MUSIC INTERVIEW: THOSE DARLINS

From Camp To Redneck Chic The Trio Explain What They 'Dig' About Independent Thinking

Though what I’m about to say is a blanket statement that won’t win me any street cred, and I’m fairly certain that it’s music critic blasphemy, I’m going to say it anyway: I have a problem with indie musicians. Why? Because they never live up to the adjective that has been slapped onto their genre. Yeah, I know, “independent music” is a technical definition referring to bands that don’t answer to a major label and churn out recordings in a basement studio without the help of the suits or the auto-tune. However, the definition of “independent,” in an adjective sense (at least according to Webster’s online dictionary), is the following: “Not looking to others for one’s opinions or for guidance in conduct. Showing a desire for freedom.”

 

This definition seems, to me, to be the opposite of what indie musicians have become. You can hear it in the purposely introverted vocals on their MySpace music players. You can see it in their self-conscious shoulder shrugs when they play loft parties littered in empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans. You can read it in every Pitchfork Media album review that uses words like “dreamy” or “introspective,” or “it gets better with each subsequent listening.” While these bands may be technically “independent music,” they are not, by definition, all that “independent.” They most certainly are “looking to others for opinions and guidance in conduct.” They are not “showing a desire for freedom.”

 

Time and time again, I have blown off indie music recommendations because I can’t help but feel when I listen to these albums that they are trying to fool me into thinking they have a completely original take on the world and that they don’t care what their peers and critics think. It’s never true.

 

I don’t have a good segue to lead that rant into the following interview. I’ll just say that I went to see this particular band that opened for Dan Auerbach at the El Rey on Saturday night, and while a lot of reviews have done so, I feel that I would be doing them a disservice by trying to use music-critic jargon or genre labels on them at all. Classic country leanings aside, they fall under the category of “independent,” both as a technical definition and as an adjective, but they blow the word, in both connotations, out of the water.

 

Both their album and their live show are reminiscent of a time when all music was independent (and exciting and funny) and not some played-out act of subtle, hipper-than-thou nostalgia.

 

The band name is Those Darlins, but when they release their album this summer, I’d like to put out a request to other members of the media: please don’t call them “indie Darlings” because this band is way, way better than that.

 

Kelly Wiles: You’re touring with Dan Auerbach. How many pieces of transportation do you have?

 

Kelley Darlin: [Laughs, points across the street to a dusty red van] Just that one red van.

 

Jessi Darlin: All five of us and all of our belongings and everything. We’ve been pulled over three times already — once for going too slow. [Laughs]

 

KD: Once for being too dirty.

 

KW: Where do you play after Los Angeles?

Nikki Darlin: South By Southwest.

 

KW: You’ve already toured the northeastern part of the country, and I was curious as to how you were received by the east coast hipster crowds, like, the Vampire Weekend, Williamsburg crowd. I feel like east coast hipsters think it’s cool to emulate southerners, accessory-wise and music-wise.

 

KD: Are you talking about southern culture or rural culture?

 

KW: Southern culture: cowboy boots, raccoon skin caps, bluegrass and country music — those things are popular affectations in the northeast hipster community. It’s not their culture, so it’s an ironic thing, and I was wondering what kind of a reaction you guys got from the Williamsburg-type crowds.

 

ND: Completely disgusted with them. [Laughs] No, not at all.

 

KD: We’ve played in New York so many times that when we play in Williamsburg, there are not just hipsters there; so many people from the city come to see us, so we usually have a good mix of people. I guess, on this tour, the difference between Williamsburg, the Music Hall, and Bowery…I’m trying to think if there were any… Well, a lot of times, in Williamsburg, the people dance a lot more, but that’s just like a rest-of-the-city to Williamsburg comparison.

 

KW: Is your audience usually more men or more women, or is it pretty mixed?

 

JD: Definitely mixed.

 

ND: It’s funny — some shows, like touring with Dan (Auerbach), there are a lot of dudes. And when we toured with O’Death, there were a lot of dudes.

 

JD: It just depends on who we open for. We have played shows where we’ve headlined and it’s all dudes [laughs], so that happens occasionally.

 

KD: But we do get a really great response from both. When we first started playing, we used to do slightly more traditional country, just because we didn’t have drums. Women came up and would hug us and say…

 

JD: [Imitating] “I’ve heard men singing those songs my whole life when I was growin’ up in the South, and it’s so empowering to see a woman singing those songs.”

 

KD: Yeah, one woman came up and literally, like, suffocated all three of us [mimes hugging] and she said, “I’ve been livin’ under a man’s thumb, and your music really speaks to me!” So there are older women that are responding to us, and younger women too.  We get a lot of comments that are like, “It’s great to see some girls that can actually play!” which is a double-edged kind of compliment. There have been some guys on this tour that have come up to us and said, “At first, when I saw three girls get up there, I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever,’ and then you guys played and it was awesome!”

 

JD: Yeah, there have been reviews like that too.

 

KD: Some people just stare at our hands when we’re playing because they’re total guitar shredders who worship Dan Auerbach, so they appreciate that we know how to use our instruments.

 

KW: It’s interesting that, in 2009, this gender thing is still going on, when there have been women playing guitar for decades now.

 

KD: I think that’s a really good point too. A lot of early country music — string bands and all of that — were big family affairs. Until things turned into the music industry in the southern music culture — and just music culture in general — women were expected to know how to play an instrument. 

 

KW: On your MySpace blog, it says that you guys met at the Southern Girls Rock and Roll Camp which Kelley actually started. Is that right?

 

KD: When I was 18, I volunteered at the Portland Girls Rock ‘N Roll Camp. I’d never left the southeast and never been on an airplane. I was just like, wow, this sounds incredible. This sounds like somewhere I need to be. So I just worked all summer and saved up and then flew out [to Portland] and taught guitar, and I was so moved by the experience and thought that every girl needed to have that kind of experience available to them. I was involved in a feminist group on campus at MTSU (Middle Tennessee State University) in Murfreesboro, and the resources were there to make it happen. There was a facility, there was a student group that would support it, there were volunteers, and there was a good music scene.

 

JD: I enrolled at the camp the first year she started it, when I was 12.

 

KD: She saw a commercial that our friends made that we ran on the WB at 2:00am.

 

JD: Then Nikki was in Murfreesboro and she started volunteering at the camp.

 

ND: My boyfriend was volunteering and he was actually Jessi’s camp counselor, and that’s how I met Jessi [laughs], and we talked about country music and we were like, “Hey, we should play music together sometime,” and then she ended up moving in with me.

 

JD:  I lived in Kentucky and I had just turned 17 and really wanted to move, so I thought, well, I know people in Murfreesboro, so I guess I’ll just go there.

 

KW: How did Those Darlins come about? Were you guys just jamming together, or was it more of a plan?

 

KD: It was not a plan. [Nikki and Jessi] were living together in this crazy house where the front porch looked over a graveyard. They asked if I wanted to come over and play some country music, and we’d play on that porch.

 

JD: Yeah, [Nikki and I] said, well, we like the same music, and I said, well, Kelley likes the same music, so let’s invite her over.

 

KD: We were just teaching each other songs, like, “Oh, you know that one. Okay, check out this one,” you know, trading it up, and it was cool because we were just entertaining ourselves. We were just having fun, getting our kicks. It was great for me because I’d always been in rock ‘n roll or punk bands, so it was really exciting for me to learn all the country songs. We started out just doing covers, and I’d never done that in other bands. In [rock or punk] bands, you start out sort of like, “I’ve got a batch of songs, you’ve got a batch of songs, let’s play in a band. What kind of music do you want it to be?  I like Sonic Youth…” or whatever. [Those Darlins] was the most organically formed band I’ve ever been in.

 

ND: We had no intentions of actually being a real band.

 

KD: We crashed two house parties on the same night and played at those. One was our friend’s birthday party, and then when that was kind of dwindling, we went to another party and we had all our shit with us, and there was a P.A. because bands had played earlier, so we just did another show.

 

JD: No, I don’t even think there was a P.A. I think we just played acoustic.

 

KW: How did the band build from there?

KD: Well, our friends saw us play at those parties and asked us to open for them, so we were like, “Oh shit, I guess we need a band name.”

 

JD: We had been a sort of band for around four months, but we didn’t want to play any shows yet. We were like, “Let’s just keep playing together.” We played those first two shows in October, and then in February we had our first real show at a really divey bar in Nashville.

 

KW: When did you get your drummer?

 

KD: He’s been playing with us for three months.

 

JD: When we went to New York to record the album, we didn’t have a drummer. We’d been trying out all these drummers but it wasn’t really working out, so when we got there, our producer played drums on the album so we recorded all our songs without drums, and he went back over the top of it and put the drums on there.  He had a crazy style and it was really awesome, and he played with us for a while. But we had to be able to practice with our drummer. Having a drummer that lived in New York wasn’t really working.

 

KD: It kind of worked out perfectly because I’ve known Lin [Linwood Regensburg, Jr.] ever since starting the camp six or seven years ago and had always known him as a guitarist and hadn’t really thought about him as a drummer. He moved in with us and was our roommate and would actually house-sit the first couple months we were on tour, and watch our cat and dog.

 

JD: We didn’t even really think about [Lin being our drummer]. Our manager was the one who pointed it out to us. 

 

KD: Musically, it just really clicked.

 

JD: He’d been to almost every one of our shows, so he knew the songs.

 

KW: One of the things that I love about you guys is that your hooks and vocals and lyrics all come across as completely effortless. Your songs sound — and this is a compliment — like they were written in 15 minutes. Like, you got wasted, ate a chicken, and ten minutes after that, banged out a genius song about the experience.

 

ND: I wrote that before I was playing with them. They heard it and were like, “That sounds awesome,” and I said, “We are not playing that song.”

 

JD: Yeah, she was like, “No way,” and we were like, “We have to!”

 

KW: What’s your songwriting process like as a band? Do all of your songs takes 15 minutes to write?

 

ND: Well, yeah, but they evolve.

 

JD: But it’s pretty fast. We’ll have the words and we say, “Oh, this is kind of how it goes,” and then we’ll all play it once and then, after we play it for months, it finally becomes a real song.

 

KW: You guys play more classic country, and one of the reasons I think some people have a hard time taking the more modern, pop country music seriously is because it takes itself so seriously. It’s got these melodramatic stories and lessons in family values or religion.

 

JD: Like, America! [Laughs]

 

KD: Yeah, country is so pop though now, I don’t even really consider it country music.

 

Linwood Regensburg, Jr.: It doesn’t even have a country beat in it.

 

JD: Yeah, it doesn’t even sound country.

 

KW: Would you say your music is making fun of modern country music at all?

 

KD: Well, there is a little bit of that because I think, traditionally, southern culture and music always kind of pokes fun at itself anyway. There’s this imagery, and it’s hard to put the imagery out there without adding humor to it, just to let people know, “No, I’m not Kenny Chesney. I don’t actually take this that seriously.” I did grow up around a lot of that very southern pride; my Dad had a confederate flag on his truck and all that stuff. I tried to rebel as far away from that as possible, so coming back to it is kind of full-circle.

 

JD: Me too. I went all the way away, and then I came back to it.

 

KD: It’s pretty ironic, though, because I never thought I would move to Nashville to be in a country band.

 

ND: Me neither.

 

KD: It’s kind of a joke, in that sense. I think modern pop country is the image people have [of the genre], but we’re “girl country singers,” and we’re not [like that].

 

ND: And people are like, “You guys sing on the Opry ever?” and we’re like, “Noooo!” [Laughs]

 

JD: We’re in the rock scene in Nashville, which has nothing to do with all that [pop country] stuff, and we just kind of laugh at that stuff. We were all listening to traditional country and saying, ‘Let’s write songs like that.” We didn’t think about what we were writing; we were just like, “Oh, that sounds cool,” and, “Ha ha, we wrote a country song.” We were just having fun. We didn’t really think about it until afterwards, like, “Aw man, we live in Nashville and we started a country band, and now we’re trying to make it big!” [Laughs]

 

KW: I did read some article that called you “rednecktastic.”

 

JD: [Laughs] Woo-hoo!

 

KD: That’s a terrible word!

 

JD: I’ll tell you the word that I’m the most sick of, that doesn’t really have to do with country, but I’m tired of being called “sassy.” I’m like, “I’m not sassy; I’m angry.” [Laughs] It’s like, obviously you’re gonna call a girl band sassy.

 

KW: It’s kind of sexist.

 

KD: It is!

 

JD: I mean, no offense to all those people out there — they probably don’t realize they’re doing it, but they’re just like, “Oh a girl band…”

 

KW: That has an actual personality…

 

JD: Yeah, that’s not afraid to be comfortable in their own skin, so let’s call ‘em “sassy.” [Laughs]

 

KD: You wouldn’t call The Black Lips “sassy” — you’d call them “bad-ass.”

 

KW: The press needs an angle.

 

JD: Yeah, Pitchfork [Media] just wrote about us and they said we were like “the hillbilly cousins of The Vivian Girls,” and I was like, “What?” And Pitchfork loves The Vivian Girls so that’s a compliment, but I don’t know…

 

KW: Well, people from other parts of the country want to slap a southern label on you.

 

JD: They don’t understand what the south is like. They’re like, “Oh the south — they’re rednecks.” There’s a big difference between rural living and redneck living.

 

KW: What was your upbringing like?

 

JD: Redneck.

 

ND: Redneck.

[They both laugh]

 

JD: No, I would say we were more like backwoods…

 

ND: We’re more like hillbillies than rednecks.

 

KD: Hillbillies are more like mountain people — no water or electricity kind of deal.

 

JD: Yeah, “redneck” implies ignorance. A redneck is a redneck because he’s ignorant to the rest of the world.

 

KD: …Or even to why someone would call him a redneck.

 

ND: We {Gestures at Jessi] grew up in the middle of nowhere, but our parents were both artists. We had no running water, no electricity for most of our childhood, no money…

 

JD: [Laughs] Definitely no money. So we lived in the middle of nowhere, but our parents weren’t ignorant.

 

ND: They were artists, doing what they wanted to do.

 

JD: They were just like, “Go out and have fun.”

 

ND: Yeah, like, “You want to be home-schooled so you can run around the fields all day? Sure.”

 

KW: You guys started as a band less than a year ago, at a time when Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube had all been around for a few years and have become “instrumental” — no pun intended — in people discovering new music. As a band whose music hearkens back to a simpler time and place, how do you feel about the Internet and its role in your career?

 

ND: Well, I just learned how to use a computer about three years ago. I’m not bothered by it, but if I’m like, “Ooh, I want to find out what’s going on with Those Darlins,” I can’t do it. But it’s great for everyone else. [Laughs]

 

JD: I think it’s awesome because bands can do it on their own. They don’t need to be slaves to some record industry asshole.

KD: I think it’s important for the independent market; it’s definitely helped us.

 

KW: Where do you see Those Darlins in the next five years? Writing, recording…?

 

KD: Riding in a tour bus instead of a van. [Laughs]