Burgeoning Americana quartet tracks tour thru Bozeman
Quickly and not-so-quietly making their mark on the Americana scene, Wyoming foursome The Two Tracks head to the Pacific Northwest this month for their “West Coast Tour” — but not before a welcome return to the Bozeman area for a show serving as the tour kickoff.
Hitting the road in promotion of their new album Postcard Town, the band is comprised of Julie Szewc (vocals, acoustic guitar), David Huebner (cello, electric guitar), Fernando “Fred” Serna (drums, percussion), and Aaron Ashear (bass).
“Vibrant harmonies and a knack for writing eager, infectious melodies guarantee them an ability to lock on to their listeners without any hesitation whatsoever,” said Country Standard Time. “The Two Tracks’ music serves as a reminder that the ability to tap tradition can pay off with a sound that’s still contemporary in its delivery and insightful in its conception.”
Roots music journal No Depression wrote of the group, “There is just enough twang in the music to make it country, and just enough rock to make it interesting. Lay the voices of Szewc and Huebner on top and it is a musical banana split of consequence.”
In anticipation of their upcoming Bozeman performance, The Rolling Zone dialed up Szewc and Huebner to talk inspirations for their genre-bending sound and taking it on the open road.
RZ: Wyoming-based, The Two Tracks are starting to pop up more frequently around Southwest Montana. Who is this band and what are its intentions and aspirations?
DH: [We’re] a four-piece Americana band out of Sheridan. We’re going to be touring more this fall than we have been this summer — just trying to get further and further away from home, slowly but surely, to get our sound out there. It’s a real classic Americana sound. We’ve got a lot of different influences with bluegrass, and blues and rock ‘n’ roll and folk. We try to tie that all up into one show.
RZ: For those who haven’t had a chance to catch a show, what can Bozemanites expect from your September show, and others to be determined?
DH: It’s definitely good dancing music. A lot of different Americana genres are well represented. Some bands blend all those into one sort of unique sound that’s very similar on all their songs, but we try to represent each one of those somewhat individually. We have some very bluegrassy songs, we have some very bluesy songs, we have some very folky songs.
JS: And we’ve been working on a lot of new material since our album came out. We’re going to be featuring some new songs at that [Sept. 7th] show as well.
RZ: You’re also bringing the man behind Live from the Divide, Jason Wickens, along for the show. How did that collaboration come to be?
DH: It was suggested by the venue and we thought that would be a really good idea.
JS: It was a good pairing. We supported Jason’s Kickstarter, met him after [our] show at Live, and he’s got some good music!
RZ: Let’s dive into your original music. The Two Tracks’ second album, Postcard Town, released in May. What does this collection represent? Would you say there’s a central theme to the tunes, or that it’s more assorted?
JS: I would say it’s more assorted. The difference between the [albums], the first [The Two Tracks] was all of my songs, and the second we kind of collaborated with Dave and added more of his music in. It’s a good mix. We have a lot of songs about the West. I trend towards writing sad love songs, Dave trends towards writing songs about the mountains. He’s an outdoors guy. He’d be just fine up in the mountains for months on end by himself. I guess there are some themes there.
RZ: How do you decide what makes the final tracklist?
JS: Every time we do an album we’ve got so many songs, we’ll go through and try to pick things that are going to fit well together. It was kind of fun going through the process of looking at all of our songs we had on the table and saying, “Okay. What really do we want this to sound like,” picking and choosing. We have quite a few songs for the next [one], and we’re consistently writing. We hope to do another album next year. It’s just always a fun process. Dave or I’ll write a song and we’ll bring it to the band [to] come up with the arrangements with the entire group. On the first album, I had everything figured out. I knew what I wanted to hear on the guitar, what I wanted to hear for a bassline, and now it’s more of a collective effort where we’ll bring it to the group and try different things.
RZ: Produced by Will Kimbrough and recorded in Nashville, how did the creation of this sophomore effort differ from your eponymous debut, released only last year?
JS: We made the first album with Chris Cunningham at Basecamp Studios, right there in Bozeman. It was similar in the sense they were both pretty comfortable atmospheres, really laid back personalities, and also were really easy to work with. The difference in Nashville, we did hire Will as a producer, so he had more insight into everything. We came with fully-arranged tracks, went through each song a few times. Then we’d go back and listen and he’d say, “Hey. Let’s throw this or this on.” It was great because he had a lot of great ideas. He’s been in the business for so long and played with so many great people. Having him there, available for us to feed off his energy was pretty cool.
RZ: You’ve thus far released these albums independently. How does that work?
DH: With the second album we did a Kickstarter, so we were able to crowdsource. That was a really fun process, we’d never done that before. To some degree, you expand your dedicated fan base because all of a sudden you find several hundred people signing up for albums. It’s a great feeling to have all that support. We hope, perhaps in the future, to get a record label. It’s not as much of an industry anymore, but we definitely see that it’s helpful. We have a publicist and radio promoter and got the album up to, I think, number 75 on the Americana charts —
JS: Pretty awesome for being independent.
DH: Yeah. We hope to do better next time with a little more awareness of the band, and a little more touring to back it up. We’re just going to keep plugging along until a label says, “Hey we want you.” [laughs]
RZ: From either of your albums, is there a particular song each of you have a special connection with that you also love to perform? That may be an unfair question.
DH: I’m kind of torn between a couple of my songs, “Old Coyote Moon” and “Dragonfly.” They both talk about some outdoor themes, and I’m sort of nostalgic about when I wrote them and where I was at the time. “Dragonfly” includes a Gary Snyder poem — [he’s] a huge influence on me. “Old Coyote Moon” is a reference to Native American mythology a little bit, the coyote stories, and thinking back on where we used to be and things like that. I love getting to project those messages to a crowd.
JS: I love those songs, too. “Dragonfly” is a little groovy, so you can kind of lay back and get in the groove. That’s a great one… You know, I’d have to say probably one of our most popular ones to this day is off of our first album — “Old Victrola.” That’s got a little bit of a groove to it too. That one is probably the most requested song we get. It was written about an old Victrola player we have here at the house.
RZ: Switching gears a little bit, each of your albums have some pretty amazing cover art. Is there a particular artist you guys use? Why art instead of a band pic?
DH: I think we all, at least Julie and I, really love bands that’ve done really creative artwork rather than portrait shots on the cover. I basically created the artwork for both albums, obviously with plenty of influence and help from Julie. The first one is our local skyline here, Cloud Peak and Bomber Mountain from the Big Horn. The second cover I got from a photograph I had of the Tongue River Canyon, which a beautiful spot right outside Sheridan. I used that photo to draw the image, then we did a whole lot of messing around with it, layering, distressing and all of that. Now we’ve raised the bar by doing two like that.
RZ: You might have to keep up with the theme.
JS: And Dave is so creative. We’re very fortunate to have a graphic designer in our group.
RZ: Can you share the story behind the name of the band?
JS: Fred and I, the drummer, we’ve been playing for quite a few years. Fred and I started the group. We had a different guitar player and bass player. At the time we were in different projects, but we’d get together and perform as The Two Tracks every couple months or so. I have an anthropology degree with a concentration in archaeology, so years of my life was spent serving throughout the country. I went to school in Colorado then got a job doing archaeology survey in Sheridan. So I spent a lot of time on the road, spent a lot of time driving on two-track roads. That’s where the idea originally surfaced. Since then, there’s so many correlations with “The Two Tracks” — people will think it’s a railroad track, or in the wintertime we’ll do a poster with ski tracks. There’s a lot of creative energy in the graphic work with the name. But that’s where it spawned from.
RZ: So cool. You and the other band members were musicians before The Two Tracks came together. How have you noticed your artistry evolve since your solo days, through these two albums, to the material you’re working on now?
JS: It’s kind of neat to see the different backgrounds come together. Fred actually grew up playing in Mexican bands, so you see this Latin flair in a lot of our songs. Since then, he would sit in with country bands in Sheridan — he loves country swing. He knows different genres so well, so we’ll try and incorporate a lot of his history into songs. Russell Smith was playing bass for us for quite a while. [Our] new bass player, Aaron, is Dave and I’s age so we have similar musical tastes. But he can be into more new pop or rock, more so than us. It’s fun. When we think of cover songs, it’s all over the map. As for myself, I was just a folk singer/songwriter. For many years I would do solo or duo shows. So a lot of times when I write, I’ll write more in a folk genre and it’ll transform into whatever it transforms into once we bring it to the group.
DH: My background is in classical music as a kid, but I kind of left that long ago for songwriting, guitar playing, and folk/cello bluegrass stuff. It’s been fun with this group to see how the cello melds into more of a rock band, country band kind of feel. And then also to develop my guitar playing. It’s been super fun for me in that regard because I play the electric guitar, and I’ve gotten a lot better in the process.
JS: What’s really great is when we’re on the road in the car. Dave and I really gravitate to bluegrass or outlaw country. Then Fred will have his headphones in, or if he DJs, it’ll be all like ‘70s and ‘80s rock. We’ll take turns DJing and you can just see the influences on the music we choose in the car.
RZ: All of those various interests will really let you diversify your sound as you continue to create new material.
DH: I think as a band, it’s getting easier to develop arrangements for songs. We’re coming up with a pretty comfortable, solid approach — play through a song, what does this need, and somebody will suggest a different beat or different instrumentation or tempo or whatever. We’ve definitely becoming more comfortable. Going into the first album, it was much more rehearsed in terms of “Alright. This is what this is going to be.” Now it’s a little more organic the way it happens.
The Two Tracks will perform alongside Jason Wickens on Thursday, September 7th at The Filling Station beginning at 9pm. Advance tickets to this 21+ show are $8 in store at Cactus Records or www.cactusrecords.net and $10 at the door. Doors at 8pm. Learn more about The Two Tracks and discover their music at www.thetwotracks.com. Postcard Town is available for download now. •
