it is
never going to happen to me again. All of a sudden there it is.”
Aubrey Richmond talks about the music video for another of the album’s songs, “Runaway Cowgirl.” “I find with CALICO we have so many good friends and fans and even when I came into this they had a group of friends and fans that were so supportive. A lot of people love the band and respond to it and sometimes people will say, hey, I really want to do a music video for you. A lot of times it just feels right to let them take the lead creatively. I believe that Kirsten and Cody Bedbe were already friends and they knew each other from previous things. He had a video production company that he started called Digital Vendetta Productions. He just loved the song “Runaway Cowgirl,” and he had this whole vision for it. He started setting us up in different locations (in Yakima Valley) to do the shots and a friend had an old car that he borrowed for the day. We put it (the video) in his hands and we let him do his thing. We were so happy with how it all turned out. We were up there on our Pacific Northwest tour in May. It was freezing that day, but gorgeous.”
Proffit picks up the conversation at this point, “It is
funny we started in the morning and we ended before dark that day. They did the
editing over a few days back and forth, because they are artists too. For such a
simple thing with less than perfect conditions and everything I think that we
are getting a really nice response from it.
The scene in the beginning where there are all of those
apple blossoms (Mosher adds, “They were just gorgeous.”) The next day a
windstorm blew through and blew every one of those blossoms off of the trees.
We have (endorsements with) Gretsch guitars and in that
video Manda is playing the Gretsch mandolin and I am playing a red Gretsch
acoustic guitar. Gretsch really liked it. They posted it up on their
gretschguitars.com and their Gretsch pages and that got a lot of attention.”
That provided a nice segue into a discussion about the
importance of endorsements for an artist or band.
Proffit says, “To me it is very important, because not
only do you get the support of the company backing you with the instruments, but
we are also able to get instruments when we need them.
We needed a new mandolin and they got us another level up of mandolin
called the Gretsch Park Avenue. It has just come into the family, so we are
still getting used to it. It is a beautiful instrument and it is really nice to
just be able to have it, because these things are expensive. We are very hard on
our instruments, because we are traveling a lot. They are being put in and out
of the trailer everyday when we are on tour, in heat and cold, so it is really
nice to have a company behind you that wants to have those instruments in your
hands.
The other thing is the marketing and the fact that we
were able to get our video on their (Gretsch) website and in an email blast to
hundreds of thousands of people who would not have seen us otherwise.
It has become a partnership, we are proud to play their instruments and
they are happy that we are out there gigging with them and going to these
different cities. On our last tour they put us in a Sam Ash store and we did a
little question and answer (session). We are going to be doing more of those
types of things for Gretsch where we go play in music stores. They also have
radio there or someone to do an interview. We answer the questions of the
patrons at the store who ask about our instruments and how we use them. It’s fun
and it is another way to engage with your audience. The audience wants to know.
Almost at every show that we play, someone comes up and wants to know, what is
that guitar? We have some really beautiful instruments. Manda plays the
resonator and everybody always wants to know what that thing is. It looks cool
and it sounds cool. It is a really neat partnership (with Gretsch) to have.”
Mosher says, “Kirsten was talking about how people ask
us about the instruments and it is like an icebreaker when we are done
performing. They really like to do that and it makes it easier to talk about the
brand that we are promoting. They just come right up and say, what are these
things? I have this white Gretsch electric Panther guitar and it sounds really
cool and it looks really cool. They come up to it and go ooohhh what is it?”
For fans of vocal harmonies it doesn’t get any better
than the song “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” Each of the ladies sings one verse and
then they harmonize on the chorus. To say that Manda Mosher, Aubrey Richmond and
Kirsten Proffit serve up a breathtaking beautiful vocal performance almost
sounds like an understatement.
The question is posed to the group as to whether or not
their song “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” is the most Country sounding song of this
record.
Kirsten Proffit replies, “That would be fair. You
wouldn’t lose any demerits for that.”
Aubrey Richmond says, “I guess you could make a case for
that. In the seventies the Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons were Country
(West Coast Country Rock), but now
more and more they are referring to bands like Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills
& Nash, as the California Country sound. To me, “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” still
reflects a lot of that Roots Rock Folk sensibility of that time. If I am
thinking more of modern Country, I would go to “Runaway Cowgirl,” having more of
that vibe in the traditional sense.”
Mosher says, “We do have a music video that will be
coming out for “The Lone Ranger,” and that was the first song that we wrote. The
video will be coming out as an exclusive with Gretsch. They did an interview
with us and then they are going to announce that video. We are really excited
about it. It really does everything in one song. It showcases each of us
individually with our own verses and then blending our harmonies on the chorus
together. It has a very unique, identifying CALICO kind of sound.
We feel in a lot of ways that we are continuing
traditions that we learned and that we loved while growing up. Great songwriters
like Bob Dylan are very inspirational to us. Crosby, Stills & Nash are very
inspirational to us in terms of their harmonies, songwriting and the
instrumentation. All of these artists who have come before us (inspired us) and
many of them are still going in various incarnations, but we feel as the younger
generation that we have our own stories to tell and we have our own way of
incorporating those influences. I feel
like we are a part of a lineage in musical history. We are carrying on more of
the California sound, the Laurel Canyon sound, because that is what we are
closer to and it is the region where we live.”
The beginning of CALICO the band can be traced to the
“Lone Ranger,” which was the first song that Kirsten Proffit and Manda Mosher
wrote together.
Manda Mosher talks about the song. “It is about
traveling, being out there on the road and being out there in the world. (It is
about) feeling like you are by yourself and feeling like you are on your own
solo path and then you meet others that you realize are just like you. Lone
Rangers are loners out there on their own paths and then you come together and
there is sweetness to not being so alone anymore. That is how we really felt
about each other as a band. We were all solo artists, doing our own thing and
then we met each other, and we saw each other, in each other.”
You can listen for CALICO the band’s music on AAA and
Americana radio stations in the United States. Early in 2015 the group has plans
to start creating a new album, sandwiched in between their fall 2014 tour and a
spring 2015 tour.
Please visit the CALICO the band
website and you can follow them on their
official Facebook page.