TWANGTOWN

(Continued from 6) someone else.

Lewis: That’s another thing. One of the things we do is we have a studio ... and we record all our own records here. We record demos for other people, and I’ve produced other people’s projects. One thing I was always told was, “If you’re going to do a John Prine cover, don’t sing it and don’t play it like John Prine. We’ve got John Prine. You’re not going to out-John Prine John Prine. Do it like you.” That’s why if we go to do a cover, we’re going to do it our way. If you want the original, you got the original. You don’t need us.

Is there an artist you’d love to tour with? Any dream tour that would make a good bill?

Zamer: I would say Bonnie Raitt in a heartbeat.

The music landscape has changed so much over the past 20 years. A lot of people don’t care as much for albums anymore, and it’s all about songs. Where do you guys stand on that?

Lewis: Work-wise, I just love putting out a single. Because it just focuses on that song and you aren’t worried about how it fits into a group of 11 other songs. We just put out a tune called “I Want To

Be Free” that we don’t play live because we just can’t. There’s too much going on, too much instrumentation on it. It’s different from what we normally do. It’s sort of like a pop tune. If we put out a single, we can do anything we want. We don’t have to stay in our genre, so to speak. The problem is, if you want radio promotion, the radio promoters need a full album and they need a physical copy. But people aren’t playing CDs anymore. The market for vinyl records has outshined the market for CDs. There are now more vinyl records sold than CDs every year, starting a year ago. People are streaming everything. We make .0022 cents per play on Spotify. Basically, somebody walks into our house, steals all our furniture, takes a dump on our rug and leaves a note saying “From Spotify.”

Well that doesn’t sound fun.

Lewis: It was better when Napster was there and he just said, “Hey, I’m a thief and I’m stealing your music,” whereas Spotify and Apple are under the guise of legitimacy. They are basically stealing people’s music. They are screwing all the songwriters and all the artists. But we still have to put our albums [on Spotify] because that is what radio [stations] and promoters need. Those have to be focused. We can’t just cut 12 disparate songs on a record. The last one we did is where we like to go — this blues-based thing. And that went on blues radio. But when you do a single, you don’t have to worry about that stuff. It’s not as big of a time or money investment and it frees you up to do whatever you want to do.

Zamer: I actually prefer doing albums because I like being able to go into a studio and cut more than one song. It’s just fun for me. And I like releasing records because it gives people an opportunity to hear a bunch of songs and not just one. Plus, I like getting the radio play. A lot of genres — blues, Americana, jazz — you can’t promote to radio without at least an EP, if not a full record.

Do you have anything in the works for the rest of the year?

Lewis: We’re building up to an album. We have about six songs. There’s one or two actually recorded. We’ve got another four ready to go. MaryBeth likes to go in and sing stuff, but I’m thinking ahead and I know those songs have to make sense together. Sometimes, we’ll write tunes that are outside whatever the focus of the project might be. For instance, right before we released our last album, MaryBeth had written a song, this little folk ballad about a woman during the Holocaust being saved, but it had no business being on a blues record, so we released it as a single to folk radio and it did really well. It went to No. 2.

Zamer: That’s the beauty of doing sin- gles. We have to stay open to both.

Lewis: We’re midway through a focused project which should be a bit along the lines of our last album, which was blues-based stuff but not strictly blues songs because harmonically, we like to do more than that.

How about touring? Plans for the fall?

Zamer: Yeah, we have a little tour in October that we’re still putting together. We have some gigs in Vermont and New York, but we’re hoping to get some in Maryland or Pennsylvania on the way. Then, in February or March, we’ll go out again. We usually take December and January off. We’ll be home writing and recording then. But we’re doing a little fall tour and then something in the winter.

Lewis: Yeah, we usually like to go north in the summer [laughs]. It’s pretty hot down here.

Colin McGuire has been in and out of bands for more than 20 years and also helps produce concerts in and around Frederick. His work has appeared in Alternative Press magazine, PopMatters and 72 Hours, among other outlets. He is convinced that the difference between being in a band and being in a romantic relationship is less than minimal. Contact him at mcguire.colin@gmail.com.