Call Me Spinster, hailing from Chattanooga, Tennessee, brings a unique blend of kaleidoscopic indie rock and porchy holler pop firmly rooted in a family operation. Formed by three sisters, Amelia, Rachel, and Rosie, the band expertly navigates a myriad of influences from psychedelic folk to ’90s synth-pop. Their journey, highlighted by the addition of motherhood into their band practice, reveals a dedication to their craft amidst the beautiful chaos of raising children. With early beginnings as a cover band, their transition to original songwriting was spurred by personal milestones, leading to the creation of their genre-bending freshman album, Potholes.
Potholes is an exploration of life’s transitions, reflecting themes of marriage, motherhood, and the shift towards domesticity. Amelia shares that the album’s inspiration stemmed from personal experiences, particularly the transformative journey of motherhood, which prompted the band to begin writing their own music. The production process, a collaborative effort with Drew Vandenberg, blends the sisters’ creative vision with Vandenberg’s expertise, resulting in a sound that is both intricate and authentic. The decision to record base tracks live contributes significantly to the album’s genuine feel, capturing the organic chemistry of the band’s live performances.
The familial dynamics of Call Me Spinster play a crucial role in their creative process and in overcoming creative differences. Their bond as sisters fosters a unique collaborative environment, allowing for a blend of individual strengths to shape their music. This closeness is reflected in their harmonies and the cohesiveness of their songs, which span a range of emotions and themes. From the reflective “Married in My Mind” to the exploration of domestic themes in “Feet Are Dirty,” the album navigates the complexities of life with a blend of humor, depth, and musicality.
As they look towards the future, Call Me Spinster aspires to continue their musical journey, with hopes of reaching broader audiences and fulfilling personal milestones, such as performing at a Tiny Desk concert. With “Potholes,” they aim to connect with listeners through shared experiences and emotions, inviting them into the world of Call Me Spinster, where music and family intertwine to create something truly special.
Your upcoming debut album, Potholes, navigates through themes like marriage, motherhood, and settling down in 2024. Can you share the initial inspiration behind this album and how your personal experiences influenced its creation?
Amelia: We started out as a cover band playing mostly ‘80s and ‘90s pop songs – it wasn’t until I had my first kid that we started writing our own music. The first ever was “Here You Are” about the experience of meeting a baby for the first time – feeling totally startled by how fully formed of a human he was, like this wearied little traveler from a different dimension. Another early song was “Feet Are Dirty,” which came out of the sort of disorientation of early marriage and has evolved over time to also chronicle this feeling of being simultaneously stuck and love-struck in my role as a mom, as a largely domestic person. But the songs on this record run the gamut – all three sisters contributed songs, and a few were also a collaboration with my husband – so I think its sum total is a commemoration of life’s many seasons and the nature of them changing rapidly.
This album was co-produced alongside Drew Vandenberg, featuring a blend of psychedelic folk and ’90s synth-pop. Could you describe the production process and how you balanced your creative vision with Drew’s expertise?
Amelia: We did a lot of pre-production for this record, both at home and in a separate session with Drew prior to recording. We had been playing many of these songs out as a band for years in various formations, so they’d been baking for a while. Drew is great at hearing what needs to be simplified – we tend to write a lot of melodically busy parts – and which moments need more complex layers, or a new element. Not all of the songs we worked on in the pre-production session made it to recording, and not all we recorded made it to the album, so maybe we’ll release a B-sides one day.
In recording sessions at Chase Park Transduction, we tracked keys, drums, bass, and guitar all together live for most of the songs and then spent a while working out overdubs at home – including Matt “Pistol” Stoessel on the pedal steel tracks, Wave Magnetik on “Born in a Ditch” and “Burn the Boxes,” additional keys layers on “Married in My Mind,” and a few other tracks by our pal JoJo Glidewell. We recorded lead vocals in the studio and a lot of our background vocals at home.
“Feet Are Dirty,” “Constantly Dying,” and “No Yield Sign” were a little different. We came to the studio with drum tracks programmed for “Feet” and “Constantly” and some synth layer ideas – we’d spent many months working on those with the drummer on the album, John Hooker, who helped with a lot of the demo work. But a lot of the layers on those songs were built in the studio. JoJo plays with the band Of Montreal and has amassed a very cool collection of synths and toys that we dragged in – so there’s everything from a Prophet and Minotaur Moog for more the modern dancy sounds on “Feet” to older stuff like a Dreadbox Nymphe and Oberheim Matrix, even this wacky old heavy organ we lugged in called a Nihon Hammond – that give certain songs a little more vintage flavor. We used two pedals a ton, which gave a really specific sound – on guitars, the Rhodes – I think I even ran my accordion through one on something – Death By Audio’s Echo Dream and EarthQuaker Disaster Transport.
Drew has been recording at Chase Park since he was a kid and is just an effing pro – he knows the room so well, knows the equipment – much of which is analog stuff from the ‘70s and takes a lot of specific finesse and wiggling – and is just very good at creating the conditions where you can get a sound that feels simultaneously raw/real but also shinier, more elevated and full than the versions of these songs that we had been playing live for so many years. He also has this sort of ‘70s ethos that just seeps into things, I think.
I think the whole record is a reflection on life’s seasons – and the bitter and sweet contained in most of them.
Your recent single, “Married in My Mind,” has been praised for its harmonies and emotional depth. Rosie, you mentioned it was inspired by reflections on life and commitment after your grandfather’s funeral. Can you delve into the songwriting process for this track and how it fits into the album’s broader narrative?
Rosie: I think the whole record is a reflection on life’s seasons – and the bitter and sweet contained in most of them. The reason we were drawn to the iconography of potholes was this idea of finding light in dark places – we had this image in our mind of floating in a giant pink flamingo inner tube on a gray, rainy day in the middle of the street in a giant St. Paul pothole. I think my relationship with my partner, Given, has been a lot like that. Right before me and my sisters’ whimsy wonder of a grandpa died, Given and I had just been on our first date, and I had two eight-hour drives to his funeral and back to think about it. And for the first time in my life, I felt like fantasizing about the institution of marriage. Our grandpa was such a vast vat of love and quirky humor, I felt that his passing in some sort of strange way was leaving even more room for me to love this similarly delightful human that quickly became my partner in transforming potholes into perfectly acceptable private beaches. This song sonically embodies that trippy ride that falling in love with Given is, and the simple text is the ownership of that strange desire to try out all the ups and downs of life with someone I wasn’t even sure felt the same way yet.
I wrote the song back in Chattanooga and just had some chords, melody and a little bit of a bass line we ended up scrapping. I thought it was a quarter of the way finished, but Rachel and Amelia immediately heard the song as a more lo-fi electronica song and liked that it was sparse. They wrote me a new bass line and started adding layers and layers until it felt whole.
With the band’s practice dynamics deeply intertwined with motherhood, how do you balance the responsibilities of parenting with the demands of creating and performing music? How has motherhood influenced your artistry and the thematic elements of your music?
Rachel: Rosie and I moved to Chattanooga to jump in as co-parents and start a band when Amelia’s first was born, so the band and motherhood have the same birthday. Our parents recently retired and are huuuuge supporters of this whole endeavor, they do a lot of kid wrangling, as do other grandparents, and our partners are hugely supporting and subsidizing this thing. My husband Alfredo went from muse to payroll after we recorded studio guitar on our EP. He learned the guitar parts while working from home and listening to our rehearsals every day and has since become a constant in our sound playing with us at nearly every gig. His presence makes covering childcare for our six-month-old more complicated, but both his playing and his personality have a stabilizing effect that makes the extra babysitters totally worth it.
It’s not always cute or easy – I remember Amelia leaving her nine-month-old to tour around SXSW. We were sleeping on the floor of a stranger’s freezing apartment after playing for six drunk regulars at a dive bar in Oklahoma, and she, all teary, was like, “I’m too old for this s—t.”
I think the whole nature of starting a band at this point in life has forced us to slow down, be choosier, crack it in a manner that feels more sustainable, more community-oriented. It’s also been such a huge gift – a lifeline to an outside world and community in a time that can be really lonely and narrow for a lot of new parents. It also allows us to collaborate and share a lot of the domestic labor, probably more akin to how people have been doing this thing for millennia – we take turns feeding each other, watching each other’s kids while someone does booking emails or sets up for practice or works on a new song. And songwriting itself has been such an important outlet for us to think through all of these rapidly shifting eras – all of the psychedelic, existential questions posed by childbirth and child-rearing, the ebbs and flows of marriage. “Constantly Dying” was partly a response to one of our kids asking, “Why are we born if we all just … die?” That kind of thing. A lot of our songs are love songs. Falling in or out of love, demanding to be loved on our terms, or being afraid of losing those we love. I used to worry that having a baby would trump or take away love I had previously allotted, but instead, it’s opened a new ventricle, making space for new meaning for our songs, and even more feels to write about.
Potholes is described as blending various musical influences, from dreamy melodies to intricate harmonies. Can you talk about the artists or genres that have influenced this album the most and how you’ve made these influences your own?
Amelia: We grew up in a big folk, classical, vocal jazz-heavy household. Our parents met in music school; mom was a choral conductor and teacher, and our dad is a singer-songwritery guitarist, so our household deities were Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Ella Fitzgerald, Carole King. But our musical tastes have branched in millions of directions throughout the years. You can hear some Dolly and Alison Krauss, Brazilian Girls, Minnie Riperton, there’s some ‘90s trip-hop in there like Portishead and Massive Attack, Air, Bjork. Maybe a little New Orleans flavor snuck in from Amelia’s time living there. Rachel played in a Brazilian drum ensemble in college – that probably factors in.
In general, songs usually emerge pretty organically in the form of melody and some lyrics, and we sort of follow them to the chord structure and eventually genre and feel that they want to be.
The album features live-recorded base tracks and countless harmonies and overdubs. What led to the decision to incorporate these live elements, and how do you feel they contribute to the overall sound and authenticity of Potholes?
Amelia: Drew typically records this way as much as possible, often with live scratch vocals as well, and I think it goes a long way in capturing the organic groove and chemistry of a live performance. I think you can hear that in the people he works with – Faye Webster, S.G. Goodman. It’s also not squeaky clean. There are some songs where this felt like a very definitive choice – like shutting off the click track so we could feel more free, allowing vocals to not land squarely on pitch all of the time. We tried out a bit of layering in the song “Potholes,” for instance – bowed bass, more piano ideas – but ended up liking the vulnerability of very simple piano and thin, low-fi scratch vocals, even left in the squeak and rustle of the piano bench. Others wanted to feel driven by something more mechanical, like “Constantly Dying,” so we worked from a built drum track and built up loads of vocal layers, doubling each harmony part multiple times.
I think we’ve also learned to really make space for and appreciate each other’s distinct personalities and superpowers.
As a band of sisters, how do your familial ties and dynamics influence your creative process, decision-making, and the way you resolve creative differences?
Amelia: We often laugh about what humbling, “people growing” institutions parenting and marriage are, and any joint endeavor with your siblings may be even more so. You have to learn to woman up and, at the very least, apologize. We’ve learned to work with some of our broader family challenges – sometimes that means embracing our looooong roundabout decision-making process by chucking band practice for long business meetings and debate and then setting actual future deadlines for decision-making. Sometimes, our much more straightforward partners swoop in and help project-manage.
I think we’ve also learned to really make space for and appreciate each other’s distinct personalities and superpowers. Rachel and I spent the first many years of our life speaking over Rosie – she was super shy and used to stick her tongue out instead of answer people’s questions. We still have a tendency to do that – but also look to Rosie as the person who has been watching and intuiting, catching the pieces that have been overlooked.
I am tunnel-visioned and relentless, and I think my sisters make space for that by keeping my kids alive, returning my dog to me when I forget her at their houses – hoping that some work or a good song came out of it.
“Feet Are Dirty” has been highlighted as a standout track, described as a “mom-pop ode to Robyn” about the ups and downs of domestic life. Can you share more about the story behind this song and how it represents the album’s exploration of domestic themes?
Rosie: This song was one of our first and has been through many transformations, paralleling our lives from new marriage to feeding four tiny mouths on the regular. Amelia wrote the song humming on her bed, forgetting that her husband was at book club for the evening. We made it (actually with the help of her husband Dan) into a sort of freedom cry breakup song, but as we dove deeper into parenthood and marriage, we continued to identify with this feeling of seeking freedom in our suddenly very domestic lives and finding it in the small, every-day joys: sharing popsicles on a porch, watching your baby take in the world, still being in love with your partner after the worst fight of your life.
With Potholes marking a significant step in your musical journey, what future aspirations do you have for Call Me Spinster? Musically or personally, are there any particular goals that you aim to achieve following the album’s release?
Rachel: Besides getting really famous? There are specific goals that seemed like silly fantasies at the beginning. We would joke about our upcoming interview with Jimmy Fallon and have been manifesting a Tiny Desk appearance since our grandpa began sending us his faves back in 2010, before Call Me Spinster was even a twinkle in our eyes.
Rosalie: When we all converged in Chattanooga and did “sister band” for real, I think we were all surprised at how good and sustainable it felt. Not because it was easy, but for so many unexplainable reasons, it felt right and bigger than us. It feels like we’re just getting started as writers and musicians. I think the current goal is to keep this feeling going as long as possible and when it no longer feels right, finally work on those covers we’ve never gotten to.
Lastly, what message or feelings do you hope listeners take away from Potholes? Is there a particular impact you wish to have on your audience through your music and the stories you tell?
Rachel: Most everyone who makes art and puts it on display probably hopes that it speaks to someone and makes us all feel a little more connected in this great human experiment. “Potholes” is generally about finding joy or beauty in the dark and mundane, and we hope it brings that to people as they continue paddling in their own pothole of the day-to-day. As teachers, we want our live show to feel contagious like people can’t help but want to sing or clap or dance or sway along and then get inspired to go home and start a project with their family (chosen or otherwise). As moms, we want to show our kids that we and therefore they are connected to this big, beautiful world, and we can be honest about ourselves and grow and share our stories but still make time to care for each other and say thanks.
