Jhett & Callie Schiavone - Gleewood Interview
Doug Burke:
Welcome to Back Story Song. I'm your host Doug Burke and today we're here with Jhett and Callie Sioux Schiavone of the band Gleewood. Jhett Schiavone was writing laid back acoustic songs in New Mexico when he met, married and began writing with the Western desert ranch girl Callie Sioux. Jhett's bass baritone grit welds uniquely with Callie's high clear soprano vocals to create a sound that has been described as coffee and cream with a shot of whiskey.
Gleewood was originally conceived as an acoustic duo humbly sharing folk songs from town to town throughout the Southwest while living out of their Honda element. They've plugged in and added backing bands and have been relentlessly touring, promoting their unique blend of rock, folk and blues. I usually don't do much of a background on the bands, I usually dive right into the songs but you guys intrigue me so much because you couldn't be more opposite on stage when you see you guys perform because Jhett you're quite tall and you play a mean guitar and Callie you're quite smaller than...
Callie Schiavone:
I'm much smaller than he is. That's okay to say.
Doug Burke:
And you play a large string bass and then you have a baritone Jhett, and you have a soprano. So this is like, tiny woman with a bass singing high notes and this tall man with a deep baritone playing this screaming guitar. And then the last time I saw you, you had an African American female drummer, which is cooler than cool as far as I was concerned, I was like, "Oh my God, look at this." Just the visuals of watching you and hearing you perform live was cooler than cool. So tell me, you meet in the bookstore, how does the music happen from that?
Jhett Schiavone:
Well, I wrote my first song that day.
Doug Burke:
Really?
Jhett Schiavone:
I did. Yeah, playing music for me was more of a byproduct of the people I was hanging around. A lot of people got together and played jam circles and acoustic guitars at the skate park and stuff like that. And I was running sound at that bookstore where we also hosted black box theater and open mics and stuff for people that were under 21. So it was like a youth hangout and I got really inspired and started messing around with guitar more and more and that day I met Callie and I was like, "Wow, I got to write that girl a song." And so I did. It wasn't a good song. So I never recorded it. But they got a little bit better over time with some practice. And Callie was very encouraging in that. And, I don't know, we just fell into playing music. She wasn't pursuing music at all at the time.
Callie Schiavone:
Well, you literally roped me into. Well, you didn't know how to rope, but you roped me into it, the definition of it. After a while we were dating and playing and I was being the good girlfriend and going into the open mics or whatever and helping him carry his stuff. And I could tell he had this very deep, yeah, baritone voice. My mom is an incredible singer. And so she had taught me a lot about singing. So I was trying to help Jhett be bold in that bold voice because it's powerful and he was intimidated to sing out but I was trying to encourage him and we finally got to the point where Jhett had written about four songs that he wanted to record, put on an EP and start booking gigs. So he started recording in this old earthship, Do you know what earthships are? The earthships are these crazy New Mexican style of building. They're all over but it's a house built of straw or clay or adobe or tires. It's like a big recycled home, no running water, no electricity. It's all just self sustained.
Doug Burke:
Recycled materials.
Callie Schiavone:
Yes. Yeah. Tires, yeah. So he had met this gentleman who had a studio in one of these and ran a...
Jhett Schiavone:
Solar powered studio.
Callie Schiavone:
... solar powered studio. Well, one night we were around the fire, just kind of jamming and playing and we wrote a song together. That was the first time that had happened.
Doug Burke:
Okay.
Callie Schiavone:
And we sang together. We heard the differences in our voice. And we wrote this really dorky love song and Jhett's like, "Let's put it on my EP. That'd be fun." And I'm like, "I don't know." And he's like, "Yeah, come on out, and we'll just throw it on there." So that happened. And then Jhett got a gig, one of his first paying gigs out in the middle of some outlaw town in New Mexico.
Jhett Schiavone:
It's a biker bar called No Scum Allowed Saloon.
Callie Schiavone:
In white oaks, New Mexico.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Rules are clear.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Callie Schiavone:
And I'm helping him unload his equipment to play, and he looks at me and says, "Oh, by the way, you're playing with me tonight. We're booked as a duo." And I was like, "Wait, what? I don't know all of your songs." So he threw me under the bus a little bit.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yep.
Doug Burke:
Wow. How did that go?
Callie Schiavone:
It went awesome. It went really good.
Jhett Schiavone:
I don't know if anybody else enjoyed it, but we had a blast.
Doug Burke:
Okay.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah. So after we did that show, we started doing a little bit more here and there. We were working some full time jobs that didn't have anything to do with the entertainment industry. And then gosh, we started going to a lot of concerts together and enjoying music and writing more together and then I did not want to be, not that there's anything wrong with it. But for me, I didn't want to be the girl singing on stage with a tambourine. Like that's just not my personality. So we needed a bass player for a band we were putting together. So I was like, I'll play bass." So, I started playing bass. And then we recorded our first album, in New Mexico, in a basement.
Jhett Schiavone:
And then moved into the back of our Honda element and we lived out of that for about a year and played every dive bar, saloon, coffeehouse, open mic that would let us play and six years later, we're still on the road, man.
Doug Burke:
Let's talk about one of your songs because this is about the backstory vision, inspiration and creative process of songs. You want to talk about one that you co-wrote?
Jhett Schiavone:
Absolutely. We co-wrote pretty much everything that we have recorded. Whiskey Sue was a turning point for us. We wrote that together, as well as with our brother-in-law, Josh Landry. And that is a semi historical song about my great grandfather, who came over from Sicily and ended up in New York and started running whiskey moonshine during the prohibition era from the southern states up into New York City. He had a hard time finding honest work. So he almost didn't make it out of that line of work alive thanks to a girl named Whiskey Sue. So the story of my family goes, and so we expanded on that idea, and wrote that in a way where I represented the voice of my great grandfather and Callie represents the voice of Whiskey Sue. That was our first time getting in a studio environment or a rehearsal inviting With a set of drums and electric instruments, and starting from there, rather than starting from an acoustic guitar, and that really changed the way that we look at songwriting, just being plugged in loud and amplified, starting with more of a riff and a rhythmic idea, and Callie, like so many of our songs, she brings a novel of an idea. And we usually have to chop it down into verses that work with a riff and more of a vague idea, and letting the energy of the song flow and develop as we wrote it, because we were almost trying to write a song for live purposes rather than writing it for a record or writing it for radio. I think it's a seven minutes song.
Doug Burke:
It's a very long song.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
One of the things I'm hopeful that Back Story Song helps people do is to search and discover music. We've seen the album and the singles in radio become less important with the emergence of Spotify and Pandora and the computer determining what we're listening to and these algorithms determining what we listen to, and I'm hopeful that people will search this podcast and fall in love with artists and fall in love with their work and discover new things. But one of the constraints of radio is, three minute songs, plus or minus 30 seconds, and there is no constraint on Spotify. So you have a seven minute song.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah, no constraint on Spotify, no constraint on YouTube. That's the funny thing, is we actually finished Whiskey Sue here in Park City. We played it at Sundance at Atticus. And some friends of ours called Secret Circus really liked the song. They're amazing producers of music, and they wanted to help us record it. So when we got back to New Mexico, strangely enough, they were based out of New Mexico at the time and still are. We went in this old abandoned building in Roswell, New Mexico where we had the space to record the song and the video at the same time. And so we had talked a lot with them about trying to cut the song short. But the thing is, it's a rock ballad. It's a ballad, and it has these stanzas. It's telling a narrative, a story, it's not a concept, it's not just a drinking song. It's a full story. Whenever that song got popular in our fan group, people really, really enjoyed that song. That song has opened a lot of doors for us. We continued, because it's what we're passionate about. But we continued that same structure with most of our songs, there is a narrative. There's a story that's happening, there's characters involved, we play different characters. I mean, everyone has a story to their song, but lots of artists feel compelled to write about concepts or it's loose ended and you can make what you want of it, we're always inspired by characters, characters of our family, characters we come across on the road, characters we read about, and that seems to really inspire a lot of our songs. So the majority of our material is over four minutes. So, it's out of lack.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah, we like the long winded approach for this project. I love writing straightforward blues songs and love songs that are a little bit more concise, because I think they need to be, but for this project, storytelling is the center of what we're trying to do. So sometimes stories take a minute to tell.
Doug Burke:
So your new album is called?
Jhett Schiavone:
Necromancer's Dream.
Doug Burke:
And you want to talk about a song on that?
Jhett Schiavone:
Sure.
Callie Schiavone:
Sure. Man, which one?
Doug Burke:
So, I had to look up Necromancer, and maybe you can tell me what it means, Callie, to you.
Callie Schiavone:
Well, it's a dark term. It's about a type of sorcerer who can raise people from the dead or themself is risen from the dead, which could really take you down a dark path. But we're not necessarily going that direction with it. Hence why we added the dream to it, Necromancer's Dream. So the title track of the song where the idea necromancer's dream came from, is the title track of the album is Rock and Roll is Dead. And we were in discussion about various artists that we look up to and that we like, and most of them were from a certain time period in a certain era. So a lot of late 60s, early 70s style rock and roll singer or songwriters. And these days, it's hard to discover artists that were inspired by those people because most of those big name artists are still dominating the radio airwaves or popularity which is great because they deserve it. They wrote amazing songs, I'm talking about Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, I love those bands. But we rarely get to hear who they inspired on the radio. Most of the time, classic rock just plays those guys, but there's a lot of us bands who were inspired by that, grew up with that music, and are putting our own twist on it. So you really have to dig through the Spotify, profiles, the podcasts, the blogs, you have to go on a real search to find rock and roll music inspired by those artists. There's a bunch that are surfacing now, but it's still hard. So we had this notion that perhaps rock and roll is a person, a spirit. And it has been missing or dead or maybe somehow it got whisked away. This is part of that weird literary thing. We had just finished reading a book called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and it's about magic in England. And there's a character in it called The Raven King who steals people away to the Magic Kingdom of Fairy. And we thought maybe rock and roll the spirit the King of Rock and Roll has been kidnapped by this necromancer, by the sorcerer and is still alive, but is being held in this other realm. Some realm that's hard to get to, hard to hear, hard to find. And the idea of the song was that we as artists, need to call him back, need to have him, like the spirit of rock and roll, let's see it come back to the radio airwaves. Let's see it come back to pop music and...
Jhett Schiavone:
The energy of a live show.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah. We have so many screens between live shows and like you said it was fun to go to our live show, which is what we encourage people to do, because we translate better live, we're a raw band, we like being live. That's our fuel. And yeah, so that's the background of that song.
Doug Burke:
The song's called Rock and Roll is Dead, and it is the only song where the line, so we all dance together in the necromancer's dream. So that's the title lyric...
Callie Schiavone:
Yes, exactly. Yeah. The title lyric.
Doug Burke:
... in the song?
Callie Schiavone:
Mm-hmm.
Doug Burke:
Okay.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah, that's basically where the title for the album came from. We wanted people to know that the album was going to be discussing some darker material. And our previous albums have always been pretty sunshine influenced like, lots of mountains and rivers and the sun and desert and very hopeful and very joyful. And we were at a point writing these songs for the new album, that there was a bit of a darker tint to it. Kind of the night in the desert, rather than always cruising in the car out in the sunshine.
Doug Burke:
So, a lot of your music at least on this album as I listen to the songs that are out there is haunting and this whole Roswell, New Mexico feel. I don't know if that's what you're going for. I feel like space aliens invading or something from where you come from but there's a real haunting aspect to the music on it. I don't know if that's what you're going for but maybe you can talk about what you're going for on the sound of Rock and Roll is Dead. I mean, it's heavy material. I don't agree with that.
Jhett Schiavone:
No, we don't agree with it either. And that's...
Doug Burke:
It is a tongue and cheek thing.
Callie Schiavone:
Exactly.
Jhett Schiavone:
This whole album is drenched in irony. It really is. I mean, that's the idea of it, is everything is ironic. The song Chocolate on My Tongue by the Wood Brothers. That's the only song on the album that we haven't written. But the Wood Brothers are a band that we look up to a lot and they have this really happy go lucky song called Chocolate on My Tongue. And it's like this bluegrass jangly major key thing that we've always loved but the lyrics could also be taken the complete opposite way. And so when we took the song and turned it into more of like a downtempo minor key sludgy version of itself, the lyrics took on this really, what were happy uplifting lyrics. Kind of took on this darker, almost sarcastic approach. And that's the way the whole record swings. And the haunting aspect of it is, I don't know, it's just us stretching our legs and some new material. One of the songs, White Snow is inspired by a cowboy ghost found sitting on top of our roof down in the Hondo Valley in New Mexico. There are a lot of ghosts of the past that are making a little bit of a resurgence in some of these lyrics. And a lot of these songs we had started writing with our drummer Josh Landry years ago who ended up passing away due to some terrible struggle he faced with addiction. And revisiting these songs for us and completing them had a heavy feel.
Doug Burke:
You mentioned on your band camp, one of the songs is dedicated to his or is written about his addiction?
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah. That one's called Superstition.
Doug Burke:
Superstition?
Callie Schiavone:
Yes. Superstition.
Doug Burke:
Right. You want to talk about that or is it too heavy to talk about?
Callie Schiavone:
No, because Josh was an incredible person and he meant a lot to us and he was very brave and very bold and knew what he was struggling with and would want us to talk about it. The point of the track also has a little bit of that tongue in cheek stuff is that oftentimes when we know somebody is struggling with addiction or mental issues, what they can do to themselves is like superstition, it's almost like, "Well, they could hurt themselves." "Oh, they'll be all right." So, we sometimes can look over that as a friend or something. And so the song is about, from the addicts perspective of, maybe you don't believe that mental illness is a thing or if addiction is a thing, but I'll tell you what is going on through my head while I'm struggling with these demons. So that's the backstory of that song. Really, I wouldn't know where else to go with it because it does have a character that's talking to you. But then, many of the lyrics can be left up to interpretation by the listener as well.
Doug Burke:
Not everybody fills in what things mean on songs because they can mean different things to the listener.
Callie Schiavone:
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Doug Burke:
And sometimes there's a real actual story. Are you Spanish?
Jhett Schiavone:
Well, we had just gotten back from tour in Spain and growing up in New Mexico, there's a lot of bilingual people that we grew up around and working with and just using a little bit of Spanish in the lyrics, and we have a little bit of a Latin based rhythm to that song as well. It just felt right, it felt natural. And we were touring with a guy named Chavo from Las Cruces, New Mexico who was drumming with us when we finished it, and he was bilingual. So we would be in the tour rig and he would be teaching a Spanish as we were going from town to town, and so it just fell into place while we were finishing that song. It's almost a take on Last Dance with Mary Jane vibe dancing with the devil idea to that portion of the lyrics.
Doug Burke:
So I ask this to a lot of the Nashville Songwriters because many of them are not songwriter performers the way you guys are. Many of them write songs for other people. Do you have any songs that you say to yourself, "Oh my gosh, I would love for this voice to record this song." Are they all just your own songs?
Callie Schiavone:
I mean, yes, and no. There's definitely people we would really love to collaborate with. There's songs that we've written that we've tried to perform live, tried to put in our set that their style is just not quite authentically ourselves. It's a great song. We love playing it. I mean, it is our song, but it doesn't come through as Gleewood as the project's sound.
Doug Burke:
Name a song that you would like someone to record.
Callie Schiavone:
Well, truthfully...
Doug Burke:
No lie to me.
Callie Schiavone:
Lair, I said. But truthfully, I really wanted Jessica Hernandez to sing Superstition. I really wanted to collaborate with her on that song. And I was too afraid to email her with the song and ask her to be a part of it. So, I didn't do that.
Doug Burke:
I'm hopeful my podcast listeners will get it to her and she'll give it a listen.
Callie Schiavone:
Right. That would be cool. I enjoy singing that song. It's dear to my heart. But yeah, you feel like there's somebody else who possibly could fulfill the potential of that song better than you can.
Doug Burke:
Could own it differently.
Callie Schiavone:
Own it differently and sometimes some songs that you write, especially for me, I don't know if you feel this way Jhett but I feel like there's songs that I write that exactly, someone else could take this and really do the song justice. I feel like the song is good, if like the lyrics are good, I feel like structure is good, but I don't know that I have the capability of taking it to that level. So that's one song for sure.
Doug Burke:
Jhett, do you have any songs to answer this question? They're all your songs.
Jhett Schiavone:
No, I always think of songs that I would love to play those songs with. There's a number of songs that we've written like Stay and tunes like that, that I think, "Oh, man, wouldn't this be cool to work with, like Ben Harper, or Michael Franti, or these people that could add this new flavor to this song."
Doug Burke:
On Stay?
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah. On Stay. I could always hear Michael Franti adding a lyrical improvisational section and is bringing his world groove vibe to that sound and I can totally hear that. And then I've been writing a lot of blues stuff for my Jhett Black project. And I'm always filling my head with blues artists that I feel could perform the song on another level that I could ever take it to. Maybe one day I'll be able to take those songs to some of those artists that I really look up to, but for right now, where I'm at, creatively, I feel like I need to stay focused on writing the songs that I want to perform.
Doug Burke:
We obviously lost Tom Petty to addiction. You write songs about Tom Petty?
Jhett Schiavone:
We did. Yep, that's another one that made it. That one's called The Good, The Bad and The Blues.
Doug Burke:
You want to talk about that one?
Jhett Schiavone:
Sure, yeah. We were on tour in Germany, had our first day off and I don't know how long in Berlin. We'd woke up late in some hotel and we pulled up in our phones and saw that Mr. Tom Petty had passed away. And it just hit us. I don't know if it was the emotions that we were pushing down on that tour so that we could cope with everything that was going on, but they all got released when we read about Tom Petty passing away. And our band and the band we were on tour with we all were fraught with emotion over this. And we pulled out some acoustic guitars and we were just sitting in a circle talking about, "Wow, yeah, I remember first hearing that song, I was doing this or, I had my first kiss to free fallin or I remember when I got let go from my job and that song helped me through this time." And I just thought it was amazing how many memories that the six of us had attached to one man's lyrics. And it was profound. It was songs written for the blue collar American and for the working man, what an amazing testament as a songwriter, what a way to honor him by singing his songs and carrying that flame. And I was sitting there I was thinking, I was like, "Yeah, he's really has helped me through the good, the bad and the blues." And I was like, "Wow, that's a cool idea. I'm going to play around with that." And we played around with those lyric lines throughout the rest of the day and in various forms. And we compiled some stories that we had all talked about, that were connected to Tom Petty's songs and we put those in the verses and just an homage to what any musical legend, any musical hero of ours can do for us and help us through. That's what music does. It helps bring us together, it helps connect us and helps us emotionally tackle the good times the bad times and the blues.
Callie Schiavone:
We were literally, Monday morning in a cheap hotel. Heard the news that a legend fell that's literally where we were.
Doug Burke:
In Berlin?
Callie Schiavone:
In Berlin. Yeah, in a cheap hotel in Berlin. Many of us have spent Saturday night alone feeling sorry for ourselves. And that's also part of the lyric and...
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah, and that's definitely, a lyric that was close to home for me is, Saturday night alone in my bedroom, and I was counted among the fools. A lot of people say, "Gosh, I wish I could play guitar like that and I wish I could do what you guys are doing on the road." Which I believe, just like anybody who's dedicated to anything, it takes that time and dedication to it, a singular craft that can really take you away from the rest of the world in order to fulfill it. Whatever your creative outlet is to really dedicate yourself to that particular craft. A lot of other areas in your life are going to suffer due to that dedication. And so again, his songs helped me through that stage of me learning how to play the guitar, and I'll never forget I was up in a cabin in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, helping put in a barbecue restaurant and I was sitting there playing some Tom Petty songs and all of a sudden something clicked man and I just my ears were open. I didn't really come from a musical family but all of a sudden my ears were open. And this notion of the blues that I'd always loved listening to and tackled with on my guitar, I could never get that presence, that feeling to come across from the fretboard. And that day, the Lord just opened my ears up to what needed to happen and the blues settled into my heart and were able to translate to my fingertips and yeah, it changed my life for sure. So...
Doug Burke:
Playing a Tom Petty song?
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Do you remember what it was?
Jhett Schiavone:
I don't remember what it was.
Doug Burke:
But you remember the feeling?
Jhett Schiavone:
I remember the feeling though. I remember it very well. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
So, I do want to talk about that beat song, and I really like Colorado Brew, which is more of a poppier sound. I don't know if you can call it that, but can we talk about that song?
Callie Schiavone:
Sure. This song, this is actually an older song that we had been sitting on for a really long time. A lot of the songs that we end up recording on our albums are ones that we go on tour with for a couple of seasons, because we want to iron them out. We want to see how people respond to them. When you play a song live, you can figure out where you flub a little bit because sometimes just sitting there in a studio environment, recording, it sounds good. And when you get out there on the road playing it and you're like, "Actually, it would be better if we did change some things." So this is one we played for a while before we actually got it on an album. And it was written after our very first band tour that we booked through Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, with our first drummer Myles Erdman. We were touring through Colorado, in a still unnamed town, playing in this little brew pub in an afternoon ish slot. It was a family environment. We were playing there, I think maybe on a Sunday or something. So people were in there eating dinner with their kids, and we were setting up in the corner and played our first set and it went well and we're running our own sound. We're just figuring things out. And Myles and I, the drummer and I go outside at the set break, and Jhett comes up and he's like, "Hey, I met this guy. He really wants to sing with us on the next set." And we're like, "Okay, what guy?"
Jhett Schiavone:
I had had a few drinks, it was our first tour, right? So I'm like, "Yeah, wow, cool."
Callie Schiavone:
The band gets a tab.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah, we get free IPAs. Perfect. So anyways,
Callie Schiavone:
So, Jhett decided to invite this guy on stage with us. We'd never heard him sing before. As he told us he was a really good reggae rapper from LA. And Myles and I were like, "He said, he was really good, huh, okay, this will be ... and reggae rap with our stuff. Okay, whatever we're game. Sure." So, we get up there and we start a little riff and the fella grabs the microphone from Jhett and starts to sing, sort of. And basically what came out of this man's mouth was just horrible off key profanities like you wouldn't believe. And parents' eyes got huge, kids' eyes got huge and they were slapping their hands over their kids' ears and people were running out the door. And meanwhile, we're trying to get the guy off stage. Like, I hope it was one of the most entertaining things people have ever seen because it was awful. And we're like, "Okay, man...
Jhett Schiavone:
It was so bad, it was good.
Callie Schiavone:
It was so bad. We're like, "Okay, man, okay, that's good. That's good. Get off. And he wouldn't let go off the microphone he was trying to grab it and run around the room. Me and Myles had to unplug the PA we were like, "God again, and so we turn everything off.
Jhett Schiavone:
Ka-Pow.
Callie Schiavone:
Ka-Pow. We turn everything off, and he and his buddies were like, "Ooh, that was fun." And left, and there were just a few people left in the bar, and the bartenders were shaking their heads at us, like, "Shouldn't have let that guy sing with you. He does that every time."
Doug Burke:
Oh my gosh.
Callie Schiavone:
It's our first tour. We didn't know that anybody who asks you to come play with you won't be good. You're just naive to these things. Well, I was not laughing at that point in time. I was very angry and very upset because, he just embarrassed us and we're on our first tour and ah. So Myles and Jhett here locked me in the women's bathroom because I was pretty ready to just go after that guy.
Jhett Schiavone:
She was going to go after him.
Callie Schiavone:
I was so angry.
Doug Burke:
Have you ever gone after anybody before?
Jhett Schiavone:
Oh, yeah.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Oh yeah.
Jhett Schiavone:
Oh yeah. You're talking to a redheaded ranch girl here, okay, she was ready to inflict some Western justice on this dude.
Callie Schiavone:
They're terrible. I've grown up since then. But anyways, they locked me in the women's bathroom. And they're like, "Callie, just please do not come out until we get the situation under control." And I'm just fuming. I'm just like, "That guy...I want to pound him in the car." And my sister calls and I'm like, "Oh, Cheyenne, I can't believe what just happened. This guy," I was telling her what happened and she just burst out in laughter, was just laughing. And I'm like, "How can you laugh at this?" And she's like, "It's funny."
Jhett Schiavone:
But it's funny in hindsight.
Callie Schiavone:
Absolutely. And so that led to a huge portion of the lyrics. I got off the phone with her. I just had a marker in my back pocket and some toilet paper and I started just writing down some ideas. And I was let out of the bathroom, we finished the set, and we moved on and we have not played that pub since. Which makes...
Doug Burke:
Not invited back or you didn't try to book it.
Jhett Schiavone:
I don't think either would have worked.
Callie Schiavone:
We didn't want to test either one. So, we got home after the tour, hindsight is set in, it was a funny scenario, and that's the way Colorado Brew was born. We were working on the lyrics, we had the chorus, “when you're too far away”. And we had some cadence for the lyrics, we knew we wanted to be bouncy, we wanted to write something funny and light hearted about this experience. And then there's a friend of ours who's actually featured in one of our music videos named Tony Seino. Who came into our practice base because we had a practice base in Ruidoso, people could see when we were there, so we often had random folks pop in, which was awesome. He came in, and he's like, "Hey, I was thinking about you guys. And I wrote this little riff and I want to give it to you. I think it'd be a good Gleewood song."
Jhett Schiavone:
And it went - And I was like, "That's it. That's perfect. That's exactly what we needed."
Callie Schiavone:
Yep.
Jhett Schiavone:
And we just wrote down the rest of the lyrics that afternoon and around that little melody, and that was it.
Jhett Schiavone:
I think maybe we will go into one song that I like to recall because ultimately what we're trying to do with this project Gleewood is, bring hope and inspiration to people to pursue creative endeavors which was laid on their hearts because I believe we were all created to create. One of the people that inspired me to live life passionately and not be afraid to change with the seasons was my grandfather. And I got to record a song that I wrote that was inspired by our last conversation called A Fall Ballad. And it was written up in the mountains one autumn season. Me and my Grandpa Joe were hanging out on the front porch watching the leaves change colors and fall off the trees. And I was about 16 at the time, and my dad used to strongly encourage me to go hang out with old Grandpa Joe, even though we didn't really get along all that well, because I was a pretty stubborn teenager and he was a mean old man. And one day, sitting out on that front porch, he opened up just randomly about things that he had been through when he was my age, and his time in the war and in jail and raising his kids and all of a sudden, I started to see why Grandpa Joe was the way that he was and understand the things that his generation had to go through that mine just frankly, had not had to endure. And he did more to bridge that generational gap in my life than maybe he ever knew. And he started speaking in a parable about the changing of the seasons and how they're going to come and go in our lives. And that always resonated with me. And a few years later, when I started playing guitar, I learned like three or four chords from playing Bob Dylan songs and whatever, and so, I used those three or four chords to write a song to his words, the best that I could remember. That's a song called A Fall Ballad. I think we're still quite proud of that one and try to play that on as many stages as will allow such an intimate song. It's my hope that that song lifts people spirits and takes away a little bit of fear. Because we're always in a point of transition. This whole life is one of constant transition and change. And fear is what can really hold us back from not enjoying that and riding that wave we were designed to ride and get the most out of, so.
Doug Burke:
And where's your grandpa?
Jhett Schiavone:
He's passed.
Doug Burke:
He passed away?
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
How long ago?
Jhett Schiavone:
That would have been right after that conversation.
Doug Burke:
Really?
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah. It would have been 15 years ago.
Doug Burke:
And so how soon after that, did you write the song?
Jhett Schiavone:
About a year?
Doug Burke:
And how quickly did you write it? Did you start thinking about it after he passed away? Or did you...
Jhett Schiavone:
I think I wrote it more in a poem. I was such a novice guitarist, I think I pretty much wrote the entire thing as a poem idea and put chords to it later. It's one of the earlier songs that we wrote together, Callie helped. Once I did put some music to it, Callie helped me refine it with music. And so the majority of the lyrics happened in a day, like they often do, you get that flow of consciousness and you just roll with it. And then, you end up with far more lyrics than you really need. And then you can go through that later once you have the music. It's how we work and edit out what need not really be in the song or what doesn't really add to the story. So...
Callie Schiavone:
It had quite a long gestation period, because we were playing it live but we just didn't feel like we were nailing it good enough for a recording. So, A Fall Ballad made it on our second album, which is Sweet, Sweet Time, even though it was written around the same time as all the songs from the first album that came out in late 2014. And then Sweet, Sweet Time was released in 2016. So, it did take a while for that song to make it to the album. It took me a while to come up for the harmony part, like Jhett was saying, we are but we're very novice musicians. We knew we wanted to tell our story, tell other people's stories through music exactly, and God was giving us these chances and these avenues to do it through but we didn't really know what we were doing. So, it took us a little while. And then when we did finally get in the studio with it in Ruidoso, New Mexico, it really came together well, my dad ended up playing lead on it which is really cool.
Doug Burke:
Oh, no kidding.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah, in fact, he plays dueling lead with himself basically.
Doug Burke:
Wow.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Callie Schiavone:
He laid down two different lead tracks that just were so cool the way they weaved in and out one acoustic one, one electric one, right?
Jhett Schiavone:
And it reflects the lyrical conversation of an old man to a young man, he harnessed that in his musical.
Callie Schiavone:
He did. It starts off with a very soft acoustic intro and then we bring the band in in the middle. And it has a little bit of a reggae type upbeat to it, but it's still very folk. And then we go back down to the acoustic to end the song. And that's something that we really feel passionate about with our songs with each one that feels right is riding that. You're up on the mountain top and then you're down in the valley and you're up on the mountain top. In almost all of our songs, there's a lot of that exchange where there's a build of energy, and then we drop it down and we go soft, and then we build it back up. We like to do that with our live shows, hopefully it comes across that way. That would be ideal. And speaking of those two voices, there are songs that we're finishing writing and we'll be recording when we get back to Nashville. There's a whole other side to the negative darker songs on Necromancer's Dream, there's a good side to Superstition, there's a good side to a lot of the darker songs on that one Whiskey, Leave Me Alone.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah, we've kind of sat on the redemption of Necromancer's Dream that we'll hopefully be able to finish recording in Nashville and release the following year is the idea, almost as a part two.
Doug Burke:
So how do you know when a song like this one that we're talking about is done?
Jhett Schiavone:
When I'm bored with it. I don't know. We've rewritten our songs a lot. And we actually continue to rewrite them almost every tour. We're like, "Hey, we should change this part or add a new musical section or make this part of the song a Medley with another pop song or whatever." So we do a lot of rewrites continuously on our songs to keep it fresh for ourselves and fresh for our audience, people that have seen that song played live a number of times. We like to bring something a little bit new to the table with it. And so a lot of our songs will always continue to evolve. And then there's certain songs like The Good, The Bad and The Blues, Colorado Brew, Rock and Roll is Dead, there's certain songs like that that are in that shorter song format, that just have a beginning, a middle, a bridge, you know what I mean? Verse, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, vibe, and it is what it is. The song tells you, "Okay, that's complete, it's done." I don't know, sometimes the songs just say, "Here I am." And you just let them be.
Doug Burke:
And the first time you play it live is exactly how you play it over and over again live and the audience reacts to it, and then you know it works and that's it?
Callie Schiavone:
I was actually just going to say that, for me is sometimes the song will tell you like, "You know what, there's nothing more I can say." Or for me, there's nothing else this character is telling me. This is their song, this is their story. And then another part of that is the audience. If we play the song rough on that ... When you're playing a new song live, you get this weird rush of adrenaline, you're like, "Okay, I got to remember how I wrote this. I got to remember the lyrics." And if it can come across in that moment of raw energy, where you're like, "Oh, shit." If it can come across, and people react to it within that first playing, it's like, "Oh, cool. There's the song." And you might go in and refine it a little bit. But even with Whiskey Sue, Colorado Brew, Cisco Lights, Rock and Roll is Dead, within the first time of playing those songs, literally the first show, people were either up dancing, crying or whatever it was the emotion we were trying to evoke with those songs happened within the first time they were played. And that seals their fate in a lot of ways, and then some of them are just constantly grinding them out. Like we really, there's a couple of songs that we play live, which are fun live. We've tried to get into the studio and record them and it just doesn't work.
Jhett Schiavone:
There's a song that we do not have released right now that will hopefully be on the follow up album called The Last Ballad of Cynthia Chavez, and really inspired by Marty Robbins style balladry, but we recorded a scratch version of it, and we've been sitting on it and performing it live trying it out. And it just had that basic C, F major, G major G seven turnaround back to C vibe and it was just too straightforward Western, which is Not exactly where we want to live. And one day, we were sitting in the RV rehearsing for a show that we were going to play it at and we are like, "Man, what if we just move the chord around and C, D minor F, so it's still in C major, but then, took the chorus to A sharp, which is out of the key, but vocally, you can open up so much more. It can be such a more dynamic song." And then all of a sudden, we played it that way. And we're like, "Wow, that's the way." We'd already played the song live probably 30 times, but then...
Doug Burke:
That was the twist, and that twist stays there?
Jhett Schiavone:
I think it's going to stay. I think we'll probably record it that way. So sometimes it just takes us sitting on a song and reworking it. You got to be able to be comfortable in your own skin. I do. I've got to be able to be in the character of the song when I'm playing it. And I felt a little bit like an posture when I was playing it the straight up Western ballad format, I felt this little bit of imposter syndrome. Which is not a good place to be on a stage.
Doug Burke:
You want to be real.
Jhett Schiavone:
You need to own it. You got to be real.
Doug Burke:
You want to be a real actor. You want to be in the role and not...
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah. And then once we changed the chords a little bit and gave it a little bit different vibe all of a sudden, "Okay, I can own that."
Callie Schiavone:
It was our song.
Jhett Schiavone:
It was our song now. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
So you guys are husband and wife. You haven't talked about a love song. Do you guys write love songs?
Callie Schiavone:
We feel like we write one good one that makes us both cry every once in a while. But that's funny enough as a husband and wife duo we really do not perform nor write as many love songs as we feel like some other husband and wife duo do. The main one, that if we're like, slightly upset at each other about something or nervous or something's not going right, soundchecks not going right. We're late to ... Whatever happens, we can play this song on stage and it immediately brings us back to why we're playing music together, who is holding us together, and that from our very first album, Cisco Lights. Oh my gosh, we're so grateful for that. We've had people here in Park City, Utah, propose to that song, we were playing it actually for a Mountain Town Music show and this gentleman had messaged us like, "Hey, I want to propose to my girlfriend while you guys are playing Cisco Lights. Can you put it in your set?" So we played it and we've had people walk down the aisle to it. I mean, it is incredible what that song has meant to other people because it means a lot to us. And it's one that we wrote the night before our wedding.
Doug Burke:
Oh, no kidding.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah, we were...
Doug Burke:
Like, "We're in a marriage tomorrow we should write a song."
Callie Schiavone:
Well, no.
Doug Burke:
It wasn't like that?
Jhett Schiavone:
No. We were doing the traditional thing. We're not allowed to see the bride the day before the wedding.
Callie Schiavone:
I was just trying to look for an excuse to see if my dad thought it was a bad idea. And if maybe we should just not go to the wedding the next day.
Jhett Schiavone:
So yeah, exactly. So due to those comments right there. I was like a nervous wreck. I'm like, "Is she even going to show up tomorrow?" So I was trying to calm my nerves, so I started playing guitar. And I started playing, a series of chords that sounded pretty, had that Beatle-esque vibe. And I was like, "I think Callie would like this." So I recorded it on my phone and sent it over to her. And a few minutes later, she replied back with a few lyric lines. And then I played some more and recorded it and sent it over and she sent back a few more lyric lines. So, we pretty much wrote the whole song via text.
Doug Burke:
Via text? Wow. That's a first on the podcast.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah, so we pretty much wrote the whole song via text. We both showed up the next day...
Doug Burke:
To get married.
Jhett Schiavone:
... to get married.
Doug Burke:
Okay. On time?
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah, we were on time and everything. And we were set to go on our honeymoon to visit Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to visit some of the hallowed ground of our musical heroes. And so the song was finished there officially in San Francisco, hence the name Cisco Lights.
Doug Burke:
Okay, you do get categorized as psychedelic, but I'm not absolutely convinced that that's accurate for you guys.
Callie Schiavone:
We were just talking about that.
Jhett Schiavone:
We were.
Callie Schiavone:
We do have a lot of psychedelic influences, and sometimes, when maybe we're a little delusional because we've been on the road for a long time or whatever. We will, in our live shows really jam a song out, especially when we're the four piece band and it has come across psychedelic, but as far as recording anything...
Jhett Schiavone:
It's tighter than that.
Callie Schiavone:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it is. I hope so, good. But live there has been that element.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah. And doing so much of the Rocky Mountain circuit through Idaho and the Mountain Towns and just being around the ski culture so much and playing jam band festivals and stuff like that, we've jammed out a lot of our stuff and people were sticking us on the bills with quite a few psychedelic bands. We played with Radio Moscow, we've played with some old school bands and lots of jam bands and stuff like that. So, we were in that world for a little while and we thought maybe that we were going to really sink our teeth in there, but I don't know.
Doug Burke:
It's a different sound.
Jhett Schiavone:
It's a different thing.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, for sure.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Some things to wrap up. I really like the way you harmonize. Can you talk about like, how that happens for you is it just natural, or is it, you have to work at it?
Callie Schiavone:
That makes us laugh because we do have to work at it a lot. We're really lucky that our voices are such wide octaves apart. So, many things we can sing in unison and it has a nice sound to it because his voice is so low and mine is so high. We've felt that our harmonies were not really that great. And so we've been really working on them a lot lately. I have a little bit more of a background with harmonies singing in church and different things like that. So I've typically taken the role of the harmonist and Jhett has held the melody. Currently, we're actually taking lessons in Nashville have to do better harmonies. Our pinnacle goal, what we want to sound like with harmonies is actually when Linda Ronstadt was singing with the Stone Poneys. I don't know if you've heard of that group.
Doug Burke:
Yeah.
Callie Schiavone:
And they do a version of a song called Wild About My Lovin, and how she and the two guys of that band harmonize, and how they weave in and out and they're both taking harmonies and then they'll sing together. It's like watching the Olympics of harmonies. And that is really our goal. So, funny you should bring that up. We want to get better. We hope that it comes across well, because we really do enjoy singing together.
Doug Burke:
So I'm here with Gleewood. This has been terrific. I got to thank you.
Jhett Schiavone:
Yeah, thank you, man.
Callie Schiavone:
Thank you.
Jhett Schiavone:
Thanks for having us. This is super groovy time, man. We're honored to be up here in the Mountains and honored to be on your podcast.
Doug Burke:
Jhett and Callie Schiavone. Thank you very much.
