Earlier this year, I got the opportunity to interview Sarah Jarosz for my university newspaper, as she was coming to a city within our coverage area. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, my editor at the newspaper gets an email asking if I directly would do an interview with The Ballroom Thieves, who opened for Jarosz, on their new album. I immediately jumped at the opportunity.

The Ballroom Thieves are an indie, folky duo consisting of Martin Earley and Calin (Cali) Peters.

Ethan: If you want to start off with your names, band name, and where you are calling from.

Cali: I’m Cali [Peters]. Our band is The Ballroom Thieves. We’re in Midcoast, Maine.

Martin: My name is Martin [Earley]. I’m also in The Ballroom Thieves.

E: So if you could just give us a little background of your musical backgrounds how you met.

M: We met in 2013 through the band. Cali joined the band, which at that point was quite small, and we were mostly playing college shows. But our drummer at the time met Cali at an open mic that they were both playing, and Cali was announcing that she was about to leave her current band and the band was nearing its end. So we thought we would reach out because she just seemed very great. And so she ended up joining our band after she ignored my first advance.

C: Got in touch on Facebook and I was like, no, some guy on Facebook with a band, I’m good.

M: Yeah. Then we had our we had our manager reach out, who, at the time really was just kind of a friend of ours and was helping us out, but he had an email address and so that was much more professional than the Facebook advance. And Cali reluctantly joined the band. That’s how we met. I don’t have any any like classical musical training or anything. I grew up listening to a lot of music and my dad played music and still does. So music has always been a really big part of my life. And I took drum lessons when I was a kid, and then taught myself how to play guitar and and started singing and was really, really bad at everything first and just kind of kept at it and slowly improved a little bit.

C: I started cello when I was 10, and I loved it so much right away and played in every group I could find. In high school, I played drums in the pep bands and in the wind ensemble. So I learned drums and did it that way. I sang in chorus choirs but never alone and then went to college for music. And just love music so much. I mostly love playing with other people. I never loved being solo and so it’s just really, it’s really fun to be in a band and make music with someone else.

E: Martin, where did the band originally come from? You mentioned that you were in there before Cali was. When did you guys form and how did that come about?

M: I came up with a band name in 2011. So just shortly before the first release. I had been playing a lot of music just under my own name. And then I had a friend who was a drummer as well and so the two of us decided that we should we shouldn’t just go by our names and we should come up with a name, and so that’s why we ended up choosing The Ballroom Thieves. So in 2011 initially it was a trio. And then one person left the band and Cali joined and we were a trio for a long time. And then we had some additional members. We were a quartet for a little while. And and now we’re in the moment we’re just playing as a duo.

E: Give us a bit of a background you know on the album tell us a bit about it. Maybe something like the lyrical or musical choices you made.

C: We tend to write about mental health a lot. Just like, our lives and how we’re doing on on this album, we got a little more specific. We started thinking about how we’re all doing, humans, and it’s not so great, obviously. And this year, we just got really interested in why it’s gone this way. And that kind of led us to looking into a lot of psychology and child psychology and in the way we’ve all been parented for so many decades. And so we wrote a lot of songs about that our own childhoods, kind of looking back in order to look forward. And I would say eight out of the ten songs are mostly about generational trauma.

M: It was the first our first full length album where we recorded most of it at home here in Maine. So that was a really fun process because it allowed us to take our time and to really sit with the songs before we really settled on things. It took some of the pressure of being in a traditional recording studio away because usually when you’re paying something like $1,200 a day, you want to hit the ground running and get things done in an efficient way. And that’s great a lot of the time but sometimes you make sacrifices and you kind of move on from things that you otherwise would have explored because it just would have taken too long. So recording at home lets you have almost too much time. But we really enjoyed being cozy at home and sitting in the songs and letting it develop organically. Then the drums were all recorded remotely. We have a friend, Cody Iwasiuk, who lives in Winnipeg, he recorded all of the drum parts over four or five days. And that was a really interesting experience too, because usually you’re all in a studio together and you do a few takes and you get feedback from people and you settle on a take. So with this, it was just a little bit trickier because he would record something and then send it to us. And so most of the time it worked really well, then there were there were a few instances where things took a few hours where if we had been in a studio it would have been a 20 minute process but I feel like with how easy it is nowadays to record remotely and to bring people in from all over the world, I think it was a really, really enriching process for us.

E: What drew you to the idea of recording from home?

C: Honestly, saving money. Yeah, and freedom. It was very freeing to just be the two of us and no other opinions in the room. Record when we wanted to make our own schedule take as much time as we wanted.

M: It was also a way to push ourselves because we were learning and we’re growing our studio and establishing what we can do at home versus what we should be doing elsewhere in a more professional environment. So it was a way of kind of pushing ourselves to see how much we can accomplish just on our own.

E: We got connected because of the work I did with Sarah Jarosz and you guys were on the road with her. How was the tour? How’d that go? What was that experience like?

C: It was so great. We loved Sarah and her band, they were so much fun to hang out with. That’s kind of what makes or breaks a support tour. I think on any tour when you are supporting or you have support, if you get along with the everybody on the road, it’s so much more fun. But on top of that the shows were great. The venues were big and fun and full, and we met a ton of people and had a great time. It was really tiring because we drove and chased a bus. I always like to talk about how the two big time consumers on the road are sleeping and driving. So it’s very tiring, but very fulfilling.

E: You guys are about to go on tour supporting the album. Is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to or excited for about the tour?

C: This tour finally has our hometown show on it in Boston, and another hometown show in Portland, Maine. And we love playing at home, so I’m very excited for those.

M: Yeah, those will be fun. I’m just excited to go back to some of the towns that we played during the Sarah Jarosz tour, just to see if if there’s any people who were at those shows who are now coming to see us play because they liked what they saw when we were opening and so hopefully, there will be a few people.

E: Is there anything like you really miss about being on the road or on the contrary, anything you’re really going to miss once you are on the road that you get at home?

M: There are a number of things. I really like doing both for a good stretch of time. And so like a six week tour, to me it’s really nice because by the end of it, you really miss being home you miss waking up in your own bed and you want to cook your own food. So those are the things that you you can’t really do on the road. And so by the end of the six week tour, you miss that stuff. So it’s really nice when you get back home, but then after we’re home for two months or so, I get a little tired of cooking every night and doing my doing my dishes and so there’s a couple of things where I miss being out on the road and seeing different places and interacting with people and playing the shows too. There’s obviously an excitement and a dopamine effect to playing the shows and so I kind of miss that. In a perfect world, it would be like six weeks on six weeks off, and by the end of the six weeks you’re really ready to get back to the other things.

E: Do you guys have a particular favorite song off the record? Or maybe one that you’re really excited to play live or have played live already and really enjoy performing?

C: I feel like I switch around. But right now I really like “Time Just Falls Apart.” It’s funny, you make these songs, we have a very different relationship with them obviously then than other people do. And then you listen to them so many times when you’re mixing or mastering them, and you can get a little tired of them. It starts and you’re like I don’t want to go through this journey again. And I’m just not sick of it. I like that one a lot. Whenever it starts, I’m happy to hear the whole very long thing. So that’s mine for now.

M: I’m really excited about “Everything Is Everything.” It’s the lead off track to the record and we filmed a music video for it. To me it’s one of the songs on the album that really captures what the album is about, it captures the mood of the album in one song. I think Cali sounds really great singing it, but we haven’t played that one live. So I think one of the ones we’ve been doing live that I’m excited about is “Tender”. It’s a really melancholic acoustic song. It’s been doing pretty well, people seem to like it and we also just like playing it. It’s a meditative thing to play, looking at Cali and singing with her.

E: Compared to a lot of bands, you guys don’t do the traditional thing of having one designated singer and one designated person for each role. You both take on the role of singer. Why is that?

C: We have really, really different singing styles. We each sound best singing a very different song from the other one. It helps us stretch into other genres if we use both people because of how different our voices are. That’s one reason anyway.

M: I also think we write slightly differently. Usually when we put our strengths together, it’s not always clear who’s going to sing lead on each song and so in a way it makes it so that we’re a little more adaptable than a band that only has one lead singer because if we write a song that where we think initially that I’m gonna sing lead on it, but then we try it, and Cali tries to sing lead on it once or twice. Sometimes immediately we can tell oh, this song sounds way better when Cali singing it. And so I think that that’s a strength. It allows us to be adaptable and flexible with our songs.

E: Who are some artists, musicians, groups, or even people that really inspire you the most and bring you the most inspiration in both your daily life and your musical life?

C: Musicians that come to mind for me would be Fleet Foxes, The Shins, and Amanda Bergman.

M: I would add people like Tom Petty, and Warren Zevon. Some of the things that I grew up listening to, because my dad listened to them. I think that there’s a lot of inspiration to be drawn from people like that. Obviously, there are authors too. I’ve been reading Julio Cortazar and Italo Calvino. And they’re just really great at what they do. Ocean Vuong is another one, a more contemporary poet. I like when you listen to something or when you read something that takes you off guard and you realize that you weren’t fully aware that what you just read was something that was possible with the English language. It’s very inspiring to see something that you perceive as new. Georgia Harmer is really great.

E: Who are some artists that you would love to work with? Even if it were to never see the light of day, just sit down, jam with them.

M: Gregory Alan Isakov, cause he’s such a great musician and also just such a such a friendly person. Blake Mills. That would be fun and weird

C: Paul Simon.

E: What is the some of the best advice you’ve ever been given? Either musically or personally?

C: When talking about getting label interest or interest in the music industry of any kind or if you want to make it personal, interest from anyone of any kind, if they don’t come back and ask again, and they’re still waiting for you, if you’re taking a while to answer or you say no the first time, then walk away from it, because they didn’t really want you enough in the first place.

M: I think I would say no one, especially as you’re starting in the business, is ever going to work harder for your music than you. You always have to be the person who believes most and works the hardest for your project because if you’re not that person you can’t expect anybody else to do that for you.

C: I one more concise one. It’s not really advice. It’s something I read and now I just carry it around all the time. Love is a verb. It’s really what our album is all about, in a way.

E: What advice would you give to a musician or artist who’s just starting out?

C: Get a community. Play open mics, play little tiny shows, invite your friends and random people you meet and then keep on doing those. Don’t go on tour, don’t stretch out too far. Just get a little community in one town and grow from there. Because those are going to be your people. And they’re going to cheer for you.

M: Be be a kind person. I think the days of the rockstar assholes being the coolest are long gone. I think kind is way, way, way cooler. So I think even if it doesn’t help you in a direct sense with your career it does help to make a good impression on everyone that you come in contact with.

E: Any final thoughts or comments you’d like to add?

M: We’re really excited about the album. We think it’s something where we’re trying to capture the human experience, and we think it’s relatable. We think that almost anyone could find a piece in it that they can relate to and that they can identify with. And that’s the kind of thing that we were trying to make here. We’re excited and we hope that people enjoy it.