The secret sisters are Laura and Lydia Rogers and are relative newcomers to the mainstrream country music scene with their organic, classic-sounding music featured on their debut album The Secret Sisters. After auditioning for industry people last October, the sisters quickly found kindred souls in Universal Repubic Records and producer Dave Cobb.
After debuting a two song 45 single produced by Jack White this summer, The Seccret Sisters sat down with Roughstock Editor Matt Bjroke to discuss their life and their album and their approach to making music.
Matt Bjorke: How did you get interested in country music?
Laura: It’s always funny when people ask us those kinds of questions…
Lydia: we didn’t get interested in music, it was just there from the beginning…
Matt: Well, you were born and raised in Muscle Shoals, AL…
Laura: We were raised in a musical family. So all along, you kind of had no choice really. It wasn’t shoved down our throats but it was always there. Obviously our parents would’ve supported us no matter which direction went in but it was in our blood and we loved “old” music and family harmonies, we loved that for years. So here we are.
Matt: “Old Music,” how were you drawn to sing songs like the songs you’re singing because most artists, even if they sing the most contemporary sounding stuff are inspired by the older tunes. So how did you choose to sing the traditional tunes you sing?
Laura: I think that with us, if it’s us singing individually, whether it’s me in my room or Lydia at the piano, we don’t necessarily sing the ‘old stuff’ because we love artists from today, the seventies and the eighties so we’re all over the place but whenever we sing together, our just voices lend themselves to the older sounding music with the harmonies and I think our voices sound a little more ‘classic’ when we sing together.
Lydia: It’s not like we tried to sound like that either, we just do when we have those harmonies. It’s just that era of music.
Matt: So the sound just lent itself to the classics…
Laura: I don’t think you can love music if you don’t appreciate the classics. If you don’t pay tribute to that in some small or large way, then I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. I think the reason why we’re so drawn to that music is that it’s not out there much anymore, there’s so little that sounds like that.
Matt: How cool is it for you to be able to share these kinds of songs to a newer generation, to younger people who may not have heard these songs before?
Laura: It’s what we wanted to do…
Lydia: It’s really cool to be able to appeal to the older generations and the younger generations. We don’t want to just appeal to one set age group. We want to have younger people to bring their grandparents to the show and have everyone enjoy it.
Laura: I think that’s one thing that’s great about what they’re doing. I mean I love artists like Jack White, Rufus Wainwright and Brandi Carlile but bringing their albums to my grandmother for her to listen to it is not something I would do because it’s rare to find something that you love as a young person that will also appeal to your grandparents. So I think it’s really cool that young people can hear our album and think it’s so cool and new and different yet it’s old. So they can take it to their grandparents and say, listen to this, this is something you grew-up on. I think our dream is one day to be able to get to a point in our touring career where young people can bring their grandparents to the show. I think that would be so special to help bridge the generational musical gap.
Matt: You talked about Jack. What was it like to work with Jack White for that two song 45 single?
Lydia: We were such huge fans of his since we were really young so to be in the studio with him was so mind-blowing. We had to remember to not be such fan girls while out recording with him.
Laura: It was hard to make the switch mentally from “I’m a huge fan of Jack White” to “he’s our producer on this two song record.” We really had to mentally prepare ourselves before we went in to not have a ‘stupid moment’ and not say something idiotic. Fortunately, he’s so humble and down to earth and likable that the collaboration was a natural one. I mean most people only get to see jack from where they sit to where he’s standing on the stage, and he was standing five feet away from us shedding on his guitar…
Matt: Was that a ‘pinch me moment?’
Laura: Oh, absolutely. That was one of the highest points so far was to be able to work with him and for somebody who is such a tastemaker like him to believe in us and our music was incredible. Who doesn’t want Jack White to love their music? It’s like Christmas (laughs).
Matt: I think the ‘hipsters’ that follow Jack White know that he’s into stuff that’s not just rock. I mean he produced Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose record and Loretta has said – just a few weeks ago – that he is the best producer that she worked with so perhaps more artists should look to Jack to produce their records, if he wants to do it…
Laura: I think that it’s important if you want that longevity. If you want to appear applicable to the generation that’s coming up now, you need to find tastemakers that will help your music appeal to them. So eventhough Loretta Lynn’s music isn’t “new” - and I use that term loosely – it still has to appear fresh and every time you do something new, you have to show a new side of yourself…
Matt: She says it was the ‘countriest’ record that she’s ever recorded…
Laura: That’s amazing. To be able to get that kind of record out of her and be known as this kind of rocker guy…
Matt: Well his music has basically been a back-to-basics sound without many overdubs so it makes sense on some level.
Both: Yeah.
Matt: This actually brings us to the next question. I know your album wasn’t an ‘overdubbed’ record either. What was it like to work with Dave Cobb on this album?
Laura: Oh, Dave was amazing. We are humongous Dave Cobb fans. He was on the original panel of judges that heard us a year ago that eventually lead to the record deal and album and everything. We had a great meeting of the minds with Dave. He kind of knew what we wanted without us having to tell him. We didn’t know how to verbalize what we wanted…
Lydia: He just knew…
Laura: …he instinctively knew. When we all got into the studio together, we didn’t really know what was gonna come out of it but in that moment is when we were really created and we figured out what our sound is and what we love and we want to drive this. He was interested in being true to the era. He told us this from the beginning that ‘we’re not going to auto-tune, you’re gonna sing in one microphone, there will be no fancy-schmancy anything’ and that’s what we did.
Matt: That’s what Hal Ketchum did a few years ago. The album was recorded in two days and he explicitly recorded it with a full band without any overdubs in one basic long session. People want that. Why do we like live shows? To hear the real, live feel of music. I know there’s a place for pop music and ‘ear candy’ types of music but…
Laura…(laughing)…If I have to hear another ‘blerp blerp’ vocoder thing again…
Matt… I can tell you like music a lot because “vocoder” is a term/instrument that has been around for a long while, but now people hear stuff like that and hear ‘autotune.’ Stuff like this has been around longer than people think (laughs)…
Laura: I think that people are craving, I don’t know if our music is what they’re going to like or not but the population as a whole is craving real pure simple talent that isn’t overproduced and over-stylized so that when you go to a show they will hear stuff that is almost as good as, or better than what you hear on the record. And that’s what we always want, to make sure our performance live is as honest and pure and as simple as the record is. And that’s a thing with the record. We were not afraid of mistakes. There were some pitch issues, some wrong notes, some different pronunciations of things but you know what, that gives music character. Some of the stuff on the radio today…
Matt: Yeah a lot of stuff is probably too perfect…
Laura: Exactly, nobody can pull that off live…
Matt: There are some and I quote “artists” that cannot sing live.
Laura: I think that’s why as an artist you have to be careful with the choice of producers you work with. Because if you pick the right person…obviously producers will want to make it as perfect as possible because it’s their reputation on the line as well as yours but if you get the right person who is naturally good, you don’t have to overthink it and it will come out right.
Lydia: You can appreciate imperfections too…
Matt: You have never had a singing lesson, so how did growing up attending Church shape you as a vocalist?
Lydia: Our church didn’t have musical instruments at all so we had to learn how to read music, I sang alto all the time. You had to learn how to blend together…
Laura: We didn’t have a choir, or solos or anything. Everyone was in the room singing along with you. So sometimes you would be sitting next to your first cousin or next to a complete stranger but you had to get your ear trained to learn not to overpower, and to blend harmonies. So we’ve literally been in church singing our whole life.
Matt: So you guys will be in-demand session harmony singers soon, right?
Laura: (laughing) We’d do that and we do find people asking us ‘will you but a harmony track on that?”
Matt: yeah, and it’s one of the hardest things for professional singers to do, to be able to harmonize with anybody…
Laura: That’s what we’ve heard. For us we harmonize best when we’re together but I think growing up in that environment has trained us well to be able to hear and do it.
Matt: So how did you go about choosing the “old songs” that you recorded, like the old David Houston track “All About You…”
Laura: “All About You” was a song that was performed at all of our family reunions so that’s why we chose that one.
Lydia: That was collaboration with our producer Dave Cobb. We just threw out dieas of which songs we kind of wated to do.
Laura: we were so new and everything was so rushed…
Lydia: we didn’t have time to write, really…
Laura: Everybody wanted to get a record out to the public quickly so we could start a buzz so we didn’t have time to write and we decided there were so many great songs out there already so like Lydia said, we went through iTunes, YouTube and other sources to pick some good songs. And we sent ideas back and forth to one another and Dave was great about taking a song and freshening it up a bit and some were true to the original. We also don’t want to record just ‘old country songs’ so we mixed in some pop songs like “Something Stupid…”
Matt: Which was recorded by the Mavericks and Trisha Yearwood back in the 1990s...What can you tell me about the single “I’ve Got A Feeling?”
Laura: We discovered that one on YouTube. A 15 year old Nancy Barron recorded that song and if you listen to her on that, she sounds very young…
Lydia: but she’s on it, man…
Laura: yeah, but she’s got a really good voice, she really does. So if you talk about that song, most people have never heard of it or don’t remember it. It’s also a little ‘poppy’ so that is one that [aduot pop] radio stations have gravitated to. It’s a really fun one to do live too.
Matt: How did you get T-Bone Burnett’s attention? Because he’s considered by many to be a ‘roots music’ a ‘God’ or something, and now an Oscar winner…
Lydia: Our label had a lot to do with that, they pushed the album towards T-Bone, he loved it and got on board and mixed and mastered the album. He also gave us a good advice about how to develop our sound…
Laura: …just a lot of lessons on how to hear things and to be able to listen to things that may be so abrasive to listeners ears…
Lydia: Yeah, he hears many things we wouldn’t think of to listen to…
Laura: he’s such a preservationist of old-time music too…
Matt: Yeah, the Old Brother Where Art Thou? Record…
Laura: Yeah…
Matt: and now he’s created an imprint label just for you guys…
Lydia: yeah it’s like a special present just for us from T-Bone.
To celebrate the release of The Secret Sisters, we have partnered with the Secret Sisters and Beladroit/Universal Republic Records to offer fans a chance to win a copy of the album. Click here to enter the contest.
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